Bitter last days of The Greatest: His tongue as fast as his fists but today Ali can barely walk - ground down by Parkinson's and beset by a venomous family feud

Back in his imperious heyday, Muhammad Ali was acutely aware that he was carving his place in history. 

A fearless champion of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War protest, as well as the boxing ring, he was one of those rare sportsmen who have shaped the course of world events.

Determined to ensure he would be remembered as he saw himself and not as others saw him, Ali — who was never short of self-admiration — therefore embarked on an extraordinary project designed to burnish his image for posterity.

When he was away from home
— which was very often — he would wire the phone in his hotel room to a whirring, spool-reel tape-machine, dial up one of his nine (acknowledged) children and record their rambling, intimate conversations.

Knowing this so-called ‘audio-diary’ would become a key primary source for future chroniclers of his story, he was particularly keen to present himself as a devout family man, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Even Ali’s most loyal defenders wouldn’t pretend that his personal life has been anything other than a protracted train-wreck. 

Three bitter divorces, a series of affairs, two illegitimate daughters, and a procession of other children who claim him as their father stand testimony to that.

Until now, few outside Ali’s inner circle were aware the many hours of tape-recordings existed.

But after he began to suffer Parkinson’s disease, the fighter entrusted them to one of his daughters, Hana, 38, and now she has permitted them to be used in a new biographical film, I Am Ali, released this week in America and due in British cinemas next month.

‘History is so beautiful, but at the time we’re living it we don’t realise it,’ the legendary fighter remarks during the movie, by way of explaining why he was creating the tapes.

Perhaps so, yet the film serves largely to remind us of the sad shadow of a man Ali, ravaged by Parkinson’s for 25 years, is now. Indeed, the state of his health has become the focus of an intense public debate between members of his family in recent days.

Yesterday, the veteran British boxing promoter Frank Warren wrote in a newspaper column that he had been told Ali’s condition is more serious than it has ever been. Contrast this with the era when Ali made the tapes — his rich, Deep South voice as beautiful as his Adonis physique.

The Louisville Lip is silent now. Those rapier-quick rhyming couplets that reminded us he was ‘the greatest’ (and so ‘pretty’), and predicted the precise round in which he would dispatch his opponents, are lost beyond hope of recall.

 

In his hey dey, Muhammad Ali knew he was carving his place in history. He is pictured in 1963 (left) and 1974 (right)

Sonny Liston lies on the ground after being knocked out by Ali in the first round of his return title fight in Lewiston, Maine, in 1965

The most lyrical and vibrant vocal cords any sportsman has possessed are so brittle and thin that on his worst days, despite recent surgery, he can’t raise a whisper.

Whether at his Kentucky home or his gated mansion in Arizona, he spends hour upon hour propped in a huge leather armchair, watching old Westerns and re-runs of his epic fights.

The epoch-making ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ with George Foreman, and the ‘Thrilla in Manila’ which saw him beat his arch-foe, Joe Frazier, after 14 of the most brutal rounds boxing has witnessed, are relived time and again.

Painfully frail, his face an expressionless mask, he usually communicates his needs via a series of grunts and gestures comprehensible only to his fourth wife Lonnie and her younger sister Marilyn, who serve as his carers.