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What Would Muhammad Ali Say About George Floyd’s Death And The Uneven Response It’s Generated?

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With anger spreading from Minneapolis to around the nation to beyond the Pacific and the Atlantic regarding the senseless killings of African Americans by law enforcement officers and others, I’m sitting in my home near Atlanta, looking at the poster I’ve had of Muhammad Ali since high school.

Ali and I huddled during the summer of 1986 at his hotel suite in downtown Atlanta for a conversation about life (followed by one of his magic tricks), and then he signed my poster.

To Terry

Love Muhammad Ali

June 18, 1986

Not only am I studying this poster of Ali against Joe Frazier during the second of their three legendary heavyweight fights, but to paraphrase a saying among Christians from the 1990s about Jesus, I’m wondering, WWMD?

What Would Muhammad do?

So WWMD, if it were a week ago today, when that police officer in Minneapolis squeezed the life out of George Floyd by keeping his knee on the throat of his handcuffed victim for nearly nine minutes?

Floyd was motionless on the ground, while gasping between saying, “I can’t breathe” to ressurect the memory of Eric Garner, an African American killed six years ago in New York City by a chokehold from a police officer.

As Floyd moved closer to expiring, he mentioned his mother, but that Minneapolis cop and three of his peers responded with indifference.

This Floyd mess occurred just weeks after it surfaced that a father and a son spent February joining somebody else as self-appointed lawmen in Brunswick, Georgia to murder 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery jogging through a neighborhood.

Arbery was also African American.

The same went for Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Sam DuBose, Terence Crutcher, Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice and “fill in the blank” with the slew of others killed since 2012 in their version of Floyd.

Prior to those victims? Well, there was Emmett Till in 1955, surrounded by all of those other racial horrors before and afterward involving African Americans sent to an early grave through social injustice.

So WWMD if he were around when Floyd’s death produced few current or former sports personalities of prominence not named LeBron James saying anything worth mentioning for hours and then days?

Now everybody has courage.

It’s called safety in numbers. As a result, it’s suddenly fashionable among coaches, players and those running sports conferences, leagues and teams either to write (or, more likely, to have their PR folks write) statements on how outrageous society has become regarding African Americans in general and African American males in particular with these Floyd-like killings.

Even Michael Jordan slid out of the shadows Sunday. You know, six days after Floyd’s death, but what else is new?

Jordan confessed last month during ESPN’s ratings-breaking series called “The Last Dance” that he avoided social issues as a player to concentrate on winning NBA titles with his Chicago Bulls and making money for Nike NKE and himself.

So, to paraphrase again, WWM think about Jordan, period?

Consider, too, that the fourth anniversary of Ali’s death at 74 from respiratory complications is Wednesday. He spent his boxing career through 1981 turning words into action by floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee along the way to becoming “The Greatest” fighter of all time.

That wasn’t true for Ali’s bank account.

While Forbes named Floyd Mayweather the highest-paid athlete of this past decade at $915 million, the magazine also determined the guy who “shook up the world” against Sonny Liston, and who combined with Frazier to produce that boxing trilogy for the ages, and who defeated George Foreman by using his brain more than his brawn is the same guy who died with his estate worth $80 million.

I’m guessing Mayweather spends that much money for waxing his cars.

Even so, Ali’s daughter, Laila, said it best two years ago during an interview with CNBC, when she shared what her father often told her, his eight other children and anybody else who’d listen: “It’s not about how much money you have. It’s thinking about how we can make this world a better place.”

Imagine the millions Ali sacrificed by not fighting during his prime (from age 25 to nearly 29) when he was exiled from boxing for four years through September 1970 after he refused to serve in the U.S. military for his Muslim beliefs.

Unwavering conviction.

Ali didn’t invent it, but he perfected it.

Three years before Ali announced he wouldn’t enter the draft during the Vietnam War, he set the foundation for his principled actions to come by joining the Nation of Islam. He said he switched from “Cassius Clay” to “Muhammad Ali,” because the name his parents gave him at birth n Louisville, Kentucky was a “slave name.”

Ali later defended his heavyweight title six times before he retired and began a 32-year fight with Parkinson’s disease.

Despite Ali’s sickness, he remained visible and active, ranging from his trips to Lebanon (1985) and Iraq (1990) during attempts to free American hostages to his talking a suicidal man from leaping off a nine-floor ledge of a building in 1981 to his countless other philanthropic activities.

Ali stayed politically minded, too. Six months before his death, he released a statement blasting then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

So WWMD regarding this Floyd situation?

A lot more than Tiger Woods.

He remains silent.

Well, until his handlers put something together.

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