Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942) is a retired American boxer and three-time World Heavyweight Champion, who is widely considered one of the greatest heavyweight championship boxers of all time. As an amateur, he won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. After turning professional, he went on to become the first boxer to win the lineal heavyweight championship three times.

Originally known as Cassius Clay, Ali changed his name after joining the Nation of Islam in 1964, subsequently converting to Sunni Islam in 1975. In 1967, Ali refused to be inducted into the U.S. military based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. He was arrested and found guilty on draft evasion charges, stripped of his boxing title, and his boxing license was suspended. He was not imprisoned, but did not fight again for nearly four years while his appeal worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was successful.

Nicknamed "The Greatest", Ali was involved in several historic boxing matches. Notable among these are three with rival Joe Frazier and one with George Foreman, whom he beat by knockout to win the world heavyweight title for the second time. He suffered only five losses (four decisions and one TKO by retirement from the bout) with no draws in his career, while amassing 56 wins (37 knockouts and 19 decisions).[1] Ali was well known for his unorthodox fighting style, which he described as "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee", and employing techniques such as the rope-a-dope.[2] He was also known for his pre-match hype, where he would "trash talk" opponents on television and in person some time before the match, often with rhymes. These personality quips, idioms along with an unorthodox fighting technique made him a cultural icon. In later life, Ali developed Parkinson's disease. In 1999, Ali was crowned "Sportsman of the Century" by Sports Illustrated and "Sports Personality of the Century" by the BBC.[3]

IT started with a skinny boy chasing a stolen bicycle and ended with a sad old man stumbling into the sunset as the world cried with him. But between the bookends of Muhammad Ali's astonishing career was a volume of achievement that made the world look at sports and its champions differently. He was charisma, courage and chaos all in one package, a luminous personality who lit up the world. Ali was a fighter first and foremost but a conjurer too, mesmerising opponents with his hand speed and shouting long and loudly that he was The Greatest of All Times until the world believed him. His legend grew from nine minutes of furious, fleet-footed action in front of a hostile crowd at the Rome Olympics when his name was still Cassius Marcellus Clay.

THE LEAD-UP Clay's Olympic journey began in October 1954 when his new red and white bicycle was stolen outside the Louisville Home Show in Kentucky. Joe Martin, a local policeman and amateur boxing coach, was training fighters in the basement of the auditorium where the show was held. ``One night this kid came downstairs and he was crying,'' Martin told author Thomas Hauser. ``Somebody had stolen his new bicycle and he was very upset and wanted to report it to the police. He was only 12 and he was gonna whup whoever stole it. ``I said `well, you better learn how to fight.'' He never found the bicycle thief, but six weeks later Cassius Clay, weighing 41kg, won his first amateur fight. Five years later and weighing 81kg, he was at 17 the best amateur light-heavyweight boxer in America, some said the world, having beaten a 29-year-old breakaway from the Randwick rugby club named Tony Madigan in the 1959 Chicago Golden Gloves final. Madigan had won gold and silver at two Commonwealth Games but could not cope with the loose-limbed Louisville Lip and his long, fast punches fired on the retreat.

THE GOLD MEDAL Clay opened up his gold medal campaign by stopping Yves Because of Belgium in the second round. In his next fight he outpointed Genadiy Schatkov of Russia and in the semi-finals again proved too quick and slick for Tony Madigan. Then it was the gold medal bout against Polish veteran Zbigniew Pietrzykowki a craggy-faced left-hander who had won bronze in Melbourne four years earlier. In the middleweight final that preceded Clay's gold medal bout, another Kentucky boxer, Sgt Eddie Crook, scored an unpopular decision over another Pole, Tadeusz Walasek. The raucous Romans jeered all through the medal ceremony and American national anthem. ``The people made me fight harder than I should have,'' Ali said. ``When they booed for five minutes after Crook's win and I was the next American in the ring, I knew I had to leave no doubts.'' But Clay started badly in the three-round final, with British journalist John Cottrell remarking that it looked like the brash teenager would be badly mauled. Clay kept out of trouble in the second round and in the last minute abandoned his fancy footwork, standing his ground to

