Jack Anderson: 10 years after Ali's death, the greatest lives on in memories

Atlanta was 30 years ago. Thirty years before that in 1966, Ali was lighting another flame...

THE GREATEST: Muhammad Ali. Getty 

It’s 10 years to the month since Muhammad Ali died. As a boxer, athlete-activist, and self-marketeer, he was ahead of his time. He also died ahead of his time. In boxing we know that repetitive blows to the head can later lead to chronic brain trauma. We’ve known that for a century thanks to a scientific paper published in 1928 by an American pathologist Dr Harrison Martland, who used a well-known boxing colloquialism, but little-evidenced scientific phenomenon, to headline his paper – punch drunk.

One of the few photos that exist of Martland is of him performing an autopsy at Newark City Hospital in the 1920s, a cigarette loosely pursed on his lips; just showing that medicine, even some of its greatest practitioners, can sometimes take a while to realise a danger billowing in front of them.