Of all the images that have attended the news of Muhammad Ali’s death, two stand out. In the first, it is 1965 and the 23-year-old champion rages over the supine body of Sonny Liston, urging him to get up and fight some more. In the photograph, Ali looks the embodiment of physical power and youth, a sculpted David beside a fallen Goliath. Having told the world of the mythical life he might be capable of, he is on the way to living it.
In the other image, 31 years later, Ali is lighting the Olympic flame, unsteadily, in Atlanta in 1996: the undisputed American hero, now deprived of the speed of thought and action that often seemed superhuman, otherworldly, even to him. In this picture, he embodies a different kind of courage, and an altered grace, qualities that sustained him for two more decades in the daily battle with Parkinson’s disease.
In the years between those photographs, Muhammad Ali was the most storied man of our times. As well as being instrumental in creating a new era in sport and a radical shift in racial politics, he almost singlehandedly expanded the scope of exclamatory description. Writers – Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates and innumerable others – were as entranced by him as he often seemed by himself; it became a different kind of title fight to attempt to capture his generous magic in words.
The reason for this was simple: it was impossible to contain him – he ducked and danced from easy stereotypes, embodied paradox. The little magic tricks and sleights of hand – that he sometimes seemed so childishly thrilled by – were emblematic of more comprehensive enigma. This expressed itself first in the way he fought. A big man by the standards of the heavyweights of his time, he invented a new style of boxing, hands low, feet in constant motion, head high, fighting with his eyes as much as his fists.
But this was not all. As his career developed, he discovered the talent that was both his greatest strength and his eventual undoing: an almost unprecedented ability to absorb punishment, to take a punch. His indelible fights with Joe Frazier and George Foreman were exercises not in lightness but in brute bravery; he gave the impression that he could do anything.
This shape-shifting characterised him beyond the ring, too. Ali was the great warrior who refused to take up arms (“no Vietnamese ever called me nigger”); the Nation of Islam devotee who preached a black American state, but wanted to spread love with everyone; the prototype fast-talking rapper who was barely literate; the ultimate sporting improviser who liked the certainties of prophecy (“If he tries to get rough – one round is enough!”) and learning by heart.
He was both never quite in earnest and always honest to himself. The grandson of slaves, the son of a sign painter and a house cleaner from Louisville, Kentucky, he started boxing aged 12 to ensure that his prized bicycle would never be stolen again.
By the age of 18 and 108 fights, that righteous anger was directed squarely at still-segregated America. In choosing one of the traditional few routes out of the divided south, he had no illusions what was expected of him and rejected it with every nuance of his being. Even in 1970, he could say: “Fighters are just brutes that come to entertain the rich white people. We’re just like two slaves in that ring. The masters get two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet, ‘My slave can whup your slave.’” His genius, as a sportsman and as a man, was to transcend that reality; to destroy it both with quick wit and with lifelong courage. In the relative silence of the last years of his life, there was no doubt great pride in that achievement above all others.
By all accounts, Ali spent a lot of time in training camp honing his Dr Seuss-like rhymes. They were, like just about everything he did, designed to entertain and to set some serious issues straight. In London, 50 years ago, he was proud to recite these lines:
“Since I won’t let critics seal my fate
They keep hollering that I’m full of hate
But they don’t really hurt me none
’Cause I’m doing good and having fun…
So when they ask you what’s the latest
Just say: ‘Ask Ali. He’s still the greatest!’ ”
Then, as now, he wasn’t wrong.
