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| Boxing historians consider the Thrilla in Manila between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier to be one of the greatest fights of all time. |
By Louis Chan
Reprinted from AsAm News
From the classic Thrilla in Manila in 1975 to his visit to South Korea to his worldwide charisma and courage to stand up in opposition to the Vietnam War and oppression of the underclass, Muhammad Ali, 74, had a deep impact on Asians worldwide, including those in America.
As word of his death in Phoenix spread Friday night, the tributes began pouring in. The boxing legend died after being hospitalized for respiratory issues and a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
The height of his career arguably occurred in Manila in 1975 when he beat Joe Frazier in one of the most memorable championship fights in boxing history–the Thrilla to Manila.
The fight put Manila on the worldwide map. The owner of Amanita Arena where the match was held, promised to build a mall in Ali's honor to commemorate the fight. The Ali Mall in Quezon City opened a year after the Thrilla in Manila and was the first major shopping mall in the country.
Ali also had a big impact on Asians in sports and two of the biggest quickly reacted to Ali’s death.
In the Philippines, Ali’s legend is surpassed perhaps only by boxer (now, Senator) Manny Pacquiao.
Tiger Woods whose mother is Thai, called Ali a champion “in so many ways.”
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| Muhammad Ali visits South Korea in 1976 |
A year after the fight in Manila, Ali visited American troops in South Korea. Thousands of Koreans lined the streets in honor of the boxing champ as he drove in from the airport in Seoul.
Ali was born Cassius Clay in 1942 but changed his name in 1964 when he joined the Nation of Islam. Citing his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1977 and his religious beliefs, he refused to be drafted into the military and eventually was stripped of his boxing titles. His conviction on draft evasion was eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court four years later.
"When Ali went on his anti-Vietnam War speaking tour in the late 1960’s, it was primarily an effort to substitute his income after his boxing ban," according to an exhibit RE: Collections, project of the Asian Pacific Center that will be on exhibit this summer at the Smithsonian. "But while his membership in the Nation of Islam (NOI) and friendship with civil rights leader Malcolm X aligned his anti-war stance with the Black liberation movement, it also put him in a ripe position to counter widespread anti-Asian sentiment in a time when there were no Asian American media icons to do so."
“My enemy is the whitepeople, not Viet Cong or Chinese or Japanese,” Ali announced in a 1967 speech. Only two years after the public had been exposed to its first glimpses of war footage, Ali added dimension to the media’s portrayal of Vietnamese which otherwise illustrated them as faceless enemies and victims.
“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America,” Ali said about his resistance to the draft. “Shoot them for what? They never called me ni*ger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape or kill my mother and father…. How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”
Ali’s expressed kinship with Asians was not merely a circumstance of the war taking place in Vietnam. In fact, he and members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) identified as “Black Asiatic,” a concept tracing back at least as early as the beginning of the 20th Century. Japan’s 1905 victory in the Russo-Japanese War became a point of inspiration among a number of Asian and African nations, the platform for imagining a non-white coalition embraced by the likes of Chinese leader Sun Yat-Sen and African American leader Marcus Garvey.
Concepts such as the Black Asiatic, third-world liberation and a “dark-skinned race” eventually became elemental to the founding of the NOI by Elijah Muhammad. In later years, Malcolm X adopted the term Afro American but Ali, retained the term "Asiatic" as a mechanism to bridge the plights of African Americans, Vietnamese and minorities alike.
Sudip Bhattacharya, a PhD candidate from Rutgers University and a staff writer for AsAmNews, recalled on his personal blog when he was just 7 how he channeled Ali’s courage to take on bullies and racists in his neighborhood in Queens.
“I remember staying where I was and telling them “Yea, I’m Ali and I’ll knock you out,” wrote Bhattacharya. “They paused. We didn’t fight and they moved on. I already could associate images of Ali and stories of him as examples of someone who didn’t shy away from what he believed in. He was a proud Black man, and even though I didn’t understand race back then, or why exactly these White people kept bothering us, I had this image of Ali beside me too, not fighting for the sake of fighting, but believing strongly that as folks of color, you can be defiant, and free. #ripAli”
Rajan Zed, President of Universal Society of Hinduism in Nevada, said that with Ali’s death, the “world had lost someone unique and brave; a humanitarian who challenged the status quo.” Zed called Ali a “global ambassador for cross-cultural understanding; who stood up for many and who symbolized the victory of the human spirit.”
-- Views from the Edge contributed to this article.
Ali’s expressed kinship with Asians was not merely a circumstance of the war taking place in Vietnam. In fact, he and members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) identified as “Black Asiatic,” a concept tracing back at least as early as the beginning of the 20th Century. Japan’s 1905 victory in the Russo-Japanese War became a point of inspiration among a number of Asian and African nations, the platform for imagining a non-white coalition embraced by the likes of Chinese leader Sun Yat-Sen and African American leader Marcus Garvey.
Concepts such as the Black Asiatic, third-world liberation and a “dark-skinned race” eventually became elemental to the founding of the NOI by Elijah Muhammad. In later years, Malcolm X adopted the term Afro American but Ali, retained the term "Asiatic" as a mechanism to bridge the plights of African Americans, Vietnamese and minorities alike.
Sudip Bhattacharya, a PhD candidate from Rutgers University and a staff writer for AsAmNews, recalled on his personal blog when he was just 7 how he channeled Ali’s courage to take on bullies and racists in his neighborhood in Queens.
“I remember staying where I was and telling them “Yea, I’m Ali and I’ll knock you out,” wrote Bhattacharya. “They paused. We didn’t fight and they moved on. I already could associate images of Ali and stories of him as examples of someone who didn’t shy away from what he believed in. He was a proud Black man, and even though I didn’t understand race back then, or why exactly these White people kept bothering us, I had this image of Ali beside me too, not fighting for the sake of fighting, but believing strongly that as folks of color, you can be defiant, and free. #ripAli”
Rajan Zed, President of Universal Society of Hinduism in Nevada, said that with Ali’s death, the “world had lost someone unique and brave; a humanitarian who challenged the status quo.” Zed called Ali a “global ambassador for cross-cultural understanding; who stood up for many and who symbolized the victory of the human spirit.”
-- Views from the Edge contributed to this article.
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