“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam, while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I am not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evil must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here.”

— Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali’s daughter said that her father’s heart continued to beat for a full half-hour despite all of his other major organs having ceased to function.

It has been said there are times when a man’s life at the doorstep of death can pass as a flash right before one’s eyes.

What were Muhammad’s recollections like when he reached that doorstep? Did he once again see himself running through the neighbourhoods of Kinshasa as he trained in preparation for his bout against George Foreman with hundreds of Zairean children running right behind him. Everyone of them with a big smile on their faces.

Or did he revisit the fourteenth round of the “Thrilla in Manila” encounter with his old and ultimately beloved nemesis, “Smokin” Joe Frazier. He told everyone then that he was done and that fight brought him to the closet point to dying he had ever been. Frazier’s corner conceded the bout by throwing in the towel despite Joe’s fruitless opposition to doing so.

Did Muhammad recall the interview with his biographer, Thomas Hauser, when he told him “Frazier quit just before I did. I don’t think that I could fight any more”.

But even now with his heart still beating — the heart of a champion — he was still fighting and perhaps still remembering that life. That sweet life.

Would he have recalled that first of two trips to Bermuda during the early Sixties when Cassius Clay, the preter-handsome, charismatic and newly minted Heavyweight champion of the world, met an adolescent teen at D.A.’s Cocktail Bar, owned by none other than D.A. Brown the father of the future Premier of Bermuda, who, in his own way, would go on at Howard University to become a civil rights activist like Clay.

Would Clay have noticed how the teenager, no more than 15 or so, marvelled at the size of his hands? Ewart Brown, still today, would say with the same look of marvel on his face that they were huge.

Or would he remember his visit to the Forty Thieves club on Front Street where ladies’ man Cassius would meet a musician named Rudolph Commissiong, as they found themselves only feet away from each other at the bar.

It was Cassius Clay then for most people — what he would later call his slave name — as he was still in the process of transitioning to his new identity and name of Muhammad Ali. He would fight for this new name and identity in the public arena as fiercely as he fought an opponent in the ring.

And what of the legendary Bermudian impresario and promoter Olive Trott, who brought the young phenom to Bermuda? She was one of the few persons alive who had the type of charisma and toughness that would rival his own. Would he remember her, too, and that beautiful Bermuda day when hundreds turned out at the Tennis Stadium to see the boxing exhibition that would feature him — and more importantly to see the next black hope.

No one then, I am sure neither here or in the United States, could envision then that the young, brash and irresistible fighter would also be a leader for racial and social justice just as important to us in the African diaspora as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Michael Manley, Eric Williams, Kwame Nkrumah and so many other world leaders.

Would Ali once again think of Malcolm, who pound-for-pound had as much raw charisma and commitment to his people as he? Would he still question in those few minutes remaining to him as to whether — as he sometimes stated — he did enough to assist Malcolm during his time of need and greatest danger?

Did Muhammad replay that day after representing the US in the Olympics when he would return home to Louisville, Kentucky, and back to the racist “Jim Crow” South where white supremacy not only reigned but was flaunted with terrible consequences for black people, only to be told as an Olympic gold medal-winner that he and a friend could not be served at a “whites only” segregated restaurant in the city centre. Muhammad to his dying day insisted that resulted in him throwing his gold medal into the nearby Ohio river, part of the Mason-Dixon Line — the cultural boundary between the North and South. But Ali would go on to know and to understand that white supremacy was a worldwide phenomenon that relegated people of colour like him and Olive, like my father and D.A. Brown to a second-class status or worse.

He was lucky because for decades before that, “uppity” Negroes such as himself would have been lynched for defying the white-dominated social order. Would he have recalled then on his deathbed the stories he heard as a boy of soldiers coming home from the war and being beaten and even killed for simply sporting their uniforms. Did he have a relative who had met such a fate? His mother’s grandfather or his father’s second cousin on his father’s side? Many did.

