Greatest Athlete: Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali wins our nod as the greatest American athlete of all-time. There are many others beyond Muhammad Ali to consider as the greatest athlete, especially in basketball, the sport which generally features the greatest athleticism. Of course, hitting a baseball often is described as the single most difficult athletic skill of all, and at one point, Babe Ruth was hitting more home runs than entire rival teams. And during the first half of the 20th Century, Jim Thorpe was amazing with his versatility in track and field, football and baseball.

Muhammad Ali is the choice for the greatest athlete because of how he stayed in tip-top physical condition (especially compared to Babe Ruth!), how he combined size and grace, how he survived having nearly four years removed from the prime of his career, and how he endured pain unimagined by mere mortals. Also, the greatest athlete must be smart, and Muhammad Ali employed brilliant strategies beneath what seemed like self-centered bombast.

Consider that the former Cassius Marcellus Clay was only 18 years old when he won the 1960 light heavyweight Olympic gold medal in Rome. Boxers rarely enter their primes as such a young age. Ali later would toss his gold medal into the Ohio River in his hometown of Louisville, in despair with all of the racism that he viewed in his world, a forerunner to his boycott of the Vietnam War. Many people at the time, and some still today, considered him to be unpatriotic. But when a person acts on their beliefs for the sake of the greater good, with no harm intended to others, really that's true patriotism in its highest form. Furthermore, Ali did not flee to Canada or Europe as part of his military draft evasion. He stayed and faced the consequences, until his successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also evolved to the point (or perhaps better put, the world evolved) that after tossing his 1960 Olympic medal into the Ohio River, he lit the Olympic flame in 1996 in Atlanta.

The real case to select Muhammad Ali as greatest athlete begins upon his return, at age 30. Other older men who fight flat on their feet have continued into middle age (witness George Foreman), but with Ali's reliance on quick hands and feet, his best years already had been taken. But between 1971 and 1975, Muhammad Ali was engaged in four of the greatest fights of all time, his trioka with Smokin' Joe Frazier and his Rope-A-Dope masterpiece over the dimwitted Foreman.

As stated above, boxing can be so brutal that even with gloves and safety precautions, a strong case can be made that boxing should not be considered as sport. Still, a great boxer must be a great athlete, and that includes absorbing punishment. Muhammad Ali realized in his older age that sometimes, the only way he could deliver a punch was to take a punch. In those four epic fights, Ali (along with Frazier in their three bouts) displayed more athletic willpower than I've ever witnessed in the real (humane) sports such as basketball, baseball and football. For that reason, with Muhammad Ali winning his final two Frazier fights and the lone Foreman fight, Muhammad Ali is the selection as America's greatest athlete. Sadly, however, Parkinson's is the consequence.

(Personal note to readers and sports fans: This is strictly an objective analysis, in that I abhor boxing and believe it shouldn't even be legal.)

SOURCES

http://www.ali.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali