He was fast of fist and foot — lip, too — a heavyweight champion who promised to shock the world and did. He floated. He stung. Mostly he thrilled, even after the punches had taken their toll and his voice barely rose above a whisper.
He was The Greatest.
Muhammad Ali died Friday at age 74, according to a spokesman for his family. He was hospitalized in the Phoenix area with respiratory problems earlier this week, and his children had flown in from around the country. Family spokesman Bob Gunnell said Ali, who had Parkinson’s disease, died of septic shock. While it’s not clear exactly what transpired with Ali, people with late-stage Parkinson’s often have difficulty swallowing. Food and liquid landing in the lungs can lead to pneumonia or a chest infection that could cause sepsis, a bloodstream infection.
“It’s a sad day for life, man. I loved Muhammad Ali, he was my friend. Ali will never die,” Don King, who promoted some of Ali’s biggest fights, told The Associated Press early Saturday. “Like Martin Luther King his spirit will live on, he stood for the world.”
His funeral is scheduled for Friday afternoon at the KFC Yum! Center in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. The city held a memorial service Saturday.
One of Ali’s daughters described her father’s last moments in an Instagram post, saying his heart wouldn’t stop beating for 30 minutes after all of his other organs failed. Hana Ali said the family was surrounding her father, hugging and kissing him, holding his hands and chanting an Islamic prayer, while his heart kept beating as his other organs gave out. “No one had even seen anything like it. A true testament to the strength of his Spirit and Will!” she wrote.
President Barack Obama, who keeps a pair of boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali in his private study off the Oval Office, said that Ali “shook up the world and the world is better for it.”
With a wit as sharp as the punches he used to “whup” opponents, Ali dominated sports for two decades before time and Parkinson’s disease, triggered by thousands of blows to the head, ravaged his magnificent body, muted his majestic voice and ended his storied career in 1981.
He won and defended the heavyweight championship in epic fights in exotic locations, spoke loudly on behalf of blacks, and famously refused to be drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War because of his Muslim beliefs.
Despite his debilitating illness, he traveled the world to rapturous receptions even after his once-bellowing voice was quieted and he was left to communicate with a wink or a weak smile.
“He was the greatest fighter of all time but his boxing career is secondary to his contribution to the world,” promoter Bob Arum told the AP early Saturday. “He’s the most transforming figure of my time certainly.”
Revered by millions worldwide and reviled by millions more, Ali cut quite a figure, 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds in his prime. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” his cornermen exhorted, and he did just that in a way no heavyweight had ever fought before.
He fought in three different decades, finished with a record of 56-5 with 37 knockouts — 26 of those bouts promoted by Arum — and was the first man to win heavyweight titles three times.
“Rumble, young man, rumble,” cornerman Bundini Brown would yell to him.
And rumble Ali did. He fought anyone who meant anything and made millions of dollars with his lightning-quick jab. His fights were so memorable that they had names — “Rumble in the Jungle” and “Thrilla in Manila.”
But it was as much his antics — and his mouth — outside the ring that transformed the man born Cassius Clay into a household name as Muhammad Ali.
“I am the greatest,” Ali thundered again and again.
Few would disagree.
Ali spurned white America when he joined the Black Muslims and changed his name. He defied the draft at the height of the Vietnam war.
He later embarked on a second career as a missionary for Islam.
“Boxing was my field mission, the first part of my life,” he said in 1990, adding with typical braggadocio, “I will be the greatest evangelist ever.”
Ali couldn’t fulfill that goal because Parkinson’s robbed him of his speech. It took such a toll on his body that the sight of him in his later years — trembling, his face frozen, the man who invented the Ali Shuffle now barely able to walk — shocked and saddened those who remembered him in his prime.
Despised by some for his outspoken beliefs and refusal to serve in the U.S. Army in the 1960s, an aging Ali became a poignant figure whose mere presence at a sporting event would draw long standing ovations.
With his hands trembling so uncontrollably that the world held its breath, he lit the Olympic torch for the 1996 Atlanta Games in a performance as riveting as some of his fights.
A few years after that, he sat mute in a committee room in Washington, his mere presence enough to persuade lawmakers to pass the boxing reform bill that bore his name.
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