Muhammad Ali

Bio

There is not much left to say about Muhammad Ali that has not been said better elsewhere, so here is the boxing version, stripped of everything else.

He was a heavyweight who moved like a lightweight, held his hands by his waist, and beat the best generation of big men the sport has ever assembled while doing it. Three-time world heavyweight champion. Sonny Liston twice, George Foreman in Kinshasa, Joe Frazier twice out of three.

The early Ali was pure speed and geometry — he did not block punches, he simply was not there. The later Ali, after three and a half years out of the sport, was something else entirely: a fighter who had lost half a step and replaced it with an appetite for punishment that nearly killed him in Manila.

He fought George Chuvalo twice, in Toronto in 1966 and Vancouver in 1972, and could not put him down in twenty-seven rounds of trying. Ali called the first of those the toughest night of his career to that point.

He died in 2016, aged 74. Everything the modern sport is — the promotion, the theatre, the idea that a fighter's voice matters as much as his record — runs back through him.