Cooper: Ali's greatness is relative

Muhammad Ali stands over challenger Sonny Liston after knocking him out to retain boxing's heavyweight championship on May 25, 1965.
Muhammad Ali stands over challenger Sonny Liston after knocking him out to retain boxing's heavyweight championship on May 25, 1965.

More than 40 years after the last American military helicopter left Vietnam, many veterans and patriots have a hard time forgiving the direct slaps in the face.

They don't have it in their heart, for instance, to forgive actress Jane Fonda, who cavorted with the enemy North Vietnamese, called returning prisoners of war "hypocrites and liars" and, despite various apologies, says she has no regrets about much of what she did.

And they couldn't ever warm up to Muhammad Ali, the three-time heavyweight boxing champion who died late Friday. Ali had refused to serve in Vietnam due to his Muslim religious convictions, was stripped of his heavyweight title and banned from the sport for three years, and then won a Supreme Court reversal of his conviction for draft evasion.

Yet, even President Gerald Ford, who had been a staunch Vietnam War supporter, tossed out an olive branch to the war's draft evader just days into his abbreviated presidency on the heels of the resigned Richard Nixon.

"Reconciliation," he said, "calls for an act of mercy to bind the nation's wound and to heal the scars of divisiveness."

Ali, having won back his heavyweight championship, later accepted an invitation to Ford's White House.

He did more than that through the years, rhyming his way through heavyweight boxing's last golden era, making the Muslim religion at least relatable to Christian America, becoming perhaps the country's first major sports star and entertainer, and accepting various goodwill roles.

Ali was not perfect, as four wives and children through extramarital relationships (among nine children total) suggest. But which of us is prepared to throw that first stone?

The former boxer, an actual Louisville slugger since his birth as Cassius Clay in Kentucky's largest city, also put a face on Parkinson's disease, which can result from head trauma from participation in activities such as boxing. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's more than 30 years before his death, and photos and video footage of him in the years since capture the terrible struggle that became his life.

In death, he is probably somewhere between just another flawed sports star and "the greatest," a moniker he claimed for himself. But he was certainly a larger than life figure, one of the top sports stars in the last half of the 20th century, and an unusual though effective civil rights figure.

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