An Observer Classic: 18 January 1970

In the first month of 1970, Hugh McIlvanney wrote brilliantly about his hero, Muhammad Ali, but feared that the brilliance of 'the Greatest' would be purely a phenomenon of the Sixties:

There is a good reason to predict that one of the peripheral tragedies of the 1970s will be the fate of the Louisville negro who won the world heavyweight championship as Cassius Clay and then stumbled towards a kind of shabby martyrdom as Muhammad Ali.

Already the decade has begun badly for him. In its first month huge audiences on both sides of the Atlantic have seen him knocked out by a dead man. The defeat was not too depressing, because it came in a highly fanciful contest simulated for television with the dubious assistance of a computer. Since Ali is said to have received $100,000 for acting out the role of victim he probably found the ordeal about as painful as being pelted with old thousand dollar bills. And in any case, as is his habit, he had the last word. 'That computer,' he said, 'must have been in Alabama.'

Nevertheless, for those of us who have been close to Muhammad Ali from time to time in the last few years, even the showbusiness irrelevance of a computerised fight was tinged with melancholy, if only because he has declared that this charade represented his last public appearance in a boxing ring.

Now that one's ambivalence about professional boxing is hardening towards reluctant opposition to the sport, news that a likeable man is giving up the game tends to be welcome. But Ali is a special case. Amid all the sad confusion of his life - his own erratic and unconvincing espousal of the Black Muslim creed and the sordid exploitation of him by others - the beauty and verve of his performances in the ring provided him with an unassailable sense of validity.

'He only really lives to the full when he's in that ring,' Angelo Dundee, his manager and trainer, once told me. 'Everything else is just leading up to that moment when he gets up off the stool and shows the world he's the greatest.' It may be a simplistic interpretation of what boxing means or at least did mean to Ali. But I do not think it is a long way from the truth.

He claims to have come to terms with the premature ending of his career, to have found more meaningful work as a militant voice of negro protest. But any time I have come into contact with him during the interminable legal wrangles over the five-year jail sentence imposed for refusing to serve in the US Army, he has, sooner or later in a quiet moment, exuded the resigned misery of a dancer who has been told he must lose a leg. If it seems clear now that he will never serve that sentence, it is equally likely he will never box seriously again.

Recent attempts to persuade individual States to let him fight have failed. Florida and Oklahoma appeared to be on the verge of permitting a match and then withdrew permission with an abruptness that hinted at political pressure from above.

In every sense Muhammad Ali is an historic figure in boxing. We may be obliged to admit that he was not only the last of its truly universal geniuses (a man whose talent and personality transcended the limits of sport) but the ultimate flourish before its decline accelerates and leaves it as an anachronism in most developed societies.

It is most significant that Ali should be associated with the nonsense of a contest by computer. Perhaps we should regard his mock battle with Marciano as a harmless diversion, a little fireside amusement for the masses. However, I can understand why many people saw something degrading in it. Henry Cooper, Britain's best heavyweight, said to me afterwards, it was almost as bad as professional wrestling. Certainly it had all the atmosphere of emasculated vigour which hangs over that surveying branch of vaudeville. As a concept, boxing by computer is as obscene as intercourse by computer.

I accept that it is probably time we stopped men from bashing one another around a roped square, but we should resist the temptation to seek bloodless imitations. Boxing's final validity (and it is one so powerful that it will keep me going to fights as long as they take place) is as a context for courage and nobility of spirit. Most boxers are well worth knowing. They are like men who have been to war. Maybe we should not have prize fights, but those who have been involved in either have an extra dimension of experience. They have been to a frontier that most of us can only know vicariously.

No fighter was ever more interesting to know, more intriguing or baffling, than Muhammad Ali. He is an extraordinary amalgam of intelligence and foolishness, wisdom and innocence, grace and gaucherie, charm and histrionic offensiveness. A marvellous natural comedian with timing worthy of Bob Hope, he could appear sharp as a needle one minute ('If I say a mosquito can pull a plough, don't ask how - just hitch it up, man.') and unbelievably ignorant the next (as when he asked solemnly while we were riding in a taxi, 'The Mafia - what's that?').

The truth about him may be that he is an unfinished personality, a conglomeration of fascinating elements that have never resolved themselves into someone other people can get in focus. Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali is not so much a man as a happening.

· Ali returned to the ring ten months later, beating Jerry Quarry in three rounds in Atlanta. He went on to contest a further 30 fights (including three against Joe Frazier) winning 25 of them and regaining the world heavyweight title twice. He retired in 1981 after losing to Trevor Berbick in 10 rounds in the Bahamas.