Obama says Ali shook up the world and left it better off

Sports heroes of all races but especially black champions such as Jesse Owens, Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson always kept a low profile on the explosive issues of segregation and racial discrimination. Ali challenged it. He angered it.

Ali, 74, died Friday after a lengthy battle with Parkinson’s disease.

How do I know?

“What I suffered physically was worth what I’ve accomplished in life”, he said in 1992.

Elaborating, Das said that during Ali’s over a month-long stay in the country, the light-heavyweight gold medalist at the 1960 Rome Olympics never failed to impress journalists covering his events.

“To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole”. At the time Ali (the challenger) was facing Foreman, the undefeated heavyweight champion.

“It will be a killer and a chiller and a thriller when I get the gorilla in Manila”. “Because of his religious beliefs, he didn’t believe in war or fighting”.

That includes being a polarizing figure for his refusal to enter the USA military as well as his decision to join the Nation of Islam and change his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. We wanted Michael Jordan to stand for something more than selling shoes. “Muhammad Ali has shown us the way”. He stood for something. We went to integrated schools, which didn’t inoculate us against the base human instinct to favor those most like us, but allowed us to stay in denial about racism until we couldn’t – even as children – ignore the ugly images playing out on the nightly news from Southern cities we’d never heard of.

Ali took part in some of the biggest fights in boxing history, but none proved more iconic than his mighty bout with Foreman in the dark heart of Africa: the legendary Rumble In The Jungle. But honor his life by appreciating how his words regularly flew against the societal grain.

The actor noted the lengths to which he went for his memorable onscreen performance for than a decade ago. Take an interview in 2011. At one fight in Miami he had the soul singer Sam Cooke in his corner as well as Malcolm X and Sugar Ray Robinson, arguably the second best boxer of the 20 Century.

Terrorism was wrong, he said initially.

That’s the Ali I came to know as I came of age – not just as skilled a poet on the mic as he was a fighter in the ring, but a man who fought for what was right.

Somewhere in there was the Ali who refused to give the easy answer that made it easy on everyone.

Thanks to the vision of an audacious new promoter called Don King, it was set for Kinshasa in what was then known as Zaire, whose despotic president Mobutu Sese Seko stumped up the cash in a bid for global recognition. He graced magazine covers.

Ali’s exceptionally high profile ensured that episode was widely known, but Kilroy insists there are numerous others that few have been told that demonstrate much about the man he knew. I brought up his name once to my father. “But during those hours that we were together, inside that enormous body, I saw an angel”.

The silver-tongued boxer and civil rights champion who famously proclaimed himself “The Greatest” and then spent a lifetime living up to the billing, passed away yesterday, surrounded by family at a Phoenix-area hospital.

“In doing so, he made all Americans, black and white, stand taller”.