Jun 4, 2016 4 min read

Words can’t describe how glad I am to have grown up when I did. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written that sentence over the last 100 years or so. It usually preceded or followed a story about helicopter parents, overly organized youth sports, outlawing tag on the playground or the sissification of the American male.

But late Friday night I found two words to describe how glad I am to have grown up when I did.

Muhammad Ali.

When I heard about his death, I was reminded of how lucky I was to have grown up in the ’60s because of people like him.

I remember where I was Feb. 25, 1964.

I was 15 years old, sitting on the living room floor in front of my dad’s HiFi listening to the fight between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston. Clay was the only person on the planet who thought anybody could beat Liston, a guy who learned to box in the Missouri State Penitentiary while doing time for armed robbery.

I became as big a fan of the future Muhammad Ali as there was in the country.

My 43-year-old dad said Clay was a bum who wouldn’t have lasted a round with Joe Louis, but all the old guys said that and it made us kids like him even more.

Ali’s death got me to thinking about all the great world-changing events and people in that decade.

Clay said after he beat Liston, “I shook up the world.” And he did. I don’t have to tell you how.

Boxing and sports were never the same.

Sixteen days before the Clay-Liston fight, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. Music would never be the same. Has there been a musical act since that shook up the world the way The Beatles did?

Three months before that, the world was shaken by the assassination of another larger than life figure, John F. Kennedy.

Politics would never be the same.

America would never be the same.

He’s the guy who announced in 1961 we would be putting someone on the moon and bringing him back safely before the end of the decade.

For a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, the decade started off with the 1960 Pirates. The town went crazy with Bob Prince – another guy who made me glad to have grown up when I did – calling Pirates games coming from everybody’s backyard.

The old people kept talking about how it had been 33 years since the Pirates had been to the World Series. For an 11-year-old kid, it might as well have been 133 years.

Of course, I got to watch Roberto Clemente, Major League Baseball’s best hitter from 1960-69.

The nuns didn’t let us out of class to watch the World Series but they let us out to watch, on the little black and white TV in the cafeteria, Alan Shepard become the first American in space on May 5, 1961, and John Glenn become the first American to orbit the Earth the following February.

Come on. Men in space?

So Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali popped up in the middle of a tumultuous, Earth-shaking decade and in the middle of all of it became the most famous person on the planet.

Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated in 1968, and 1969 had the Amazin’ Mets and Neil Armstrong taking a giant leap that JFK proposed eight years earlier.

Ali made his decision to evade the military draft and had his title taken away in 1967.

When he made his comeback in 1970, I drove with my college roommate, Dave, who was as big an Ali fan as I was, from Kent, Ohio to Cleveland to watch him stop Jerry Quarry with a cut over his eye in the fourth round. We might have been the only white guys in the theatre rooting for Ali.

In March, 1971, we made the same drive through a white-out blizzard in Dave’s Volkswagen Beetle and barely made it to see Ali-Frazier I. I’m pretty sure we were the only white guys not rooting for Frazier.

I’ve covered World Series Game 7s, Super Bowls and Stanley Cup Finals. I even covered four heavyweight title fights in person, and I can tell you that the Ali-Frazier, Ali-Foreman and Ali-Norton fights I saw on a giant, fuzzy closed circuit TV screen were every bit as exciting. Maybe more.

And I wouldn’t trade listening to Ali-Liston on the HiFi for a ringside seat to see whoever is the heavyweight champion today.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday sports column for the Observer-Reporter.