Muhammad Ali was, among many other things, a boxing trainer’s worst nightmare. His extraordinary gifts permitted him to violate the sport’s eternal verities with impunity — carrying his hands low, bending back away from punches instead of slipping them with his upper body, delivering stinging combinations without seeming to set his feet. It was a fluid and beautiful style. Unfortunately, its brilliance spawned a generation of imitators who, against the soundest of professional advice, insisted on adopting it, unnecessarily eating leather and tasting the canvas as a result. What they failed to appreciate was that only one person in the world had the speedy reflexes, timing and ring intelligence to fight that way without courting disaster. 

In recent years, as Ali basked in a sort of secular sainthood of the spiritual kind, it was possible to forget that he was once also the worst nightmare for much of white America — a young, brash, gifted black man who lived life on his own terms and no one else’s.  All that came flooding back after he died Friday at age 74, in the obituaries and tributes celebrating his exceptional and consequential life. He really did, as he proclaimed after subduing the fearsome Sonny Liston and winning the heavyweight title for the first time in 1964 at the tender age of 22, shake up the world — inside and outside the ring.

The morning after that first Liston fight, the new champion declared his allegiance to the Nation of Islam, a separatist black sect feared and reviled by many whites, and announced that he was no longer Cassius Clay. (He eventually converted to orthodox Islam). Soon he became Muhammad Ali, and much of the rest is at the heart of the turbulent times he inhabited. A couple of years later, Ali electrified the country when he declared he had no quarrel with the Vietcong. In 1967, he refused to be inducted into the Army and sought conscientious-objector status, with the result that he was stripped of his title and faced jail. Although eventually vindicated by the U.S. Supreme Court, he did not fight again for three and a half years.

Ali returned to the ring from his exile a bigger man in all respects. His views on social, religious and political issues had evolved, and he had earned respect in many quarters for making a stand on principle that cost him years in the prime of his career. Thicker, more heavily muscled, he subtly adapted his style in the ring to new circumstances, fighting a trilogy of legendary intensity with Joe Frazier and outsmarting the seemingly invincible George Foreman in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle. In that fight, Ali — ever hetereodox, ever inventive — laid on the ropes while Foreman smashed away, blocking many of the punches with his forearms and shoulders until, with his much younger opponent exhausted, Ali flashed off the ropes and knocked him out with a blindingly fast combination in the eighth round. Thus did rope-a-dope enter the English language.

But, imperceptibly at first, the skills were beginning to erode, and Ali began to fulfill his part of the Faustian bargain that all boxers make. He took savage punishment in order to deliver it, and by the time he finally retired in 1981, he was already suffering from the damage that accumulated punches inflict. He was soon diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which eventually limited his speech and mobility. But even as the famed Ali Shuffle took on an aspect of tragic irony, he maintained his dignity and remained one of the most recognizable faces on the planet, while emphasizing in his public appearances peace and tolerance.

Ali, of course, had a dark side, too. But genius is forgiven its excess. For instance, in 1965, when the estimable Floyd Patterson insisted on calling him Cassius Clay instead of his new name, Ali taunted him cruelly while inflicting a severe beating in the ring. Patterson was eventually reconciled, though.

“I came to see,” Patterson said, “that I was a fighter and he was history.”