The Meaning of Tyson Fury

The cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote that in the 1960s and 70s Muhammad Ali was the most famous person to have lived up to that point. This wasn’t hyperbole: Ali’s fame aligned with the explosion of television. Broadcast technology cut across oceans and deserts and Ali was the most famous person of this era. He was often called a ‘man of the people’. What might this have meant at the time? Here is Ali biographer Thomas Hauser:

‘Ali’s appeal went far beyond his looks. At its core was the fact that he loved people. ‘He draws strength from the people,’ wrote Richard Durham, one of Ali’s biographers. ‘They nourish him and he keeps what they give him. Some men cannot take from the people. If the people give to them, it doesn’t get through or it just seeps away. He has the power to keep it. It strengthens him the way a parent’s love strengthens a child. And when he has enough of that strength, he can do anything the people want of him.’

Fandom for Ali transcended even his radicalism — his early support for black separatism, his conversion to Radical Islam, friendships with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., none could dampen his appeal. As someone else in Hauser’s book comments, ‘Hell, even the people who don’t like Ali like Ali’.

In the prime years of his career Ali was banned from the ring for roughly three years when the US government had his…