Boxing: Ali made the world ring to his message.

Byline: Barry McGuigan/KEVIN GARSIDE

HOLLYWOOD has done a real number on Muhammad Ali. We are no nearer a definitive understanding of the man himself after watching Will Smith's noble effort, of course.

For that I suggest Leon Gast's excellent work When We Were Kings. The film embraces the myth of Ali the fighter, while the book demystifies Ali the man.

I had no problem at all with the movie. Essentially it is a eulogy to a great, great fighter.

Smith portrayed Ali as well as anyone could, the fight choreography was top notch and the bouts realistic enough with James Toney playing Joe Frazier, Michael Bentt impersonating Sonny Liston and James Schuler slugging it out as George Foreman.

But the really interesting stuff in the life of Ali centres not on matters inside the ring, as brilliant as he was, but outside. Which ever way you look at it the man is a paradox.

Fiercely intelligent yet poorly read, charismatic but uneducated, a great communicator in public but a figure who struggled to sustain private relationships, a freedom fighter who frowned on mixed-race marriages.

Ali's critics have jumped all over the problems he has had in his private life, his womanising, his appalling treatment of loyal friend Malcolm X, his ritual humiliation of fellow black fighters Liston, Floyd Patterson and Joe Frazier.

While they have a point, to focus on his personal shortcomings misses the bigger picture. Ali arguably reached more people than the prominent black figures at the forefront of the civil rights movement.

There is no doubting the greatness and nobility of, for example, Martin Luther King in America and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, the former paying the ultimate price and the latter a dear one for the cause of black freedom.

Yet their voices initially reached largely national audiences. Ali's impact was immediately wider. When he resisted the American draft saying "No Vietcong ever called me nigger", he politicised the globe.

He already had the world transfixed with his boxing ability and vivid personality. When he made his stand at the end of the Sixties, a whole swathe of humanity who had no knowledge of King or Mandela, was listening.

His message was bold and courageous and took him into territory no athlete had been before, or since. This is the real legacy of Ali. It mattered not that he fell short behind closed doors of the high principles he espoused in the public arena.

People believed in the public figure. They walked over barriers he helped to bring down.

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THE GREATEST: Will Smith's portrayal did justice to Ali