SOON AFTER MUHAMMAD ALI posed as a martyr, the country got a real one. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered on April 4, 1968, while the Esquire cover with Ali as Saint Sebastian was on the newsstands. I felt disgusted the first time I saw it. I had been following Ali for four years for the New York Times and I thought pimping him as a saint to sell a magazine was almost as morally corrupt as stripping his heavyweight title for his refusal to be drafted.

Ali’s was the most recognizable face on the planet at that time, its greatest athlete and rapper, willfully misinterpreted as hero