This day has been a grey one for the world of sports and I think the world in general as we all spend a moment or two remembering the true GOAT that is Cassius Clay. Muhammad Ali.
LeBron James has been compared to the greats for many years of his career but even he would agree that he and nobody else will have a higher pedestal than the one that Muhammad Ali has. James has taken a moment out of his preparation for Game 2 of the NBA Finals to remember the GOAT.
“When I was a kid, I was amazed by what Ali did in the ring,” LeBron told ESPN.com. “As I got older and started to read about him and watch things about him, I started to realize what he did in the ring was secondary to what he meant outside of the ring — just his influence, what he stood for.”
“The reason why he’s the GOAT is not because of what he did in the ring, which was unbelievable,” James said, referring to the acronym commonly attached to Ali, which stands for “greatest of all time.”
“It’s what he did outside of the ring, what he believed in, what he stood for, along with Jim Brown and Oscar Robertson, Lew Alcindor — obviously, who became Kareem [Abdul-Jabbar] — Bill Russell, Jackie Robinson. Those guys stood for something. He’s part of the reason why African-Americans today can do what we do in the sports world. We’re free. They allow us to have access to anything we want. It’s because of what they stood for, and Muhammad Ali was definitely the pioneer for that.”
Even when he was exiled from boxing, even when he had his title stripped for not participating in the Vietnam War, he was still talking, still making a difference.
Even when he had Parkinsons late in his life he was still travelling the world preaching peace, love and doing the right thing.
He was a superhero in more ways than one.
