Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)

'Better... in the clutch of some disease, 

Wastin' slowly by degrees, 

Better than of heart attack...

Let me die by being black'

- from Freedom by Muhammad Ali

The Greatest has been granted his last request. The most recognisable man on the planet has gone to touch gloves with his maker after the longest, bravest, most anguished struggle of his phenomenal fighting life.

The final bell has tolled for the boxing artist, formerly known as Cassius Clay.

As those sonorous chimes reverberated around a saddened world, they signalled the end of his protracted battle with one of the most pernicious diseases to afflict mankind.

Parkinson's took the decision on points. Not at the conclusion of 15 rounds of dazzling fisticuffs but after more than 30 years of grievous attrition.

Muhammad Ali is still the all-time heavyweight champion of the world. Forever will be.

'Float like a butterfly

Sting like a bee

The hands can't hit

What the eyes can't see'

Simplicity was but one part of the complex sum of Ali's genius but in this basic, brilliant rhyme he set down the definitive statement of his unique gift for the art he truly ennobled.

At a stroke of the pen he conveyed his God-given talent with his fists into the minds of kings and commoners alike.

None of us - not Norman Mailer, not even Budd Schulberg, certainly not we humble reporters of his story - have succeeded in putting the mighty Muhammad into words with the lyrical clarity of the man himself.

From the butterfly to the bee. From the Ali Shuffle to the Rope-a-Dope. From the Rumble in the Jungle to the Thrilla in Manila. From Clay to Ali, he found the explicit phrase to match his epic performances. 

Most prizefighters are at their most articulate in the violent language of the most primitive workplace in sport.

The most extraordinary pugilist of all found expression outside as well as inside the ring. Ali spoke in the tongues of poets and, after he found Islam, the prophets.

Nor would he be silenced when the Louisville Lip, as his home town dubbed its ranting young Cassius for his boyish bragging, was reduced to a Parkinson's whisper.

As the sickness lowered the volume and slowed the diction, so the precious words were chosen with more sparing effect.

He also found other ways to communicate. Perhaps most amazingly of all, given the convulsive shaking of his hands, he became an adroit magician.

The disease was well advanced when Ali came to London for one of his several anointings as Sportsman of the Century, on this occasion by the BBC.

He dined at The Savoy in worshipful company. When supper was over, the Lord of the Ring invited a group of autograph-hunters to join our table. My then 11-year-old son was among them.

Muhammad sat him on his knee while he performed his conjuring tricks with playing cards, handkerchiefs and match boxes. As he did so, he whispered: 'What's my name?'

'Mr Ali, sir,' my boy replied.

Muhammad chuckled, almost silently: 'Lucky you said that. Otherwise I'd have to give you a whuppin' like that Mr Terrell.'

The mind, as sharp as ever behind the veil of his medical condition, had taken him back to February 2, 1967.

To the red-neck city of Houston, Texas. To the night when tough Ernie Terrell came to challenge the world champion by refusing to call him by his adopted Islamic name.

'What's my name?' asked Ali as the referee called them from their corners.

'Cassius Clay,' replied Terrell.

'What's my name?' demanded Muhammad, time after time after time, as he rained punch after punch after punch on his insolent opponent but kept withholding the knock-out blow so he could inflict further retribution, round after round.

It was a message hammered out not only to the head and body of one foolishly bigoted, if brave, individual but to white America at large. A message delivered by the Black Muslim champion of civil liberty and freedom of speech.

They ain't done me no wrong 

So I ain't got no fight

With them Vietcong'

In 1967, with America at war in Vietnam, Muhammad Ali declined induction into the United States Army.

The heavyweight champion of the world, the glistening totem of his nation's global power, refused to fight.

That decision required at least as much courage as even the most extreme of his conflicts in the ring. 

There were undercurrents of racism in the ensuing torrents of public outrage. Less than 24 hours after he failed to answer his country's call to enlist, Ali was stripped of the WBA belt and banned from boxing.

Within two months he had been convicted of draft evasion, fined $10,000 and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. He never served his time.

After three years of appeals he lifted the last, lingering threat of incarceration by announcing what proved to be a temporary retirement from the ring.

Within another 12 months America had relented, if not forgiven. Ali's comeback was already under way by the time the Supreme Court set aside his conviction.

Redemption, adulation, deification even, were to be a lot longer coming for the devilishly handsome black boy who announced that he had cast his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River after returning triumphant from the 1960 Games in Rome, only to be denied service in a Louisville diner because of his colour.  Thirty-six years later - on that warm and emotional night in a stadium in Atlanta when the world watched with its heart in its mouth and a tear in its eye as he defied Parkinson's to safely ignite the 1996 Olympic flame - they gave him a replica. So then he let slip a hint that maybe he hadn't thrown his medal away, after all.

A mischievous sense of irony was one of Ali's most constant companions throughout three marriages, America's shifting affections and all those 61 fights for cash earned the hardest way.

It was with him that evening when the Games went to the deepest south of the old slave state of Georgia.

He took it to the White House when George W Bush presented America's most famous conscientious objector with his country's highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

It was at his side when former President Bill Clinton went to Louisville to open the Muhammad Ali Center, a permanent shrine to his majesty, and a building of hope for young black Americans.

From draft dodger to freedom fighter. From the fastest mouth in the Midwest to supreme sporting icon. 

From reviled to revered.

Ali, who won the gold medal in Rome in 1960, lights the Olympic flame ahead of the Games in Atlanta, Georgia in 1996 From the maternity ward at Louisville General Hospital at 6.35pm on January 17, 1942 to his rocking chair beneath the shady trees of his ranch at Berrien Springs, Michigan, this was the most improbable journey.

One which improved and excited the lives of all those of us fortunate enough to encounter him along the momentous way.

It is a story summoned up from the indomitable spirit, told from the enormous heart and beaten out by the lightning fists of Muhammad Ali.

It is a profoundly human parable for the American way of life. In its gut, it is the chronicle of the No 1 fighting man.

Credit : Daily Mail