Muhammad Ali, titan of boxing, passes away at 74

An exemplary sports legend, Ali was more than just the sum of his athletic gifts

Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion who helped define his turbulent times as the most charismatic and controversial sports figure of the 20th century, died on Friday. He was 74. 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.

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, narrating his life with a patter of inventive doggerel.

Ali was as polarising a superstar as the sports world has ever produced - both admired and vilified in the 1960s and '70s for his religious, political and social stances. His refusal to be drafted during the Vietnam War, his rejection of racial integration at the height of the civil rights movement, 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.

Loved or hated, he remained for 50 years one of the most recognisable people on the planet.

In later life Ali became something of a secular saint, a legend in soft focus. He was respected for having sacrificed more than three years of his boxing prime and untold millions of dollars for his anti-war principles after being banished from the ring; he was extolled for his un-self-conscious gallantry in the face of incurable illness, and he was beloved for his accommodating sweetness in public.

In 1996, he was trembling and nearly mute as he lit the Olympic caldron in Atlanta. That passive image was far removed from the exuberant, talkative, vainglorious 22-year-old who bounded out of Louisville and onto the world stage in 1964 with an upset victory over Sonny Liston to become the world champion. The press called him the Louisville Lip. He called himself the Greatest.

© 2016 The New York Times News Service

THE BOXER

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, your hands can't hit, what your eyes can't see"

- Prior to his fight against George Foreman in 1974

THE ACTIVIST

"I am America. I am the part you won't recognise. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky. my name, not yours. My religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me"

- In 1970, when he was convicted of draft evasion

THE MAN

"Live every day like it's your last because someday you're going to be right… Do good deeds. Visit hospitals. Judgment Day coming. Wake up and it's Judgment Day"