A look back on the life of 'The Greatest': The Kentucky boy named Cassius Clay who died Muhammad Ali - the greatest sportsman of a generation 

He always said he was ‘the greatest’ – and he was. But white America took some years to accept that the ‘uppity’ black heavyweight from Louisville, Kentucky, who had refused on principle to fight in Vietnam and changed his name to join the hated Black Muslims, was the greatest sportsman of the age and one of the world’s most vivid and best-known personalities.

First as Cassius Clay and then as Muhammad Ali, he was idolized and vilified in almost equal measure until he achieved the status of a global icon, being named Sportsman of the 20th Century by Sports Illustrated magazine and Sports Personality of the Century by the BBC.

For the last three decades of his life, which ended yesterday at the age of 74, Parkinson’s disease stole from him both the strength and startling beauty of his prime, reducing a supreme athlete to a stumbling (though always dignified) shadow of his former self.

After a 32-year battle with Parkinson's Disease he died with his family at his bedside. 

First as Cassius Clay and then as Muhammad Ali, he was idolised and vilified in almost equal measure. Here he stands over Sonny Liston on May 25, 1965

Muhammad Ali looks thoughtful as he watches a private showing at a cinema of his world heavyweight fight with Henry Cooper in 1966

He took part in some of the greatest fights in the history of boxing - and was the only man to have won the world heavyweight championship three times. 

But while his success in the ring reflects his prodigious physical gifts, it doesn’t begin to tell the whole story of how the boy from Kentucky used his speed of thought, his courage and his sheer force of personality to become a global icon of almost unparalleled renown.

He father was a sign writer, his mother a domestic servant. He had one brother Rudolph, pictured standing over Ali in the family's Louisville home

Clay - or Cassius Marcellus Clay Jnr to give him his full, grandoise name - was born in the West End district of Louisville, which was not the city’s most deprived area, on January 17, 1942. 

His father, also Cassius, was a sign-writer with artistic ambitions and his mother, Odessa, a domestic servant. Because his parents had jobs, owned their own house and had only two children, the young Cassius was not brought up in the desperate poverty that fired the ambitions of many black fighters at the time.

His father was a loudmouth (a trait inherited by his elder son), a drinker and a womaniser. The names of father and son derived from a 19th-century white Kentucky farmer and soldier who became an abolitionist and freed his own slaves.

The future fighter’s great-grandfather worked for the farmer Cassius Clay, and may have been a freed slave himself. Some years after the farmer’s death, the boxer’s father was given the name as a mark of respect. 

His mother had some white blood, including that of an Irish grandfather from County Clare who had married a black woman.

When, in the early Sixties, he joined the Black Muslims (or Nation of Islam, as they re-named themselves) his white blood became an embarrassment – the Muslims claimed all white people were ‘evil’ - though in later life he managed to overcome those scruples and visited his ancestor’s home in Ireland.

The young Cassius took up boxing when someone stole his new bicycle and he reported the theft to a policeman. The policeman was Joe Martin, who ran a boxing club in Louisville which he persuaded him to join at the age of 12. He took eagerly to the rigours and disciplines of the sport, rising before dawn for road runs and gym work. Martin was his trainer until he turned pro six years later.

Muhammad Ali lands a right on Joe Frazier's head in the 2nd round during a clash in 1975. Ali held his title 10/1 defeating Frazier by TKO in the 14th round

Ali (left) as a young boy with his brother Rahman in Kentucky in 1946, and posing after winning the 24-carat gold-plated heavyweight championship belt on September 18 1964

He had a poor academic record at Louisville’s Central High School, being ranked 376 out of 391 pupils. This was put down mainly to daydreaming in class.

However, the school’s Principal, Atwood Wilson, had a soft spot for the talkative boy and introduced him to the school assembly: ‘Here he is, ladies and gentleman, Cassius Clay! The next heavyweight champion of the world. This guy is going to make a million dollars!’

Clay won gold as a light-heavyweight amateur at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. According to some reports, not long after his return to the U.S. he threw his medal into the Ohio River after being turned away from a diner because of his skin colour. Other biographers dispute this story.

That same year he turned pro. For this he needed financial backing, which was first offered by a local millionaire. After some time working on the man’s estate, however, and being abused as ‘a n***er’ by the family, he took up an alternative offer from a syndicate of 11 of Louisville’s leading white businessmen.

He also needed a new trainer. After being brushed off by the great fighter Sugar Ray Robinson, he was introduced by one of his backers to Angelo Dundee, the son of Italian immigrants.

Clay went to work in Dundee’s legendary Fifth Street Gym in Miami Beach and the two men formed a career-long partnership. Dundee never tried to change the young man’s unorthodox style and even encouraged his showmanship.

