Here?s the thing: You could detest everything Muhammad Ali stood for. You could rage at him for being a draft dodger, a Communist sympathizer, a coward. You could seethe at the swagger, at the braggadocio, at the times when he would reduce proud prizefighters to dust with his clever poetry.
?I ain?t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong,? he famously said in the 1960s, at a time when we believed the world was 15 minutes way from ending every time we lifted our heads off the pillow. ?No Viet Cong ever called me n??.?
You could hate him for that.
But the one thing you never could question, no matter how much you wanted to, was the legitimacy of his convictions. That was forever. That was something that will live for an eternity, long after we bid farewell to the man, to Ali, who died late Friday night after battling Parkinson?s Disease the final three decades of a most extraordinary life.
Ali paid for those convictions. He bled for them. At the height of his athletic prime, he refused to step forward and be called into the U.S. Army. He knew what that meant at the very moment he did it, April 28, 1967, at the Military Entrance Processing Station on San Jacinto Street in Houston.
He knew he would be hated. He knew he would be dismissed as a deserter and as a quitter, a turncoat who would refuse to submit to the draft. He knew.
He knew.
?Bravest thing I ever saw,? the great Jerry Izenberg told me once.
Izenberg ? longtime sports columnist at the Newark Star-Ledger who also filled the pages of The Post with his wit, his wisdom and his biting social commentary for much of the 1980s, was a friend of Ali?s, but before that he was a defender of Ali?s, one of the first to accept his Muslim name in lieu of Cassius Clay, the ?slave name? he was born with.
