Happy Birthday Champ - I Wish I'd Reported On You!

Over the 25 years I have been writing about sport I have been lucky enough to have covered just about everything in world sport, from six Olympic Games to six rugby world cups, football world cups, Commonwealth Games, all kinds of world championships and even the odd world boxing title fight, but if there is one sportsman, and one event I would have killed to have covered it was Muhammad Ali and his Rumble in the Jungle, although his Thrilla in Manila would have been almost as good.

Instead I watch the wonderful documentary, "When We Were Kings," and marvel at Ali, George Foreman, the entourages, the music stars and the cream of American and European sports journalism. Oh how good must it have been to have spent that month in Zaire in the court of Ali!

I say all this because, of course, today is Ali's 70th birthday and, riddled with Parkinson's Disease which, according to the medics, should have killed him many years ago, he is still fighting. I was there in the Atlanta Olympic Stadium when Ali, his hand shaking as he made his slow way up towards the bowl, lit the flame to officially open the Games.

It was a memorable, hairs on the back of my neck, moment. I also interviewed Larry Holmes, one of the all-time greats in heavyweight boxing but a man completely overshadowed by Ali. Holmes beat Ali up in 1980 in the ring, by which time Ali was a pale shadow of his former self and already suffering from the first stages of his illness.

Holmes defended his world title that night but as each punch rained in on his hero it hurt the current champion as much as the former. "I wanted him to stop," Holmes told me. "But he just wouldn't. I hated punching him." Such was the esteem Holmes held the great man in.

Ironically Ali has outlived two of his famous opponents, Henry Cooper and Joe Frazier, who both passed away recently. Let's hope this champion, this human rights fighter who pricked the world's conscience over the Vietnam War and civil rights in the States, and who has now shed so much light on a truly dreadful illness, has a few more years in him yet.