ATLANTA,USA, OCTOBER 1970 ...RETURN OF THE GREATEST AND AMILLION DOLLAR HEIST

The incredible story behind Ali’s return from three-year draft ban to beat Jerry Quarry... AND THAT WAS JUST THE START

IT began with a macabre warning to a draft dodger to “stay out of Atlanta” and ended with an audacious, million-dollar heist.

Fifty years ago on Monday, Muhammad Ali emerged from three-and-a-half years of exile to reboot his heavyweight career in the fight that didn’t just fan the flames of public opinion in the United States: It was a bonfire of inhibition.

On the day Ali left his Miami training camp, to head for his second coming in Atlanta against Californian slugger Jerry Quarry, a gift box was delivered to his hotel.

When he opened it, the package contained a small, black, dead dog and a 14-word note warning him to keep out of Georgia because draft dodgers like him were likely to suffer the same fate.

Ali had refused conscription into the US army to fight in the Vietnam war, famously declaring: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

Those eight words chimed with pacifists around the world but, in America, Ali’s principles cut little ice among the warmongers.

They didn’t call him the ‘Greatest’. They regarded him as a traitor.

Promoter Harold Conrad knocked on the doors of more than 20 states, but none would issue Ali with a licence to box again – including the governor of California, who would become US President 10 years later. Ronald Reagan vetoed the fight, insisting: “Forget it – that draft dodger will never fight in my state.”

It seemed nobody would touch Ali’s comeback with a bargepole until Lester Maddox, the governor of Georgia, found himself behind in the polls and resorted to populism as an expedient vehicle for harvesting votes.

When the match was made, contracts were signed and the City Auditorium in Atlanta was confirmed as the venue for Ali to roll away the stone, a so-called “army of soul” made a pilgrimage to the deep south.

Among his celebrity cheerleaders that night were Hollywood royalty Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Bill Cosby, and Diana Ross and the Supremes. The astonishing story of a legend’s comeback is chronicled in