Muhammad Ali: Three Titles, One Refusal, and the Fight No One Could Put on a Card

Muhammad Ali

Photo: Auguste Couder / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 17, 1942 Louisville
Died	June 3, 2016 (74)
Occupation	Boxer
Awards	Presidential Citizens Medal u00b7 Presidential Medal of Freedom u00b7 Philadelphia Liberty Medal

The most consequential thing Muhammad Ali ever did in boxing was the time he refused to box at all. When the United States Army called his name at the induction center in Houston in April 1967, Ali stepped forward, heard his birth name read aloud — Cassius Marcellus Clay — and did not move. The cost was immediate and total: his heavyweight title stripped, his passport seized, his license to fight revoked in every state. For three and a half years, the most dangerous heavyweight on the planet was not allowed to fight.

He was twenty-five years old.

Ali grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a billboard painter and a domestic worker, in a city still organized by the logic of segregation. The bicycle stolen from him at twelve was what sent him to a local police officer named Joe Martin, who also ran a boxing gym. The kid who wanted to beat up the thief became, within eight years, the light heavyweight gold medalist at the 1960 Rome Olympics. A year after that, he turned professional.

The persona that emerged in those early years — the trash talk, the poetry, the predictions, the hair-trigger certainty — was not promotional noise. It was a theory about what it meant to be a Black man in America who refused to defer. When Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston in 1964, stunning the boxing establishment and most of the press, he announced his membership in the Nation of Islam the next day and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. The boxing press largely refused to use that name for years.

The exile that followed his draft refusal was where Ali was transformed from heavyweight champion into something the sport had never quite seen: a martyr for a political position that would eventually be vindicated. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction unanimously in 1971. By then, he had already lost the best years of his athletic prime — years when he was, by almost every technical measure, the most gifted heavyweight in the world.

What followed was the era of the great fights — bouts that Ali, by the brutal arithmetic of boxing, had no business winning. Joe Frazier in New York in 1971, the Fight of the Century, was Ali’s first professional loss, a unanimous decision after fifteen rounds that hurt in ways beyond the physical. He avenged it. Then came George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974 — the Rumble in the Jungle — where Ali spent seven rounds absorbing punches against the ropes, letting Foreman exhaust himself before knocking him out in the eighth. He was heavyweight champion again. Then the Thrilla in Manila in 1975 against Frazier — fourteen rounds of mutual destruction that both men called the hardest thing they had ever done. Ali won. Frazier’s trainer stopped it before the fifteenth.

Here is the thing that tends to get softened in retrospective accounts: Ali came back too many times. The fights against Larry Holmes in 1980 and Trevor Berbick in 1981 — after he had already retired, after symptoms of what would become Parkinson’s disease were observable — were fights he should not have taken. Holmes, his former sparring partner and a man who visibly did not want to hurt him, ended it in the eleventh round. The damage those late fights may have accelerated was real. The argument that Ali the symbol was pushing past the point where Ali the body could follow is not a comfortable one, but it belongs in any honest account of his life.

He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s syndrome in 1984, three years after the Berbick fight. He did not disappear. He lit the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996, his hands trembling with the condition that had taken his voice and his movement but could not take his presence. He co-founded the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center in Phoenix. He traveled to Iraq in 1990 to negotiate the release of American hostages. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. For more than three decades after he stopped fighting, he showed what kind of character had built the fighter — the same willingness to appear under conditions he could not fully control, to make the case in whatever room was available.

Muhammad Ali died on June 3, 2016, in Scottsdale, Arizona, at seventy-four, of septic shock following respiratory complications from Parkinson’s. He left behind nine children, including his daughter Laila Ali, herself a world boxing champion. The completed arc argued that the ring was never the whole story — it was where the story could be told.

Tags: sports, athletes, boxing, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, heavyweight boxing

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