Legend Muhammad Ali’s most important fight -– against Parkinson’s disease -- led to the creation of the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Center at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix.
“Muhammad stood up to this disease for 34 years,” said Abraham Lieberman, Ali’s personal physician, who last saw him on the day he died.
After Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in the 1980s, the Champion was said to have resisted attempts to lend his name to campaigns on the disease. But that changed after Ali met Lieberman, who wrote a poem that persuaded Ali to join in and establish the Center in 1997.
The poem ended:
Let Muhammad Ali be known, not as the
man who floored Sonny Liston'/
A sledge hammer could have done that/
But as the man who buried Parkinson disease/
Only the Greatest could do that
Parkinson's disease is a progressive disorder of the nervous system that affects movement, says Mayo Clinic. And though it cannot be cured at present, it can be managed with medication. Ali’s fighting spirit was epitomised in his lighting of the Olympic flame in Atlanta (1996). He soldiered on as an inspiration for many others with the illness.