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Don Narey

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Ali was not the greatest boxer; that’s too small for him.

06 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by djnarey in What I'm Seeing

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Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Ali and Floyd Mayweather, Muhmmad Ali and George Foreman

No one appreciates the power of Ali like George Foreman.  As a kid, listening the gold-medalist on the radio, he viewed Ali with equal measures of fear and fascination. He recalls first hearing the phrase “black Muslim,” growing in a small Texas town. Nobody really had a problem with “Muslim,” he says, but the word “black” inspired fear and suspicion. What was this guy talking about; what kind of problems could a man like Ali cause, what trouble was he going to stir up?

Ali arrives in Kinshasa, Zaire to meet Foreman for the Rumble in Jungle

Ali arrives in Kinshasa, Zaire to meet Foreman for the Rumble in Jungle

His confusion with Ali gave way to competition which gave way to contempt and, eventually,  to a hard-earned and heart felt respect.  George Foreman didn’t just experience the force that was Ali, he came to terms with it.

Before turning pro in 1969, George Foreman was already on the wrong side of Muhammad Ali. While he trained for the ’68 Olympics, some of the most elite black athletes in the country considered boycotting the Games altogether. The Olympic Project for Human Rights,  which promoted a boycott, counted Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul Jabbar), Bob Beaumont and Tommie Smith among its members. They presented a series of grievances to the Olympic Committee concerning South Africa, Rhodesia and Muhammad Ali.

In South Africa, the Botha government had recently banned political opposition to apartheid. In Rhodesia, white-supremacists under Ian Smith declared national independence, violently imposing their will in defiance of world condemnation. Both countries planned to send whites-only teams to the Games.

By 1968 Muhammad Ali was a revolutionary force unto himself.  He cast a figure just a large as any African republic.  A convert to the Nation of Islam (and later Sunni Islam), he applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam war.  When his status was denied he stood his ground, was stripped of the heavyweight title, denied license to fight in all 50 states, had his passport revoked and was pilloried by the national press.

OPHR  demanded that the Olympic Committee ban both apartheid states from the games and that U.S. boxing officials restore Ali’s title.  They were also calling for the removal of Avery Brundage, the avowed white-supremacist and anti-Semite who chaired the Olympic Committee.

Peter Norman, Tommie Smith & John Carlos (all three wearing OCHR buttons)

Peter Norman (Aus), Tommie Smith & John Carlos, all wearing OPHR symbols.

In the end, however, OPHR concluded that boycotting the Olympics  was too much to ask of athletes who had sacrificed so much to get there. Abdul Jabbar, the best known collegiate athlete in the country, however, made a dramatic stand. He refused to join the U.S. Olympic basketball team, and he paid for it.

When Today show host, Joe Garagiola, asked Abdul Jabbar why he refused to play for his country, he famously answered: “I live here, but it’s really not my country.” Never known to be much of a thinking man, Garagiola replied,”then there’s only one solution…move.”

Tommie Smith went to Mexico City and set a world record, broke the 20 second barrier in 200 meters, and won gold.  Then, he sacrificed it all moments later. In one of the most iconic moments in sports, he and John Carlos raised their fists high during the National Anthem.  It was an act of immense courage, as well as the end of two careers.

The questions Abdul Jabbar, Smith and Carlos were grappling with are still relevant, but no closer to being resolved, today. The raging debates of athletes wearing I-Can’t-Breath jerseys, or running onto the field with their hands raised,  is no different than it was nearly 50 years ago.  How do our most celebrated athletes acknowledge the reality of being black in America?  Is it necessary, or even possible, to compartmentalize one’s existence enough to leave your identity in the locker room, like another item of street clothing?

For Muhammad Ali that wasn’t an option.  He had rejected the name, the history, the religion, the station, and the very consciousness that had been imposed upon him. He was his politics.  There was no gesture he could refrain from or button he could remove, no catch phrase he could avoid.  The problem people had with Muhammad Ali was his being Muhammad Ali.

Early in his career, after beating Sonny Liston, a reporter asked Ali about his association with the Nation of Islam.  He saw right through the question and got to the heart of the matter, saying “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.” He controlled the dialogue, he would not be controlled by it.  It was one more thing, like black, beautiful and Muslim, that we just couldn’t get used to: a black man who would define himself on his own terms.

On the other side of the moon, George Foreman understood none of this.  He was far removed from the historic Cleveland Summit.  Boycotting the Olympics never crossed his mind and he dismissed Smith and Carlos for their “college boy protests” (later he’d say it was more about elitism: he felt rejected by OPHR who, he says, never once reached out to a non-collegiate athlete).

