Muhammad Ali has died age 74
“The Greatest” one leader one champ made to be remembered across the world, Muhammad Ali has died on Friday at age 74.
The silver-tongued boxer and civil rights champion who famously proclaimed himself “The Greatest” is dead.
Ali died Friday at a Phoenix-area hospital, where he had spent the past few days being treated for respiratory complications.
Born Cassius Marcellus Clay on Jan. 17, 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky, to middle-class parents, Ali started boxing when he was 12, winning Golden Gloves titles before heading to the 1960 Olympics in Rome, where he won a gold medal as a light heavyweight.
In 2005, President George W. Bush honored Ali with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and his hometown of Louisville opened the Muhammad Ali Center, chronicling his life but also as a forum for promoting tolerance and respect.
In his life had three wifes, and divorced three times, he has nine children, one of whom, Laila, become a boxer. After divorcing his third wife, he moved to live in Arizona, after 90’s.
During his age and recent years, Ali’s health began to suffer dramatically. There was a death scare in 2013, and last year he was rushed to the hospital after being found unresponsive, but in few days ago was reported bad condition, he recovered and returned to his new home in Arizona.
In his final years, Ali was barely able to speak. Asked to share his personal philosophy with NPR in 2009, Ali let his ex wife read his essay:
“I never thought of the possibility of failing, only of the fame and glory I was going to get when I won,” Ali wrote. “I could see it. I could almost feel it. When I proclaimed that I was the greatest of all time, I believed in myself, and I still do.”
The Greatest, never dies, RIP!!!
