Muhammad Ali and the Decline of Sportsmanship

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Teams fire managers and coaches who don't win a championship within a year or two of taking the job. Fans boo and throw things if a team loses two games in a row. Winning, after all, is the only thing. This may not be all Vince Lombardi's doing, but it seems to me he made it fashionable to be obsessed with winning. It is impossible to think of him without remembering his snarling demeanor on the sidelines.

Muhammad Ali's deification shows an America reluctant to confront its past

The obsession and the snarl became the emblem of modern sports. The old standard, that it was honorable just to compete, went out the window. The obsession will be on full display during the Super Bowl, and so will another of the evils of modern sports: Lombardi had nothing to do with this one; it was the work of another revered sports hero. Muhammad Ali taught the modern athlete and the modern fan that it is not enough to win, that you must utterly vanquish your opponent by stealing his pride and his dignity.

Ali gave us the modern successors to sportsmanship: Ali's style was not simply to beat his opponent, but to humiliate him. He got away with it in much the same way Lombardi did: I was as susceptible to those charms as anyone else. Still, I must now hold these men responsible for the harm they have done.

Sportsmanship in Black: Muhammad Ali – The Sportsmanship Guy

Sports has always had people like Lombardi and Ali, of course. But it seems peculiar to the modern age that we hold them up as paragons. I recently saw a tape of a fight between Ali and Floyd Patterson.

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It struck me that here was the Armageddon of the old and the new in sports: Ali postured and pranced through the fight, clearly the superior athlete and the superior fighter, but also clearly the inferior man. He just had to have something meaningful to say. Ali recited the following original poem more than 35 years ago during an interview.

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Did Muhammad Ali’s final bouts cost him his life?

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