A stolen bicycle set twelve-year-old Cassius Clay on the road to boxing
At 12, Cassius Clay was furious that someone had taken his bicycle in Louisville and told a police officer he meant to beat up the thief. The officer, Joe Martin, also coached boxing, and suggested the boy learn to fight first. Clay later became Muhammad Ali, widely called the greatest heavyweight ever.
Born in 1942 to a sign painter and a domestic worker, Clay grew up under segregation; his mother remembered him being refused a drink of water at a store because he was Black. He was dyslexic and struggled with reading. He took to boxing after watching amateurs on a local television show, went on to win six Kentucky Golden Gloves titles, and finished his amateur career 100–8, crowned by light-heavyweight gold at the Rome Olympics in 1960, aged 18.
His famous boasting was a deliberate act. After meeting the wrestler Gorgeous George in Las Vegas in 1961, Clay learned that big talk sold tickets to fans who wanted to see him win and fans who wanted to see him lose. He called opponents bums, rhymed his insults, and predicted the round of each knockout, a style now cited as a forerunner of hip-hop.
In February 1964, aged 22, he faced Sonny Liston in Miami Beach as an 8-to-1 underdog. At the weigh-in his pulse ran at 120 against a normal 54. In the fight he danced away from Liston's rushes, cut him for the first time in Liston's career, and survived a fifth round half-blinded by something stinging his eyes. Liston failed to come out for the seventh. That year Clay rejected his birth name as a slave name and became Muhammad Ali.
In 1967 he refused induction into the army on religious grounds and in opposition to the Vietnam War. Convicted and stripped of his titles, he lost nearly four years of his prime before the Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1971. The stand made him a hero of the counterculture and a symbol of Black pride. He regained the undisputed title in 1974, retired in 1981, and lit the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996. Sports Illustrated named him Sportsman of the Century in 1999.
Source: Muhammad Ali