Court jester in his corner was Drew ‘Bundini’ Brown, who coined his famous slogan, ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’, and started Clay’s habit of forecasting the round in which he would fell his opponent. A noted eccentric, Brown called God ‘Shorty’ and used to say to Clay before a fight: ‘I’ve just heard from Shorty. He’s on our side.’

Also in Clay’s corner was Ferdie Pacheco, who became his doctor. Pacheco said of Clay: ‘In 1961, 1962, 1963, he was the most perfect physical specimen I had ever seen … perfectly proportioned, handsome, lightning reflexes and a great mind for sports.’

Pacheco was later to resign from the camp when the boxer, by then in his 30s and starting to show the effects of taking too many punches, refused his advice to retire before he suffered permanent injury.

A smiling Muhammad Ali shows his fist to reporters during an impromptu news conference in Mexico City in July 1987

By 1964, after four years as a pro, Clay had won 19 straight fights, all but four of them by knockouts, and was ready to challenge for the world title.

He had already acquired a reputation for his big mouth – ‘Gaseous Cassius’ and ‘the Louisville Lip’ were two of his nicknames. He started baiting the current holder, Sonny Liston, calling him ‘a big ugly bear’ and following him around to throw more insults. Liston, a convicted hoodlum who was in the pocket of the Mafia, was an uncouth bully who was portrayed in the press as a beast, a frightening black bogeyman.

After Clay was pictured with Malcolm X, then one of the most feared figures among white America, he announced he would henceforth be known as Muhammad Ali and joined the Nation of Islam, then known as the Black Muslims

An early attempt by promoters to present Clay as a contrasting ‘good n***er’ - this was in the early days of the civil rights movement and America was still a segregated society - was sabotaged when the contender was pictured in the presence of Malcolm X, the radical Black Muslim leader who was one of the most feared and despised figures among American whites.

Clay then announced that he was joining the sect himself and would henceforth be known as Muhammad Ali, rejecting the name of the ‘colonialist slave-owner’ with which he had been baptised. It took several years before the conservative, middle-aged white men who dominated the media began calling him by his new name.

Ali lit the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996 (pictured)

Ali’s interest in black politics was nothing new. He had been greatly moved by his father’s enraged account of the lynching of a 14-year-old black boy, Emmett Till, in Mississipi in 1955. 

His father had also told him about the political leader Marcus Garvey, who in the early twentieth century had called on African-Americans to be proud of and retrace their ancestral roots.

Ali himself had been upset by the evidence of segregation in Louisville, especially when his mother was refused a drink of water in a whites-only café. He started going to the rallies of religious leader Elijah Muhammad from 1959 and befriended Malcolm X in 1962.

A religious man who prayed several times a day to the end of his life, he was impressed by the personal morality preached (but not always practised) by the Black Muslim leaders. In 1975, he became a Sunni Muslim and towards the end of his life, in retirement on his farm in Arizona, he practised spiritual exercises.

At the time of joining the Black Muslims, he was married to a cocktail waitress named Sonji Roi. But the pair separated when she refused to conform to the strict edicts by which the group thought women should live. 

He was then married to Belinda Boyd from 1967 until 1975, when he began an affair with the exotically named Veronica Porsche, and was photographed arriving in the Philippines with her for the ‘Thrilla in Manila’ fight in 1975 while he was still living with Belinda.

Veronica and Ali were married in 1977, but divorced nine years later when he wed Yolanda Williams, who looked after him in his declining years. With these women he had seven daughters and two sons, one of them adopted. One daughter, Laila Ali, became a professional boxer.

His private life was disjointed. He married four times. Fourth wife Yolanda 'Lonnie' Ali, in purple, right, in 2012, looked after him in declining years. He also has nine children

But if his private life was often disjointed, there was nothing halting about his motormouth, which became almost has renowned as his ringcraft.

Although Ali had always belittled his opponents before a fight, often in home-spun verse, his rants against Sonny Liston were the first time the boxing Press had heard the insults at close quarters. 

Most wrote them off as the ravings of a lunatic, especially when he raged at Liston so wildly at the weigh-in that doctors found that his blood pressure had doubled.

He explained to friends that his aim had been entirely rational: to get inside Liston’s head, to get him to think of the contender as an inconsequential clown. ‘He knows how to handle a fighter,’ he said, ‘but not how to handle a nut.’ 

A writer for Sports Illustrated said: ‘Ali had the capacity almost of self-hypnosis or self-induced hysteria and he’d work himself up to this crazy pitch.’

Floyd Patterson, a former world champion beaten by him, once said: ‘I never liked his bragging. It took me a long time to understand who Clay was talking to. Clay was talking to Clay.’ His ravings have been likened to a Red Indian or Maori war dance: to intimidate his opponent and bolster his own self-belief.

