The Greatest Punches Out

NYT NEWS SERVICE





He floated like a butterfly, stung like a bee. The three-time world heavyweight champion was not just the greatest boxer, but perhaps also the greatest sportsman of all time. He was an anti-war activist who lost his title and three years of his prime for refusing to fight in Vietnam. A proud warrior in the battle against racism, he rejected his `slave name' Cassius Clay and embraced Islam. Of his 61 fights, he lost just five but his most dogged battle was with Parkinson's, the disease that slowed down his dancing feet and his silver tongue but not his spirit. As for how he should be remembered, Ali said it best himself: `As a man who never sold out his people. But if that's too much, then just a good boxer. I won't even mind if you don't mention how pretty I was'

Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight box ing champion who helped define his turbulent times as the most charismatic and controversial sports figure of the 20th century , died in a Phoenix-area hospital on Friday , a day after he was admitted for a respiratory ailment. He was 74.

Ali was the most thrilling if not the best heavyweight ever, carrying into the ring a physically lyrical, unorthodox boxing style that fused speed, agility and power more seamlessly than that of any fighter before him.

But he was more than the sum of his athletic gifts.An agile mind, a buoyant personality , a brash self-confidence and an evolving set of personal convictions fostered a magnetism that the ring alone could not contain.He entertained as much with his mouth as with his fists, narrating his life with a patter of inventive doggerel.

Ali was as polarising a superstar as the sports world has ever produced, admired and vilified in the 60s and 70s for his religious, political and social stances -his refusal to be drafted during the Vietnam War, his rejection of racial integration at the height of the civil rights movement, his conversion from Christianity to Islam and the changing of his “slave name“ Cassius Clay , to one bestowed by the separatist black sect Nation of Islam.

In later life Ali became something of a secular saint, a legend in soft focus. He was respected for having sacrificed more than three years of his boxing prime and un told millions of dollars for his anti-war principles after being banished from the ring; and he was extolled for his un-self-conscious gallantry in the face of incurable illness (Parkinson's). In 1996, he was trembling as he lit the Olympic cauldron in Atlanta. Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr started to box at 12, after his new $60 bicycle was stolen off a downtown street. He reported the theft to Joe Martin, a police officer who ran a boxing gym.When Cassius boasted what he would do to the thief when he caught him, Martin suggested that he first learn how to punch properly . Cassius was soon the star of a youth boxing show on local TV .

Martin, who was white, trained him for six years, although historical revisionism later gave more credit to Fred Stoner, a black trainer. It was Martin who persuaded Clay to “gamble your life“ and go to Rome with the 1960 Olympic team despite his fear of flying.

Clay won the Olympic lightheavyweight title and came home a professional contender.In Rome, Clay was everything the sports diplomats could have hoped for -a handsome, charismatic and black glad-hander.When a Russian reporter asked him about racial prejudice, Clay told him, “To me, the USA is still the best country in the world, counting yours. It may be hard to get something to eat sometimes, but anyhow I ain't fighting alligators and living in a mud hut.“

Ali would later cringe at that quotation.

Of course, after the Rome Games, few journalists followed Clay home to Louisville, where he was publicly referred to as “the Olympic nigger“ and denied service at many downtown restaurants. After one such rejection, the story goes, he hurled his gold medal into the Ohio River. But Clay , and later Ali, gave different accounts of that act, and according to Thomas Hauser, author of the oral history `Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times', Clay had simply lost the medal.

Clay turned professional by signing a six-year contract with 11 local white millionaires and began training in Miami. It was at a mosque there that he was introduced to the Nation of Islam, a sect led by Elijah Muhammad who taught that white people were devils genetically created by an evil scientist.Years later, after converting to orthodox Islam, Ali gave the Nation of Islam credit for offering African-Americans hope at a time of persecution. “Colour doesn't make a man a devil,“ he said. “It's the heart and soul and mind that count. What's on the outside is only decoration.“

On February 17, 1966, a day already roiled by the Senate's televised hearings on the war in Vietnam, Ali learned that a lowering of criteria had made him eligible to go to war.“Why me?“ Ali said when reporters swarmed around his rented Miami cottage. “I buy a lot of bullets, at least three jet bombers a year, and pay the salary of 50,000 fighting men with the money they take from me after my fights.“ As the reporters continued to press him, he snapped, “I ain't got nothing against them Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me nigger.“

The remark was front-page news around the world. In America, the news media's response was mostly unfavourable, if not hostile. On April 28, 1967, Ali refused to be drafted and requested conscientiousobjector status. He was immediately stripped of his title by boxing commissions around the country . Several months later he was convicted of draft evasion, a verdict he appealed.He did not fight again until he was almost 29, losing three-anda-half years of his athletic prime.

He returned to the ring on October 26, 1970. The fight, which ended with a quick knockout of the white contender Jerry Quarry, was only a tuneup for Ali's anticipated showdown with Frazier, the new champion. NYT NEWS SERVICE