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| photo by Harry Benson I don’t have to be what you want me to be, I’m free to be what I want.” WASHINGTON POST
Muhammad Ali, the charismatic three-time heavyweight boxing champion of the world, who declared himself “the greatest” and proved it with his fists, the force of his personality and his magnetic charisma, and who transcended the world of sports to become a symbol of the antiwar movement of the 1960s and a global ambassador for cross-cultural understanding, died June 3 at a hospital in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he was living. He was 74.
A family spokesman said the immediate cause of death was septic shock. The boxer had been hospitalized with respiratory problems after years of suffering from Parkinson’s disease, which had been diagnosed in the 1980s.
Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was born Jan. 17, 1942, in Louisville. His father was a sign-painter, and his mother was a domestic houseworker. Mr. Ali played few sports as a child, but he began boxing at age 12 to exact revenge on a thief who had stolen his bicycle. Joe Elsby Martin, a Louisville, Ky., policeman who ran a local recreation center Martin suggested that he first learn how to punch properly. He quickly became enamored of the sport, and he won several national amateur boxing championships before he graduated from high school in 1960.
In boxing he found boundaries, discipline and stable guidance. It was Martin who persuaded Clay to “gamble your life” and go to Rome with the 1960 Olympic team.
Clay won the Olympic light-heavyweight title and came home a professional contender. In Rome, Clay was everything the sports diplomats could have hoped for — a handsome, charismatic and black glad-hander. When a Russian reporter asked him about racial prejudice, Clay ordered him to “tell your readers we got qualified people working on that, and I’m not worried about the outcome.”
Of course, after the Rome Games, few journalists followed Clay home to Louisville, where he was publicly referred to as “the Olympic nigger” and denied service at many downtown restaurants.
Clay turned professional by signing a six-year contract with 11 local white millionaires. (“They got the complexions and connections to give me good directions,” he said.) The so-called Louisville Sponsoring Group supported him while he was groomed by Angelo Dundee, a top trainer, in Miami.
Ali was the most thrilling if not the best heavyweight ever, carrying into the ring a physically lyrical, unorthodox boxing style that fused speed, agility and power more seamlessly than that of any fighter before him.
The traditionalist fight crowd was appalled by his style; he kept his hands too low, the critics said, and instead of allowing punches to “slip” past his head by bobbing and weaving, he leaned back from them.
He had an while keeping his hands low at his sides. Some sportswriters considered his unconventional, almost casual style, lightly bouncing on his feet, an almost suicidal approach, but Dundee trusted in Mr. Ali’s foot speed and quick reflexes, which enabled him to evade punches.
Eventually his approach prevailed. Over 21 years, he won 56 fights and lost five. His Ali Shuffle may have been pure showboating, but the “rope-a-dope” — in which he rested on the ring’s ropes and let an opponent punch himself out — was the stratagem that won the Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman in 1974, the fight in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in which he regained his title.
But he was more than the sum of his athletic gifts. An agile mind, a buoyant personality, a brash self-confidence and an evolving set of personal convictions fostered a magnetism that the ring alone could not contain. He entertained as much with his mouth as with his fists.
Mr. Ali came to represent a new kind of athlete, someone who created his own style in defiance of the traditions of the past. Glib, handsome and unpredictable, he was perfectly suited to television, and he became a fixture on talk shows as well as sports programs.
“This is the legend of Cassius Clay, the most beautiful fighter in the world today,” he said before his initial 1964 title bout with Sonny Liston. He recited rhymes that reduced Liston to a comic punch line:
Who would have thought when they came to the fight
That they’d witness the launching of a human satellite?
Yes, the crowd did not dream, when they put up their money,
That they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny.“The brash young boxer is something to see, and the heavyweight championship is his destiny.” One of his assistants, Drew “Bundini” Brown, captured his lithe, graceful presence in the ring, saying Mr. Ali would “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” The description entered the vernacular.
The night of the fight, to the shock of the crowd, Clay, taller and broader than Liston at 6 feet 3 inches and 210 pounds and much faster, took immediate control of the fight. He danced away from Liston’s vaunted left hook and peppered his face with jabs. He resumed his attack in the sixth, pummeling Liston and opening a deep cut under his left eye. As the bell rang to open the seventh round, the demoralized Liston sat on his stool, refusing to continue the fight. Liston, his left arm hanging uselessly, gave up. He had torn muscles from swinging at Clay in vain.
The next day, he announced that he was a member of the Nation of Islam, a move considered shocking at the time, especially for an athlete.
