A look back at the life and legacy of Muhammad Ali — the man who shook up the world

If anything, the passing of Muhammad Ali on June 3rd 2016, at age 74, bestowed even more greatness on the man. This in the knowledge that even after all he achieved, everything he went through both in and out of the ring, ultimately he was mortal just like the rest of us.

The words just trip off the tongue — ‘beauty’, ‘poetry’, ‘elegance’, ‘vision’, ‘defiance’, ‘anger’, ‘justice’, ‘rebellion’, ‘determination’, ‘compassion’, ‘grace’, ‘strength’. Ali owned all of these attributes and qualities — and then some.

Who could have predicted when a young, gangly, loose-limbed boxer from Louisville, Kentucky by the name Cassius Clay took the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics — dismissed by the major sportswriters of the day as lacking the ability and power to go on and make any impact as a professional — that he would explode onto the world stage like a hurricane unleashed thereafter?

Just four years later not only did he become at the time the youngest fighter to win the world heavyweight title at 22, with a performance against the fearsome Sonny Liston that induces wonder to this day, he did it while refusing to know his place as a black athlete in Jim Crow America. “Uppity negro” was one of the kinder insults thrown his way in a society in…