Personal Narrative: Ali's Death

I just heard about his passing, and while I rarely care about celebrities dying, I always admired Ali so much.

My mother was in love with him and got me into boxing at an oddly young age; she showed me the elegance and grace in the sport. Also, having grown up down South in extreme poverty, she'd been an early and fervent civil rights activist; admiring him (and MX) was natural. My brother and I were (coincidentally) raised believing in so many of his causes that he never became distant from my thoughts.

Since I was very young, I would actually cry when I saw signs of his illness, which for years we'd attributed his to just having taken too many punches. It seemed tragically ironic that his gift of boxing had cost him his eloquence,