float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
i'm resting now Muhammad Ali ...

Big man, big personality. RIP

A man who managed to combine sublime skill at his chosen sport with a poet's gift for showmanship and a level of personal moral conviction few manage. Whether or not you liked him, you literally couldn't ignore him. It'd be hard to argue that he wasn't 'The Greatest'.

Yes, another one claimed in 2016.
Mind you, Alzheimer's had decimated the man so it was only a matter of time. I remember seeing him light the flame at the 1996 olympics and he was obviously suffering then so making it another 20 years was impressive in itself.

Can't say I ever took to the bloke.
Such extreme levels of arrogance and cockiness.

Cockiness undoubtedly yes. It's a sport that encourages loudmouths and braggarts, and he undoubtedly was one. But does someone who was, almost by universal consensus, considered to be the best practitioner of his sport that has ever lived allow themselves to be arrogant by their actions? This is a genuine question, because I really don't know. Is arrogance ever acceptable? And if so, is being the best there has ever been enough to justify it?

Is say Pele allowed to be arrogant? Was Ayrton Senna? If you approach the point where the things you say that are arrogant are also actually true, what are we to say to that?

It's always tempting to eulogise the recently passed, to gloss over their frailties. Ali definitely had frailties - he fought on for years the he should have retired to save his health. Indeed his years of disability were probably a direct consequence of his stubbornness in this. And no perfect man has been divorced three times.

But he remains to this day a talent almost unrivalled -I'd say Sugar Ray Leonard has a claim to the 'greatest ever boxer' as well but he's the only one.

Muhammad Ali – 25 of the best photographs

Some of the are rather prosaic, but the first and last are genuine art.

Jesus wept, BBC News have been running the story for eight solid hours. They're now at the point of interviewing people who have met people who once met Ali. It is a significant news story, fair enough, but they've not so much flogged the horse as whipped then buried it, dug up the corpse, whipped it again and then set it on fire.

Well, if they can get off the sodding EU referendum...

Fair point . It did get to the stage of them reporting 'Muhammad Ali still dead' though. They even dropped the weather forecasts and sports news, all day. It was actually really odd.