IT IS 1996, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Coca-Cola’s home town. And in a great coup de théâtre, with NBC there to send the world the pictures, Muhammad Ali took the torch, raised it in his trembling arm and lit the Olympic flame.

Ali, the well-beloved. Ali, the man who had stood for integration. Ali, the man who preached tolerance in a troubled age. Ali, the hero of the civil rights movement. Ali, cruelly struck down by a caprice of biology, still showing the courage and the strength that America had always loved.

Never in the history of sport has the past been so comprehensively rewritten. Ali was not loved, he was hated. Before that epochal bout with Sonny Liston, he was hated for being a cocky nigger. After it he was hated for being a dangerous revolutionary. And no, he didn’t preach integration. As a disciple of Elijah Muhammad, he wanted a separate nation for black people. “What country is called Negro?” a black Muslim preacher had asked Ali in his youth.

And no, it is by no means certain that Ali was struck down by illness. It is, some neurologists believe, far more likely that he is suffering from damage sustained by boxing. But such an idea spoils the story. There is a need, it seems, to see Ali as a hero brought down by something other than the trade he practised with such brilliance.

At the end of the Atlanta Games, they wheeled the old boy out again. This time they gave him a gold medal, to replace the one which, according to legend, he hurled into the Ohio river in disgust after a traumatic encounter with a gang of white trash.

The presentation happened at the basketball final, the event in which Dream Team II stomped the rest of the world, a somewhat tautological expression of American hegemony. And there was Ali, the former butterfly-floater, wading through treacle to his medal with the whoops of his ever-loving American public echoing in his ears. And it occurred to me, as I sat in the arena, that Ali was America’s Mr Rochester.

Mr Rochester is the homme fatal in Jane Eyre, but he can’t be truly loved by Jane until he has been blinded — until he has been more or less castrated. Ali is no longer dangerous, so now he can be loved without question, without ambiguity, without restraint.

It was all rather different 40 years ago. Before the first bout against Liston, the bragging had gone down pretty badly. A Good Negro was supposed to be humble. Ali didn’t do humble. And he said he was pretty. Outrageous for any male athlete to claim to be pretty, but multiply that by a factor of ten for a black man. It was a revolutionary concept for the white world. Black men aren’t pretty — they all look the same, for a start, and they’re all ugly. What made matters worse was that Ali’s beauty was so obvious it was hard to blind yourself to it, though plenty tried.

After the bout, Ali took hatred on to a higher plane by publicly embracing the Nation of Islam. From that moment, every time he was spoken of, that fact would have to be taken into account. That is because it involved a change of name. Ali rejected his “slave name” of Cassius Clay. He publicly espoused an organisation that was involved in a kind of warfare against white people. Against the Establishment. Against America. “I’m not a Christian any more,” he said. “I know where I’m going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want. I don’t have to be what you want me to be.”

Savour that. It is the key to the man, the athlete, the rebel, the performer, the thinker, the truth, the myth. And he was a Muslim. America struggled with the concept then and it still struggles with the very idea of Islam today. Ali was not a part of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King said: “When Cassius Clay joined the Black Muslims . . . he became a champion of racial segregation, and that is what we are fighting against.”

It was a fundamental difference in philosophy. Ali was a separatist. King wanted to destroy barriers, Ali to reinforce them. Malcolm X was openly scathing about the peaceful protests that King espoused. He was especially scornful of sit-ins: “Anyone can sit. An old woman can sit. A coward can sit . . . it takes a man to stand.”

Ali was always a stander by nature. And so he refused the draft, not because he was a peace-lover, but because it was a white man’s war and nothing to do with him. In a confused meeting with the press, he suddenly blurted out the line that summed up his stance for all time: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

It was a phrase that, despite Ali’s separatist agenda, leapt clean across the racial divide. America was full of people who had no quarrel with them Viet Cong. So, for that matter, was the world. The world outside America was much quicker to love Ali; anti-Americanism is often an endearing trait, especially in an American.