But in 1974, the man who had feared the term “black” confronted the man who owned it  in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Dem. Rep. of the Congo).  The likes of Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson and George Plimpton were on hand, propelling this far beyond a mere title fight.  This was a story vindication and validity, righteousness and respect, courage against compromise.

It would be hard to overstate the significance of Ali’s victory.

I suppose it would be equally hard to overstate what it meant for Foreman to lose.  Ali had always reached something in him that no one else could touch. Only Ali could trigger that level of rage, that depth of shame. When he read in an interview that Ali said “Foreman is no boxer, he just wants to kill somebody,” he says he felt so ashamed. He also said every word was true.

Foreman turned the Rumble in the Jungle into an obsession, an internal burning rage that  that ate at him relentlessly.  He said he was robbed, the water was drugged, the ropes were loose and the fight was rigged. For six years he couldn’t admit to being beaten. Then, in 1980 when a reporter asked what had happened in Kinsasha, he said the words aloud. “He beat me.” The air coming out of his lungs took with it a crushing weight, but exposed a another level of shame. Recalling that moment, Foreman, says he realized what he’d done in denying Ali’s victory. He had had put a “blemish on this great man’s career.”  So, in the early 1980’s he  reached out to Ali.

He discovered the animosity was one-sided. Without hesitation, Ali welcomed the friendship, the unique bond and unabashed love he love he had to offer.  In 2003, Foreman would remember  the Rumble in The Jungle like this: “He wanted them to love him…Ali made them love him. That’s why I couldn’t beat him. He heard them chanting his name;  that’s where the stamina came from. They loved him. I love him too.”

“He’s the greatest man I’ve ever known,” Foreman added, “Not greatest boxer, that’s too small for him.”

Edward Brooke, Republican from Massachusetts

08 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by djnarey in What I'm Seeing

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Edward Brooke, Massachusetts GOP, Massachusetts Republican

Edward W. Brooke (R-MA)

Today marks the forty-eighth anniversary of Edward Brooke’s election to the United States Senate.  I don’t think the significance of Brooke is lost on anyone of any party: the first African-American elected to Senate by popular vote, the only African-American elected to a second term and, until 1993 the only one to serve in the twentieth century. By lately, when his name his invoked, it’s about the other distinction.

Brooke was the last Republican senator elected from Massachusetts, before Scott Brown. His, is the brand of Republicanism Scott Brown or Charlie Baker needed to market: proof that “compassionate conservative” is not an oxymoron. At ninety-five, Brooke is a final link to the era when the Mass Republican Party produced national leaders.

Brooke, Elliot Richardson, Leverett Saltonstall, Francis Sargent and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. easily commanded network coverage and frequently influenced foreign and domestic policy.  Before John Kerry’s unlikely election the Senate, Saltonstall and Brooke kept the seat Republican for forty years. It was, in fact, the Republicans who handed Lt. Governor Kerry a golden opportunity by rejecting the national prominent, well funded statesman Elliot Richardson for right-winger Ray Shamie in the ’84 primary.

But, beyond geography, there is simply no demonstrable connection between those Republicans and their modern counterparts.  And the difference goes well beyond legislative priorities. Of course Brooke’s landmark legislation, the Fair Housing Act,  expanding Title IX protection to girls and women and tightening the Voting Rights Act, would be inconceivable in today’s GOP.  But his vision for the party was different.  He refused to cast those in need as the enemy.  For him, poor people are not the ones defrauding our government. The safety net is not what’s bankrupting us; further disenfranchisement couldn’t possibly be the answer.

He vigorously opposed Nixon’s Southern Strategy, to marginalize minorities in exchange for the white Southern vote. He believed that Republican ideas could win on merit, not tactics. After all, he’d done it, beating a popular Democratic governor by half a million votes and winning a second term by six hundred thousand. He warned his party not politicize the Supreme Court, that it would only compromise the Court’s independence and the Party’s integrity.  They didn’t listen.  So, when Nixon attempted to deliver a key campaign promise– reversing the direction of Warren Court–Senator Brooke chose conscience over loyalty. He voted against the confirmations for G. Harrold Carswell and Clement Haynsworth to the High Court and both were defeated.

In 2007, Brooke told NPR that Nixon was neither conservative nor liberal, but a pragmatist. Nixon, he said, liked power and knew how to get it.  It would be hard to imagine any circumstance in which the modern Republican party could be described as pragmatic. Nixon’s formula for winning, has since become the dogma that leaves little room for dialogue and no room for compromise.

