Cricket has in recent years lost some wonderful commentators: Tony Greig, Richie Benaud and Tony Cozier have all passed on taking with them their huge mass of knowledge, ebullience and incisiveness. You miss these people because they weren’t just voices calling a sport, they were facets of the sport itself, indivisible parts of your experience growing up watching cricket.
It is the same regardless of the game, and for millions of people BBC’s David Coleman - also sadly no longer with us - was another such commentator on football and athletics, whose tones were integral to fans’ enjoyment. Like the best in cricket, Coleman knew when to speak and when not to, when to drizzle the action with insight or enhance it with his boyish exuberance.
At the time of the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, Muhammad Ali was already suffering from the onset of Parkinson’s disease, the illness which, along with related complications, has seen the planet on Saturday lose one of its most beautiful humanitarians and most exceptional of men. It wasn’t known that he would light the flame at those games and, indeed, with his condition diagnosed many years ago, he may have seemed an unlikely candidate to do so.
So when he emerged onto the stage, his body shaking wildly as he held the torch aloft, Coleman’s voice tremored with delight and surprise: “And look! It’s Muhammad Ali!”, he exclaimed, a justified reverence in those five words laden with emotion. Here was a veteran commentator who had worked on numerous football World Cups, Olympics and had been behind the mic for countless records on the athletics track, still clearly moved by Ali’s magnificence and sheer presence.
It was a terribly poignant moment for anyone watching boxing’s lethal butterfly struggling a little as he brought the torch down to light the flame, seeing this man who was the epitome of physical perfection being pummelled by the lottery of health. His features still shot charisma out of every pore, but it was a moment of mortality for everyone, splendidly captured by the frugality of Coleman’s words.
Around the same time, my grandmother had moved into an old people’s home. She too was suffering from Parkinson's, coupled with mental complications arising from both age and the medication she was administered. On the drive to see her, my father would chat with me, but on the way back there was little scope for conversation. My dad was too busy trying not to cry after another visit which confirmed his mum was sliding inexorably into the cruelly separate world of dementia.
On one such occasion she told me to be quiet because she was talking to Michael Atherton. The then England captain was there with us in the room, but only because he was batting on the television in the corner. It was odd and sobering to see two such huge presences in your existence, your grandma and Ali, transformed to such a degree by illness. The world can at least be thankful that for many years Ali's didn't rob him of his acute, cerebral sharpness and wit.
There will be some majestic tributes to Ali in the next few days, as writers attempt to match the greatness of their subject’s own acidic, joyous poetry in his honour. We will all watch his fights on YouTube and look at the endless galleries of photos of a man for whom the camera seemed to have been waiting since its invention.
There is one particularly lovely picture of him visiting the dressing rooms at Lord’s in June 1966 as England took on the West Indies in the Second Test. Ali sits there in apparent conversation with someone out of shot, his eyes zinging stardust and impishness. Next to him sits Garry Sobers, giving the world heavyweight champion a look which conveys a fantastically warm adulation, a genuine sense of knowing he was in the presence of someone who transcended sport, life and society. That photo with Sobers actually really rather tells you everything you could ever want to know about Muhammad Ali: Even the greatest was in awe of The Greatest.
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