RIP Muhammed Ali

In the late 90s the Sunday Times ran a poll among sporting journalists to find the greatest sportsman of all time. Ali came out on top by a large margin. But he was, of course, so much more than that: poet, loudmouth, campaigner for black person's rights. The list is impressive, yet in his own country he was reviled as a traitor and barred from fighting during what should have been the peak of his career. I was watching a biopic of Martin Luther King on PBS the other day when the TV crews were on the street garnering reactions just after he'd been shot by James Earl Ray. One white man offered this opinion:
"What with all the unrest and conflict between blacks and whites he was responsible for, I'd say he got what he deserved".
Even today I was horrified by his bigotry. But this man would doubtless have been one of those people who probably figured he got off easy after refusing the draft in 1967, and should perhaps have been given the death sentence. But these attitudes were highly pervasive in the America of the 1960s, with everyone from senators to car mechanics believing in segregation and legalised apartheid. These views are not uncommon even today, though less publicly expressed.

In his autobiography in 1975, Ali revealed he had visited and been refused service at a whites only restaurant in Ohio following his return from Rome with the gold medal for the heavyweight title. He was so distraught he hurled the medal into the Ohio river. In 1996 the IOC presented him with a re-strike of that medal, and then in 2014, incredibly, the original medal was retrieved during a big cleanup.

I have always felt that Ali was graced by God with the amount of talent usually doled out to a dozen people, and that people like him are born perhaps only once in a hundred years. Mr Ali sir, you will be greatly missed.