This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
CHICAGO • Muhammad Ali kissed me once. On the cheek.
According to my dad, I was 4 or 5 years old. We were standing around at a terminal in Chicago's O'Hare Airport waiting on the arrival of a family member when my dad spotted a crowd forming around a large, familiar figure.
My father picked me up in his arms and followed the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion out onto the street shouting for my grandmother and aunt to follow him.
I remember the giant mass of a man bending deeply over to gently kiss my tiny grandmother and aunt on the cheek. Then Ali reached down, picked me up and planted a soft, tiny kiss on my face, which, at the time, I found odd considering we had not been properly introduced.
He was so kind to us in those short few moments, signing the only piece of paper my dad had on him — a five-dollar bill which lives on in family history. There are surely thousands of people out there with similar stories, as Ali was well-known for being very kind to his legions of adoring fans.
And so another hero passes.
As I enter the back half of my life, a sad repeating occurrence is seeing people who have been huge parts of public life as long as I've been alive become consigned to history.
Just in the last six months, there have been so many: Alan Young, of "Mister Ed" fame (a show my father credits for helping him polish his English when he first arrived in this country), the venerated journalist Morley Safer, the legendary Merle Haggard, the far-too-young Prince, the inimitable David Bowie, the irresistible Alan Rickman, to name only a few.
Ali, however, was something of a different order. He managed to combine both pride and humility, and both explosive physical violence and pacifism. He was a civil rights contradiction.
Frankly, until his death, I didn't know much about him. Nothing, really, aside from his excellence in the ring, which was what made him a household name even, apparently, in the hills of the Andes mountains where my grandmother had lived not too long before coming to Chicago, the town where Ali emerged from his former Cassius Clay self.
It turns out that the same guy who eventually went on to say, "Color doesn't make a man a devil. It's the heart and soul and mind that count. What's on the outside is only decoration," had previously broken the golden rule of being a minority in America — you don't put down others who face similar obstacles — by mocking rival Joe Frazier's skin color, hair and other features.
Then there was his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, and his jump into the arms of the Nation of Islam, which is today classified as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a top civil rights advocacy organization.
Julian Bond, former longtime chairman of the NAACP and former president of the SPLC, once told The New York Times: "I remember when Ali joined the Nation of Islam. ... The act of joining was not something many of us particularly liked. But the notion he'd do it — that he'd jump out there, join this group that was so despised by mainstream America, and be proud of it — sent a little thrill through you."
That a boxer had that kind of cultural and political cache is amazing just in and of itself.
President Obama said it best in his statement on Ali's passing: "He wasn't perfect, of course. For all his magic in the ring, he could be careless with his words, and full of contradictions as his faith evolved. But his wonderful, infectious, even innocent spirit ultimately won him more fans than foes — maybe because in him, we hoped to see something of ourselves. ... Muhammad Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it. We are all better for it."
There is a belief in some East and Central African societies that a recently departed person remains in the "Sasha" until the last living person who can remember them also dies. Then he or she moves on to the "Zamani," where they become part of the collective human story.
Undoubtedly, Ali will be among those who will live on in our collective consciousness for a long time to come.
Twitter, @estherjcepeda