One thing for sure is that when he came to Bermuda in the early 1960s, he could see graphically that not only the South had “Jim Crow”, for it was in Bermuda, too, as sister Olive would have told him even before he got off that aircraft.

You see, Muhammad Ali epitomised “black power” before it became a slogan; and he showed us how we could have pride in being black long before James Brown would fashion that into a song.

And his heart, the heart of the people’s champion, kept beating until literally it had no more left to give.

No athlete in the 20th century and there were many — Jesse Owens, Jack Johnson, Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, whom Ali worshipped as a boy, Pelé, Michael Jordan — had a more lasting impact in a way that profoundly transcended their respective sport.

He was the iconic and defining athletic figure of his era, bar none. He also, as importantly for my generation and that of my parents, defined black identity and became a model of resistance to the global, racist oppression of black and non-white people during the 1960s and early 1970s.

“The Fight of the Century” took place in 1971 at Madison Square Garden between Ali and Frazier. Muhammad was seeking to reclaim the title that was so cruelly stripped from him after his decision not to honour draft enlistment to fight in the Vietnam War. This was the title fight that he was seeking, as “Smokin” Joe held the coveted World Boxing Council and World Boxing Association title belts. But it was not to be, as Frazier won by unanimous decision after 15 rounds and gave Muhammad his first professional defeat.

All of the world was at the Garden that night, or at least it seemed like it, including, of course, the New York’s heavy hitters from the worlds of politics, entertainment, sport and business. It also was an event that attracted all of the gangsters, black and white, from all over the city and beyond.

The world by that time had literally beat a path to Ali’s door. It was not always that way; only a few years before, he was reviled by some of the same whites and conservative blacks who will no doubt celebrate him now — and deservedly so. Yet a large number of those who are now over 55 years of age would have once viewed him with contempt or worse.

Note how the white city fathers of Louisville and the white citizenry of Louisville, Kentucky, will seek to bask in the glow of Ali’s accomplishments without coming to grips with the past that so shaped him. Many, of course; not all.

There would be two more titanic battles between Ali and Frazier.

My father is a big boxing fan and he, along with my uncle Labby Laborde, had the pleasure of attending the second bout between them in 1974 at the same venue. The anticipated rematch was not a title fight, as Frazier by then had been brutally beaten by Foreman and lost the belts.

Yet, like the first, it was an amazing event, as all of the stars were out in force again. It also ended with the right result, as far as we were concerned, because Ali finally overcame Frazier by way of an unanimous decision.

As a student at the University of New York, then I had the privilege to accompany my father and my uncle the following year in 1975 to the Garden to watch the “Thrilla in Manila” bout. This was the third and final contest between “Smokin” Joe and Ali. The bout was on closed circuit and projected into a massive screen. It was really exciting to be there, as most of the heavy hitters in New York who could not actually make it to Manila in the Philippines were present. Ali, as expected, won the fight but little did I know then — as indicated earlier — that Ali saw death stalking him just before “Smokin” Joe’s corner threw in the towel in the fourteenth round.

He might have cheated death then.

The sweet science always exacts a price. And so does a system that effectively robbed Ali of his prime athletic years and literally millions of dollars from the age of 25 to just short of his 29th birthday. It’s hard to imagine any athlete today making the type of sacrifice that he did by opposing the military draft and the war in Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr and thousands of middle-class white college students, who later would take up the banner, were essentially following Ali’s lead — as even Dr King would acknowledge. Ali was first to the party.

Is this why he ended up fighting way too long? Was it to compensate for the great loss that he endured during the prime of his career? Was Parkinson’s the ultimate price that he paid? We will likely never know now.

That fight is the closest that I ever got to my icon, but I am not complaining. After all, I, like many of my generation, could not even begin to pay the great debt that we owe our beloved Ali and his family.

Ali once said the following, which bears repeating:

“Some people thought that I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything that I did was according to my conscience. I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free.”

Rest in peace, my brother.