His conversion from Christianity to Islam and the changing of his “slave” name, Cassius Clay, to one bestowed by the separatist black sect he joined, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, were perceived as serious threats by the conservative establishment and noble acts of defiance by the liberal opposition.
More than a year later, in May 1965, he would retain his crown in lightning-quick fashion in a rematch with Liston in Lewiston, Me. Within two minutes of the first round, Ali threw what became known as the phantom punch, sending Liston sprawling and resulting in a disputed decision to end the fight.
Mr. Ali stood over his fallen opponent, shouting and gesturing for him to stand up. But Liston stayed down, his eyes darting from one side to the other. He eventually rose to his feet, and the fight briefly resumed until the referee, former champion Jersey Joe Walcott, stepped between the combatants.
The unexpected finish stirred enormous controversy. Mr. Ali’s knockout blow was dubbed the “phantom punch” by skeptics, and others openly speculated that Liston had taken a “dive” in order to collect a payoff from gamblers. Slow-motion film appeared to show that Mr. Ali landed a short, powerful punch with his right hand on Liston’s jaw, but doubt about the result never completely went away.
After the second Liston match, Mr. Ali marched through a string of challengers, including ex-champ Floyd Patterson and Britons Henry Cooper and Brian London. On Feb. 6, 1967, he faced 6-foot-6-inch Ernie Terrell, who called Mr. Ali “Clay” in the weeks before the fight.
“I’m gonna give him a whupping and a spanking, and a humiliation,” an angry Mr. Ali said before the fight. “I’ll keep on hitting him, and I’ll keep talking. Here’s what I’ll say. ‘Don’t you fall, Ernie.’ Wham! ‘What’s my name?’ Wham! I’ll just keep doing that until he calls me Muhammad Ali. I want to torture him. A clean knockout is too good for him.”
True to his word, and showing a vindictive, even cruel streak, Mr. Ali punished Terrell throughout the bout. Instead of knocking him out, Mr. Ali battered the challenger with a barrage of punches to the eyes as he shouted, “What’s my name?”
It was a side of him so out of character that to this day I find it hard to believe it was him,” sportswriter Jerry Izenberg told Hauser for “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.”
“I saw it. I was there, and it was evil. He was trying to hurt Terrell. Ali went out there to make it painful and embarrassing and humiliating for Ernie Terrell. It was a vicious ugly horrible fight.”
It took months for Terrell’s vision to return to normal.
In 1967, after Mr. Ali had been heavyweight champion for three years, he refused to be inducted into the military during the Vietnam War. Despite the seeming contradiction of a boxer advocating nonviolence, he gave up his title in deference to the religious principle of pacifism.
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam,” Mr. Ali said in 1967, “while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”
Mr. Ali’s heavyweight title was immediately removed, and he was banned from boxing for more than three years. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but his conviction was unanimously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971.
Mr. Ali’s decision outraged the old guard, including many sportswriters and middle Americans, who considered the boxer arrogant and unpatriotic. But as the cultures of youth and black America were surging to the fore in the late 1960s, Mr. Ali was gradually transformed, through his sheer magnetism and sense of moral purpose, into one of the most revered figures of his time.
A casual statement he made in 1966 — “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong” — distilled the antiwar views of a generation.
“Ali, along with Robert Kennedy and the Beatles in the persona of John Lennon, captured the ’60s to perfection,” writer Jack Newfield told Thomas Hauser, the author of a 1991 oral biography, “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.”
Mr. Ali’s boxing license was finally restored in 1970, and a year later the U.S. Supreme Court vacated his conviction for draft evasion. After two tuneup fights, the 29-year-old boxer sought to regain his heavyweight title from the new champion, Joe Frazier, in a highly touted fight at New York’s Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971. 
Frazier wore Ali down with blows to the body while moving underneath Ali’s jabs. In the 15th round, Frazier unleashed his famed left hook, catching Ali on the jaw and flooring him for a count of 4, only the third time Ali had been knocked down. Ali held on, but Frazier won a unanimous decision.
Afterward, both fighters were treated at hospitals.
Frazier met Ali again in a nontitle bout at the Garden on Jan. 28, 1974. Frazier kept boring in and complained that Ali was holding in the clinches, but Ali scored with flurries of punches and won a unanimous 12-round decision. But by then the heavyweight title was in the hands of George Foreman. Mr. Ali sought to recapture his crown by facing Foreman in an international spectacle in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Congo), dubbed the “Rumble in the Jungle.”
Foreman, seven years younger than the 32-year-old Mr. Ali, had won 40 consecutive fights. None of his previous eight fights had lasted longer than two rounds, including an impressive performance in which he knocked Frazier to the canvas six times.
