Irish bareknuckle boxer tells of unlikely friendship with Ali
The 72-year-old from Fermanagh started a campaign to get Ali's boxing licence reinstated when he was stripped of that and his world heavyweight title in 1967 for refusing to join the US Army's war effort in Vietnam.
Monaghan oversaw a petition that accumulated 22,224 signatures, later wrote to US president Richard Nixon to plead Ali's case, and eventually grew so close to him that "The Greatest" frequently visited him and his family in their home in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
