In the Royal Suite of the Kuala Lumpur Hilton on a June day in 1975, Muhammad Ali announced that his heavyweight title defence against Joe Bugner the following week would be the last bout of his career. With $2m in the bank, a property portfolio worth significantly more than that, a religion to promulgate and a desire to spend more time with his family, the 33-year-old was determined to quit while he was ahead.
“Horses get old, cars get old, the pyramids of Egypt are crumbling,” he said. “I want to retire while I’m still on top. As of now, this is the last time you will see Muhammad Ali in a fight.”
He was back in the ring against Joe Frazier three months later, fought another 10 times (many of those encounters damaging his fistic reputation), and shipped hundreds more blows across the next six years. By the end, grandiloquent retirement proclamations became as much part of his schtick as declarations of his prettiness. His persistence wasn’t about money. There was no need to prove his greatness. He just couldn’t stop. Whether driven by a thirst for the adulation of the crowd or an addiction to the spotlight, Ali refused to walk away. Even Ferdie Pacheco urging him to do so while resigning as his doctor in 1977 failed to jolt him to his senses.
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When the great ones reach the endgame, they sometimes find it more difficult than mere mortals to depart the stage. The same preternatural self-belief that makes them extraordinary performers in their pomp seems to persuade them they can still be what they once were, even in their sporting dotage. Ali being mortified by Larry Holmes. Forty-year-old Sugar Ray Leonard’s shameful last dance with Hector Camacho. Cristiano Ronaldo sulking past his sell-by date on the bench at United?
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Football is not boxing and there are some fundamental differences between Ali then and Ronaldo now. The Portuguese star isn’t suffering blows to the head and he has not let himself go physically, like the three-time heavyweight champion did when adding rolls of flab to that previously immaculate physique as the seventies wore on. Yet, watching the soap opera surrounding the waning days of his second United tenure, there is something very reminiscent of Ali’s own delusions in the second half of his thirties.
The 37-year-old version of Ronaldo can’t seem to accept the ravages of time, refuses to acknowledge the evolution of the sport he once bestrode, and appears bent on ignoring all evidence suggesting it’s time to migrate to a less hectic environment like Major League Soccer. Or Ligue 1 for that matter.
“They think I can’t fight anymore,” said Ali in December, 1980 when the Nevada State Commission effectively told him he could never box in Las Vegas again. “According to my last performance, I don’t blame them. I don’t have too many fights left. But I didn’t want to go out being retired. I want to be free to make my own decision. If I stop, it’s because I want to stop. Nobody’s going to make me stop.”
It’s not difficult to imagine that type of refrain whirling around Ronaldo’s head as he vents on social media regarding “lies” being spread about him. After his own statement of belligerence, Ali spent 12 months trawling the planet for a friendly/medically negligent boxing commission to license him to fight as he closed in on 40. There were flirtations with Hawaii, London, Madison Square Garden, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Casablanca and South Carolina. Where once great cities and storied venues vied for the right to host his contests and gain an entry on the most famous resumé in sport, he now had to venture farther and farther off Broadway, cap in hand, in search of a welcome.
Ronaldo knows exactly how it feels to be suddenly unwanted. Twelve months ago, Manchester United apparently had to swoop to stop Manchester City signing him. Now, he’s been so diminished you have managers of much lesser clubs around Europe reportedly threatening to resign if he’s brought in against their wishes for commercial rather than footballing reasons. There are stories of his agent trying to persuade United to pay a significant portion of his stratospheric weekly wages just so Napoli will take him on loan.
And, judging by one unintentionally hilarious positive piece in an English broadsheet this past weekend, his handlers are spinning furiously on his behalf. All in vain. Whatever they try to say, wherever he ends up, this has been an embarrassing postscript, doing no little damage to his legacy, the kind of stuff that really matters to a character with such a celebrated ego.
Ali was humbled at the finish too, fighting his last in a makeshift ring in a community baseball field in the Bahamas. Shortly after the first round began (tolled by a bell stolen moments before from a cow in a nearby field), he got in a clinch with Trevor Berbick, felt his own fat jiggle against the hard, fit body of the younger opponent and knew he had no business being there.
“To see him lose to such a moderate fighter in such a grubby context,” wrote the peerless Hugh Mcllvanney, “was like watching a king ride into permanent exile on the back of a garbage truck.”
Ronaldo will depart Carrington for the last time in a Bentley but the general air of regret remains the same.
