The Stolen Bicycle

It was an autumn day in 1954, in Louisville, Kentucky. A twelve-year-old boy and a friend had ridden their bicycles to a fair in a big hall downtown, to look at the stalls and eat the free snacks. The boy's bicycle was brand new, red and white, and he was very proud of it.

When they came out, it was gone.

The boy was furious, and close to tears. Someone told him there was a policeman in the basement of the building. He ran down the stairs, ready to report the theft, and announced that when he found whoever had taken his bike, he was going to beat them up.

The policeman looked at the skinny, angry boy. Then he told him that, before he went around beating anyone up, he had better learn how to fight.

The basement gym

The policeman was Joe Martin. In his spare time, he ran a boxing gym in that very basement, where he trained young people from the neighbourhood. The boy's name was Cassius Clay.

Cassius had been born in 1942 in Louisville. His father painted signs and church murals, and his mother, Odessa, cleaned and cooked in other people's homes. They were not the poorest family on their street, but money was always short. And Louisville, like much of the American South, was segregated: Black families like the Clays were kept out of many shops, restaurants, parks and schools.

The bicycle was never found. But Cassius came back to the gym. And then he kept coming back.

Up before dawn

From the start, Cassius was not the strongest boy in the gym. What he had was speed, and a burning wish to be the best. He ran in the early mornings while the city slept. He trained after school and late into the evening. He talked constantly, to anyone who would listen, about how one day he would be champion of the world.

People laughed at him. He trained anyway.

He won local amateur bouts, then Kentucky titles, then national ones. In 1960, aged eighteen, he was chosen for the United States team at the Olympic Games in Rome. He was so afraid of flying that he almost did not go. He went, and he won the gold medal in the light heavyweight division.

Champion, and a new name

Back home, he found that an Olympic gold medal did not change the colour line. There are famous stories about what happened next, including one in which he threw his medal into a river after being refused service at a restaurant. Historians doubt that story, and he himself later said he had simply lost the medal. What is certain is that he was still treated as a second-class citizen in his own home town.

He turned professional. He was quick, cheeky and impossible to ignore. He made up rhymes predicting the round in which he would win, and he described his style in words that became famous: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

In February 1964, aged twenty-two, he fought Sonny Liston, a huge and frightening heavyweight champion. Almost nobody gave him a chance. He won.

Soon afterwards, he announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim movement, and that he had a new name: Muhammad Ali.

The stand

In the 1960s, the United States was fighting a war in Vietnam, and young men were drafted, or called up, to serve in the army. In 1967, Ali was called up. He refused to be inducted. He said his religion did not allow him to fight in the war, and he told reporters that he had no quarrel with the Vietnamese people.

The cost was enormous. Boxing officials took away his heavyweight title. He lost his licence to box. He was convicted in court and sentenced to prison, although he stayed free while he appealed. He was not allowed to fight for about three and a half years, at the very peak of his career.

Many Americans were angry with him. Others, especially as the war grew more unpopular, came to admire him for standing by his beliefs when it cost him so much. During those years he spoke at colleges across the country, and earned what he could.

In 1971, the United States Supreme Court overturned his conviction.

The greatest

Ali returned to the ring. He lost some fights and won many more. In 1974, in Kinshasa, in what was then Zaire, he defeated George Foreman and became heavyweight champion of the world once again.

In 1984, he was found to have Parkinson's disease, an illness that slowly affects movement and speech. He spent his later years working for charities and for understanding between people of different faiths.

At the opening of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, the world watched as Muhammad Ali, his hands trembling, lifted a torch and lit the Olympic flame. Many people cried. During those Games, he was given a new gold medal to replace the one he had lost from Rome.

He died in 2016. In Louisville, crowds lined the streets to say goodbye to the boy who once came down to a basement gym, angry about a stolen bicycle, and found the thing he was born to do.

Want to read more?

Muhammad Ali reflected on his own life in The Soul of a Butterfly, written with his daughter Hana. Thomas Hauser's Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times and Jonathan Eig's Ali: A Life are the fullest biographies.