Ali! Ali! Ali!

The re-release of Greatest of All Time shows there was more to Ali than boxing, writes Sean O'Toole

In1981 Muhammad Ali fought his last professional fight against a Jamaican man whose name few of us remember, Trevor Berbick. He lost, the defeat a humiliating end to a luminous career.

A year later, Steve van Rooyen, an English teacher at an unremarkable high school on the eastern outskirts of Pretoria, gave his standard six class a composition assignment. Write about your hero.

My first thought was that I didn't have one. Sifting through my dad's heap of Scope magazines, a 12-year-old desperately in search of a hero, I came across an article on the retired champ. Of course, yes. Ali was so much more interesting than the moustached hopeful with a poodle from the East Rand mining town that lent Gerrie Coetzee his nickname: "Die Boksburg Bommer" - try "Dark Gable" for size.

And what bravado from a prizefighter in this arcane blood sport: Ali insisted on wearing white. Photographs are silent, but in every picture of Ali I saw you could hear the laughter, the taunts, the squabble of newsmen, the click of cameras, the ecstasy of jam-packed bodies proud to be near the champ. Oh, and he boxed under water.

I still remember the awe when discovering Flip Schulke's 1961 classic portrait of Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr, then still "Louisville Lip", posed in profile, under water. There was an irrefutable science to the caption, which explained that Clay increased his punching speed by training in a swimming pool.

There was also that photograph of Ali posed as Saint Sebastian, the Milanese martyr impaled by the arrows of a vengeful Roman emperor. Carl Fischer's April 1968 cover photo for Esquire magazine is a blatant parody of an established Catholic icon that has preoccupied artist the likes of Botticelli, Titian, Daumier and Louise Bourgeois.

Fischer's photo (pictured right) is, however, more than just a quotation. It remains an extraordinarily elegant riposte to the cruel indignity of Ali having his heavyweight title stripped in 1967 because of his ethical disposition. Disposition? The champ was never that quaint.

"I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong," he said of his decision to refuse the Vietnam draft. "They never called me nigger."

It was details like this that my dad, sparring with a 1970's radio commentator, elided as he celebrated Ali. There were lots of things white dads, here as elsewhere, didn't fully explain to their sons about this man who found consolation in racial pride and the Koran.

But this understanding came later, long after Leon Spinks, the toothless wonder of the 1976 Olympics beat the champ, the loss one in a series of humiliations as Ali overcooked his greatness. Long, too, after my dad dropped me off at school with my eulogy to Ali, the few words in blue cursive forming a rickety scaffolding around the pictures.

"He loved the camera, and the camera loved him," wrote Neil Leifer in 1998. His 1966 God's-eye view of the champ walking away from a floored Cleveland Williams has been described as the "greatest sporting image of all time", according to London's Observer.

Leifer's photo appears on the silk-covered box that enclosed the original 34kg luxury edition of publisher Benedikt Taschen's labour of love, Greatest of All Time. Originally released in 2003, the book is now available in a welterweight format (Taschen, R2100).

Savour it, because it almost never happened. Ali, a Muslim, was unimpressed when Taschen, a lifelong fan, sent him a book of nudes by photographer Helmut Newton. Taschen had to jab his way out of the corner by telling Bernie Yuman, Ali's manager, to relay to the champ that, "all the girls in the book were very poor and had no money to buy clothes". Ali laughed, said okay.

Photographs are undoubtedly the book's draw, but this "affordable edition" is brimful of words too. Ali was a man of words who also inspired words. George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Gay Talese, I could go on naming the giants who have marvelled at this colossus of an athlete. Hyperbole? You get punched about in a ring and still have the wherewithal to come up with this poem: "Me/We."

These two words - huge and pulsing in white neon - grace the entrance to the Studio Museum in Harlem. The museum is just out of earshot of the Apollo Theatre, where James Brown tested the limits of conjoined vowels.

For all the words ever published about Ali, Brown probably said it best: if not directly about Ali, then of the era that moulded him into being: "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud."