Nina Seale takes us through the reasons why we consider Muhammad Ali great, both in and out of the ring.

The boxer who refused to fight, the “antiwar prophet” who stood up against the compulsory Vietnam draft and racial prejudice, Muhammad Ali’s title as the only three time heavyweight champion with a new style of boxing that relied on speed and agility is only one of the reasons why he has become a true hero. Ali celebrated his 70th birthday last week and his legend continues to grow even in his ripe old age.

It is almost forty years since Ali’s most famous boxing matches: the ‘Fight of the Century’ (nicknamed by the huge press hype) between Ali and his nemesis Joe Frazier and the subsequent rematch, the ‘Thrilla in Manila’. The battle between Ali’s quick fists and Frazier’s sheer power was more than just a clash of talent, as Ali represented the anti-establishment movement through his political stand against the Vietnam War and Frazier the conservative, pro-war movement.

Ali lost to Frazier’s formidable blows in their first, full, fifteen-round encounter, but four years later the champions fought again and Ali defeated his biggest rival by tiring him with his dancing spars and recurring, punishing blows.

Yet Ali’s fame arose from his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War, saying that he had no fight with Vietnam as they had never discriminated against him: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”

He was found guilty of draft evasion by an all-white jury in Houston with a sentence three and a half years longer than the typical time-period of eighteen months for a similar offence. His appeal to the US Supreme Court was eventually successful, but he was exiled from the boxing ring for three and a half of his prime boxing years.

He spent this time gathering support in a movement against the racist establishment, inspiring America’s youth by speaking at 200 university campuses about his beliefs and what he was standing up against.

His courage even reached Nelson Mandela in his years as an isolated prisoner on Robben Island. After his release, the former boxer said that “Ali’s struggle made him an international hero. His stand against racism and war could not be kept outside the prison walls.”

Ali ‘shook up the world’ not only by becoming the youngest challenger to defeat the reigning heavyweight champion Sonny Liston at 22, but also by revealing shortly afterwards that he was part of the Nation of Islam; as a result he changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali. The new name represented his new identity as a member of the Nation of Islam, but only a handful of British journalists, a few notable American journalists and boxing announcer Don Dunphy addressed him as Muhammad Ali.

Ali’s beliefs about integration would still be controversial today. His hatred of the white man extended so far as for him to profess about inter-racial marriage that “no intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.”

After defeating every worthy heavyweight in his era, Ali’s boxing career came to a close. He did, however, remain in the public eye, publishing an oral history, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser, meeting with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War to negotiate the release of war hostages, travelling to Afghanistan as a ‘U.N. Messenger of Peace’ and being voted as Sports Personality of the Century by the BBC in 1999.

His fight with Parkinson’s disease is likely to be his last one, but the causes that this man stood for and the bravery he showed in the pursuit of his beliefs will be what this great sporting hero is remembered for.

His boxing motto was to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” His personal determination sprung from the belief that “if my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it - then I can achieve it.”

Muhammad Ali was so much more than just a boxer, and that is why he will be remembered as the Greatest.