Inevitably, it was George W. Bush who epitomised the rewriting of history when he handed the former world heavyweight boxing champion the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, the President’s eyes twinkling with suppressed excitement as he described Ali as a “man of peace” and having “a beautiful soul”.

Ali performed a little pirouette as onlookers grinned. In many ways, it represented the apogee of Ali’s rehabilitation in the eyes of white America and the culmination of the long and dubious process of historical revisionism.

Every nation fights for the way its heroes are remembered, but in the case of Ali it has been a knockout blow for the conservative elite, something that is rendered more poignant because Ali, quivering under the affliction of Parkinson’s disease, is in no fit state to have a say in the matter. In the eyes of a new generation, he is a Gandhi-esque caricature: non-controversial, utterly non-threatening and devoid of the contradictions that symbolised the deep divisions in postwar American consciousness.

The suspicion that Ali’s handlers have conspired in this anti-historical process is confirmed by the hagiographic Muhammad Ali Center in Kentucky, a temple inscribed with simpering platitudes and pacificatory iconography.

It is difficult to imagine that any youth who happened to strut in from the ghettos of downtown Louisville would leave with any authentic sense of the provocative role that Ali played in the ructions of the Civil Rights movement, or the polemical way he asserted his opposition to Vietnam: “No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.” But even more disturbingly, the youth would walk away oblivious to the shocking fact that the cause to which Ali gave his puff has failed in many of its most basic objectives.

The 2000 census was unequivocal, recording the enduring concentration of poverty, drug abuse and criminality among black Americans. Is it any wonder that liberal intellectuals discern the rancid whiff of tokenism in the accolades that continue to rain down on the former champion?

Of course, many of Ali’s acolytes will be pleased that in the rush to sanitise him in the eyes of white America, some of the hypocritical aspects of his character have been glossed over. There is little mention of the fact that he proclaimed white people were “blue-eyed devils” while not only enjoying friendships with whites but also employing many in his vast entourage. Or that he evangelised about the value of liberty while courting some of the world’s most sadistic dictators, including Idi Amin, Ferdinand Marcos and President Mobutu.

Many will argue that Ali was misled by his devotion to the Nation of Islam, the black religious sect headed by Elijah Muhammad, but this hardly excuses the tendency to omit all reference to its implications. Although the Nation’s theology was crudely apocalyptic — it believed white people were congenitally unjust, having been bred in a malign historical experiment, and that blacks will be rescued from Judgment Day by a wheel-shaped spaceship — it was its policies on social housing and family values that captivated Ali and other disaffected blacks.

But even here there was hypocrisy. Ali followed the example of Elijah Muhammad in moralising about the virtues of sexual abstinence while living a life of rampant promiscuity. This was never better illustrated than at the Thrilla in Manila in 1975, when Ali caused a diplomatic incident at a presidential reception by introducing Veronica Porsche, his girlfriend, as his wife. Belinda Ali, who had put up with the boxer’s philandering for years, flew to the Philippines for an explosive confrontation. They divorced two years later.

Ali’s seminal historical influence derived not only from his sporting and oratorical genius but from his intuitive grasp of his country’s traumatic history. Martin Luther King started fully to comprehend the cultural and psychic depths of racial division only after the signing of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. But this is something Ali understood deep in his bones and articulated with a poetic thrust that cut to the quick of a new generation of politically self-conscious African Americans.

But where is that melodious voice now? Who knows how Ali, freed from the terrible restrictions of Parkinson’s, would have pronounced upon the great issues that defined his era and have yet to be resolved? Who can tell how a new generation of black Americans would have reacted to his historical legacy had it not been drowned in a torrent of mushy and historically misleading sentimentality?()

Ali’s tragic mistake was to ignore the evidence of his body after the bouts that left him urinating blood. He should have retired after his defeat of Joe Frazier in Manila, but no one was around to tell him. His vast entourage wanted him to box on, as did his religious mentors. Indeed, the wider world, still traumatised by Watergate and Vietnam, yearned for the escapism provided by Ali’s global roadshow, with its glorious pre-bout vaudeville.

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