Respect

We hope you've enjoyed all the odds and ends we brought you today on the official No Mas "It's Ali's 65th Birthday" Smackdown. It's all meant to show our massive respect for the Champ and the excitement, intrigue, provocation and pure fun he brought into our lives. He touched so many different worlds, did so many different things, I feel like I could go on with these posts about him for days and never have to repeat myself.

But I got to wrap it up, and so for our last Ali post, I chose this one from 1978, when Ali himself is paying respects to perhaps the only other athlete of the century who shocked the world so completely and profoundly as he did. And, as Ali points out, Jack Johnson did his business at a time when black men weren't just sitting in the back of the bus - they were getting lynched every weekend. "They'd send him letters," Ali says, "that said nigger you win this fight we'll kill you... and Jack Johnson say well then just kill my black butt cause I'm gonna knock this white man cold."

I love this clip, even though you can already detect the beginning of the end in Ali's voice, the hint of a drawl that was not for dramatic emphasis but early evidence of a mind rapidly slowing. Nevertheless, he riffs so easily, so spontaneously, on his heroic forebear in the ring, and in about a minute and a half gives you a glimpse of that feeling that just about everyone who ever spent time with Ali comments upon with a gleam in their eye - how endlessly entertaining it was just to hang around with the man.

"It was so long ago, people still had log cabins"