17 January: Muhammad Ali

This date in 1942 saw the birth of Muhammad Ali (formerly known as Cassius Clay). 10 facts about him:

1. The boxer Muhammad Ali was born in Louisville, Kentucky and was originally named Cassius Clay after his father, who had in turn been named for a white abolitionist. The original Cassius Clay was a wealthy 19th-century planter and politician who published an anti-slavery newspaper. However, there was evidence that in spite of arguing against slavery, Clay kept slaves on his family estate. At least part of Ali’s reason for changing his name was to dissociate himself from that.

2. He got into boxing after his Bicycle was stolen as a child. The police officer he reported the crime to happened to be a boxing trainer, who suggested the boy took up boxing.

3. He was embroiled in a court case lasting for years because he refused to serve in the Vietnam War. By this time he had converted to Islam and refused on religious grounds. He was arrested and stripped of his boxing license and heavyweight title. On June 20, 1967, he was convicted of draft evasion and banned from fighting. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously overturned his conviction in 1971.

4. During his suspension from boxing, Ali took up acting in New York for a brief time and starred in a Broadway show called Big Time Buck White. The play ran for five nights at the George Abbot Theatre in New York.

5. In 1976, Ali recorded The Adventures of Ali and His Gang vs. Mr. Tooth Decay, an album made to warn children about consuming too much Sugar.

6. He was a writer and artist as well. Despite having dyslexia, he wrote several bestselling books about his career, including The Greatest: My Own Story and The Soul of a Butterfly. He’d compose verses with which to taunt his opponents in the ring and hence earned the nickname the ‘Louisville Lip’. In 1963, he recorded a spoken word album called I Am the Greatest. In 2021, 26 of his drawings and arts were placed on auction and sold for close to $1 Million.

7. He threw his Olympic gold medal in a river in 1960. Returning home from Rome, he was refused service in a diner because of his race, even though he was wearing the medal he’d won for representing his country at the time. He wrote in his autobiography that he was so angry about it that he threw the medal off a bridge into the Ohio River. He was given a replacement medal when he lit the Olympic cauldron at the opening ceremonies of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

8. He starred in a DC comic in 1978, in which he defeats Superman and saves the world.

9. In 1981, when a man threatened to jump from the ninth story of a building in L.A. Ali’s friend Howard Bingham called the boxer, who lived nearby. Ali successfully talked the man down from the ledge.

10. In 1984, Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which can result from head trauma. He was 42. He died in 2016 aged 74. His headstone reads "Service to others is the rent you pay for your room in heaven".