Muhammad Ali Biography: The Champion Who Gave Up His Prime on Principle

Muhammad Ali’s professional career ran twenty-one years, and for three and a half of them he was not allowed to work. He was 25 when the ban started and 28 when it ended, which is precisely the window in which a heavyweight is at his physical best.

Everything people find remarkable about him after 1970, including both of the fights he is most famous for, happened to a man who had already lost that window and knew it was not coming back.

Louisville, a Stolen Bicycle, and Joe Martin

He was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. on 17 January 1942 in segregated Louisville, Kentucky. His father painted signs. His mother worked as a domestic.

The origin story is unusually well documented. At twelve his bicycle was stolen. He went to report it to a policeman named Joe Martin and announced that he intended to beat up whoever had taken it. Martin, who ran a boxing gym in the same building’s basement, suggested he learn how to fight first.

Six years later he won light-heavyweight gold at the 1960 Rome Olympics. He turned professional that October, bankrolled by a syndicate of eleven Louisville businessmen, and spent three years assembling a record and a reputation for talking.

25 February 1964: Sonny Liston

Nobody gave him a chance. Sonny Liston was the most intimidating champion since Joe Louis, and Clay was a 22-year-old who had been dropped in sparring and looked, to most of the Miami Beach press row, like a fast light-heavyweight in well over his head.

Liston did not come out for the seventh round.

The morning after, Clay confirmed what had been rumoured for months: he had joined the Nation of Islam. Within days Elijah Muhammad gave him the name Muhammad Ali. American sportswriters and several opponents refused to use it for years, and that refusal became a running subplot in his fights, most notoriously against Ernie Terrell in 1967.

Houston, 28 April 1967

Ali defended the title nine times in three years. Then his draft status was reclassified, and on 28 April 1967 he presented himself at a Houston induction centre and declined to step forward when his name was called. Three times. His grounds were religious: as a minister of the Nation of Islam he claimed conscientious-objector status.

The punishment arrived before any trial. The New York State Athletic Commission suspended his licence and the World Boxing Association stripped his title the same day. On 20 June 1967 a jury convicted him of refusing induction, and he was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

He never served it. He stayed free on appeal for four years, but he could not get licensed in any American state, and the withdrawal of his passport closed off the option of fighting abroad.

So he lectured. Ali spent most of the exile on the college circuit, speaking against the war to audiences that were frequently hostile at the start and rarely by the end. Public opinion moved underneath him during those four years. By the time Georgia licensed him and he fought Jerry Quarry in Atlanta in October 1970, he was something no boxer had been before: a political figure with a fight record attached.

Clay v. United States, 28 June 1971

The Supreme Court heard the case under his birth name and overturned the conviction 8-0, with Thurgood Marshall recused.

It is worth being precise about what the ruling did and did not say. The Court did not endorse his politics or rule on the war. It found that the Justice Department had failed to specify which of the three statutory tests for conscientious objection his claim had failed, which made the appeal board’s denial impossible to sustain. A narrow, procedural win. It ended the matter all the same.

Three months before that decision he had already lost the first fight of his life. On 8 March 1971, at Madison Square Garden, Joe Frazier beat him over fifteen rounds. Ali was 29, and no longer the fighter who had beaten Liston.

Zaire and Manila

The strangest and best stretch of his career came next, and it was built on damage tolerance rather than speed.

The Zaire fight only happened because of a piece of promotional nerve that would be illegal today. Don King, a former Cleveland numbers operator whose sole promotional credit was a charity exhibition, signed both Ali and George Foreman to $5 million guarantees before he had a dollar of it, then went looking for the money and found it in Mobutu Sese Seko, on condition that the fight be staged in Zaire.

On 30 October 1974 in Kinshasa, Ali spent most of the fight leaning on the ropes, letting a champion eight years younger punch himself into exhaustion, and knocked Foreman out in the eighth. He was 32 and heavyweight champion again, seven years after the title had been taken off him.

On 1 October 1975 he met Frazier for the third time in Manila, in conditions close to unbearable. Frazier’s corner stopped it before the fifteenth. Ali said afterwards it was the closest thing to dying he knew of. Both men left something in that ring.

He lost the title to Leon Spinks in February 1978 and won it back in September, the first heavyweight to hold the world championship three times. He should have stopped there. He fought Larry Holmes in 1980 and Trevor Berbick in December 1981, lost both, and retired at 39 on 56-5.

Parkinson’s, the Atlanta Torch, and 3 June 2016

Ali’s Parkinson’s syndrome became public in 1984, three years after his last fight. Doctors have generally linked it to the punishment he absorbed, particularly in the final five years, though the cause of the condition in any individual is not something medicine can settle definitively.

It took his speech and his motor control over more than three decades. Consider what that means for this man in particular: the two faculties it removed were the ones his entire public identity had been built on.

He did not withdraw. He worked as a humanitarian envoy, negotiated the release of American hostages in Iraq in 1990, and in July 1996 lit the Olympic cauldron in Atlanta with visibly shaking hands in front of a global television audience. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, the year the Muhammad Ali Center opened in Louisville.

He died on 3 June 2016 in Scottsdale, Arizona, aged 74. Tens of thousands lined the route of his funeral procession through Louisville a week later.

The estate is covered on his net worth profile, and he appears alongside the men he beat on the richest boxers list. But the arithmetic that explains him is simpler than any valuation. He was the best heavyweight of his generation. He was made to sit out the three and a half years he would have been at his peak. Asked in later life whether he regretted it, he said he did not, and nothing in the four decades after 1967 suggests he was performing that answer.