Obama hails boxer Muhammad Ali as ‘man who fought for us’
World mourns ‘the greatest’ boxing champ and cultural icon who died at age 74
SCOTTSDALE, Arizona (Reuters) – Muhammad Ali, the former world heavyweight champion whose boxing feats, showmanship and political activism made him one of the best-known figures of the 20th century, died on Friday, aged 74.
Ali, who had long suffered from Parkinson’s disease which impaired his speech and made the once-graceful athlete a prisoner in his own body, died a day after he was admitted to a Phoenix-area hospital with a respiratory ailment.
His youthful proclamation of himself as “the greatest” rang true until the end for the millions of people worldwide, who admired him for his courage both inside and outside the ring.
Along with a fearsome reputation as a fighter, he spoke out against racism, war and religious intolerance, while projecting an unshakable confidence and humor that became a model for African-Americans at the height of the civil rights era.
Stripped of his world boxing crown for refusing to join the US Army and go to fight in Vietnam, Ali returned in triumph by recapturing the title and starring in some of the sport’s most unforgettable duels.
“Muhammad Ali was one of the greatest human beings I have ever met,” said George Foreman, who lost to Ali in Zaire in a classic 1974 bout known as the “Rumble in the Jungle.”
“No doubt he was one of the best people to have lived in this day and age. To [call him just] a boxer is an injustice,” Foreman said.
Ali enjoyed a popularity that transcended the world of sports, even though he rarely appeared in public in his later years.
US President Barack Obama said Ali was “a man who fought for us,” and placed him in the pantheon of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.
“His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public standing. It would earn him enemies on the Left and the Right, make him reviled, and nearly send him to jail. But Ali stood his ground. And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognize today,” Obama said in a statement.
Ali’s death was confirmed in a statement issued by his family spokesman late Friday evening.
“I am happy my father no longer struggles. He is in a better place. God is the greatest,” his daughter Maryum said on Saturday.
Few could argue with his athletic prowess at his peak in the 1960s. With his dancing feet and quick fists, he could – as he put it – float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
He was the first man to win the heavyweight championship three times.
But Ali became much more than a sportsman. He spoke boldly against racism in the 1960s as well as against the Vietnam War.
During and after his championship reign, Ali met scores of world leaders and for a time he was considered the most recognizable person on Earth, known even in remote villages in countries far from the United States.
Ali’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s came about three years after he retired from boxing in 1981.
He struggled with the disease for three decades, but carried on making public appearances including at the opening ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, stilling the tremors in his hands enough to light the Olympic flame. He also took part in the opening of the London Games in 2012, looking frail in a wheelchair.
His influence extended far beyond the sport. He became the unofficial spokesman for millions of black people and oppressed groups around the world because of his refusal to compromise his opinions and his willingness to stand up to white authorities.
Tributes poured in from across the world of sport, entertainment and politics.
“We lost a giant today. Boxing benefited from Muhammad Ali’s talents but not nearly as much as mankind benefited from his humanity,” said Manny Pacquiao, a boxer and politician in the Philippines, where Ali fought arch rival Joe Frazier for a third time in a brutal 1975 match dubbed the “Thrilla in Manila.”
Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson said on Twitter: “Let us pray for @MuhammadAli; good for America, world boxing champion, social transformer & anti-war hero. #TheGreatest.”
Flags were flown at halfmast in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, where he will be buried and where his modest childhood home at 3302 Grand Avenue has been turned into a museum.
“His journey from Grand Avenue to global icon serves as a reminder there are young people with the potential for greatness in the houses and neighborhoods all over our city, our nation and our world,” Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said at a memorial service. “There is no limit to what our kids can do if we help them realize their full human potential.”
In a realm where athletes often battle inarticulateness as well as their opponents, Ali was known as the Louisville Lip and loved to talk – especially about himself.
“Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far,” he once told a reporter.
