Muhammad Ali scored his first knockout against his own mother when just 18 months old

 Ali took to boxing aged 12, to beat up the kid who stole his bike

“I jab him once, twice, three times. Dance away. I move in again. Bam. Bam. Bam. I hit him five times. He hits me one time. I back away. I’m moving around him. Bim. Bim. Bim. I get him again. He’s movin’ in, ain’t reaching me because he’s too small to reach me. He’s reachin’ and strainin’ with those hooks, and they’re getting longer and longer. And now he’s lunging and jumping, and that’s when I started popping and smoking,” that’s how Muhammad Ali described his fight strategy against Joe Frazier in 1971, the so-called “Fight of the Century,” which Ali lost.

Did you know that Cassius Clay aka Muhammad Ali came out swinging, and scored his first knockout against his own mother Odessa. Clay, then a toddler, waved his arms around, as babies do, and punched his mother’s tooth out. He was just 18 months old.

He once asked his father Cassius Sr, “Why can’t I be rich?” In reply, his father touched his son’s hands and said: “Look here,” he said. “That’s why you can’t be rich.”

Ali took to boxing aged 12, to beat up the kid who stole his bike. That was in 1954. As a kid, books gave him trouble — he barely graduated in high school because of his struggle with reading.

He would however rise to win Olympic gold medal in 1960 in Rome. It is rumoured that he threw the medal into the Ohio River after he was publicly referred to as “the Olympic nigger” and denied service at many downtown restaurants. He claimed to have lost the medal and would get a replacement medal.

Off the ring, Ali helped to secure the release of 15 US prisoners in Iraq in 1990 after meeting with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on a “goodwill tour”. Ali was instantly criticised, taking flak from the likes of then-President George Bush.

“I’m not going to let Muhammad Ali return to the US,” Saddam had said, “without having a number of the American citizens accompanying him.” Ali got all 15.

So controversial was Ali that National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapped his phone, that’s according to declassified documents revealed in 2013. NSA tapped overseas communications of Vietnam War critics, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Ali.

In a mighty show of defiance on April 28, 1967, Mohamed Ali refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army and was immediately stripped of his heavyweight title.

Ali said: “I’ve got nothing against them Vietcongs” and “I can fight in wars declared only by Allah himself.” He was sentenced to five years in prison, though the Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that he was entitled to conscientious objector status.