Those involved in other sports are sometimes forced to count the cost - arthritis broken limbs paralysis burns

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Those involved in other sports are sometimes forced to count the cost - arthritis, broken limbs, paralysis, burns and worse. In that moment Ali stood for them, too, and for their sacrifices in pursuit of the thing that brought pleasure and glory and, sometimes, a missing focus to their lives.So, in the end, although Ali was undoubtedly a great boxer, the question of whether he can be proved to have been a better one than Joe Louis or Rocky Marciano is less important than the fact that he is a great man. Nor was this just a question of a boxer damaged by too many punches to the head. But as he stood there, his hand shaking helplessly and the torch flickering in the breeze of a southern evening, those of us who were in the stadium and the hundreds of millions watching the telecast were confronted with some of the less easily marketable truths about sport.As Ali took an age to summon the co-ordination required to transfer the flame from his small torch to the fuse that would ignite the larger one,the spectacle forced us to deal with the thought of what sport can do even to one of its most distinguished and successful practitioners. And it is in subconscious recognition of his impact in that dimension, as much as for the memories of his great fights, his brazen showmanship or his appearances on the Parkinson Show, that the emotions are stirred so profoundly by the sight of him today.There are those who still criticise the decision by the organisers of the 1996 Olympic Games to invite him to light the flame at the opening ceremony in Atlanta.

He was the first sportsman of world stature to stand alongside Bob Dylan, Che Guevara, Angela Davis and John Lennon in the pantheon of the Sixties counterculture. "Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong," Ali told a reporter, and in those nine simple words he had linked himself with a worldwide shift in the balance of society.When he was stripped of his titles by the boxing authorities, it was the signal that he had made common cause with anti-establishment movements around the world. Others, however, recognised his gesture, and the price it exacted, as an event of far greater significance than the winning or losing of a boxing title. "Clay is not a fake," he concluded, "and even his blustering and playground poetry are valid, and demonstrate, as far as I'm concerned, that a new and more complicated generation has moved on to the scene."Three years later Ali would attract widespread condemnation from a very different sector of society for his decision to spurn the US draft board and refuse to fight in South-east Asia. As David Remnick's fine book, King of the World, reminded us this year, the brash-mouthed young Cassius Clay was initially a figure greeted with dismay and distaste even by those who were looking for a figurehead for the black consciousness movement in the febrile atmosphere of the early Sixties.Writing in 1963 about Sonny Liston, the reigning world heavyweight champion, as the awesome embodiment of the white race's worst nightmares, the black poet and activist LeRoi Jones declared: "There is no white man in the world who wants to fight Sonny Liston (though Cassius Clay has come from the Special Products Division of Madison Avenue to see what he can do)." A few months later, after Ali had taken Liston's title, Jones was forced to revise his view. Our weaknesses, too, are mirrored in sudden and calamitous collapses of mind or body on the track or the pitch. Not just through his choice of sport (will there be any boxers, or any boxing at all, from whom to select a comparable figure at the end of the next century?) but in his manner of conducting himself within it.

Muhammad Ali belongs to the world. Sport is entertainment for participant and spectator alike. And then there are the more complicated scenarios, often just as instructive, in which defeat becomes ennobled, or victory is tainted.Muhammad Ali checks in on the complicated side. Yet sometimes it also serves a deeper purpose, to remind us of the human condition. Our everyday strengths and virtues are magnified in the skill, endurance and teamwork needed to create champions.