Muhammad Ali turns 70 on Tuesday, and for many of those 70 years, he has had us all on the ropes.
To say he is merely a famous boxer is to say the sky is always blue. There are so many sides to him his nickname should be Octagon.
Now, he is revered. Passage of time softens and endears. He is ill, and has been since 1984, when he first received a diagnosis of Parkinson's. That was just three years after his final fight, when he made one last, mostly pathetic, effort to convince the world he was still "the Greatest."
Today, we see an aging man, ravaged by a disease, and we add sympathy and empathy to our reverence. We have long since chosen to forget how an inflated ego inflicted 61 fights on a brain. We have stopped wondering if the Parkinson's is just a convenient medical label, in Ali's case, for a condition better characterized as hit-in-the-head-too-much syndrome. In boxing, of course, that is an epidemic.
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