Ali had Parkinson’s disease, diagnosed in 1984, three years after his final bout. But he had been showing signs of the condition, including slurred speech, as far back as the 1970s. He retired aged 39, after losing to Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas. Three years earlier he had the opportunity to leave at the top when he beat Leon Spinks to become the only man to regain the heavyweight title twice.
Parkinson’s has been linked to the type of head trauma Ali would have received. Now his brother Rahaman Ali has revealed that the champ revelled in being the most famous man in the world and feared losing his popularity on retiring.
In My Brother, Muhammad Ali he says the boxer was feeling his age by the time of a 1976 bout against Ken Norton.
He says: “A photographer was telling him, ‘Muhammad, as a friend, I don’t think you should be fighting, you’re going to hurt yourself. Why do you keep on like this?’
“He said, and he always spoke in a whisper way, ‘You know, I’m the most famous face in the world. The fight, the ring, is my stage. If I leave the ring nobody’s going to know who I am and no one is going to remember me so I have to keep it up.’
“The man said, ‘Eventually there’s going to be a time’. My brother said, ‘Well, I can’t worry about that now. I just need to go on and I need to be in the public eye and I have to keep selling tickets’.”
Ali kissing his mother Odessa Grady Clay with his brother Rudy and father Davis Clay (Image: Getty)
Ali having a laugh with activist Malcolm X at the Hampton House in 1964 (Image: Getty)
Ali, who died in 2016, showed signs of Parkinson’s in 1982 at a wrestling event. Rahaman says: “They had celebrities such as Cindy Lauper and Hulk Hogan. Muhammad was very quiet. He didn’t look like the invincible person he always had been. It was sad to look at him like that, the deterioration and not his usual powerful look.
“However, when my brother was introduced he got the biggest applause, he got the loudest applause – there’s no question that when he was introduced the fans loved him and showed their appreciation of his career.
“I felt that once powerful-looking man was not as powerful at that particular moment as he’d been in the past.”
In 2009, on his final UK visit, Ali made a big effort to meet his fans. Rahaman says some guests at a gala dinner felt he shouldn’t have been there because of his health. But, he says: “Guess what, he still needed to be out there knowing the public loved him. People want to remember him for the dancing master.
“A lot of people did not like to see him but a majority realised that for his sake he needed to be there.”
Rahaman, 76, says that, growing up in the 1950s, the pair would spar together, using a tree as a punch bag. But Ali was more interested in conjuring than fighting.
“Muhammad thought he was going to be a magician,” he says. “He would do little tricks and get kids to gather around and he would perform.”
He says their parents instilled a strong moral sense in them. Although Muhammad always attributed much of his success to support from the Nation of Islam, and counted Malcolm X as a friend, he rejected calls for racial hatred.
“When Muhammad first met Malcolm, I was with him,” says Rahaman. “It was 1963 in Harlem. Malcolm tried to convince me and my brother that all white people were the enemy.
“We shared this with our parents and they said that some things Malcolm had told us were not nice and not right. Our father was taken aback, actually.
Champion Ali at his boxing peak in the 1960s (Image: Getty)
“My brother and I were loyal to Nation of Islam and Muhammad felt that the Nation played a pivotal role in his success.
“In the 1970s my brother was having a conversation with a white friend who lived in what could be classified as a somewhat racist town on the east coast. Muhammad said, ‘You have a picture of a black man hanging in your house?’
“His friend started laughing and said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I have more pictures of black people in my house than you have white people in your house’.
“My brother said, ‘Touché’. Muh-ammad loved all people, regardless of colour or creed…”
● My Brother, Muhammad Ali (John Blake, £20)