The name of the game

The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)

Crit

[Narcissism alert!] In a way, Muhammad Ali and I grew up together, and in a way he helped raise me. We came to despise the war in Southeast Asia in parallel, but he taught me more about acting on your convictions, no matter the cost, than did the boys just a little older than I, who looked more like me and whose backgrounds were more like mine, who went quietly to Canada.

I remember the first Liston fight--I had no idea that Sonny Liston was a thug, but I knew Cassius Clay was a braggart, and that was a cardinal vice for my 10-year-old self, so as I listened on the radio that night (such a different me: caring about boxing, listening to the radio), I was rooting for the champ, and was distraught when he didn't answer the bell in the 8th, and then again when he was floored early in the rematch.

Like any white boy from a conservative family, I was skeptical of Clay's conversion to Islam. (Louis Farrakhan, a key talking head in the film, makes the perceptive point that in the mid-sixties, the mainstream white attitude toward Islam in the Middle East and Asia--where it belonged, Farrakhan might have said but didn't--was benign, but Black Muslims in the United States were considered violent and dangerous, whereas now African-American Muslims are mostly tolerated, but Muslims in the rest of the world are the dangerous ones.) Within a few years, though, the sincerity of his religious convictions came to be as clear as the force of his antiwar stance, and I don't remember, but I suspect that my choosing Islam as the subject of a high school report must have been inspired in part by an interest in Ali.

That's speculation, but this is not: part of who I am today, part of the way I look at the defining global challenge of our time, has to with watching Ali's public evolution from the reflective comfort of my private living room. I wonder how Donald Trump's perspective was shaped? 

Oh, so the film? Very good, affectionate but not hagiographic, and focused on the matter of the title without falling prey to tunnel vision. The most informative segment is an insider's look at how the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision to uphold Ali's conviction turned into an 8-0 vote to overturn it.