When We Were Kings
“Titanic cosmic self-assertion…” - Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
One of the most extraordinary moments in the documentary When We Were Kings: Ali in close-up, but at an angle, as always he is, as if the camera itself were afraid to meet full-on the fury of his gaze, finally in frustration venting at the assembled press for the insufferable crime of being scared of the monstrous Foreman.
“Scared of what?” he snaps, straining at some self-imposed leash, sure sign that Ali alone amongst all would never hurt us, “There’s nothing to be scared of.”; withdrawing now, into his seat and self, and again, mumbling, “Scared of what.”, but this time an inaudible mutter accompanied by a haunted dart of the eyes, and suddenly he is like nothing so much as he is the bullish older brother spooked momentarily by the fears of younger kids, and yes, it occurs that this is what Ali had been doing all along, diminishing and weakening resistance simply by willing it so, swatting aside the so many mite-bites of smaller souls 
before they could rupture the supreme bubble of his consciousness, a snow-globe within which even the behemothal George Foreman shrank to the size of a crumpled beer can, distorted by the magic mirrors of Ali’s mind. But what a will!
Increasingly rationalistic and objectifying, above all we value those people who can see things as they are; how rarely it occurs that there are people in whom the mere act of seeing is itself a changing force, to whose perception reality bends and obsequies like a paid piper. Incredible! Just watch Ali, just watch him talking, in conference rooms, in training, toe-to-toe even with Oblivion, watch those whirling words go like incantations flying, Ali, assigning to each thing the very nature of itself, like Aslan singing the world into creation!
We like to be able to say of a field, like sport, in which we do not yet acknowledge genius, that its greatest practitioners are comparable to those of the arts: that Ali, say, is the Bakhtin, or the Beethoven, or the Bobby Fischer of boxing. Better yet that we should call him its Byron: spurning the baseness and poverty of the roles inherent to us through either essence or existence, grinning the truth in masquerade, revering as God and first cause almighty of all things not the world but the mind.