Muhammad Ali The Greatest

"I am the Greatest," I said that even before I knew I was.- Muhammad Ali. 

June 1967 was an important time in my life. I had just graduated from High School and was going to enlist in the Army with two of my friends. I thought I had enough of school and wanted to do something else.

My father stopped me from going with my friends that day. He said, "Ron, your mom and I have never asked you to not do something you wanted to do. But, today we want you to not go to enlist. Please, go to college. Then if you want, enlist after you've graduated. Don't become cannon fodder for them, Ron. Don't waste your life for nothing. I know. I enlisted. They wasted millions of lives and for what? You'll see. In a few years we will be selling things to the Vietnamese and making money, just like we did after WWII."

June 1967 was when Muhammad Ali was convicted of draft evasion. He knew then that the war in Vietnam was wrong. He had been stripped of his heavyweight title. He faced five-years in a federal penitentiary and a $10,000 fine, plus three-and-a-half-years in exile from boxing... but not from the people of the world and not from history.

After the Texas Federal District Court decision (later overturned by the Supreme Court) he said, "I strongly object to the fact that so many newspapers have given the American public and the world the impression that I have only two alternatives in this stand — either I go to jail or go to the Army. There is another alternative, and that alternative is justice. If justice prevails, if my constitutional rights are upheld, I will be forced to go neither to the Army nor jail. In the end, I am confident that justice will come my way, for the truth must eventually prevail."

Years later, he said:
"Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience. I wasn’t trying to be a leader. I just wanted to be free. And I made a stand all people, not just black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war. Then, after the rich man’s son got out of college, he did other things to keep him out of the Army until he was too old to be drafted."

My family wasn't wealthy. Mom was a nurse and Dad was a postman. Yet, I was rich because of their love for me.*

Ali will always be the Greatest.

*While in my junior year at the University of Akron I enlisted in the Army. I graduated in March 1971.