Back in the Ring, Manny Pacquiao Battles the Ghost of Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali is to boxing what William Shakespeare is to language, yet just as the sport delivered the “Louisville Lip” to the world stage, it also rendered him, by the end of his life, nearly unable to mumble a discernible sentence.

“Time is a vandal,” journalist Jimmy Cannon wrote. He watched his hero, Joe Louis, get beaten mercilessly into retirement by Rocky Marciano in 1951. Louis was Ali’s hero, too, and, in 1980, Louis went to Caesar’s Palace in his wheelchair and saw Larry Holmes brutalize Ali until Angelo Dundee finally stopped the beating.