Muhammad Ali Gets a Museum and More

Muhammad Ali was a mesmerizing figure in 1974, with his wit, boasts, bursting energy, and lightning speed. That year he went to Kinshasa, Zaire, for the “Rumble in the Jungle,” a fight to reclaim the world heavyweight title, which he had been stripped of in 1967 after refusing to register for the draft. But it would take more than rhyming insults to beat George Foreman, a formidable boxer seven years his junior. “The time may have come to say goodbye to Muhammad Ali,” Howard Cosell of ABC Sports told his viewers, “because very honestly I don’t think he can beat George Foreman.” And for the first seven rounds it looked like Cosell was right. Ali, the dancer, was pinned against the ropes, taking punch after punch. Then, in the eighth round, with Foreman flagging, Ali leapt from the ropes to land a series of deft blows that knocked out the “big bad monster nobody could beat.”

A magnificent new center in Ali’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, celebrates the magic of such moments in the fighter’s remarkable career, but like Ali himself, it’s about a lot more than boxing. Ali combined sports and politics, using his celebrity as a boxing superstar to promote racial equality in America, and now he devotes himself to the developing world, addressing such issues as poverty and hunger. He declared that he wanted to win fights “for the prestige. Not for me but to uplift my little brothers who are sleeping on concrete floors . . . black people who are living on welfare, black people who can’t eat, black people who [have] no knowledge of themselves.”

The Ali Center has been true to the multifaceted legacy of this once highly controversial but now almost universally beloved figure by creating a variety of outreach programs and fashioning exhibits that are meant to inspire as well as educate. “We don’t call ourselves a museum,” says the chief curator, Susan Shaffer Nahmias. “A museum is an institution that is organized around a collection and interpreting a collection. We are about ideas.” The center prides itself on offering a “nontraditional visitor experience,” and it caters to a variety of learning styles by presenting information via wall text, interactive video, film, and still photography.

The six-level complex overlooking the Ohio River tells Ali’s story in interactive “journeylines,” screens that jump to life when the viewer activates them. Ali was inspired to start boxing when his bicycle was stolen as a child and he wanted to fight the boys who took it. The first journeyline curves around a red Schwinn, and when the viewer touches the bike the story appears on the wall behind it.

There are also pavilions organized around principles that have guided Ali’s public life, including confidence, generosity, conviction, and respect. They use quotations from the boxer and others to explore these different themes. One on spiritually, for example, examines the importance of Islam in Ali’s life. The respect one, on the other hand, looks at the boxer’s regard for his opponents. In the orientation theater, visitors are introduced to the center’s concepts while surrounded by flickering screens, including one that arches over the audience.

“We don’t want people to think of it as a shrine,” Shaffer Nahmias says. “We want them to think of it as an active center of learning.” In the vaulting lobby, you can sit at one of 25 computer stations and take a test meant to identify your personal strengths. As the Ali Center Web site explains it (at www.alicenter.org/walkwithali/strengths.html), “Each one of us has our own ‘signature strengths’—a cluster of personal qualities that best define the essence of who we are.” Also, you are urged to sign up for something called the Personally Great Coaching Program, a Web-based self-improvement course that promises—for a fee—to “make your life count.”

Organized architecturally around a copper-colored cone piercing through two levels, symbolizing the Olympic torch, the building has wings that spread like a butterfly’s, recalling Ali’s boast that he would “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Peering down from the second story of the torch, you can watch the film The Greatest projected on a full-size boxing ring below.

“I wanted more than a building to house my memorabilia,” Ali has said. “I wanted a place that would inspire people to be the best that they could be at whatever they choose to do, and to encourage them to be respectful of one another.” But for those fans who want to learn more about Ali’s tactics in the ring, the center dedicates much space to the story of his boxing career. There are stations where you can call up videos of his greatest fights, plus an interactive timeline and a modest collection of artifacts. These include a glittering robe Elvis Presley gave him, with the words “People’s Choice” emblazoned in blue jewels across the back, and the torch he used to light the flame at the 1996 Olympics. This year the center is also host to an exhibit of photographs by the renowned black photographer Howard L. Bingham, who documented his career in intimate and spirited images.

After Ali’s last fight, in 1981, and his revelation that he had Parkinson’s disease, once more it looked like the time had come to say goodbye to him. But again he defied expectations. He continues to tirelessly raise money, advocate, lobby, and travel for the causes he believes in. At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta he proved he could still mesmerize the world when some three billion viewers watched him, shaking visibly from the disease, slowly carry the Olympic torch to its unlit saucer. Reflecting on that occasion, the writer George Plimpton, who had watched Ali’s triumphant knockout in Zaire, wrote that one could only marvel that this physically broken man had once, “through the wonderful excesses of skill and character . . . become the most famous athlete, indeed, the best-known personage in the world.”

The Muhammad Ali Center is at 1 Riverfront Plaza in Louisville, Kentucky. For more information go to www.alicenter.org or call 502-584-9254.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.