Muhammad Ali: A SportTimes tribute to the bee that will sting no more

The butterfly has finally folded its delicate wings. And the bee, so graceful in flight, will sting no more.

Muhammad Ali was more than just a boxer. How could someone who stepped into the cauldron of a boxing ring be so damn pretty?

And he was.

How could this huge guy, marble-hewn and glistening like a bronze adonis, move with such effortless speed?

And he did.

Where were the scars of battle? There were none. At least not on the outside.

The Louisville Lip they called him. And, yes he shot his mouth off occasionally. Some of the things he said about Joe Frasier especially were shameful. He was far from a saint.

But he did his best talking inside a ring. As a young Cassius Clay, the 'slave name' he came to reject, he lit up his sport.

Sonny Liston, the big, ugly bear, was the first domino to fall in 1964. Retired on his stool at the start of the seventh round. And then he fell again just over a year later. This time laid out on the deck, suckered by the so-called phantom punch. So called because Liston didn't have a ghost of a chance.

"Ah told you, ah told you…I'm the greatest of all time," said the victor, gloating over the corpse of the vanquished.

He wasn't. Not yet.

His decision to embrace the Nation of Islam and change his name to Muhammad Ali divided fans into two neat camps. But his principled stance against the Vietnam War and his refusal to be drafted - I Ain't Got No Quarrel With The VietCong - turned him into a counterculture icon on university campuses throughout America and beyond its borders.

He went to jail for his beliefs. Alongside Martin Luther King, he became a symbol of the civil rights movement. When King was assassinated, Ali, reluctantly, found himself cast as the leading voice in the Civil Rights movement, alongside the likes of Jesse Jackson.

But he was never a politician. Nor would he pretend to be. He was a boxer.

He puts bums on seats. And he put bums on the canvas. Frasier, as we all know, was his one-time friend and then his nemesis. Hatred grew out of enmity.

They fought three times. The first, the Fight of the Century in 1971, saw Ali lose on points after being unceremoniously dumped to the floor by Smokin' Joe, the world heavyweight champion. Ali would later avenge the defeat. But it was their final confrontation, the Thriller in Manila, that we remember most.

Fourteen rounds of brutal, uncompromising, unflinching combat between two old warriors already well past their best. But it was - and still is - so compelling.

Ali won when Frasier's corner stopped their man continuing at the end of the 14th round. Ali, drained and close to quitting himself, admitted it was the closest he had come to death.

Watching it today on You Tube still makes me wince.

That fight, of course, was preceded by the Rumble in the Jungle. Ali versus George Foreman, a new and more brutal Sonny Liston and the foreshadow of Mike Tyson.

The biggest mis-match in boxing history, they said. Well, they got that wrong. The eighth-round knockout remains embedded in the memory. And it will be replayed time and time again on news and sports channels today.

Down the years, Foreman has been grace personified over his defeat to Ali. It was bad enough to lose, he said. But to lose to Muhammad Ali, the biggest braggadocio in the world. Man, that really hurt.

How do you measure greatness? Frankly, I don't know. But Ali had a sense of aura, that indefinable quality that raises a select few on to another dimensional plain. Jack Nicklaus comes to mind. Maybe Pele.

I truly loved Ali. He was my hero, while at the same time, silently acknowledging his human failings.

One of his interviews with Michael Parkinson in particular shows him uncharacteristically with his guard down over the subject of race. It's not nice. But who would break a butterfly on a wheel? He gave a voice to those who didn't have one at a time when the world, especially in America, turned a blind eye to intolerance over the colour of another person's skin.

In later years, long retired, Parkinson's held him in an unforgiving prison. It was the price he paid for giving us so much. And it was horrible to watch, the twilight of a God.

Now he is free of the involuntary spasms and the wretched shackles of his old age. These are just a few, off-the-cuff thoughts.

Too few to capture a life less ordinary.