Before the fight, which took place on Oct. 30, 1974, Mr. Ali used the same kind of verbal attack on Foreman that he had unleashed on Liston a decade earlier. He belittled the hulking champion — then considered surly and unlikable, long before his second act as the affable pitchman of electronic grilling devices — as “the Mummy.”
During the fight, Mr. Ali tried a new and dangerous tactic, which he dubbed “rope-a-dope.” He often backed into the ropes, protecting his face with his hands as he allowed Foreman to slug him with one punch after another.
Somehow, Mr. Ali remained standing as he absorbed the barrage, and the ploy depleted Foreman’s strength and confidence.
“I went out and hit Muhammad with the hardest shot to the body I ever delivered to any opponent,” Foreman told Hauser. “Anybody else in the world would have crumbled.”
Mr. Ali began to goad Foreman in the ring, saying, “Show me something, George. That don’t hurt.” As the bell rang for the eighth round, he told Foreman, “Now it’s my turn.”
He stayed on the ropes for most of the round, parrying Foreman’s blows and fighting back with counterpunches. He landed a solid right hand on Foreman’s chin, driving the champion to the canvas. Mr. Ali’s knockout victory was considered almost miraculous and took on symbolic importance because it took place on African soil.
It had been more than 10 years since Mr. Ali first won the title, and seven years since he relinquished it. When he reclaimed the heavyweight championship in such dramatic fashion, many observers considered it one of the most remarkable displays of endurance and boxing skill in history.
“I fought that fight over in my head a thousand times,” Foreman told Hauser for his biography of Mr. Ali. “And then, finally, I realized I’d lost to a great champion; probably the greatest of all time.”
After three title defenses, Mr. Ali agreed to face Frazier for a third time in the Philippines, in what became known as the “Thrilla in Manila.” In the weeks before the bout, Mr. Ali’s gamesmanship took on a personal, racially tinged tone as he insulted Frazier as a “gorilla” and relentlessly mocked him as ignorant and ugly. He pulled out a toy gorilla at a press conference as a gesture of contempt.
In what became the most brutal Ali-Frazier battle, the fight was held at the Philippine Coliseum at Quezon City, outside the country’s capital, Manila. The conditions were sweltering, with hot lights overpowering the air-conditioning.
Ali, almost a 2-to-1 betting favorite in the United States, won the early rounds, largely remaining flat-footed in place of his familiar dancing style. Before Round 3 he blew kisses to President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, in the crowd of about 25,000.
But in the fourth round, Ali’s pace slowed while Frazier began to gain momentum. Chants of “Frazier, Frazier” filled the arena by the fifth round, and the crowd seemed to favor him as the fight moved along, a contrast to Ali’s usually enjoying the fans’ plaudits.
Frazier took command in the middle rounds. Then Ali came back on weary legs, unleashing a flurry of punches to Frazier’s face in the 12th round. He knocked out Frazier’s mouthpiece in the 13th round, then sent him stumbling backward with a straight right hand.
 
Ali jolted Frazier with left-right combinations late in the 14th round. Frazier had already lost most of the vision in his left eye from a cataract, and his right eye was puffed and shut from Ali’s blows.
Eddie Futch, a renowned trainer working Frazier’s corner, asked the referee to end the bout. When it was stopped, Ali was ahead on the scorecards of the referee and two judges. “It’s the closest I’ve come to death,” Ali said.
“I hit him with punches that bring down the walls of a city,” Frazier later said. “What held him up?”
Mr. Ali was so exhausted, he could barely move to acknowledge victory.
The two fighters were linked in history, but the animosity built up before the fight would fester for years until Mr. Ali formally apologized in 2001.
n 1978, an aging and poorly prepared Mr. Ali lost his championship to Leon Spinks. He defeated Spinks in a rematch later that year to become the first heavyweight to win the title three times, then he announced his retirement.
He was already showing signs of slurred speech and general sluggishness, which only grew worse with time.
His condition was initially called Parkinson’s syndrome, which many thought — correctly or not — was caused or exacerbated by the thousands of punches he absorbed throughout his career. Some doctors and supporters insisted that Mr. Ali was mentally alert, but by the time the boxer was in his 50s, he had noticeable tremors in his limbs and spoke in a halting whisper, if at all.
Later, as Mr. Ali’s boxing career receded into the past, and as neurological infirmities left him increasingly slowed and silenced, he became a symbol of unity and brotherhood, someone whose very presence and image acquired an aura of the spiritual. He was greeted by thousands whenever he toured the world.
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