I had just turned twelve when in 1965 I drew the short straw at my Catholic primary school in London St Philip’s and became captain of boxing.
I was pretty skinny and of average height for my age, and I was no great boxer. Indeed with the evidence of hindsight I now see I got the appointment by default rather than on merit. I was an improvised choice after several more physically prepared front runners showed no interest, knowing that their reputation lay elsewhere.
Boxing was not considered a key sport at the school –unlike football in autumn and winter and cricket and athletics and swimming in the summer months. We had a part-time boxing teacher in ‘Mr Mates’ – a personable cockney from the East End with a striking resemblance to Ronnie Kray- who turned up whenever he felt like it which was never very regular.
Mr Mates however did teach me the meaning of fair play. Thus when I was lined up to box someone half my size on boxing day-the one and only time in the year we had our parents as an audience and could win medals-he stopped the fight after round one, and declared the fight a draw.
But crucially it was Mr Mates who in my early boxing lessons brought to my attention the unique talent of the the named Cassius Clay. I owe Mr Mates a huge debt of thanks for having urged me to watch the future Ali perform in the ring rather than out of it which I did with a growing sense of adulation. I remember how pedestrian Clay made Henry Cooper look, and how graceless seemed Sonny Liston, and how I had longed for the noble defeated former world champion Floyd Patterson to be avenged.
I never fully understood the motivation that lay behind his conversion to Islam but was hugely impressed by Ali’s refusal to fight in Vietnam and the way he found the time to speak up for the civil rights of persecuted races . But most of all I loved his physical beauty and power and how it transformed the blunt and rough sport of boxing into a seemingly effortless act of balance and movement in the ring, poetry in motion.
The years went by and we grew older. Ali became frailer, physically a diminished shadow of his former self. And yet a nobility of spirit towards others endured and shone through his suffering, in a world over populated by celebrity narcissists.
