Ali: forebears but no heirs. (In the Mix).

The great b-baller Charles Barkley once told the world that he wasn't a role model, so stop asking him to be one.

Fair enough. However, Barkley, who grew up in Alabama, made his declaration in the early '90s, when black folks could eat in any restaurant, live in the suburbs, and star on Southeastern Conference basketball teams such as Auburn, his alma mater.

Barkley could afford not to be a role model. However, could Muhammad Ali?

Michael Mann's film Ali explores the complexities of life in a Lagrangian point, with forces pulling him between champion boxer and cultural icon. Yes, Ali had a choice to be a talented boxer with a big mouth and nothing to say, but sometimes you are compelled--drafted, if you will--to move beyond the easy expectations.

Forget what critics have said: Ali is one of the best films in a year of disappointing work. Biopics are difficult to pull off, especially when the subject is alive and well remembered. The film--which follows Ali from the 1964 fight with Sonny Liston to the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" with George Foreman--features brutal fight scenes, tense dialogue, good politics, and plenty of uncomfortable moments.

Will Smith stars as Ali, and proves once again, as was the case in Six Degrees of Separation, that he is an actor with depth. Smith delivers both physically and spiritually in transforming himself from Fresh Prince to the Greatest of All Time. And Smith takes on Ali's arrogance and tenderness in a way that draws more compassion out of a viewer than ambivalence. If you don't like Ali, the film will not lead to a change of heart.

But the greatest challenge in offering Ali to the audience is correctly placing his cultural significance in the turbulent years between 1964 and 1974. The movie does this quite well.

Let's face it, the elite in this country were not ready for a loud, sometimes obnoxious black male delivering crushing blows to the body politic. Sure, it's not as though Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael weren't making enough noise with pro-black, anti-government rhetoric. But, whether we like it or not, athletic heroes have far more cultural power than they often want to assume. And for black fighters, their prowess in the ring has generally been seen as a threat.

Check out the 1910 fight between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope. The story begins in late December of 1908, as Johnson crushes Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, to win the world heavyweight title. Burns had earlier claimed that black fighters had neither the heart nor the skill to be world champions. Burns had gone as far as calling Johnson "yellow." Johnson taunted Burns as soon as the opening bell, telling Burns, "You're white, Tommy--white as the flag of surrender." Remember, this is 1908, and trash-talking a white man was as brazen an act as you could imagine.

Jack London was at that fight. London conceded that Johnson had thoroughly beaten Burns, likening the scene to a man cuffing a child. But he also penned a commentary for The New York Herald: "Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove the golden smile from Jack Johnson's face. Jeff, it's up to you!"

Jeffries, a former world champion who refused to fight black fighters while he held the title, came out of retirement to fight Johnson on July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nevada. What was at stake was clear. White writers hyped Jeffries as the man who would reclaim racial superiority in the ring. Black writers claimed this fight was a defining moment for a race.

Johnson, in the fifteenth round, puts Jeffries down with a stunning left to the face. Johnson is now the undisputed champion, and all hell breaks loose across America. On July 6, the London Daily Express reports in a headline: "Race Riots in America. 19 Deaths. Many Hurt, and 5,000 Arrested."

The story was even more astounding because of its blame-the-victim overtone. "Racial riots swept the United States last night from the Atlantic to the Pacific after Jeffries's crushing defeat by Johnson.... Most of the casualties were Negroes who were hunted down by white mobs, mostly because of boasts by the blacks that they had demonstrated their superiority over the whites." Several city councils outlawed showing the film of the fight; Congress passed a law banning the distribution of the film across state lines for commercial purposes.

Johnson, who was considered an "uppity nigger" for, among other things, speaking fluent French, wearing nice clothing, driving big cars, and dating and marrying white women, would be hounded with trumped-up charges of prostitution and transporting women across state lines for immoral acts. Booker T. Washington, through his secretary, eviscerated Johnson in a statement he was asked to give about the charges leveled against the champion in 1912. "This is another illustration of the more irreparable injury that a wrong action on the part of a single individual may do to a whole race," Washington wrote.

Johnson was sentenced to a year and a day in prison in the summer of 1913. He escaped to Canada, then sailed to Europe.

Johnson was the first people's champion, at least for black people. As barbaric as boxing is, beating down two white men was, paradoxically, the psychological balm that religion or education could not provide.

This same racial pride returned with Joe Louis, whose handlers modeled him to be the antithesis of Johnson: strong, but humble; proud, but low key. However, Louis becomes a transcendent figure in racial politics in America. Although he won the heavyweight title by beating Jimmy Braddock in 1937, much to the delight of the black community, Louis vaulted into the role of people's champion by pummeling German fighter Max Schmeling. Despite Schmeling's noninvolvement with the Nazi regime, he was symbolic of Aryan superiority. Louis laid him in out in a two-minute, one-round thrashing and became, as sportswriter Art Rust Jr. wrote, the avenging angel of white America. "Odd that a man whose race has been subjected to slavery and whose people continued to be repressed should be looked upon in this light," Rust wrote in his Illustrated History of the Black Athlete (Doubleday, 1985). "President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt Louis's muscle and said, `Joe, we're depending on those muscles for America.'"

