Muhammad Ali dies at 74

Muhammad Ali, the silver-tongued boxer and civil rights champion who famously proclaimed himself "The Greatest" and then spent a lifetime living up to the billing, is dead.

Ali died Friday at a Phoenix-area hospital, where he had spent the past few days being treated for respiratory complications, NBC News reported. He was 74.

Ali had suffered for three decades from Parkinson's, a progressive neurological condition that slowly robbed him of both his legendary verbal grace and his physical dexterity.

Born Cassius Clay in 1942, Ali won his first 31 fights before suffering a loss and was named the world heavyweight champion by the World Boxing Association three different times, in 1964, 1974, and 1978. He was an Olympic gold medalist and a quick-footed dancer in the ring, lithe and smart and ready with trash talk to throw off his opponents.

But he was also a global celebrity who wasn't afraid to speak his mind, at a time when black men who spoke their minds often paid dearly. His gleeful boasting about his abilities made him tremendously fun to watch on camera. But his unapologetic, outspoken politics made him a figure of tremendous significance.

In particular, Ali's refusal to fight in the Vietnam War caused him to be suspended from boxing for almost four years, at the prime of his physical prowess. "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 while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?" He asked.

Even as recently as 2015, Ali spoke out against Donald Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the country. (Ali was himself a Muslim and famously a Nation of Islam member at the height of his fame.)and barriers, race and religion. His fights against other men became spectacles, but he embodied much greater battles.

Like Babe Ruth before him and Michael Jordan after him, Ali was simultaneously the greatest athlete in America and such a massive cultural figure that his every move inspired news coverage. (Perhaps not coincidentally, those three athletes were also judged the greatest in history in a 2015 Harris Poll of Americans.)

To get to that point, however, he really did have to be "The Greatest," and after winning the gold medal at the 1960 summer Olympic games, he burst onto the professional scene that fall, tearing his way through opponent after opponent.

Ali rarely had the strongest punch in any given fight, nor was he the kind of brutalizer who could simply keep forcing massive hits in through his opponent's defenses. Instead, he danced, staying one step ahead of his opponent, dodging punches, and looking for openings in the other fighter's defenses that he might quickly exploit.

This compilation of his greatest moments shows just how thrilling watching Ali at work could be. He'll seem as if he's slightly indifferent to what's going on around him, lazily ducking punches, then suddenly throw a combination that drops his opponent completely.



The above clips also suggest what a great psychological fighter Ali was, a master of knowing just how to get under his opponent's skin and make them second guess themselves. In particular, Ali would often suggest his black opponents were tools of the (implicitly or explicitly white) man, while he himself was on the side of the people, the underdogs. (He even called opponent Joe Frazier, among others, an "uncle Tom.")

While this was a canny way of throwing his opponents off their games, Ali was also placing himself at the center of the greatest political discussions of the day, especially the struggles of the civil rights movement and the counterculture to push back against white, mainstream American culture in the 1960s and '70s.