Boxing’s brash, brilliant champ
A sports legend, he was celebrated and vilified
Muhammad Ali, the brash and ebullient heavyweight boxer whose brilliance in the ring and bravado outside it made his face one of the most recognizable in the world, has died. He was 74.
Ali was admitted Thursday to a Phoenix-area hospital with a respiratory illness, and members of his family were at his bedside.
He had been hospitalized before for respiratory problems, which were complicated by Parkinson’s syndrome, but several people familiar with his condition had indicated that this time was more serious. By Friday afternoon, he was placed on life support.
Ali suffered from Parkinson’s for many years, which doctors attributed in part to the poundings he endured in the latter stages of his career, after he had lost his storied ability to feint and dance his way out of harm’s way.
Though boxing was Ali’s initial source of fame, he also was known, and in some quarters vilified, for his opposition to the Vietnam War and his joining the Nation of Islam, when as the newly crowned heavyweight champion he changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali.
The move, which caught the country by surprise, was the first of many times that Ali would live by a set of rules that confounded the fight game and trained the spotlight on a boxer who
brought a carnival atmosphere but also dealt with some of the most serious issues of his generation. He became famous as a boxer who boasted that he could “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” while also enduring the outrage of those who viewed him as a draft dodger at a time when the country was embroiled in war.
A native of Louisville, Ky., he burst on the national scene in 1960, when he won the light heavyweight gold medal at the Rome Summer Olympics. From then on, Ali remained in the spotlight for more than 50 years, 21 of them as a professional boxer and all of them as a player on the world stage.
Ali, then known as Clay, was a 7-1 underdog against fearsome Sonny Liston in his first heavyweight title fight in 1964. But the younger, quicker, smoother Clay was declared the winner when the stolid, slow-moving Liston could not come out for the seventh round, claiming a shoulder injury.
The euphoric victor screamed, “I shocked the world!”
That win marked the beginning of a boxing career in which Ali would win the heavyweight title a then-unprecedented three times. He lost only five professional fights in his long and controversial career, and two of those were toward the end, when he came out of retirement and was long past his prime.
In his later years, he made public appearances and signed autographs to pay the bills. In an emotional moment, a tentative Ali lighted the Olympic torch at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, moving President Clinton and much of the nation to tears. When he appeared at the 2012 London Olympics, he was even more frail.