Later, while serving in the Army during World War II, Louis, once again, became the avenging angel leading the charge against totalitarianism when he said before a charity fight for the Army Relief Fund in 1942: "I'm only doing what any red-blooded American would do. We gonna do our part, and we will win, because we are on God's side." The speech was so inspiring that he received a thank you telegram from Roosevelt.

So, there is Ali, twenty-five years later, standing in the Houston induction center on April 28, 1967, refusing the call to serve his country.

Ali rejected the system that Louis embraced. His rejection was based on a political order that did not live up to the spoken and unspoken promises made to Louis's generation, as well as to Frederick Douglass's generation nearly a century earlier. Black folks stayed, for the most part, humble, hardworking, and proudly patriotic.

Who really believes that Ali was going to be a member of an infantry platoon in the middle of the shit? Please, it would've been easier for him to join. Life magazine probably would've done a nice photo essay on the champ on K.P. duty, and joking it up with his fellow recruits and the drill instructors during hand-to-hand combat training. The Army isn't against Islam. The Army wants its soldiers to be spiritual. So there would be the black-and-white silhouette of Ali praying to Allah to help kill godless communists. Two years he's out, and ready to step back into the ring.

But why should Ali have rolled over? He had come a long way since he won a gold medal in the light-heavyweight division for the United States at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. In a way, Mann's one glaring fault was not exploring young Cassius Clay's Olympic moment. Dig the sentimental jingoism exposed in the poem Clay composes upon his victory:

   To make America the greatest is my goal, So I beat the Russians, and I beat
   the Poles And the USA won the medal of gold Italians said, "You're greater
   than Cassius of old." We like your name, we like your game So make Rome
   your home if you will. I said I appreciate the hospitality But the USA is
      my country still 'Cause they're waiting to welcome me in Louisville.

What happens when he returns to Louisville--after the twenty-five-car parade--is what happened to many black men when they returned from fighting for America.

In a disputed section of his autobiography, The Greatest (Random House, 1975), Ali recounts the time when he and his friend Ronnie King--the two were out riding their motorcycles--escape a rainstorm by seeking refuge at a whites-only restaurant. A waitress recognizes him, probably through the gold medal he is wearing. He hadn't removed it since they put it around his neck. The owner of the restaurant tells her that he doesn't give a damn who he is, "I don't serve niggers."

Ali says in that moment he wanted to shout out that he had brought back the Olympic medal for the city of Louisville. He was an American, and that if a foreigner could be served here, so should he.

"But I never said a word," Ali says. "Instead of making them feel ashamed, I felt shamed. Shamed and shocked and lonesome." Later, after fighting off a white motorcycle gang intent on stealing his medal, Ali throws the most outward symbol of his patriotism into the Ohio River.

So, there is Ali, seven years later, standing in the Houston induction center on April 28, 1967, refusing the call to serve his country. And we should all wonder why anyone dared ask why.

There are those who believe that he was being controlled by the Nation of Islam. That his politics were part of a sham ethic directed by Malcolm X, then through Elijah Muhammad and his son Herbert.

But the years he spent in a racially segregated Louisville shaped his political point of view more than the Nation of Islam did. In the sixty-seven years of the twentieth century to that moment at the Houston induction center, Ali needed only look at the fact that black Americans had fought bravely in two World Wars, in Korea, and now in Vietnam only to find themselves treated as less than full citizens in many parts of the nation, despite Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Ali didn't need the Nation of Islam to tell him about racism. He wanted, like many impatient black males of his era, to hear something harder than "We Shall Overcome" and to see something more powerful than slogans on signs.

"No Viet Cong ever called me nigger," he said. This wasn't a glib remark. Just an ironic reminder that it was disgusting enough to be called one by fellow citizens. It was sickening enough for Ali as a young boy to have Seen the coverage of Emmett Till's lynching: not the first black male lynched, nor the last. But to endure racism as a man was too much. In the end, Ali could not be swayed by a government that was basically saying: "Muhammad, just take the oath, put on the uniform, and help us defeat the commies. Maybe this time is the time we do the right thing by you people."

For black people, the sports world offers a platform for heroics away from the stadium. From Jack Johnson to Joe Louis to Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood, who wrecked his career fighting for free agency, black athletes fought for more than just winning. Tommie Smith's and John Carlos's defiance during the 1968 Olympic games stood for something higher and more compelling than the medals they briefly wore around their necks.

Ali was the epitome of this kind of role model. It would be nice to see if someone else would take up the mantle.

Fred McKissack Jr. is Associate Editor of The Progressive.