The place in the history of Muhammad Ali, champion of civil rights

The man who more than any other left a deep mark in the history of sport would have turned 80 on January 17. Muhammad Ali born Cassius Marcellus Clay instead he is almost gone six years ago, in June 2016, due to a respiratory crisis, weakened for some time by Parkinson’s disease, against which he had fought for more than thirty years. We speak without any doubt the greatest sportsman of the twentieth century.

In fact, it was not just a boxing legend, the man who in 1964, after converting to Islam the day after becoming world champion against Sonny Liston, changed his name to Muhammad Ali. She said: “Cassius Clay is a slave name. I didn’t choose it and I don’t want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name. It means loved by God ». Besides the sporting merits, there are the civil ones.

He has always seen his profession as a useful tool to fight for civil rights and to give visibility to his social battles in favor of the African American community. Since the first great triumph of his career, the gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics, won just eighteen. Back in America, he went into a restaurant, asked for food but was shown the door. A sign hanging at the entrance sadly read: “White people only».

He was courageous, idealistic, dreamer. He quickly became a symbol for the black liberation movement in the United States during the 1960s, several times openly defying the American government. Due to an episode of racism he threw the gold he won in Rome into the waters of the Ohio River, and only in ’96 did the IOC give him a replacement medal.

In 1966 he refused to join the US military to fight in Vietnam, supported in his battle by Martin Luther King. “Where is Vietnam? On TV. I have nothing against the Vietcong, they never called me a Negro. ‘ He paid dearly for his choice with the deprivation of the world title and five years of exclusion from the ring: only in 1971, in fact, his sentence of draft evasion was annulled by the Supreme Court. Unimaginable, for a sportsman of our times. He was already a champion, he became a myth. He once said, “How would I like to be remembered? Like a man who has never sold his people“. The former president of the USA Barack Obama in commemorating the boxer after his death he described him as an immortal legend, arguing that the world was better thanks to Muhammad Ali.

Extremely talented, provocative, brash, arrogant, aware of his enormous skill; Ali was able to relate to the mass media better than any other champion of his time. Out of 61 matches played, the most famous of which is certainly The Rumble in The Jungle, the epochal 1974 challenge against George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, Ali boasts a record of 56 wins, 37 of which by KO. He lost by KO only once.

But more than the accounting of victories and the place of honor among the great legends of boxing, Muhammad Alì will be remembered for being the first true sportsman capable of broadening his horizon, of feeling an integral part of society, of being a source of inspiration for generations and generations, to take charge of the feelings of the weakest and of the oppressed and for these reasons to become a planetary champion of human rights. If in the ring Muhammad Ali, according to his immortal definition, “moved like a butterfly and stung like a bee”, in life he was much more and much more.