Muhammad Ali

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. was born in Louisville, Kentucky. Taking up boxing at age twelve after his bicycle was stolen, Clay won the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games. Turning professional, he stunned the sporting world in February 1964 by defeating the terrifying heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, famously declaring: 'I am the greatest! I shook up the world!' Shortly after, he embraced Islam, changed his name to Muhammad Ali, and rejected what he called his slave name.

Ali revolutionized heavyweight boxing with unprecedented hand speed, dance-like footwork, and psychological showmanship. In 1967, at the peak of his athletic prowess, Ali refused military induction into the US Armed Forces on religious and political grounds, famously declaring: 'I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong; no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.' Stripped of his championship title and boxing license for over three years, Ali became a global symbol of civil rights and anti-war principle.

Vindicated by a unanimous US Supreme Court ruling in 1971, Ali returned to the ring for legendary wars: the 'Fight of the Century' against Joe Frazier, the dramatic 'Rumble in the Jungle' against George Foreman in Zaire in 1974 where he invented the 'rope-a-dope', and the brutal 'Thrilla in Manila' against Frazier in 1975. In his post-boxing life, Ali battled Parkinson's syndrome with serene grace, lighting the Olympic flame in Atlanta in 1996 and traveling as a United Nations Messenger of Peace.