The 12-year-old in Louisville, Kentucky, learned to box, the story goes, because someone had stolen his bike and the young Cassius Clay Jr. wanted to “whup” him. Within a decade, this angry young man would earn worldwide fame in this sport and later be known as Muhammad Ali.
And then years further on, his boxing career over, Ali continued traveling the globe, helping people to see how much they have in common. Ali won fame by hitting people. He achieved a kind of immortality by helping to close divisions.
Last Friday, after being hospitalized in Phoenix with respiratory problems, and desperately frail with Parkinson’s disease, Ali died at the age of 74.
What started as a quest for revenge became so much more.
Ali’s personal courage and personality won him adoration in part because he stood up for himself as an African-American man at a time when racial bias and segregation still stifled freedoms.
After winning a gold medal in boxing at the 1960 Summer Olympics, he returned home to Kentucky only to be refused service at a whites-only restaurant. Dismayed, he threw his Olympic medal into the Ohio River.
But the brash fighter known as the Louisville Lip wasn’t to be kept down. A breakthrough, and turning point, came with his stunning 1965 victory over Sonny Liston in Lewiston, Maine. Clay changed his name, embraced Islam and, in 1967, refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army.
Through the 1960s, Ali challenged notions of what was acceptable for a black man to do and say in white America. When he defied the draft during the Vietnam War, he declared, memorably, that he had “no quarrel” with the Vietcong. For taking that stand, he lost his boxing title and more than three years of bouts in his prime.
But Ali had plenty of fight left in him. When his ban on boxing was finally lifted, Ali took on two particularly memorable opponents, Joe Frazier and George Foreman.
Ali invented the “rope-a-dope” technique of laying back against the ring in a defensive posture to coax Foreman to punch himself to exhaustion in their epic 1974 battle in Kinshasa, Zaire, known as the “Rumble in the Jungle.”
He battled Joe Frazier three times, losing the first fight in 1971 but winning the second and third – the last being the “Thrilla in Manila” on Oct. 1, 1975, one of the most punishing heavyweight fights in history.
Frazier didn’t rise for the bell in the 15th and final round. Ali described that fight as “the closest thing to dying” he’d experienced.
The real end came 41 years later.
Ali retired in 1979, came out of retirement for several disastrous fights that muddied his glory and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1984.
In the last decades of his life, it was clear that Ali was paying a high price for climbing so many times into the ring. In his career, it’s believed that Ali endured as many 29,000 punches to the head.
As a living legend, Ali drew worshipful fans around the globe, despite his failing body. He used that body silently when he appeared before a Congressional committee to lend the evidence of his diminished capacities to arguments in favor of the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, enacted in 2000. The federal law protects boxers from unethical practices by promoters.
No one sold his own story as boxing’s greatest more than Ali.
But given his talents as a fighter, and his champion’s heart, the hype never seemed overblown. He ended his career with a 56-5 record, with 37 knockouts.
Around the world, Ali rallied people to address problems. The pugilist who rose on the fury of his fists became a global humanitarian, the champion everyone wanted to hug.
Last weekend, people in his hometown of Louisville had only each other to hug. On Friday, the world will get another chance to reflect on his life at a public funeral.
Ali reportedly planned the service himself. That means it could contain some surprises, and some mischief.
And, of course, greatness.