Today’s Republicans seemed to have lost any ability to self-regulate. One, of the many, great things you could say about Edward W. Brooke III, Republican from Massachusetts is… he saw it coming.

When a K-9 Questions the Purpose of Life

28 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by djnarey in What I'm Seeing

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Notes dated June 24, 2011…

The dog keeps trying to squeeze between me and my laptop, laying her head on the keypad, pawing at my hands. I think it’s because we just saw the ophthalmologist to talk about the future of the one eye she has left.   It’s a very big deal, so maybe she’s anxious.  Maybe she’s overwhelmed by the finite nature of it all, wondering how ten years of living so vividly, suddenly becomes a handful memories fading like her eyesight.

I wonder what she thinks about the dimming of the light. I mean,  here’ll come a time when each of us is desperately trying to magnify his own flashes of memory, recall the fading colors, searching for confirmation, praying that we’ve done right by those we loved the most.  The Power of the Universe will not measure us by the thoughts in our heads nor hopes in our hearts, but by what we actually did with what we’d been given.

Did our eyes see broadly enough? Did we look for signs of redemption? Reflect compassion?  Did our ears hear bravely enough? Could our shoulders, these shoulders, be leaned upon, did these arms hold, did my hands hold the hands that need to be held?  How will I know if I was even worth the time that I have used up, and what if I wasn’t, what have I done, what has been squandered?

I look back down at Bessie. She’s staring up at me, as though she’s asking for something. It’s something I’m just I’ve got.  I don’t know what to do with these questions: they’re so much bigger than I feel right now.

But, then I take another look and wonder: “on second thought, she might just want to rub her belly.”

When The Finish Line is Home

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by djnarey in What I'm Seeing

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Boston bombings, Boston chracter, Boston marathon, Boston paracholism, Boston rude, Boston spirit

Whether you’re a runner, a spectator, or just a guy who loves this town, each of us has his own memories to reconcile, his own peace to make.  For me, today is a confirmation of everything I’d thought about how much would change the day two bombs exploded on Boylston Street.

Nothing.  You know, some things just can not be changed.

Even in the heat of the moment, tragedy still unfolding, with the impact far from fully-realized, still trying to register what had happened,  I just didn’t share the view that anything had permanently changed.  I heard the cries and felt the pain of everyone who said, “this is it, nothing will be ever be the same about the marathon, the city or its people.”  But, to me,  that’s not how life works.

It’s not that I didn’t understand the scope of the tragedy or the cowardice of men who would launch sneak-attacks on people who are–in every sense of the word–stronger than them and, even worse, people who aren’t.  I understood, to whatever extent possible, the life-altering pain, confusion, grief, anger.   But some things are just too big to be changed. That’s not romanticism or defiance or hope and, God knows, it is not victim’s consolation.  It’s just a fact.

Every Patriot’s Day something big happens here, in Boston, and it’s not just the world’s oldest continuous marathon.  As South-Enders wander across the Corridor and North Enders cut across Haymarket and even the folks over in Jamaica Plain make that rare journey across Mass. Ave (or at least think about it), the rest of the world squeezes in and lines of demarcation fade away.  A hardscrabble town cracks a smile and it’s truly a sight to behold.

I’ve seen that most clearly through the eyes of others.  One of  the many spectacular Patriot’s Days I remember, I wandered into the crowd drifting into Copley from Tremont. It was about 4:30, all the elite runners had long been shuttled off.  But, like a lot of locals who’d opt to avoid the traffic, crowds, or just do other things that day, I’ve always prefered to show up after the fanfare just cheer on those last stragglers.  It’s always a small local crowd left to to encourage our own, or those who become our own that one day a year, those who finish the race on sheer grit.

This is a day when infamous parochialism melts like the March frost, Bostonians are actually willing to make eye-contact as though they recognize you, and the do.  You came here to do something, to win a battle we don’t know about, take a prize can not see and and we know that.

I was walking across the church yard with a friend, a transplant from D.C.. He was on his cell phone.  He was on his cell phone a lot back then with friends in Washington or family in Arizona.  Boston isn’t really an easy place to break into and it can leave the best of ’em longing for home. But when we reached the front of the library on Dartmouth, a few yards from the finish line, I noticed his conversation wasn’t about a place he missed, but the place he finally discovered a year after moving.  He wasn’t complaining to the person on the other line, he was sharing.  He was bragging.

Flanked by the BPL’s bronze goddesses of art and science on the left and the Trinity Church on the right, he was describing this newfound place.  People were out, smiling, talking, welcoming and it didn’t seem that big, cold or dark a city after all. It was like he just found home, on Patriot’s Day, in the place he’d merely been living all year.

