Thursday , March 28 2024

Muhammad Ali dies

Three-time heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali has died, according to the family spokesman. He was 74.He was hospitalised in Phoenix with respiratory problems earlier this week, and his family gathered around him. He died Friday night, according to a statement from the family.

The Greatest has been granted his last request. The most recognisable man on the planet has gone to touch gloves with his maker after the longest, bravest, most anguished struggle of his phenomenal fighting life.

The final bell has tolled for the boxing artist formerly known as Cassius Clay.

As those sonorous chimes reverberated around a saddened world, they signalled the end of his protracted battle with one of the most pernicious diseases to afflict mankind.

From the butterfly to the bee. From the Ali Shuffle to the Rope-a-Dope. From the Rumble in the Jungle to the Thrilla in Manila. From Clay to Ali, he found the explicit phrase to match his epic performances.

Most prizefighters are at their most articulate in the violent language of the most primitive workplace in sport.

The most extraordinary pugilist of all found expression outside as well as inside the ring. Ali spoke in the tongues of poets and, after he found Islam, the prophets.

Nor would he be silenced when the Louisville Lip, as his home town dubbed its ranting young Cassius for his boyish bragging, was reduced to a Parkinson’s whisper.

As the sickness lowered the volume and slowed the diction, so the precious words were chosen with more sparing effect.

He also found other ways to communicate. Perhaps most amazingly of all, given the convulsive shaking of his hands, he became an adroit magician.

The disease was well advanced when Ali came to London for one of his several anointings as Sportsman of the Century, on this occasion by the BBC.

He dined at The Savoy in worshipful company. When supper was over, the Lord of the Ring invited a group of autograph-hunters to join our table. My then 11-year-old son was among them.

Muhammad sat him on his knee while he performed his conjuring tricks with playing cards, handkerchiefs and match boxes. As he did so, he whispered: ‘What’s my name?’

‘Mr Ali, sir,’ my boy replied.

The mind, as sharp as ever behind the veil of his medical condition, had taken him back to February 2, 1967.

To the red-neck city of Houston, Texas. To the night when tough Ernie Terrell came to challenge the world champion by refusing to call him by his adopted Islamic name.

‘What’s my name?’ asked Ali as the referee called them from their corners.

‘Cassius Clay,’ replied Terrell.

‘What’s my name?’ demanded Muhammad, time after time after time, as he rained punch after punch after punch on his insolent opponent but kept withholding the knock-out blow so he could inflict further retribution, round after round.

It was a message hammered out not only to the head and body of one foolishly bigoted, if brave, individual but to white America at large. A message delivered by the Black Muslim champion of civil liberty and freedom of speech.

Muhammad chuckled, almost silently: ‘Lucky you said that. Otherwise I’d have to give you a whuppin’ like that Mr Terrell.’

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