Ali speaks to reporters alongside Dr Martin Luther King in 1976. The boxer's stand against the Vietnam War had encouraged King to lead a black revolt against it

It worked with Liston, whom he beat in six rounds (and the return bout in one), just as it worked with most of the opponents that followed. He was particularly cruel in his taunting of Joe Frazier before their famous 1975 fight in the Philippines. ‘It will be a killa … and a chilla … and a thrilla … when I get the gorilla in Manila,’ he had chanted.

Yet, when Frazier died in 2011, he admitted that he had really admired him. Ali’s approach to a fight was largely psychological, working out how to confuse his opponent. 

As time went by that became more difficult, and in his later years, when the speed in his legs had gone, he had to learn how to absorb heavy blows. In the end, tragically, he took too many punches for his own good.

He became sport’s first global TV superstar but was not just a vacuous celebrity. He brought a moral element to his fame. At heart he was a black man who wanted the white world to pay more attention and respect

But after his retirement, his reputation continued to grow and the iconography surrounding the name Muhammad Ali blossomed.

The man who was despised in the Sixties for refusing the draft - he was handed a three-and-a-half year suspended sentence and banned from boxing for that period - was later sent by the President of the United States to visit war-zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he was welcomed by soldiers as one of his country’s great heroes.

Ali applauding during a ceremony at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland

Ali’s stand against the Vietnam War had encouraged Martin Luther King to lead a black revolt against it. His reason for not fighting caught a growing anti-war feeling in the country: ‘I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me ‘n***er’.”

One reason why Ali became one of the most famous people in the world was that the impact of television in projecting sports contests, and to make its stars unimaginably rich, was just beginning. He became sport’s first global TV superstar. 

His knockabout appearances on Michael Parkinson’s chat show in this country produced some of the stand-out moments of popular television history. And his lighting of the Olympic flame at Atlanta in 1996 is remembered as one of the most spellbinding sights the Games have witnessed.

But he was not just a vacuous celebrity. He brought a moral element to his fame. The sacrifices he made for his principled stand against the American government over the Vietnam war made him a hero to black people all over the world.

At heart he was a black man who wanted the white world to pay more attention and respect to his people. He certainly achieved that, and a great deal more besides.

ALI’S TALE OF THE TAPE

Three of his world championship fights were with his most formidable challenger, Joe Frazier, including the so-called Fight of the Century in New York in 1971 (which Ali lost on points) and, four years later, the Thrilla in Manila (which he won when Frazier couldn’t rise from his stool for the final round).

Then, there was the legendary Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, which he won in the eighth round, against all the pre-fight predictions, with consummate ringcraft and great courage under fire to regain his world title at the age of 32.

At the legendary Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, he won in the eighth round, against all the pre-fight predictions, and regained his world title at the age of 32

Ali with his daughters Laila (left) and Hana (right) at a hotel in London in December 1978

At six feet three he was taller than most of his challengers and could use his height and exceptional reach, 80 inches, to fend off aggressive opponents. At the height of his powers he had a bewildering speed of hand and feet, an athletic elasticity (one opponent said he never knew any fighter who could stretch so far back over the ropes to avoid being hit), a dancing mobility and an array of virtuoso tricks.

Ali gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles in 2002

These included the ‘Ali shuffle’ that left giants floundering as their punches missed their target helplessly, the ‘rope-a-dope’ in which he covered up with his arms and gloves and allowed opponents to tire themselves out by battering away to little effect, and the non-stop rants of mockery, before and during the fight, that maddened and confused them.

Such daredevil tactics required a level of fitness and fight preparation that were magnificently evident in his early years, but slowly diminished in time, especially after the lay-off between 1967 and 1970 caused by the jail sentence (which was suspended, but which meant he couldn’t box competitively) and the legal battles he faced for refusing the draft to serve in Vietnam.

He was stripped of his world title and refused a licence to box in any state. Some shrewd judges believe that, because of that enforced absence from the age of 25 to nearly 29, the world never saw the very best of Ali. 

He was never beaten before 1967, having had a run of 29 successive victories, 23 by knock-out, since turning professional in 1960 at the age of 18.

After his return to the ring in 1970 until his retirement 11 years later, he suffered five defeats, though three of those were to inferior fighters as he stubbornly fought on, against medical advice and in poor physical shape, a month before his 40th birthday.

The only men to beat Ali in his prime were Ken Norton, who broke his jaw in 1973, and Joe Frazier. He took his revenge on both men twice in return bouts. In his whole career he won 56 out of 61 fights, 37 by knock-out.

Now, he has lost his last fight, but as befits his indomitable warrior spirit, he took it to the very last round.

Ali (pictured in 1970) has lost his last fight, but as befits his indomitable warrior spirit, he took it to the very last round