He doggedly refused to fight a war for America because of his religious beliefs but would seldom lose a battle in the ring. He punched, he pummeled and he berated his opponents with the ferocity of a soldier and with an audacity that few could withstand in White America of the 60s.
But none could ever fault this boxing genius, not when at 22 he won his first heavyweight title, or when he refused to be conscripted into the US Army and was stripped of his title, or when he converted to Islam to give up his “slave name” or, least of all when he put down giants in the ring with pre-conceived statements of victory. “I am greatest”, he roared and none was able to ever refute that.
Cassius Clay, a la Muhammad Ali, is no more. At 74, he breathed his last in a Phoenix hospital after a 32-year-long fight with Parkinson’s disease which was fallout of repeated blows to his head during his boxing days and resultant respiratory issues.
Besides winning 56 of the 61 fights in his three-decade-long career, slaying established names as a precocious youngster, Ali’s greatness was that his major punches also rained on racism, for Black rights and in warzones.
When he passed away on Saturday, he had global ovations, awe and heartfelt tributes to take with him into the final sunset. In his death, the world acknowledges that an icon much more than just a heavyweight champion has been lost forever, some even calling him greater than Martin luther King Jr.
Mostly seen as a synonym for unbridled power, it was sad to see this 6-foot-3-inch fighter of the ring, tremble, shake and lose his speech to the debilitating disease and yet when he lit the Olympic flame for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, hands shaking uncontrollably, the standing ovation
was unusually long and unprecedented. Same at the london Olympics in 2012 when he needed much more assistance to do the same and was wheeled away without speaking a word.
“If I had no problem, people would be afraid of me. Now they feel sorry for me. They thought I was Superman. Now they can (say) ‘he is human like us. He has problems’,” he said about his ailment.
For once, and perhaps the only time in his life, Muhammad Ali was being publicly modest. For, he fought disease as men rarely do, like an undefeatable soldier fighting his enemy in a fight to the finish. RIP The Greatest. RIP, the man who could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. RIP American icon, global legend.