What we should remember most of all about Muhammad Ali the great boxer

Muhammad Ali in 1987 Photo:Here’s the thing: You could detest everything

Muhammad Ali stood for. You could rage at him
for being a draft dodger, a Communist
sympathizer, a coward. You could seethe at the
swagger, at the braggadocio, at the times when
he would reduce proud prizefighters to dust with
his clever poetry.
“I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong,” he
famously said in the 1960s, at a time when we
believed the world was 15 minutes way from
ending every time we lifted our heads off the
pillow. “No Viet Cong ever called me n—–.”
You could hate him for that.
But the one thing you never could question, no
matter how much you wanted to, was the
legitimacy of his convictions. That was forever.
That was something that will live for an eternity,
long after we bid farewell to the man, to Ali, who
died late Friday night after battling Parkinson’s
Disease
the final three decades of a most extraordinary
life.
Ali paid for those convictions. He bled for them.
At the height of his athletic prime, he refused to
step forward and be called into the U.S. Army.
He knew what that meant at the very moment he
did it, April 28, 1967, at the Military Entrance
Processing Station on San Jacinto Street in
Houston.
He knew he would be hated. He knew he would
be dismissed as a deserter and as a quitter, a
turncoat who would refuse to submit to the
draft. He knew.
He knew.
“Bravest thing I ever saw,” the great Jerry
Izenberg told me once.
Izenberg — longtime sports columnist at the
Newark Star-Ledger who also filled the pages of
The Post with his wit, his wisdom and his biting
social commentary for much of the 1980s, was a
friend of Ali’s, but before that he was a defender
of Ali’s, one of the first to accept his Muslim
name in lieu of Cassius Clay, the “slave name”
he was born with.