Nation of Islam phaseĪ title fight against Sonny Liston won him fame in 1964.
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Six years later, he won a gold medal in the 175-pound division at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome and launched his professional career.
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Martin – who also ran a boxing gym – said Ali had better learn how to fight to come good on his threat. The skinny 12-year-old sought out local police officer Joe Martin to report his red bicycle as stolen in his home town of Louisville, Kentucky.Īli said he would whip the thief who had pinched his Christmas gift. In 1954, it was Ali’s quick tongue that got him into boxing. His mother, Odessa Clay, was a housemaid. He was born in the American South of 1942 and the segregation era, taking his original name, Cassius Clay, from his father, a sign and mural painter. READ MORE: Muhammad Ali quotes on boxing and racismĪli also made headlines outside the ring with critiques of racism in the US, his conversion to Islam and a refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. He died on Friday aged 74, after a decades-long struggle with Parkinson’s disease – a slowly worsening brain disorder that never wholly subdued one of the sporting world’s biggest personalities.Īs a boxer, he will be remembered as a three-time world heavyweight champion who won 56 bouts over a 21-year career. “It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am,” he said. If anybody took this self-congratulation for arrogance, Ali had an answer ready. Most of the time, Ali dispensed with comparisons or complex superlatives.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1984, at the age of 43Īli died late on June 3, 2016, in a hospital in Arizona after being admitted with respiratory problemsĪli’s funeral will take place in LouisvilleĪli is survived by his wife, the former Lonnie Williams, who knew him when she was a child, along with his nine childrenĪli, in his own words, was the “prettiest, the most superior, most scientific, most skilfullest fighter in the ring”.Įlvis Presley was the 20th century’s king of Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Ali was the Elvis of Boxing, he once said.
Married four times, he had seven daughters and two sons In 1967, he famously refused to fight in Vietnam, citing religious reasons He won and proclaimed to the world: “I am the world’s greatest!”Īli was the first man to win heavyweight titles three timesĪli attended his first Nation of Islam meeting in 1959 and converted to Sunni Islam in 1975 Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr on January 17, 1942, in Louisville KentuckyĪged 22, he took on heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in Miami.
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