His taunts could be brutal. “Joe Frazier is so ugly that when he cries, the tears turn around and go down the back of his head,” he once said. He also dubbed Frazier a “gorilla” but later apologized and said it was all to promote the fight.
Once asked about his preferred legacy, Ali said: “I would like to be remembered as a man who won the heavyweight title three times, who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him... who stood up for his beliefs... who tried to unite all humankind through faith and love.
“And if all that’s too much, then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxer who became a leader and a champion of his people. And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.”
Ali was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 17, 1942, as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., a name shared with a 19th-century slavery abolitionist. He changed his name after his conversion to Islam.
Ali is survived by his wife, the former Lonnie Williams, who knew him when she was a child in Louisville, along with his nine children.
Muhammad Ali is not dead. He’s every bit alive as he was last week, last year or half a century ago.
Ali’s not gone because he was more than a person. He transcended life.
Muhammad Ali is an ideal, a presence, ethereal. He’s not going anywhere. He’s still here. He shook up the world forever.
He called himself “the greatest,” but that’s unfair. The word “greatest” denotes some type of comparison. He was incomparable.
Ali’s body, quaked by Parkinson’s syndrome almost certainly caused from repeated brain trauma in the boxing ring, finally submitted Friday night in Arizona. He was 74.
He was more than a boxer, more than a man. He’ll remain a global icon and majestic figure. He was bigger than the Beatles, bigger than Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan and in many regions more recognizable than the Pope.
Ali defied the establishment, confronted inequality and challenged people to think. He rallied African-Americans. He jostled the status quo in the streets while he pummeled opponents with his fists. Oh, did that young man rumble. Parkinson’s turned Ali’s handsome face into a frozen mask and muted his formidable tongue decades ago.
Yet his aura endured and will continue to endure.
Ali in silence produced one of the most striking sports moments in 1996. Expressionless and with trembling hands that used to crumple opponents to the canvas, he lit the Summer Olympics cauldron in Atlanta. Grown men who watched the scene got wobbly in the knees and wiped their eyes.
“The world will never get another Muhammad Ali,” former heavyweight champion and Ali sparring partner Larry Holmes told me by phone Friday night. “If there was somebody you wanted to be like, it was him.”
The opening sentence for his bio in the International Boxing Hall of Fame’s record book reads: “In all of boxing history, Muhammad Ali stands alone.” But boxing does not define Ali’s legacy. Victories over Archie Moore, Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson and George Foreman are seared in my memory. Forever will I see a bewildered Foreman, looking up from the canvas after being rope-a-doped onto his rump at the “Rumble in the Jungle.” Ali’s trilogy with Joe Frazier remains the heavyweight standard.
My admiration for Ali’s boxing brilliance, however, is dwarfed by the other aspects of his remarkable life. That appreciation was galvanized last summer while researching and writing the book “Muhammad Ali: Conscientious Objector” for Buffalo-based Cavendish Square Publishing.
Born in 1942 as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., he emerged during a time of civil and political tumult in the United States, where black people were denied the same opportunities and services as white people.
A black man use the same restroom as whites? He’d better be careful not to get arrested – or worse.
He won a gold medal for a country that still allowed Jim Crow laws at the 1960 Rome Olympics then evolved into a multi-layered sociopolitical-cultural-sporting force. He befriended Malcolm X, converted to Islam, changed his name and three years later rebuffed induction into the US Army.
Ali’s military refusal threatened his lucrative career, but he stood by his principles.
America expected its sports stars and celebrities to serve their country. Ted Williams, Bob Feller and South Park High grad Warren Spahn were among the baseball superstars who lost parts of their careers to combat. Heavyweight champ Joe Louis volunteered in 1942 (but was assigned to a touring promotional unit). Elvis Presley dutifully reported when the Army drafted him in 1958.
Ali wouldn’t conform. The sporting world’s Alpha Male, which is who the heavyweight champion used to be, objected to what was happening in Vietnam, although there was concern Elijah Muhammad and his radical Nation of Islam sect were manipulating Ali to further its purposes.
“Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong!” Ali was famously quoted as saying, while it has been debated whether the Nation of Islam fed him the line.
Regardless, Ali was the one who put his reputation and career on the line. After refusing induction in April 1967, he was stripped of his world heavyweight championship, suspended from boxing and eventually convicted of draft evasion.
Ali didn’t serve prison time. He remained free while appealing the verdict, but no boxing commission would license him for nearly four years of his prime. To pay his bills, he went on a college speaking tour. He visited Canisius College for $1,500 and also visited UB.
His stand against the Vietnam War played a significant role in shifting the public’s opinion on whether American soldiers should be over there. His draft-evasion appeal made it to the Supreme Court in 1971. The conviction was reversed.
About that time, Ali began training with a young heavyweight prospect.
“He gave me a job,” said Holmes, the world champion from 1978 to 1985. “I was able to travel with him and fight with him for four years. When I told him I wanted to try to make it myself and chase my dream, he told me, ‘Good luck. You will always be my friend.’
“He would give you anything, everything. He would take you by the hand.”
Holmes and Ali fought in 1980. It was revolting. By the time the student squared off against his mentor, Ali already was showing signs of brain damage. Ali’s speech was slurred, his reflexes noticeably slower. He didn’t float like a butterfly anymore.
The physical decline probably began earlier than Ali’s third fight with Frazier, but not obviously. The “Thrilla in Manila” was 14 rounds of ruthless sledging in a 107-degree arena. The proud rivals were just enough past their primes to be elusive no longer, yet still thunderous enough to injure.
“It was at the very top, the tip top of a slow murder,” Ali’s corner physician, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, told me for the fight’s 30th anniversary in 2005. “Do you think after the beating he took that day in Manila he went home happy and had chocolate ice cream?
“He g---- near died. It’s the reason he’s a shambling, neurological wreck.”
In between the Thrilla in Manila and Ali’s unwise matchup with Holmes, Ali looked shoddier and shoddier. Leon Spinks, a gold medalist with seven career professional bouts, beat Ali in a 15-round split decision. Ali avenged the defeat seven months later and then retired, only to return in two years.
Holmes obliterated his idol, dominating him so badly he begged referee Richard Greene to stop the fight when not unleashing a barrage of punches, most of which landed with grimacing accuracy.
One year later, Ali tried to leave the ring triumphant. With no title belt on the line, mediocre prospect Trevor Berbick won a comfortable unanimous decision that inflicted further damage to Ali’s brain.
Hubris wasn’t Ali’s only character flaw. He was far from perfect. Ali, inspired by pro wrestler Gorgeous George, valued showmanship over sportsmanship. He humiliated opponents with poetic predictions and below-the-belt insults – he called Frazier, the son of a South Carolina sharecropper, an “Uncle Tom” and a “gorilla” – that overshadowed those otherworldly skills.
In 1990, Ali made the US government nervous like the old days. He defied President George H. W. Bush’s wishes and went on a diplomatic mission to Iraq, which had recently invaded tiny, oil-rich Kuwait and taken hostages.
Ali arrived in Iraq, met with Saddam Hussein and nine days later boarded an airplane with 15 Americans who had spent four months in captivity.
Ali was Nelson Mandela’s hero. Mandela was exiled for trying to overthrow South Africa’s apartheid government but became president in 1994, four years after apartheid was abolished. He said of meeting Ali for the first time: “I was paralyzed because it made my day.”
“His unique ability to summon extraordinary strength and courage in the face of adversity, to navigate the storm and never lose his way,” President Barack Obama said, “he has shown us that through undying faith and steadfast love, each of us can make this world a better place. He is and always will be the champ.” Ali is a monolith, immortal. His will is everlasting. As long as his spirit floats and his absence stings, he won’t be forgotten. That will be forever. “I want to cry, but I can’t cry,” Holmes said.
“There’s just love.”