`Greatest of all time' in his exile

Tomorrow will mark the 36th anniversary of what may arguably have been the most significant date in the annals of 20th Century American sport. It was on February 25th, 1964, that a bruised and battered Sonny Liston declined to answer the bell for the eighth round of his heavyweight championship defence against a boxer then known as Cassius Clay, thereby setting in motion a sequence of events which would not only alter the face of the boxing world, but would ultimately change the way an entire nation viewed itself.

A day after the Liston fight in Miami, the new heavyweight champion confirmed his conversion to Islam, and within weeks he had taken a new name, Muhammad Ali. Two years later he would refuse induction into the US army.

Ali's opposition to the Vietnam War was so unpopular that he became an instant pariah, and boxing commissions around the world raced against one another to strip him of his title and licence.

For 41 months he was denied the right to practise his trade, yet by the time it was over the world had come to realise that this extraordinary man of conviction had been right all along. Indeed, it can be reasonably argued that Ali not only mirrored his times, but more than any other single individual helped to shape them.

"He divided sheep from goats, peace-niks from gung-hoers, leftists and liberals from conservatives and reactionaries," the eminent novelist, screenwriter, and boxing aficionado Budd Schulberg recalled of the shadow cast by Ali in exile.

"Did Ali have the right to practise his brawny and brutal trade while his celebrated case was still being judged by higher and higher courts? If your answer was negative, we would know how you stood on a dozen front page issues, on the ABM and the SST, on the CIA, the FBI, and Kent State, on the Nixon doctrine and the law-and-order bills.

"Never before had there been a heavyweight champion who provided this kind of touchstone. Never before in this ideological sense had there been a champion of the world. Never before a champion fighting for millions of people in the United States against the government of the United States."

My last encounter with Ali came four weeks ago in Atlanta. He was in town to preview a commercial which would be shown on the following day's Super Bowl telecast, and he heard that we at the media centre had arranged for a live viewing of the Mike Tyson-Julius Francis fight from Manchester, a bout which would be broadcast to the rest of the country by tape-delay later that evening.

On this particular day it was clear Ali was heavily medicated to control his Parkinson's, but even if he hadn't been, sitting in front of a television set staring at 12 rounds of Joe Calzaghe versus David Starie would have put anyone into a catatonic trance.

In any case, for the solid hour we waited for Tyson and Francis to enter the ring, he was deluged by a steady parade of sycophants, all of whom felt entitled to plop themselves down on the arm of his chair while a compatriot snapped a photograph.

Ali obligingly posed for every one of them without even looking to see who might be sitting next to him. A couple of times during that hour, an actual acquaintance from Ali's past materialised. On these occasions, I would whisper the name to Howard Bingham, who would then alert Ali to the approach of a friendly face. Otherwise he might never have even looked up.

It has been said of Howard Bingham that "you don't know Muhammad Ali until you know his best friend", and Bingham, one of Ali's daughters once told me, "is the best friend any man ever had".

An acclaimed photographer who worked for Life magazine during Ali's heyday, for the past three decades Bingham has served as the great man's travelling companion, schedule-maker, confidante and, on occasions, gatekeeper. While the rest of the sporting press was pestering Ali, and Death by Calzaghe dominated the large-screen television set that afternoon, Bingham leaned over and whispered to me: "I have a new book coming out. I'll have the publisher send you a copy."

Now, although there have been literally dozens of books on Ali, more than a few of which have included Bingham's photographs, I'll confess that I was eagerly looking forward to reading what Bingham might have to say when he weighed in on the matter of his closest friend.

I was surprised, though not unpleasantly so, when the book arrived a week or so later. It turned out to be not the personal memoir I had expected, but instead a rather gripping account of Ali's wilderness years.

Framed by the Liston fight and Ali's subsequent, post-exile return to the ring, Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight: Cassius Clay vs the United States of America recounts the often-lonely battle for exoneration. With the passage of time it has become easier to forget that, for at least three years, Ali was virtually a condemned man, and that he would eventually have to do the five-year prison term to which he had been sentenced. Yet his principles never wavered.

For much of his early banishment from the ring Ali was alternatively famous or notorious, but mostly dead broke. His means of earning a livelihood sapped, he borrowed money from friends. He even served a stint - for $1,000 - as a sparring partner for Joe Bugner.

Yet it was Ali himself who, Bingham and his co-author Max Wallace remind us, presciently said way back in 1967: "It has been said that I have two alternatives - go to jail or the army. But there is another - justice. If justice prevails, I will neither go to jail or to the army."

Bingham's black-and-white photographs of the era accompany the text, which is jointly credited to Bingham and Wallace, a Canadian-based investigative journalist. And while it makes for compelling reading, I'm going to blame Wallace for a number of factual errors which creep up from time to time in the text.

Still, it is a valuable addition to Ali's growing lore, and having spent the past few days reading it in advance of tomorrow's anniversary I found myself increasingly drawn to another conclusion: Ali may or may not have been the best boxer of the 20th Century - for my money, Sugar Ray Robinson was - but he may well have been its greatest man.