He was born Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, in January 1942, in a city that was still largely segregated and in a country that had not yet decided what it owed the people it had enslaved. He grew up riding his bicycle to school, discovered boxing at 12 after someone stole his bike and a local police officer suggested he learn to fight before threatening anyone, and by 18 he had won a gold medal at the Rome Olympics. By 22 he was heavyweight champion of the world. By 25 the United States government had stripped him of his title, his passport and his right to earn a living, because he refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War.
The ring is the most obvious place to begin when talking about Ali, but it is not the most interesting. The man who climbed through the ropes for 61 professional fights was remarkable. The man who existed outside them was something else entirely.
The draft refusal
In April 1967, Ali was ordered to report for induction into the US Army at a facility in Houston, Texas. When his name was called, he did not step forward. He had already made his position clear: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” It was a statement that cost him almost everything in the short term. The World Boxing Association stripped his title within days. He was convicted of draft evasion, sentenced to five years in federal prison and fined $10,000, though he never served the sentence while the case made its way through the courts. More immediately, he was banned from boxing in every state in the country, a ban that lasted three and a half years and covered the prime of his career.
He was 25 when the ban came into effect and did not fight again until October 1970. He later said that he was willing to pay the price and that no Viet Cong had ever called him the word that white Americans had been using toward him his whole life. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 1971. The stand he took in 1967 is now taught in civil rights history and considered one of the defining acts of American athletic protest of the 20th century. At the time, the majority of public opinion in America was against him.
Ali understood before almost anyone else in professional sport that what you said was as important as what you did, and that a press conference was as much a performance as a fight. He wrote poetry, delivered it at weigh-ins, predicted the round in which he would knock opponents out, and was correct often enough that the predictions became part of the narrative. Before his fight with Sonny Liston in 1964, the odds were 7-to-1 against him. He won by TKO in the seventh round.
The quotes that circulate most widely now are the ones about effort and identity and self-belief, the kind of lines that get printed on motivational posters. But the ones that were actually most dangerous at the time were the political ones, the ones about Vietnam, about race, about what America owed the people it had discriminated against. He said things in the 1960s that public figures today still avoid saying, and he said them in front of television cameras when saying them carried real consequences.
He became a Muslim in 1964, changed his name from Cassius Clay, a name he referred to as his slave name, and aligned himself with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam at a moment when that alignment was being monitored by the FBI. He later moved toward mainstream Sunni Islam and distanced himself from the Nation of Islam’s more extreme positions, but the conversion itself, and the name change, and the refusal to answer to the old name even when journalists insisted on using it, were all deliberate acts that forced people to confront something.
The way he dressed
While his contemporaries in boxing, Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, George Foreman, favoured the heavy, theatrical robes of boxing royalty, Ali went in a different direction. His ring robes were clean and simple, usually white, the trunks white with black trim. The restraint was almost architectural. His long-time trainer Angelo Dundee said that outside the ring, Ali always liked to be buttoned-up. The suits were well-fitted and conservative, slim-lapelled in the early 1960s style, in dark navy and charcoal, often with a slim tie or bow tie. He wore sunglasses to press conferences in an era when very few athletes thought about that kind of detail, and his posture and presentation at every public appearance looked like someone who knew he was being watched and had decided to make it count.
He was photographed more than almost any athlete of his generation, and he rarely looked anything other than exactly as he intended to look, which for a man from a segregated city in Kentucky who had no access to stylists or image consultants in the early years of his career, was its own kind of achievement.
In October 1974, Ali fought George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in a fight that Norman Mailer covered for Rolling Stone and the filmmaker Leon Gast documented in a film called When We Were Kings, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1997. Ali was 32, Foreman was 25 and had destroyed every opponent he had faced. The odds were heavily against Ali again.
He won by knockout in the eighth round, having spent much of the early rounds on the ropes absorbing Foreman’s punches and waiting for him to tire, a strategy that had no name before that night and has been called the rope-a-dope ever since. It is the most written-about fight in boxing history and one of the most written-about sporting events of the 20th century. Ali’s ability to conceive of that strategy, trust it in the middle of a heavyweight fight, and execute it with a 25-year-old puncher coming at him says more about his intelligence than any press conference ever did.
After Boxing
Ali fought his last fight in December 1981, losing to Trevor Berbick at 39, and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1984. He had been showing symptoms for some time, and the medical debate about the relationship between his career and the diagnosis has continued since. He carried the Olympic torch at the Atlanta Games in 1996, his hands shaking, and lit the cauldron in front of a watching world. He was 54 and had been one of the most famous people on earth for 35 years, and the moment landed differently than almost any other Olympic ceremony has before or since.
He died in Scottsdale, Arizona, in June 2016, aged 74. He had spent the last three decades of his life doing humanitarian work, travelling to Iraq in 1990 to negotiate the release of American hostages, working with the United Nations World Food Programme, and meeting with foreign governments in a capacity that no official role required but his name made possible.
The ring gave him the platform. Everything he did with it was his own.