By Sam Gardner (Design: Heidi Roller)
A legendary world champion boxer and a devoted philanthropist and social activist, Muhammad Ali was considered by many — including, most notably, himself — to be “The Greatest” heavyweight of all time. And in the wake of his tragic death, a look at his stellar career in the ring and his lasting impact on the world at large makes that a difficult point to argue.
The only three-time world heavyweight champ in the sport’s long and storied history, Ali was more than a handful inside the ropes -- stronger than steel, quicker than a blink and as brash as a man could be.
So perpetually confident was Ali that, prior to The Rumble in the Jungle, his first and only fight with George Foreman, he ostentatiously boasted that, “I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail. That’s bad. Only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I'm so mean I make medicine sick.”
It was bombastic, yes — this is, after all, the fighter who famously claimed he “shook up the world” after winning his first heavyweight title a decade earlier — but rarely was Ali’s over-the-top self-aggrandizing unjustified. Over the course of his two-decade career, Ali went 56-5, with three of those losses coming in his last four fights, long after he’d passed his prime.
When Ali wasn’t bigger, he was faster, and when his speed began to betray him and he was no longer quick enough to evade younger fighters, Ali was still strong enough, tough enough and cunning enough to get the job done anyway. Simply put, Muhammad Ali, the face of the golden age of boxing, was “The Greatest” — not because he told us so but because he showed us so.
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Getty Images
Getty Images
Getty Images
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