THE GREATEST
Barack Obama leads tributes from around the globe to Muhammad Ali, the boxer who became a legend, the legend who became an icon
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA HAILS THE GREATEST
Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. Period. If you just asked him, he’d tell you. He’d tell you he was the double greatest; that he’d “handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder into jail”.
But what made The Champ the greatest – what truly separated him from everyone else – is everyone else would tell you pretty much the same thing. Like everyone else on the planet, Michelle and I mourn his passing. But we’re also grateful to God for how fortunate we are to have known him, if just for a while; for how fortunate we all are that The Greatest chose to grace our time.
In my private study, just off the Oval Office, I keep a pair of his gloves on display, just under that iconic photograph of him – the young champ, just 22 years old, roaring like a lion over a fallen Sonny Liston.
I was too young when it was taken to understand who he was – still Cassius Clay, already an Olympic gold medal winner, yet to set out on a spiritual journey that would lead him to his Muslim faith, exile him at the peak of his power and set the stage for his return to greatness with a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of south- east Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden.
“I am America,” he once declared. “I am the part you won’t recognise. But get used to me – black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”
That’s the Ali I came to know as I came of age – not just as skilled a poet on the LEGEND mic as he was a fighter in the ring but a man who fought for what was right.
A man who fought for us. He stood with King and Mandela – stood up when it was hard, spoke out when others wouldn’t. His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and 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 recognise today.
He wasn’t perfect, of course. For all his magic in the ring, he could be careless with his words and full of contradictions as his faith evolved. But his wonderful, infectious, even innocent spi r it ultimately won him more fans than
We will mourn him but how fortunate we are that The Greatest chose to grace our time
foes – maybe because, in him, we hoped to see something of ourselves.
Later, as his physical powers ebbed, he became an even more powerful force for peace and reconciliation around the world.
We saw a man who said he was so mean he’d make medicine sick reveal a soft spot, visiting children with illness and disability around the world, telling them they, too, could become the greatest. We watched a hero light a torch and fight his greatest fight of all on the world stage once again – a battle against the disease that ravaged his body but couldn’t take the spark from his eyes.
Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it. We are all better for it.
Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to his family and we pray that the greatest fighter of them all finally rests in peace.
I’ll tell you how I’d like to be remembered: as a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could – financial and also in their fight for freedom, justice and equality. As a man who wouldn’t embarrass them. As a man who tried to unite his people through the faith of Islam that he found when he listened to the Honourable Elijah Muhammad. And if all that is asking too much, then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people. And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was. – Muhammad Ali, who died yesterday