By Norm Frauenheim-
PHOENIX, Ariz. – They stood in 103-degree temperatures on both sides of Central Avenue Thursday just to see the hearse. They stood in line for three hours in the desert’s relentless, late-summer heat Wednesday just to see his flag-draped casket above Arizona state’s seal at the Capitol Rotunda.
John McCain, the People’s Champ.
I’m not sure McCain would have called himself that. A great sports fan, the longtime Arizona Senator was first and foremost a boxing fan. In my days as a sportswriter who covered everything from the Phoenix Suns to the Olympics, my conversations with him would always wind up with talk about the legends who had captured the public imagination, no matter what the scorecards or promoters or writers thought of them.
McCain — called “the Boxing Senator” by Bob Arum in a story I wrote for The Ring Saturday https://www.ringtv.com/542243-bob-arum-on-the-passing-of-the-boxing-senator-john-mccain-he-was-a-great-american/ — was fascinated by Manny Pacquiao, the last true People’s Champ throughout his astonishing rise from Filipino street kid to four titles in four weight classes. He named his federal boxing bill the Muhammad Ali Act. He led the fight for the pardon of Jack Johnson, the historical icon who became a People’s Champ for later generations who never saw him fight but knew about his role in the civil rights’ fight.
I don’t know exactly why McCain liked boxing. At times, I’m not so sure why I do either. On the politically-correct scale, it ranks somewhere near the bottom for all the cliched reasons. I’m sure many of McCain’s colleagues looked at him and wondered why. I’ve seen it myself from fellow sportswriters who look at boxing as though it’s something that should be scraped off the bottom of a dirty shoe.
But where there’s dirt, there’s drama. In boxing, it’s all there. Better writers have called it life in a shot glass and I think that’s what appealed to McCain. There are sports that are safer. And sports with greater public appeal. But none is as 100-proof genuine as boxing.
For all his flaws, McCain was genuine. In part, that explains why all of those people waited on hot Phoenix streets just for a glimpse of his hearse and his casket. Populism is a dirty word these days. It’s been muddied up, trampled and misused in a daily tweet storm from Washington D.C. Little is believable. Few are accountable. If Donald Trump were a boxer, he’d blame Google for a loss.
But McCain has blamed himself for lots of mistakes, including a failed marriage and his role in the Keating Five in 1989.
Acknowledging mistakes, I think, is fundamental to success in the boxing ring. I’m not sure what kind of a boxer McCain was at the Naval Academy. My guess he was physically limited, yet always there in the end.
To use a cliché, he always found a way, mostly because he was honest with himself, first and foremost. Perhaps, that’s something he learned in that Hanoi Hell Hole, no Hilton, during his five-plus years as a Viet Nam POW. Only he could figure out to survive and do so with his life and honor intact.
Trump has derided his POW experience, saying that he only likes people who weren’t captured. Trump doesn’t know, or conveniently forgets, that McCain was targeted by the North Vietnamese because his father was a prominent admiral, who was given the CINCPAC post – Commander-In-Chief Pacific – not long after McCain’s fighter jet was shot down. They offered him early release. McCain turned it down, knowing North Viet Nam would use it as propaganda that would stain him as a collaborator forever.
Put Trump in the same situation and I’m guessing you’d have seen a Trump Tower in Hanoi a few years later. He’d have been out of Hanoi and back home, saying ad nauseam there was “no collusion, no collusion” with his North Vietnamese captors.
In McCain, there has never been much guessing about how he would fight. Often, there was disagreement with his reasons. With the why. But rarely the how. McCain was about the good fight in a life that ended with crowds who will remember him as their champion, a People’s Champ.
