Hi, this is Josh Levine and Stefan Fatsis and I are going to bring you a special episode of Hang Up and Listen. We're recording this on June 4th, 2016, the day after Muhammad Ali's death. In 1964, a young New York Times sports writer named Robert Lipsite was assigned to cover, as he later put it, the dismemberment of the fighter, then known as

Cassius Clay, at the hands of heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.

After Clay shocked the world, Lipsight covered the boxer for the next three years as he

changed his name to Muhammad Ali and helped redefine sports in American society.

And Lipsight continued to write about Ali through his death on Friday. An agile mind, a buoyant personality, a brash self-confidence,

and an evolving set of personal convictions fostered a magnetism that the ring alone could not

contain. Lipsight writes in his obituary of Ali in the New York

Times. He entertained as much with his mouth as with his fists, narrating his life with a

patter of inventive doggerel. Robert Libsite joins us now. Hey, Bob. Hey, how are you guys? So I'm getting

all these condolence calls, and I don't think we need to mourn.

I think we just kind of need to celebrate what he once was, which really was the most interesting

and spectacular sports figure that any of us have ever even thought about, I think. And most

importantly, I think what we really want to do, and what we want to do here on this podcast,

is remind people that he's not the secular saint in this kind of beatified teddy bear that people have been thinking

of him in the last few years.

He was a very controversial, very scary, very paradoxical, very interesting character

who in his time kind of epitomize the splits in America.

The thing that really makes me totally angry right now is stories coming out about

Ali as this noted civil rights activist.

If anything, early on when he first rose to prominence, he was the anti-civil rights activist.

We were kind of appalled.

Most of us were kind of young liberal reporters who were really interested in this story, were integrationists.

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