throw four hard rights to the head. He was still behind on points and needed a big third round to win. Moving in and out, he carved up Pietrzykowki's face with a fast lead right through his opponent's southpaw guard. The Pole was lucky to survive the final round and Clay won a unanimous decision. ``I wanted to keep these trunks as a souvenir. Now look at them,'' Clay said of his blood-splattered gear. ``That was my last amateur fight. I'm turning pro, but I don't know exactly how. I want a good contract with a good manager.'' A Soviet reporter asked Clay how it felt to be denied service at restaurants back home because he was black. ``Russian,'' he answered, ``we got qualified men working on that problem. America is the greatest country in the world.''

THE AFTERMATH In his first autobiography, Ali recalled that a few weeks after making that statement he walked into a Louisville diner with the gold medal around his neck and was told the establishment didn't serve niggers. He claimed he then threw the medal into the Ohio River out of disgust at his own country. But he later admitted he'd made up the tale after the medal was lost when he moved home. Ali had been proud of the medal and had worn it for days at the Olympic village. It was still around his neck when he returned to New York after the Olympics. Then he flew home to Louisville for a ceremony at the high school where he had graduated a few months earlier at the bottom of his class. ``I said I was the Greatest,'' he later remarked, ``not the smartest.'' Clay recited a poem entitled ``How Cassius Took Rome'', the first in an endless ream of odes to himself he penned over the next 20 years. The following month he earned $2000 beating up on a local police chief, Tunney Hunsaker, in his first professional fight in Louisville. Then he headed out to LA to train with the great light-heavyweight Archie Moore, a seemingly ageless veteran he would knock out with his ``Pension Punch'' two years later. Moore's trainer Dick Sadler recalled that Clay's enthusiasm was so infectious it made everyone sick. ``I rode with him on the train, from the west coast down to Texas where Archie had a fight,'' Sadler said. ``First the kid would be standing and shouting outside the carriage: `I am The Greatest. He'd shout this at the passing cars and sheep and fields. Then he started singing this number by Chubby Checker about the twist. He didn't know the words, just kept on and on singing: `C'mon Baby, let's do the twist'. And it got to me. He done twisted all across California and Arizona. By the time we got to New Mexico it was seven hundred miles of twisting. Twisting and I am The Greatest. It drove me crazy.''

THE YEARS SINCE Declaring the brooding, malevolent Sonny Liston too ugly to be the champ, Ali won the world heavyweight title in 1964 at the age of 22. He immediately changed his name to Muhammad Ali after converting to Islam. The gangly boy who won gold in Rome weighing 81kg had morphed into 100kg of perfectly proportioned muscle with speed, footwork and self-promotion unmatched in heavyweight history. He was no longer shy around women, or microphones for that matter. ``I'm young, I'm fast, I'm pretty, I can't possibly be beat,'' he said after thumping Liston. By Ali's estimation he became the most famous man alive. He helped shape and define his age as no other sporting figure has done. He could barely read or write and, when asked to point out Vietnam on a map, had no idea where it was. Yet when he gave up the best years of his fighting life serving a three-year suspension from boxing rather than be conscripted to fight there, his reasoning helped galvanise anti-war feeling. ``I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,'' he said. ``They never raped me, lynched me or called me ******.'' He became world champion when blacks still had to give up their seats to whites in some parts of America. But when he was through, punched into a pitiful retirement by Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick in 1981, he had created a new platform for free expression and civil rights. He won epic bouts around the globe, most notably against Joe Frazier and George Foreman, but became an envoy of peace and befriended kings, presidents and dictators. Shaking from Parkinson's Disease, he was a figure of pathos and pride when he lit the flame for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. He married four times, but was he ever really in love? ``Not with nobody else,'' he once said. ``When will they ever have another fighter who writes poems, predicts rounds, beats everybody, makes people laugh, makes people cry, and is as tall and extra pretty as me?''