ABSTRACT

"Muhammad Ali is the first 'free' black champion ever to confront white America," Cleaver asserts lyrically, continuing, "In the context of boxing, he is a genuine revolutionary, the black Fidel Castro of boxing”. Ali represents Cleaver's black male ideal because he is the incarnation of a new, aggressive, street-smart, intensely urban kind of masculinity. The momentousness of this bout—for Ali—had little to do with Terrell's boxing skills. Ali was at the peak of his illustrious career. In Loser and Still Champion, Budd Schulberg recognizes, in a work remarkable for its treatment of Ali as a serious political figure, the role of the Greatest within the United States as a postcolonial voice. Ali could reach new audiences, critique dominant ones, and make transnational links with newly independent societies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Financially strapped because of his banning, Ali was able to cash in on his standing in the decolonized community by staging fights there.