‘He will never die’

From the White House to Kinshasa and Uzbekistan they remembered a sporting and cultural icon, saying there would never be another one like Muhammad Ali, ‘The Greatest’.
Ali was recalled not just as a heavyweight boxing king but also for his fight for social justice, while others told moving personal stories of his warmth and generosity, how he was equally at home with presidents and people on the streets.
President Barack Obama hailed Ali, who died on Friday after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, as a towering champion “who fought for what was right”.
“His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public standing,” Obama said in a heartfelt statement.
“It would earn him enemies on the left and the right, make him reviled, and nearly send him to jail. But Ali stood his ground and his victory helped us get used to the America we recognise today.”
In elegant, elegiac prose, Obama wrote of the boxing legend, one of his personal champions: “Muhammad Ali was The Greatest. Period. If you just asked him, he’d tell you. He’d tell you he was the double greatest; that he’d ‘handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder into jail’,” he wrote in his statement released by the White House.
“But what made The Champ the greatest - what truly separated him from everyone else - is that everyone else would tell you pretty much the same thing,” Obama said.
“Like everyone else on the planet, Michelle and I mourn his passing. But we’re also grateful to God for how fortunate we are to have known him, if just for a while; for how fortunate we all are that The Greatest chose to grace our time,” Obama wrote.
“In my private study, just off the Oval Office, I keep a pair of his gloves on display, just under that iconic photograph of him - the young champ, just 22 years old, roaring like a lion over a fallen Sonny Liston,” the president wrote.
“I was too young when it was taken to understand who he was - still Cassius Clay, already an Olympic gold medal winner, yet to set out on a spiritual journey that would lead him to his Muslim faith, exile him at the peak of his power, and set the stage for his return to greatness with a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden,” Obama continued.
The president went on to quote Ali who stated: “I am America, I am the part you won’t recognise. But get used to me - black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”
Obama added that “the Ali I came to know,” was not just “as skilled a poet on the mic as he was a fighter in the ring, but a man who fought for what was right. A man who fought for us.”
“He stood with King and Mandela; stood up when it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t,” Obama said.
Ali had been Nelson Mandela’s hero, the Nelson Mandela Foundation said, revealing how Mandela’s favourite book at his office was an autographed copy of an Ali biography and that there was a photo of the two men together there.
“Nelson Mandela, a boxing enthusiast most of his life, acknowledged Ali as his boxing hero. Madiba had great respect for his legacy and spoke with admiration of Ali’s achievements,” said Sello Hatang, chief executive of the foundation.
Reflecting Ali’s reach far beyond boxing, former US president Bill Clinton said he had been “honoured” to award Ali the Presidential Citizens Medal at the White House in January 2001, just before leaving office.
“Through triumph and trials”, Clinton said, Ali “became even greater than his legend”.
Thousands of kilometres away in Kinshasa, underlining Ali’s enduring global appeal, they still talk about that historic night in 1974 in what was then Zaire -- the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’.
Ali knocked out the previously undefeated George Foreman in the greatest victory of his storied career.
“Ali was part of our youth, it is he who shaped us,” Martino Kavuala, a former amateur boxer now aged 63, remembered fondly.
“In those days, if you were young and you didn’t box, it wasn’t only that you weren’t really a youngster, you didn’t have a place in society.”
Football great Pele led the tributes from the sporting world, which united to remember one of its biggest names.
“The sporting universe has just suffered a big loss. Muhammad Ali was my friend, my idol, my hero,” Pele said on Instagram.
“We spent many moments together and always kept a good connection throughout the years. The sadness is overwhelming.”
Ali spoke out for African-American civil rights in the 1960s, carrying on his fight against injustice and sacrificing the prime years of his own career in the process.
Retired NBA all-time scoring leader Kareem Abdul-Jabbar praised Ali’s courage in fighting discrimination.
“At a time when blacks who spoke up about injustice were labelled uppity and often arrested, Muhammad willingly sacrificed the best years of his career to stand tall and fight for what he believed was right,” said Abdul-Jabbar.
“In doing so, he made all Americans, black and white, stand taller. I may be 7-feet-2 but I never felt taller than when standing in his shadow.”
Ali won an Olympic gold medal in 1960 and battled the onset of Parkinson’s to light the torch at the 1996 Olympic opening ceremony in one of the most memorable moments in Games history.
Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, said Ali “was engaged beyond sport, an athlete who had the courage to give hope to so many suffering illness by lighting the Olympic cauldron and not hiding his own affliction”.
Foreman reminisced about the three-way rivalry he enjoyed with Ali and Joe Frazier during heavyweight boxing’s most feted era, tweeting: “Ali, Frazier and Foreman... we were one guy. A part of me slipped away, the greatest piece.”
“We lost a legend, a hero and a great man,” said Floyd Mayweather, who retired last year as an unbeaten welterweight champion. “He’s one of the guys who paved the way for me to be where I’m at. Words can’t explain what Muhammad Ali did for the sport.”
Another former world heavyweight title-holder, Mike Tyson, tweeted: “God came for his champion. So long great one. The Greatest. RIP.”
Don King, who promoted the Rumble in the Jungle, said Ali will live on forever alongside other US civil rights heroes.
“He was tremendous, not just a boxer, a great human being, an icon,” King said. “Muhammad Ali’s spirit, like Martin Luther King Jr., will live on. That’s why Muhammad Ali will never die.”
In Tashkent, Uzbekistan at the amateur World Series of Boxing the crowd and boxers from Cuba and Britain stood in respectful silence as three bells rang out in poignant respect.

Muhammad Ali’s ring record
Oct 29 1960 Tunney Hunsaker Won 6th rd Pro debut
Feb 25 1964 Sonny Liston TKO 7th World championship
May 25 1965 Sonny Liston KO 1st World championship
Nov 22 1965 Floyd Patterson TKO 12th World championship
Mar 29 1966 George Chuvalo Won 15 World championship
May 21 1966 Henry Cooper TKO 6th World championship
Aug 6 1966 Brian London KO 3rd World championship
Sep 10 1966 Karl Mildenberg TKO 12th World championship
Nov 14 1966 Cleveland Williams TKO 3rd World championship
Feb 6 1967 Ernie Terrell Won 15 World championship
Mar 22 1967 Zora Folley KO 7th World championship
Mar 8 1971 Joe Frazier Lost 15 World championship
Oct 30 1974 George Foreman KO 8th World championship
Mar 24 1975 Chuck Wepner TKO 15th World championship
May 16 1975 Ron Lyle TKO 11th World championship
Jul 1 1975 Joe Bugner Won 15 World championship
Oct 1 1975 Joe Frazier TKO 14 World championship
Feb 20 1976 Jean Pierre Coopman KO 5th World championship
Apr 30 1976 Jimmy Young Won 15 World championship
May 24 1976 Richard Dunn TKO 5th World championship
Sep 28 1976 Ken Norton Won 15 World championship
May 16 1977 Alfredo Evangelista Won 15 World championship
Sep 29 1977 Earnie Shavers Won 15 World championship
Feb 15 1978 Leon Spinks Lost 15 World championship
Sep 15 1978 Leon Spinks Won 15 World championship
Oct 2 1980 Larry Holmes KO By 11 World championship
Dec 11 1981 Trevor Berbick Lost 10 Last pro fight

NAMPA/AFP