Magister Ludi

By Kevin D. Williamson

Saturday, June 04, 2016

Given my presence this week in the conurbation that still has the confidence to call itself the Eternal City, it was inevitable that I’d be thinking about gladiators.

Touring the Coliseum, we are immediately liberated from any temptation to romanticize the lives of the men who fought, often to the death, for the amusement of the Roman people: slaves, prisoners, condemned criminals, fighting wild animals or each other — when common life is bread and circuses, meat is meat. That some chose the gladiator’s life does not raise our opinion of the gladiatorial games but rather lowers our opinion of the material and spiritual state of life for the Roman plebs. There is something familiar about the amphitheater, just beyond the edge of recognition until I hit on what it reminds me of: a bullfighting arena, where the entertainment is part sport, part ritual sacrifice.

There is moral value in sport, even (and perhaps especially) in violent sport, very closely related to the moral value in art. It isn’t in the sporting virtues we celebrate: perseverance, the cultivation of technique, enduring lonely hours in the pursuit of excellence. Those are worthwhile, in sport as in art, but the deeper value in sport is in watching, and possibly understanding, someone doing something extraordinarily well, witnessing the grace and the beauty of man at his best, even if what he’s best at is a boy’s game.

For my generation, the model of this phenomenon was Michael Jordan. A great many people who did not care in the least about professional basketball, or professional sports in general (who indeed may have found the entire notion of “professional sports” faintly ridiculous), could not help but be fascinated by his performances. Basketball obsessives may dispute the details, but the feeling in the stands and in front of the television screens was that we were watching someone who was, at that time, simply the best there had ever been. Michelangelo on his ceiling, Bernini with his chisel, Jordan with his tongue sticking out: The idea of the human form taking flight has been with us for a very long time.

For an earlier generation, the model of this phenomenon was Muhammad Ali, formerly Cassius Clay and subsequently “the Greatest.” And not to dwell upon the eternally hackneyed comparison between boxers and gladiators, but here in the city where he won his Olympic gold medal in 1960, it isn’t very difficult to imagine him in the Coliseum. “Grandson of a slave, he was feted by presidents and kings,” the Los Angeles Times said in its headline, to something less than general acclaim. But we are not so far from the Romans as we like to imagine. Muhammad Ali did not die in the ring, but injuries sustained there — for which the term “dementia pugilistica” had to be invented — helped him to the grave, like a veteran counted among the war casualties after dying, decades later, of his battle wounds.

Ali had gifted hands and feet but was best known for his mouth, and for the sometimes absurd things that came out of it. He rejected the name Cassius Clay as a “slave name,” though it is in fact the name of a great abolitionist. (Names are funny things: The day before the great boxer died, I visited the Church of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, where a guide pointed out the great alabaster pillars: “A gift from Muhammad Ali,” he said. “The real Muhammad Ali.”) Ali said daft and ignorant things about American society, the American military, and more. The admixture of genuine sentiment and cynical self-promotion in that — controversy pays — is impossible to sort out. The sportswriters will try, but it won’t be worth the work, because none of it matters. All that really matters about Ali is that he was, at least for his moment, what he called himself: the greatest.

He was charming, which is what separated his famous boasting from ordinary sports trash-talk. Years later he described his celebrated Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman in a radio interview and his being shocked at how hard Foreman (who wasn’t always a cuddly sandwich-grill peddler) punched him, and reorganizing his strategy around a new goal in the first round: “I didn’t want him to hit me no more.”

Ali became the most famous and glamorous athlete of his time. But not all boxing careers turn out that way. If you had the opportunity to watch the fights at Philadelphia’s famous Blue Horizon (which, as I understand it, is about to be converted into a parking garage), you saw the skill and the drama — and the plain violence — that draws people to boxing, but it’s hard to imagine that many of the fighters who passed through there were under any delusions that they were on their way to fame and fortune.

And with that in mind, the usual ninnies and nannies will make the usual noises, that Ali is “the greatest . . . reason to ban boxing.” But that’s a mistake. There’s a certain grace and beauty to boxing, which presents an opportunity to be great — if not the greatest — at something that is deeply human, that already was ancient by the time the Romans got around to building the Flavian amphitheater. Of course there is a price to pay. There always is. A career in ballet is more brutal than many people imagine, too.

“Those of us who are about to die salute you,” the gladiators said. But all of us are about to die. The tragedy is to have failed to live. Muhammad Ali lived, sometimes beautifully, sometimes painfully enduring. That isn’t a life to regret.