Whee! Or We? The Ballad Of Muhammad Ali

Machochip contributing editor Cindy Casares brings her female, sports ignorant point of view to all matters sporting and male. Pull up a chair and bask weekly in her feminine charms. This week Cindy rants about the common misinterpretation of America’s most beloved poet, Muhammad Ali.
I’m no sports fan, but I do have a Bachelor of Arts in English and if there’s one thing that really chaps my Moleskine, its jocks misquoting poetry. When that misquote changes the entire meaning of said poem? Well be prepared to deal with the bee in my bonnet, bub.
I work out at this one particular YMCA that has large, vinyl banners hanging on the wall with inspirational, community-oriented quotes printed on them. One of the banners has that famous quote from Ghandi, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” I can’t remember what the one next to it says. Probably “There’s no I in team” or something equally schmaltzy. I don’t remember because I am fixated on this third banner that sits right in front of the elliptical machines. It bears the following headline:

Me, we.
–Muhammad Ali.

Now, it’s always been my understanding that the correct spelling of the poem is, “Me, whee!” or perhaps, “Me! Whee!” Which, if you know anything about Muhammad Ali, you know is a lot more plausible than him writing a poem that includes other people. I’ve been staring at this quote for weeks and, finally, I decided to look the poem up and settle this argument between me and the banner once and for all. It turns out that the poem is quite difficult to source. It doesn’t appear on any of the dozens of Muhammad Ali YouTube videos I viewed. (Admittedly there are quite a few of them and I may have missed it.) And it may or may not be on his 1963 album, I Am The Greatest. If anyone out there has heard it in its entirety, let me know. It consists of Ali (then still called Cassius Clay) reciting poetry that it turns out was ghostwritten by a guy named Gary Belkin. Which brings up a sad fact: Ali may not have even written the elusive couplet. In fact, Belkin may have claimed in an interview with the New York Press that he wrote the poem. More about that later.
What I did find in my lengthy online search is a lot of people who not only think Ali said, “Me, we,” but actually find the alternative spelling to be “more profound.” I also found this one person who wrote 500 words on why the real spelling is, “Me, Oui.” Really? You think the champ spoke a lot of French growing up a poor, black kid in 1940’s Louisville, Kentucky? Not according to an interview he did with Michael Parkinson back in 1974. He claimed he was “a little black boy in Kentucky” who “didn’t know the value of” an education and spent his time, “playing hooky,” adding that, having learned from his mistake, he made sure his daughter could already speak three languages by the age of six.
The only seemingly credible source I could find for the quote was deceased journalist and author George Plimpton being interviewed in the 1996 Leon Gast film When We Were Kings which documents the 1974 heavyweight championship bout in Zaire between champion George Foreman and underdog challenger Muhammad Ali. At the end of the movie, Plimpton tells a story of Ali giving a lecture at a Harvard commencement to the graduating class. When the kids asked him for a poem, Plimpton says, he returned with—you guessed it—the world’s shortest one, “Me, whee!” Plimpton audibly enunciates the ‘h.” “Me, w-hee!” he coos. He then goes on to explain his interpretation of the poem. The video is below.

But getting back to that ghostwriter, Belkin claimed in that New York Press interview that Plimpton quoted one of his poems as Ali’s in When We Were Kings and “He didn’t even do the poem right.” Did Belkin mean that Plimpton got the whee wrong? Unfortunately, Mr. Belkin died in 2005, so we couldn’t email him for a comment. But, it’s important to note that Belkin was a comedy writer. When he wasn’t writing for Ali, he was busy working for Mad magazine and The Carol Burnett Show. In fact, I Am The Greatest earned a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album that year. The whole bit was based on Ali’s infinite ego. Do you really think Belkin would write a serious poem about community spirit with an egomaniac like Ali to play with? The majority of sources on the internet that list the poem (without a documented source) list it as part of a longer speech. Commonly something like this:

I am the greatest!!! I’m young; I’m handsome; I’m fast. I can’t possible be beat. They all must fall in the round I call. I should be a postage stamp: That’s the only way I’ll ever get licked. The heavyweight champion of the world should be pretty like me. IT AIN’T BRAGGING IF YOU CAN BACK IT UP.. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. I’m so mean, I make medicine sick. I shook up the world. Me! Whee!

So perhaps Belkin simply means that Plimpton left out too much of the poem. Because when you take into account that Ali called himself The Greatest of All Time and claimed, “I shook up the world!” from his first championship fight against Sonny Liston, it’s not much of a leap in logic to arrive at the self-congratulatory “Me, whee!”
Then, of course, there are the official journos like ESPN and NPR who also quote the poem with the “whee” spelling. And finally, BBC Radio 4, on a 2005 episode of a show called, Poetry Please listed the poem as “Me – Whee by Mohammed Ali” with source unpublished. Which explains why I can’t find the damn thing anywhere. For all we know, George Plimpton made the whole thing up. And if that’s the case, then whee is definitely the correct interpretation. So, please, America. Stop misquoting the bard. Because, really, what the heck does, “Me, we” mean, anyway?