Buoyed by the lengthening days, the blossoming spring and promise of another summer in a coastal town, The Marathon, more than any other event reveals the spirit of this city.  Parochialism starts to look familial and people don’t seem as defensive as they do protective.  It’s the time when people get hooked and feel a sense of ownership in a city that will end up owning them in some way.  So even if we don’t say “hi” to every random person we pass or ask where you’re from or care whether or not “y’all come back,” this place has a way of revealing itself in those lovely, long-awaited, shared moments.

When it happens, when you get it, you’ll forever understand Bostonians because you will be one too.

On Monday there’ll be the painful memories that’ll last forever, but there will also be an unassailable sense of community.  It will be triumphant and irresistible like it always has. If anything, it’ll be stronger and that’s never going to change.  Not because of two guys with bombs, or ten guys with bombs or even ten-thousand.

Some things can never be changed.

The Soul Invictus

01 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by djnarey in What I'm Seeing

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December 25th was, among other things, The Sol Invictus, the day Ancient Romans celebrated the Unconquerable Sun before the rise Christianity.   I’m always struck by the idea that no matter what we believe, we seem hardwired to seek out our higher selves in the darkest months.  Whether it’s the Unconquerable Sun, the victorious lights of Diwali, the menorah that burned eight days or the light in the stable where redemption touched the earth, we need this stuff.  We don’t need it just because it’s comforting, we need it because it’s true.

We are also hardwired to rise up after a fall. So, when I see Stonehenge aligned with the Solstices, I don’t imagine dull Neolithic tribes cowering at the darkening sky or appeasing an angry god.  I imagine, instead, a primordial knowledge that each of us has a higher self. There is an alternate version of each of us which comes out on the other side the of darkness stronger and more fully realized than we could have imagined.

There is a Soul Invictus for which dormancy was merely part of the plan. It will blossom again because it knows no different and it has nothing to fear.

Making Memories and Making Them Over

24 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by djnarey in What I'm Seeing

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false memories, Karim Nader, Karim Nader McGill University, karim nader memory, Memory, memory consolodation, memory reconsolidation

If you’ve reached the age when you’re starting to doubt your own memories, don’t worry. It really doesn’t matter.  In fact, it’s a complete waste of time debating whether leaves were beginning to fall or there was already snow or the ground, or whether it was Aunt Bess or Cousin Margaret or even if it was just an awkward choice of words or a calculated verbal assault designed to ruin your holiday.  The part you recall, and the part with which no one can argue, is how you felt about the event, not how it happened.

Timothy Leary explained that other kind of truth saying “we are each the stars our own life story,” unable to see beyond the prism of our own experience. But, there’s more to it than that. Our life stories are, by definition, works in progress.  To retain any relevance at all, events are continually reconsidered and revised. The past is influenced by the present as much as the present is influenced by the past.

Now, neuroscience has begun to catch up with what psychology has known for decades.  Memories, particularly important ones, are not like photographs that freeze a moment in time: they are more like keepsakes that are reframed with each new look. Studies by Karim Nader, at McGill University, indicate that each recollection of a significant memory triggers the production of new proteins used to store that memory.  The chemical process of recalling a memory is not unlike the process of creating it in the first place.

He says important events, the “flashbulb” memories thought to consolidate over time, are actually most susceptible to change since we replay them over and over. That, by the way, is not a bad thing; it’s essential to managing Post Traumatic Stress.

But  even innocuous recollections are subject our value systems.  For my niece, a sweater I passed on to her years ago was navy blue, well-worn and meaningful.  In my mind it was black, rather new (laundry mishap) and Armani. I’ve no conscious purpose for altering that image; there was no consciousness involved at all.  Yet, there I stand, lead actor in this little movie in my head, pulling the practically new, black, turtle-neck out of bag in her living room.

Poetic license allows the replacement of items that don’t resonate with a particular audience with ones that do to convey the most accurate meaning in a particular medium.  Telling the truth, you might say, sometimes requires tweaking it.  Although I’m certain that I hadn’t tweaked anything, I even more certain that the neurological/psychological process of developing our own storylines is far more complex, multi-layered and pluralistic than anything Miramax could imagine.

Legendary film director, Luis Bunuel, writing his autobiography in his eighties, offered up this disclaimer: “Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths…I am the sum of my errors and doubts as much as my certainties. Such is my memory.”

So, next time a family member, old friend or classmate shares a memory you find utterly absurd, anachronistic, uncharacteristic or just plain stupid, remember: you’re hearing the review not the script.

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