Reading List: Muhammad Ali, dead at 74, remembered

Muhammad Ali was the Greatest of All Time, and in the wake of his death, that's precisely how he's being remembered. And yet, you can't help but acknowledge that such a title still, somehow, fails to capture the enormity of the man - both his personality and his impact on humanity.

That's what writers everywhere have attempted to do following Friday evening's news that the transcendent boxing titan passed away at the age of 74.

Here's how Ali is being remembered.

Richard Hoffer, Sports Illustrated

Later in his life, when the man who could float like a butterfly was palsied, when that once indomitable mouth was mostly silenced, he became not just famous but beloved. It was a horrible irony to see such physical elegance stiffened by Parkinson’s, but like everything else that came along for Ali, his impairment was one more opportunity to prove his greatness, perhaps even enlarge his already considerable constituency. For his last 20 years, the Ali shuffle was indeed his only form of locomotion, and it was painful to see his jazz become fugue. But he was uncomplaining, dignified, unmindful even of any infirmity, and he kept about his proselytizing, which, more than anything, meant sharing his peculiar mysticism. He’d still stoop to produce a quarter from behind a child’s ear, but now he’d explain the trickery. No need to hoodwink anybody anymore. Life was too short.

Marc J. Spears, The Undefeated

Fashionably late, a Parkinson’s-stricken Ali arrived with his wife, Yolanda Williams, by his side. She helped him walk. His renowned photographer, Howard Bingham, snapped away as the crowd went pin-drop silent with The Champ’s arrival. It was as if Jesus had just walked in … and then, the crowd parted like the Red Sea as Ali floated like a butterfly to his table. He reached out for a little girl who was about 3 years old or so and certainly had no clue Ali was America’s most beloved athlete. She reached back and smiled, hugging Ali as if she could sense she was meeting someone beyond special.

Dave Kindred, FOX Sports

How sad that near the end we saw him only in a wheelchair, diminished, a withered old man with Parkinson’s. A pity that two generations of Americans have come of age without understanding how Ali became Ali. He last fought in 1981 and was last seen around the world at the torch-lighting in Atlanta. Saddest of all, in the time after Atlanta, marketers transformed the stricken Ali into a commodity for sale, sanitized, a Disney version of the Ali who once mattered. Some kind of living saint.

The Ali who mattered and matters still was no saint. The Ali who matters told America to go to hell.

William Nack, ESPN

Ali fought for more than two decades, but the world inside the ropes was never really large enough for the man in full. By chapters, Ali's life became so large and brassy, so charged with daring and devilment, so touched by his charm, his existential madness and the play of his mind, that prizefighting served as mere entertainment in the ever-expanding narrative that was his life. He not only was a showman endowed with a high order of charisma and commanding physical gifts, but he also owned a personality that flattered nearly all who met him.

Robert Lipsyte, New York Times

If there was a supertitle to Ali’s operatic life, it was this: "I don’t have to be who you want me to be; I’m free to be who I want." He made that statement the morning after he won his first heavyweight title. It informed every aspect of his life, including the way he boxed.

David Remnick, The New Yorker

As an athlete and as a performer, Clay learned from, and copied, a multitude of sources: the braggadocio of the professional wrestler "Gorgeous" George Wagner, the footwork and boxing style of Sugar Ray Robinson. But no public figure affected him more deeply than Emmett Till, a boy from Chicago, who, on a visit to family in Money, Mississippi, was murdered for the alleged sin of "reckless eyeballing." The story was that Till, who was fourteen, dared to call a white cashier "baby." A few days later, white men turned up at the house where he was staying, dragged him out of his bed, shot him in the head, tied barbed wire attached to a bulky cotton-gin fan around his neck, and threw his corpse in the Tallahatchie River. The horror that Cassius experienced looking at the pictures of Till’s brutalized face in the pages of Life and the black press helped convince him of the limits of his possibilities as a black kid in the South.

Sean Gregory, TIME Magazine

Imagine, for a moment, a 21st-century athlete who could command an audience with presidents and the pope, the Dalai Lama, Castro, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. Ali might have been the most famous man on earth. Disease robbed Ali of his speech late in life. But his peacekeeping trips, fundraising efforts for Parkinson’s research, and support for UNICEF and the Special Olympics and many more charitable organizations were more powerful than his poetry ...

"Muhammad Ali was not just Muhammad Ali the greatest, the African-American pugilist; he belonged to everyone," poet Maya Angelou wrote in the 2001 book Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World. "That means that his impact recognizes no continent, no language, no color, no ocean."

From the vault

And here, we sample just a (very) small portion of the most memorable writing the three-time heavyweight champion of the world, the man who could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, inspired over the years.

Mark Kram - 'Lawdy, Lawdy, He's Great' (Sports Illustrated, 1975)

Barack Obama - What Muhammad Ali means to me (USA Today, 2009)

Tim Layden - The Legacy: At 73, Muhammad Ali remains an inspirational force (Sports Illustrated, 2015)