"After a 32-year battle with Parkinson's disease, Muhammad Ali has passed away at the age of 74. The three-time World Heavyweight Champion boxer died this evening," Bob Gunnell, a family spokesman told NBC News.

Often considered the greatest boxer of all time, Ali was the world heavyweight champion in a golden-age of boxing in the 1960s and '70s. His bouts against George Foreman and Joe Frazier are etched into fighting history.

His supreme skill, as much with his fists as with his mouth, made Ali a household name the world over, with his legendary wit used to trash talk every opponent he faced.

Ali is just as well known for his positions on race and religion, including his controversial decision to become a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.

Ali suffered from Parkinson’s Disease for more than three decades.

On page one of Norman Mailer's seminal 1975 book The Fight, he describes Muhammad Ali up close thus: "The world's greatest athlete is in danger of being our most beautiful man. Women draw an audible breath. Men look down. They are reminded again of their lack of worth. If Ali never again opened his mouth to quiver the jellies of public opinion, he would still inspire love and hate."

But he did open his mouth, loquaciously, colourfully, sometimes poetically, but foremost to tell us that he was "the greatest". He conferred the title on himself, then made it his. Now that he is dead, what other living mortal would strip him of it?

Ali might not have been the greatest boxer of all time. He didn't win nearly as many fights as Sugar Ray Robinson, for instance, and he lost more than Rocky Marciano, who was never defeated. I won't pretend to understand all the intricacies of Ali's technique, but I do know that it was mesmerising to watch. Until Ali, "on the ropes" was axiomatically a near to hopeless place, near the end. Ali began from there.

Ali might not have been the greatest sportsman of all time. Pele in his game, Don Bradman in his, were more dominant, and lest we start a fire that would immediately jump control lines, we will stop there.

Ali might or might not have been the greatest sportsman/emancipist of all time. There are so few others. Most have been content to let their legs/arms/fists/bats/racquets do the talking. Ali did the talking and the walking. His refusal to be conscripted to go to Vietnam cost him a short time in jail, four years of his career and all his gains to that time, but he would ultimately win that fight in the US Supreme court, a victory to match any of his in the ring.

You could argue that there would always have been a Barack Obama, but by an indefinable period, Ali brought his day forward.

Ali was the sportsman of his times because he made the times his. He created an impression of greatness, a persona of greatness, and played up to it, and lived up to it. In 1999, he was named by Sports Illustrated Athlete of the Century, and the BBC's Sportsman of the Century. By then, he had become a transcendental figure in the world of sport.

It is 20 years since Ali's last grand public appearance, shimmering and shaking a little as he lit the flame at the Atlanta Olympics. Already, Parkinson's was taking its inexorable toll. Two years later, he appeared at the MCG on grand final day, for no apparent reason other than that he was Muhammad Ali, but causing people to cry at the sight anyway.

Since, he has receded from view. In that time, boxing also has withered away in the public imagination, partly because of its own neglect, partly because times have changed. Then, it was, without irony, "the sweet science". I can't remember when I last heard that expression. But Ali somehow did make boxing appear almost sweet.

In The Fight, an account of Ali's win over George Foreman in Zaire, Mailer describes meeting Ali in the dressing room immediately afterwards. "His face was unmarked except for a small red bruise on one cheekbone," Mailer writes. "Maybe he never appeared more handsome. He stared out like a child. 'I have stolen the jam,' said his eyes, 'and it tastes good'. Light twinkled in those eyes all the way back to the beginning. Truth, he looked like a castle all lit up."

If boxing was a little over romanticised then, it is not at all now. It alters contemporary perspective on Ali. But it cannot and should not diminish who he was and what he meant in his prime and its long afterglow.

Now he is dead, but undimmed.

Greg Baum