By Ben Dirs

BBC Sport

It is crass, I know, to reduce Muhammad Ali’s greatness to little more than a game of Top Trumps. And how great, really, is a man who happens to have been conferred with the tools to render another man senseless?

But there’s the thing. Even if you consider feats of athleticism to be trifling in the grand scheme of things, there is a chance you still find Ali compelling. Because, with Ali, athletic feats were only a part of the whole.

Ali created the mould for the modern athlete and promptly broke it. No athlete has been so great in so many different ways since.

Here, BBC Sport breaks Ali’s greatness into its constituent parts, in an attempt to explain why there has never been anyone greater and probably never will be.

Athletic ability

Most boxing aficionados will tell you Ali wasn’t even the greatest boxer of all time. But with the very next breath, they might tell you he is the greatest sportsman. This is because making comparisons in boxing is a less exact science than making comparisons in other sports.

People will tell you Jack Nicklaus is greater than Tiger Woods because he won more majors. They will tell you Sachin Tendulkar is better than Brian Lara because he scored more runs at a higher average. But attempting to compare boxers who fought at different weights in different eras is the way to madness.

Still, it is true that Ali didn’t fight on the inside, would lean back rather than slip punches, didn’t set his feet and was susceptible to left hooks. And old-timers who saw both in action said Sugar Ray Robinson, who lost only one of his first 131 professional fights, was a more complete fighter. “Robinson,” said legendary American boxing writer Bert Sugar, “was the sweetest practitioner of ‘The Sweet Science’.”

However, one of the marks of greatness is the ability to perform great feats without the use of a textbook: true greatness comes from within. And just as coaches tell kids the single-handed backhand is redundant, despite the factRoger Federer has won 17 majors with it, they will also tell kids that to fight like Ali is nuts: “Gloves up, chin tucked in – and stop mucking about.”

But saying Ali wasn’t as good as Robinson is like saying bliss isn’t as good as nirvana. And a frightening thing about Ali is we might not have seen the best of him. Exiled from boxing between the ages of 25 and 28, Ali was spreading his anti-war message on the college circuit when he was at his most vital as an athlete.

Athletic achievements

On paper, Ali is the greatest heavyweight in history. The first three-time world champion in boxing’s blue riband division – when there was only one heavyweight world champion at any given time – Ali fought all-comers and whupped almost all of ’em.

Another mark of greatness is the ability to evolve and in Ali’s case there were four distinct ages: Olympic champion Ali, the innocent boy with a grin; pre-exile Ali, when his feet were a whir, his hands were a blur and nothing could touch him; post-exile Ali, a thicker, slower version with courage to burn; fading Ali, an empty shell of a man whom none of us wanted to see.

Ali reigned in arguably the most talent-rich era of heavyweight boxing, winning the title from the fearsome Sonny Liston in 1964, winning it again from the even more fearsome George Foreman 10 years later and beating greats such as Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton in between. Even Ali Marque 4 had enough to win the title for a third time from a youthful Leon Spinks.

Ali gave us the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila and many iconic moments in sport. But if anyone wants proof that athletic achievement is about more than a win on the record, I suggest they rewind all the way to Ali Marque 2, particularly his fights against Cleveland Williams and Zora Folley.

“Most fight fans would not spend a dime to watch Van Gogh paint Sunflowers,” wrote Sports Illustrated’s Pat Putnam, in reference to Sugar Ray Leonard’s “artistic perfection”. “But they would fill Yankee Stadium to see him cut off his ear.” In his pre-exile pomp, Ali gave fight fans both artistry and gore.

Heroism

Boxing allows for greater feats of heroism than other sports. Kicking a ball around with opponents trying to kick you and thousands looking on might get the ticker going, but it’s hardly on a par with being attacked by a 17st man with wrecking-ball hands.

Like men born at the wrong time and forced into wars, in some respects Ali was an accidental hero. Liston was the most hated heavyweight champion in history and considered almost unbeatable. People genuinely thought Ali might be killed by Foreman. Ali claimed he almost did die in his third fight against Frazier.

But accidental or not, heroism garners great respect.

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