Muhammad Ali... Float Like a Butterfly Sting Like A Bee
Rational Nation U S A Purveyor of Truth Ten years younger than Ali I grew up watching and admiring The Greatest. His honesty, courage, and strength of his convictions top the list. You Were, and Will Always Remain the Greatest Champ Rest In Peace What a loss to suffer, even if for years you knew it was coming. Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, in Phoenix, at the age of seventy-four, was the most fantastical American figure of his era, a self-invented character of such physical wit, political defiance, global fame, and sheer originality that no novelist you might name would dare conceive him. Born Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville, Kentucky, he was a skinny, quick-witted kid, the son of a sign painter and a house cleaner, who learned to box at the age of twelve to avenge the indignity of a stolen bicycle, a sixty-dollar red Schwinn that he could not bear to lose. Eventually, Ali became arguably the most famous person on the planet, known as a supre...