c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ Lists of the century’s greatest in varied categories are now cramming our consciousness the way catalogs are filling our mailboxes. It is mostly harmless fun on the People magazine level of intellectual challenge.

Still, one morally vacuous exception stands out to which nobody has yet taken exception.

That is the ongoing exploitation of Muhammad Ali as either the greatest boxer or the greatest athlete of the fading century.

There is no doubt that Ali is a popular personality in America. He understood, as Norman Mailer wrote of one of his fights, that”ego”is”the word of the century.”So Ali cleverly constructed and inhabited his public persona, adding a fleeting aura of charm to boxing just before it lost all its claims to be a sport and, like politics, became a part of show business.

Ali is not a triumphant athlete but a burnt-out case, a shambling man whose central nervous system was permanently damaged by the punches he absorbed in his many years in the ring.

The former boxer suffers from Parkinson’s disease, a neurological affliction that causes tremors, loss of balance, memory lapses and confusion. It has most notably affected Ali’s speech. Some doctors have said that Ali’s symptoms were brought on by the repeated blows to the head he endured during the latter part of his career.

But now he is brought out like the national mascot, the light that once danced in his eyes banked or burning low, his once finely coordinated movements blunted by the uninventoried injuries to a brain once nimble enough to compose comic verses to disarm us as they celebrated Ali himself.

This is not Attention Deficit Disorder, this is irreversible damage, the dreadful payment exacted of him for his championships. This man stands wounded in our midst, a memorial in himself to the barbarism of boxing that was condemned by moral theologians 50 years ago because of the brain damage it created.

Boxing is the moral equivalent of capital punishment. It just takes longer to carry it out. But the person dies nonetheless, huddled in the shroud of his once powerful physique.

How, in a nation obsessed with victimhood, can we fail to identify Ali as a victim of a brutal pseudo-sport that has cratered in on itself to such an extent that it now features flabby 50-year-olds making spectacles of themselves in what are advertised as”comebacks”?

Yet boxing persists, as do the tragedies so often connected with it.

Recently, in the fitting setting of an Atlantic City, N.J., casino, 31-year-old Stephen Johnson suddenly lost consciousness at the end of the 10th round after what were described as”two fairly light blows.”A week later, he had still not awakened. His manager said, as if this were a movie,”He was always one fight away from hitting the big time.” But, according to The New York Times,”questions have been raised about his health after his last fight … a similar knockout … falling unconscious after a series of light blows.” In critical condition, on a respirator, he was diagnosed as having suffered the classic boxer’s injury,”a buildup of blood between the brain and the skull.” If this kind of injury were inflicted routinely on animals in some research protocol or manufacturing process, hordes of people would protest and lead vigils, sit-ins and other dramatic protests against it.

Perhaps America will pay attention to the Wall Street Journal report that the”market prices”for boxing memorabilia have”taken a dive.”Once you translate something into profit and loss, the market, as the business-minded say, speaks. According to Don Scott, described as editor of Boxing Collectors’ News,”Mismanagement and scandal are killing the sport and the collecting hobby.” Not soon enough, however, and too late for Ali, the value of whose mementos continues to outpace the market. That is because we see him as fans see matinee idols, blinding themselves willfully to their aging, bad performances, or ending up in guest shots on”Hollywood Squares.” Perhaps the national infatuation with the once handsome Ali prevents people from taking a good look at him to see what boxing has done to him. We view him, perhaps, as cameramen once did women stars, shooting them through a layer of gauze to obscure the taxes their faces were paying to age and hard living.

Whatever it is, we do not see Ali as the tragic figure he truly is. We do not honor or help him, or other boxers, by allowing the savage vaudeville of fighting to survive.

It is a sacrilege against humanity if not a sin to insist that he is the greatest when he is only the saddest of all our used-up celebrities.

DEA END KENNEDY