Death of Muhammad Ali, Boxing Legend

The three-time world heavyweight champion was admitted to the hospital with respiratory problems.

Muhammad Ali, one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century, a man who reinvented himself several times and reflected the traumas and conflicts of the United States of his time, died Friday at the age of 74 after a short stay in a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. The boxer had been battling Parkinson’s disease for 32 years.

Ali’s death is more than just the loss of a member of America’s athletes’ hall of fame, three-time heavyweight champion and Olympic gold medalist at 18. We have lost an American icon, one of those figures who personifies what it means to be American, a controversial man whose career stretched from the social unrest of the ‘60s to the arrival of an African-American in the White House in 2009, and defining the recent history of the United States.

Muhammad Ali was not strictly a politician, nor was he an activist, yet his influence outside of the ring outstrips any other athlete of his time. The impact of his gestures — his conversion to Islam, his refusal to fight in Vietnam — is comparable to that of Martin Luther King’s speeches, or the massive anti-war demonstrations. Ali is a mirror held up to the United States of his time, reflecting often uncomfortable but unerring truths.

Despite his declining health, he took part in the public debate until the end. In December, after the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced his plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States, Ali said, “We as Muslims must stand up to those who use Islam as a means to advance their own personal agenda.”

President Barack Obama said in a White House statement, “Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. Period.” Obama keeps a pair of the boxer’s gloves in his private office adjoining the White House Oval Office. “Muhammad Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it. We are all better for it.”

A spokesman for the family explained that Ali died at 9:10 p.m. local time of septic shock due to unspecified natural causes. The funeral will be held Friday, June 10, in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Former President Bill Clinton, actor Billy Crystal and journalist Bryant Gumbel are expected to speak at the ceremony.

Ali, born Cassius Clay in 1942, was a black man subjected to the daily humiliations of segregation, raised in a world in which the members of his race had to keep their heads down, do as they were told and avoid conflict. He proclaimed his identity with pride. He was a loquacious athlete who flaunted his ego without a trace of modesty: “I am the greatest; I am the King of the World.” As an activist, his stance was closer to the defiant Malcolm X than the ecumenical Martin Luther King in the defense of civil rights. As a sporting hero, his conversion to an unfamiliar religion was baffling to the majority of his fellow citizens. Influenced by the teachings of the Nation of Islam group, he adopted the name Muhammad Ali in order that he, the descendant of slaves, was responsible for choosing his own name and religion. “I don’t want to be what you want me to be,” he said.*

Ali’s opposition to the Vietnam War was more than mere rhetoric: He resisted the draft and was sentenced to five years in jail. He won his appeal and evaded jail, but was banned from boxing tournaments. “Ain’t no Viet Cong called me nigger,” he famously said, nigger being the most pejorative word used against African-Americans in the United States.**

Half of the United States detested him; the other half adored him. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote to Ali, “In the coming months, there is no doubt that the men who rule Washington will try to damage you in every way open to them, but I am sure you know that you spoke for your people and the oppressed everywhere in the courageous defiance of American power.” In 1971 the Supreme Court found in his favor as a conscientious objector, and Ali was able to return to the ring, where he took part in and won two fights as extravagant as they were legendary: the Rumble in the Jungle in what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), against George Foreman in 1974; and the following year, the Thrilla in Manila, in the Philippines against Joe Frazier.

Ali retired from boxing at the beginning of the ‘80s and shortly after was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. He traveled on humanitarian missions to Lebanon, Cuba, Afghanistan and South Africa. As the years went by, the man who had been a polarizing force became a man of consensus, celebrated by both blacks and whites, on the right and on the left, even receiving a decoration from George W. Bush.

In 1998 Budd Schulberg, the author of the boxing novel which inspired the Humphrey Bogart film “The Harder They Fall,” wrote, “Who could have predicted in the late 1960’s, when Muhammad Ali was reviled by the sporting press and most of white America as a black racist, a mouthy troublemaker, that he would be the obvious choice to light the Olympic torch at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, as a symbol of international understanding, peace and love?”

At the beginning of his political career, Obama kept a photograph of Muhammad Ali in a fight with Sonny Liston in his electoral office in Chicago. David Remnick, author of what are surely the best biographies of both Ali and Obama, told me a few years ago: “Muhammad Ali represented more than just boxing. He had the political sensibility of a proud and self-assured African American.”

Like Obama, who grew up in a white family and assumed his black identity as an adult, Ali also searched for and found his identity. “Cassius Clay didn’t want to be Cassius Clay. He didn’t want to be an obedient, traditional fighter of the segregation era,” says Remnick. “He wanted to be something different. He chose the Nation of Islam, he chose another name, he chose a number of political ideas which, to be fair, he understood only slightly.”

Ali, like Obama, was an essentially American figure, a black icon in a country still afflicted by racism, a man who created his own identity, a free man.

*Editor’s note: Muhammad Ali’s actual words were: ”I don’t have to be what you want me to be.”

**Editor’s note: Muhammad Ali’s actual words were: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”