Stung Like a Bee in Diyarbakir

Poet John Donne once wrote that when a church bell tolls out for the dead it also tolls for the living, because every death diminishes the living to some extent. The bell recently tolled loudly for many of us when we heard about Muhammad Ali the other day.

My favorite Ali memory took place in 1986 outside of Diyarbakir in Eastern Turkey. I was staying in a flea bag hotel. The owner was dazzled by his latest toy from Germany, a remote control. He kept turning the TV on and off, from across the lobby. Shazam! And the TV was on!  

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In those days, Ali had shazam everywhere. A travelling carnival in a broken-down lot on the edge of town was a prominent event at a time when the Republic of Turkey was flat broke and even the currency was riddled with inflation. The carnival was operated, as town fairs often are, by a crew of drifters. Eastern Turkey, back then, was the most impoverished part of a poor country. Appalachia’s Appalachia.

The clowns at the carnival wore beat-up plastic shoes with fake plastic laces and the old ponies looked longingly at the public works hay trucks as school groups moved about drinking hot cups of salep and chai. In the center, one machine spun rusted swing-set swings in a circle faster and faster until the men on the swing were flying parallel to the ground.

As those unemployed men went round and round with no real place to go, I heard a high-pitched and tinny, “'çok güzel'!” (pronounced choke goo-zell) which is Turkish for “Very Beautiful!” and when I turned to look there was a plastic Muhammad Ali figure standing about 6 feet tall.

The Ali machine had a coin slot and a pillowed buffer covered with brown boxing-glove-leather for receiving the blows from players that rented their own boxing gloves in order to try their luck. Who could hit Ali the hardest and get a “çok güzel!”? If you really hit the fake Ali’s cushion extra hard, a hidden tape machine said “çok güzel,” much as a bell might ring at an American county fair if you hit the lever hard enough with your rubber sledge.

I figured that If Ali could get his own vending machine game out near Diyarbakir in 1986, he was among the most famous athletes on earth. Back then, Diyarbakir was the back end of nowhere and this was a suburb of Diyarbakir. With its black basalt castle walls and ancient mosque, it was always one of my favorite places.

Ali had won the championship in the ring and lost it in the courts. The greatest fighter of all time wouldn’t fight the Vietnamese on behalf of people who declared themselves his enemy. He won his championship back in the ring in 1974 at age 32.

Not too long ago, Turkey was a champ too. Last year nearly 37 million foreigners visited Turkey, about 800,000 of them American. Turkey had become the sixth-largest tourism destination in the world (after France, the USA, China, Spain and Italy).  Now it’s down for the count again as ISIS has successfully, through its terror and propaganda, managed to attach Turkey to Iraq and Syria in the minds of potential tourists.

Back in 1986 Turkish tourism was also hurt by the film Midnight Express, before the country got really strong. It’s so hard to reconcile Turkey today and Turkey back then. Somehow, I know Turkey will return from its current nightmare. The challenges for Turkey will be larger than the challenges provided by Chuck Wepner, Jerry Quarry or even the Great Joe Frazier for Ali.

Turkey has everything for tourists: nature, history, nightlife, sea and city. Like heavyweight champions, the popularity of destinations rises and falls. At its peak, Turkey’s largest overseas markets were Germany, the U.K. and Russia. Germany and the United Kingdom are struggling with their own E.U. challenges and the collapse of petroleum has taken Russia off the map. U.S. travelers like to spend about 12 days and see Istanbul, the Aegean and the Mediterranean regions as well as Cappadocia.

For decades Turkey strove to be a member of the European Union (E.U.) with no success. Now some E.U. members are on the edge of leaving the union. Turkey likes to say Istanbul is located on the cusp of Europe and Asia and that Turkey is in the middle of both continents. But Asia doesn’t really begin until much further East and the role of country in the middle has never been so thoroughly tested by war and politics.  The ‘Asia’ in Istanbul, is really the ‘Asia Minor’ that the Romans used to describe Anatolia. Istanbul is more centrally located between Europe and the Middle East than Europe and Asia. Now the country must decide which region it belongs to.

In many ways, identity is the most important question any of us have to answer and back in 1961 the Republic of Turkey gave the African American and Gay writer, James Baldwin, a country he could love without proclaiming any racial or sexual policy. When he went there he could just be himself. Muhammad Ali had no such luck. The America of 1966 put him against the ropes and compelled him to announce his identity. The idea was to shout him down, but this fighter who wouldn’t kill, this essentially humble man shouted louder.

Without him, the world feels different today. We had a champion and now there is none, just a lot of athletes who stand for themselves and the contracts they signed. He was the Greatest and in resisting the authorities of his time, he fought for America.