Muhammad Ali turns 65

At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, organizers had tried to keep very quiet the identity of the distinguished American who would light the Olympic cauldron. The torch was carried into the stadium, and when it reappeared for the big moment the spotlight showed it in the hand of Muhammad Ali.

And all anyone could think was:

Of course.

For years, Ali had been the best-known American in the world, one of the great athletes in history, an Olympic gold medalist.

And, almost forgotten by 1996, for a time in the 1960s he was one of the most controversial figures in the United States.

Ali turned 65 this week, an impossible concept for anyone who remembers, or sees on tape, the sleek, sinuous, muscular body that danced uncatchably around the ring before landing a piledriver on the unfortunate boxer facing him. His self-described pattern of "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" seemed like an understatement on both ends.

He was also a permanent one-man parade, of poetry and put-ons and principle, from Louisville to Madison Square Garden to Manila.

These days, Ali is a physically sad figure, a sufferer from pugilistic Parkinson's syndrome, an old boxer who clearly took too many punches, one of the fastest-talking figures of sports now having trouble making his words understandable. It's hard to see the pantherlike boxer in the 65-year-old.

But it's even harder to recognize the widely hated, electrically controversial figure of the 1960s, the world's best-known war resister coming from the world's most violent sport, in the American icon that Ali has become.

If he's changed in 40 years, so has the country and the world around him.

It's one more lesson from Ali's life, a bulletin to politicians who claim that while things may not look good today, their militant insistence will be validated by history. History, even a few decades of it, makes judgments different from what establishments expect. It's not always on the side of the folks who send out the bombers and the search-and-destroy missions.

Ali, after all, wasn't even always called Ali. He won his Olympic gold medal, and his first heavyweight championship fight, as Cassius Clay. When he announced, in the company of Malcolm X — another public enemy looking better in the history books — that he was dropping Clay as his "slave name" and becoming a Muslim, he was more editorially denounced than rock and roll. Most sports reporters attacked him — Howard Cosell became a celebrity simply for treating Ali decently — and the next five years were absorbed in an effort to find a heavyweight to beat him and uphold right-thinking values.

And when Ali refused the Vietnam-era draft, going to the ceremony and not answering when his name was called, he was stripped of his title and sentenced to five years in prison. It took until 1970 for the Supreme Court to throw out his conviction, and longer for him to regain the championship, and during all that time Ali was an inviting punching bag for millions of Americans.

In the Vietnam era, it turned out that Ali's most useful boxing skill wasn't fighting, but the ability to take a punch.

Now, 40 years later, Ali is a national hero, not to say an international icon. Resisting a war doesn't seem an incomprehensibly disloyal act, and becoming a Muslim doesn't seem an act of cultural betrayal. As of this month, an African American Muslim sits in the U.S. House of Representatives, where the walls once echoed with denunciations of Muhammad Ali.

History, it seems, has dealt considerably more generously with Ali than with the people who wanted to send him to war.

Which is why it often can be a mistake for a president to set his jaw about the casualty lists and stand next to a White House portrait of Lincoln and assure himself that one day history will vindicate him.

History makes its own judgments, and sometimes the objects of popular and government abuse end up lighting fires -- sometimes on international television coverage -- that burn brighter than the politicians of the past ever expected.

-- David Sarasohn is an associate editor at the Oregonian of Portland, Ore