World mourns loss of Muhammad Ali, dead at 74 in Phoenix

Three time World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Muhammad Ali, who sparked his own international acclaim winning an Olympic gold medal at the 1960 games in Rome, died at a hospital near his Scottsdale, Arizona home on Friday, June 3, 2016, at the age of 74. A glorious athlete, he will be remembered not only for his boxing prowess and wins, but also his intertwined talents for self-promotion and provocation, which notably extended to issues of racial equality and US military intervention in Vietnam. The self-proclaimed "Greatest of All Time," and less deferentially as the "Louisville Lip," Ali embodied self-confidence and independence of thought and action in a way that no athlete ever had, at a time when African Americans were of mixed views on the goals and tactics of the "Black Power" movement. Through his words and actions, such as his embrace of Islam and changing his name from his "slave name," Cassius Clay, shortly after his win in Rome, Ali was part of the 1960s zeitgeist that celebrated questioning the establishment, traditional authority figures and the status quo, he broke ground leading America's election of Kenyan-American Barack Obama as the country's first presidency a half-century later.