At the height of his fame, he could walk past a monastery in Tibet and Buddhist monks would look up from their prayer wheels, point their bony fingers, and shout out his name. He has always been one of my heroes, not for what he did in the boxing ring(though that was magical, almost more ballet than prizefighting, at least in his early years), but for what he said and did outside of it. In the late 19603, when, like a lot of other young men, I was trying to prove to people, including myself, that being against the Vietnam War didn't necessarily mean that you were a coward, he went to jail for refusing to be drafted into what he considered an unjust war ("No Vietcong," he said memorably, "ever called me a nigger."). With that gesture, the problem was solved. No one could ever accuse Mohammed Ali of being a coward.
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