What round he would knock out his opponents in wasn’t the only thing boxing legend Muhammad Ali used to predict.
He once said the U.S. government should put his picture on a stamp.
“That’s the only way I’ll ever get licked,” he bragged.
Well, the U.S. Postal Service went ahead and did it. The champ is on a stamp.
“Those of you who knew Muhammad would have relished this moment,” Ali’s longtime wife Lonnie said during an announcement last week in Ali’s hometown of Louisville, Ky.
“I know he would want this moment to be a teaching moment, too. This moment is an invitation to all of us, an invitation to pause and ask ourselves before every word we utter — what stamp am I making on this world?”
Few Americans made more of an impact on the world than Muhammad Ali.
He won a gold medal for his country during the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome.
Seven years later, he took a sacrificial stand against the Vietnam War, and was stripped of his boxing crown.
“No, I will not go 10,000 miles from here to help murder and kill another poor people simply to continue the domination of white slave masters over the darker people of the Earth,” Ali, just 25 years old, said.
“The real enemies of my people are right here — not in Vietnam.”
Ali, who died nearly 10 years ago on June 3, 2016, was given the posthumous stamp honor on Jan. 15 on what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 97th birthday, just days before the national holiday in King’s honor.
King was among Ali’s biggest admirers, praising the dethroned boxing champ for defying the draft in 1967.
“He’s doing what he’s doing on the basis of conscience,” King said at the time. “He’s absolutely sincere. I strongly endorse his actions.”
King, who also spoke out against the war and the draft, was assassinated less than a year later, shot and killed on a Memphis hotel balcony as he prepared to march in support of striking sanitation workers.
Like King, Ali was a flawed man. His infidelity and other issues cost him three marriages before finally settling down with Lonnie Ali.
And he lost points with many fans for his cruel taunting of fellow boxing champ Joe Frazier, whom he called “a gorilla,” an ugly, racially loaded insult that hurt Frazier more than any of Ali’s jabs.
But perfect people have never led any movement. Infallibility has never been a requirement for standing up to injustice.
We get flawed leaders because they inspire us to be our best despite what holds us back.
Ali, by his own and other accounts, was The Greatest boxer of all time.
But he was even greater outside the ring, spreading a message of peace and love despite his battle with Parkinson’s Syndrome that robbed him of his speech and mobility.
During his lifetime, the man born Cassius Clay Jr. before changing his name and joining the Nation of Islam, won an Olympic gold medal in 1960, the United Nations Messenger of Peace Award in 1998, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.
Now his face is on a stamp.
“This stamp will travel millions of miles,” Lonnie Ali said. “It will pass through countless hands, but it will quietly remind the world of a man who dared to believe that kindness could be powerful and that being in service to others could be heroic.”
