Statement from
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on the Passing of Muhammad
Ali
June 04, 2016
The White House
Office of the
Press Secretary
Muhammad Ali was
The Greatest. Period. If you just asked him, he’d tell you. He’d tell you he was the double greatest;
that he’d “handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder into jail.”
But what made The
Champ the greatest – what truly separated him from everyone else – is that
everyone else would tell you pretty much the same thing.
Like everyone
else on the planet, Michelle and I mourn his passing. But we’re also grateful to God for how
fortunate we are to have known him, if just for a while; for how fortunate we
all are that The Greatest chose to grace our time.
In my private
study, just off the Oval Office, I keep a pair of his gloves on display, just
under that iconic photograph of him – the young champ, just 22 years old,
roaring like a lion over a fallen Sonny Liston.
I was too young when it was taken to understand who he was – still
Cassius Clay, already an Olympic Gold Medal winner, yet to set out on a
spiritual journey that would lead him to his Muslim faith, exile him at the
peak of his power, and set the stage for his return to greatness with a name as
familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of
Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden.
“I am America,”
he once declared. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me –
black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals,
my own. Get used to me.”
That’s the Ali I
came to know as I came of age – not just as skilled a poet on the mic as he was
a fighter in the ring, but a man who fought for what was right. A man who fought for us. He stood with King and Mandela; stood up when
it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t.
His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public
standing. It would earn him enemies on
the left and the right, make him reviled, and nearly send him to jail. But Ali stood his ground. And his victory helped us get used to the
America we recognize today.
He wasn’t
perfect, of course. For all his magic in
the ring, he could be careless with his words, and full of contradictions as
his faith evolved. But his wonderful,
infectious, even innocent spirit ultimately won him more fans than foes – maybe
because in him, we hoped to see something of ourselves. Later, as his physical powers ebbed, he
became an even more powerful force for peace and reconciliation around the
world. We saw a man who said he was so
mean he’d make medicine sick reveal a soft spot, visiting children with illness
and disability around the world, telling them they, too, could become the
greatest. We watched a hero light a
torch, and fight his greatest fight of all on the world stage once again; a
battle against the disease that ravaged his body, but couldn’t take the spark
from his eyes.
Muhammad Ali
shook up the world. And the world is
better for it. We are all better for
it. Michelle and I send our deepest
condolences to his family, and we pray that the greatest fighter of them all
finally rests in peace.
