The world’s boxing legend Muhammad Ali and former world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali is dead, Reuters reports.
He was one of the best-known figures of the 20th century with his unprecedented flair for showmanship and for setting record in boxing career.
He died on Friday at the aged of 74.
His death was confirmed in a statement issued by family spokesman Bob Gunnell late Friday evening, a day after he was admitted to a Phoenix-area hospital with a respiratory ailment.
“A part of me slipped away, the greatest piece,” George Foreman, a former heavyweight boxer who fought Ali, said on Twitter after the news of Ali’s death.
He had long suffered from Parkinson’s syndrome, which impaired his speech and made the once-graceful athlete almost a prisoner in his own body.
He proclaimed himself as “the greatest” – as well as “the boldest, the prettiest, the most superior, most scientific, most skillfullest.”
He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on Jan. 17, 1942, as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., a name shared with a 19th century slavery abolitionist. He later changed his name after his conversion to Islam.
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