The greatest in one hundred years

OF ALL the millions of words written about him, no-one has succeeded in describing Muhammad Ali better than Muhammad Ali. ``People don't realise what they had till it's gone. Like President Kennedy - nobody like him. Like The Beatles, there will never be anything like them. Like my man, Elvis Presley - I was the Elvis of boxing.''

An illiterate black from an impoverished neighbourhood of Louisville, Kentucky, Ali transcended the ring to become the most recognisable man on the planet. Kennedy, The Beatles, even Elvis, were unknown in many parts of Africa and Asia, whereas Ali's legend spread across the map of the world like an empire. I Am The Greatest! He was, and will forever remain so.

If Ali's fists and feet were quick, then his tongue was even swifter, delivering a rapid-fire salvo of poems, one-liners and outrageous predictions. ``It's hard to be humble,'' he would inform us mock seriously, a mischievous smile playing across his handsome features, ``when you're as great as I am.'' But Ali was more - so much, much more - than simply the greatest boxer of his or any other century; liberal politicians, folk singers and religious leaders may have been the first to speak out against the Vietnam War, but it was only when Ali declared himself a conscientious objector that the youth of white, middle-class America used their draft- cards to build a mounting bonfire of protest. ``I don't have nothing against them Viet Cong,'' proclaimed Ali. ``They never call me nigger. If I have to die, I'll die fighting for freedom here in the United States of America.''

Just as Parkinson's Syndrome would never take away his dignity in later years, they might have taken away Ali's title when he refused to be inducted into the army, but they could never take away the courage of his convictions. He was hated for it by a goodly proportion of America, of course, just as he was reviled when he embraced Islam and changed his name: ``Cassius Clay is a slave name. I didn't choose it, and I didn't want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name - it means beloved of God - and I insist people use it when speaking to me and of me.''

Even seeing Ali now, a slow-moving, slow-talking shell cruelly reduced by disease, it is impossible not to remember him as he was then; the two improbable dramas with Sonny Liston, the three wars with Joe Frazier, the Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman. As Ring magazine writer Joseph D O'Brian so aptly put it: ``He was like God - God with a custard pie up his sleeve.''

I am the Second Greatest may lack a certain resonance, but given Ali's achievements, popularity and influence, I trust Pele will accept this column's runners-up medal as the honour it is intended to be. While acknowledging the claims of Cruyff, di Stefano and Best, it was Pele who described football as `the beautiful game' and no one played it more beautifully more often. On every occasion he came into possession of the ball it was Show Time!; you came to expect the unexpected and rarely were you disappointed.

There had been many wondrous Brazilians before him - Leonidis, Didi, Garrincha - but the famous yellow shirt assumed its golden lustre only when Pele first performed his magic show at the 1958 World Cup finals in Sweden. Having missed the 1962 final through injury, and been kicked out of the '66 tournament by Bulgaria and Hungary, Pele turned the 1970 World Cup in Mexico into a one-man master-class. Scorer of over 1,000 goals, I will forever remember Pele for the `goal' he did not score against Uruguay in the semi- final when, after dummying goalkeeper Mazurkiewicz, he hooked the ball millimetres wide from an acute angle. So outrageous was the manoeuvre, legend has it that hours after the match, a crazed Mazurkiewicz could be seen opening cupboards in the bowels of the stadium muttering: ``Where did he go?''

If you have never watched baseball or read the sport's folkore, then my third-placed pick will appear incongruous, but it was Babe Ruth who single-handedly transformed the game into America's national pastime. With his piggy eyes, bulbous nose, flabby torso and sparrow's legs, Ruth was an unlikely sporting hero, yet like Ali and Pele, his arrival at the batting plate sent a shiver of expectation through the attendant audience.

The bare statistics - as mightily impressive as they are - are an irrelevance; suffice to say over 50 years after his death, Ruth remains as much a part of American history as Paul Revere. A physical giant with a gargantuan appetite for bourbon, women and hot dogs, the Home Run King was idolised by every child and down- and-out alike. At his peak in 1930, Ruth's salary from the New York Yankees was 80,000 - 5,000 more than President Hoover. Such was his fame that the Japanese fighter pilots who attacked Pearl Harbour painted the battle-cry To Hell With Babe Ruth on their wing tips. Forget George Washington, Frank Sinatra, Neil Armstrong, on the eve of the third millennium, Babe Ruth remains America's most popular figure. In the words of team-mate Harry Hooper: ``I saw it all happen from beginning to end and sometimes I still can't believe what I saw. Rude, poorly educated, only slightly brushed with the social veneer we call civilisation, gradually transformed into the idol of American youth and the symbol of baseball. A man loved by more people and with an intensity of feeling that may never be equalled. I saw a man transformed from a human into some kind of thing pretty close to a god.''

Having grown up in working-class Glasgow where cricket was marginally less popular than flower-arranging in my gang, I have spent much of my personal half-century living in ignorance of Donald Bradman. My recent education, as supplied by E. W. Swanton and Colin Cowdrey, has persuaded me that The Don was cricket's Babe Ruth. Even I am impressed by a Test average of 99.94 (especially in an era when the England XI finds it a struggle to reach that total collectively), although Bradman himself was firmly of the belief he could have done even better. ``If I'd had the opportunity of playing against India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, I rather think I would have increased my average.''

If Arnold Palmer did more than anyone to popularise golf, then it is Jack Nicklaus - despite the claims of Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones and Tiger Woods - who deserves to enter the year 2000 as the game's champion of champions. Judged soley by his tally of `Majors', the Golden Bear is supreme, winning more titles than Hogan and Tom Watson put together, more than Player and Palmer put together, more than Jones and Sam Snead put together. Far less endearing in reality than his popular image, Nicklaus has earned the respect, if not the affection, of golfers worldwide of all standards.

``To win the things he's won, build golf courses around the world, be a daddy to his army of kids, and be a hell of an investor, too, is phenomenal,'' opines former Masters champion, Jackie Burke.

Positions 6-9 produced a blanket finish; basketball's Michael Jordan, the first globally admired superstar who happened to be black rather than a black superstar; Jesse Owens, who made nonsense of Hitler's sick sense of Aryan superiority; Rod Laver, the finest tennis player who ever lived and the game's most gracious champion; Gary Sobers, cricket's greatest all-rounder (my thanks again to Messrs. Swanton and Cowdrey for introducing me to his genius).

And, lastly at No 10, Tommie Smith, a highly personal man whose courage and humanity moved me to tears when I had the privilege of interviewing him in 1993, on the 25th anniversary of the Black Power salute he delivered on the podium in Mexico City after winning the Olympic 200 metres gold medal. As I wrote at the time: Tommie Smith bowed his head, raised a black-gloved fist, and prepared to die...''

``I was deathly afraid, deathly afraid,'' Smith told me in a whisper. ``Every little crack I heard, I thought I was a goner. Hey man, we were wide open up there. We'd been threatened a hundred times. Whooo, the Sixties were real scary times for us blacks. They'd got to Malcolm X, they'd got to Martin Luther King. Me? I was an easy target. There's never a day goes by I don't look at that old photograph of me, fist raised, head bowed, heart on fire. I'm mighty proud of what that young man did in Mexico City. I've lived my entire life up on that victory stand. I guess I'll never step off 'til my people are free.''

- Copyright Telegraph Group Ltd., London, 1999

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