“So I went to talk to Ali,” Arum told Mannix. “He says, ‘Jim wants to do what? Bring him here.’ So I took him to Hyde Park in London, where Ali used to run. Ali said, ‘Jimmy, here’s what we’re going to do: You hit me as hard as you can.’

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“So Brown starts swinging and swinging, and he can’t hit him. He’s swinging wildly and not even coming close. This goes on for, like, 30 seconds. Then Ali hits him with this quick one-two to his face. Jimmy just stops and says, ‘Okay, I get the point.’ ”

Good instinct. Even a decade later, Ali remained lightning fast, as Michael Dokes, then 19, found out in a fight against the 35-year-old. As a 15-year-old, he’d bragged about challenging Ali one day.

“I call myself Dynomite Dokes. Dyn-o-mite,” he told Sports Illustrated when he was 17. “When I’m moving and grooving, there ain’t nobody in the world who can touch me. Speed? They ain’t seen nothing. My hands are so fast they can’t catch them on film. I can hit a guy three times and all he can think is somebody has snuck up behind him. I told Muhammad Ali, ‘I’m gonna get you, old man, so you better get out while you can.’ ”

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Here’s how that worked out for Dokes:

Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman, author of a Jim Brown biography, writes that Ali and Brown were, besides being occasional sparring partners, close. Brown organized a press conference at which Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) and other great athletes of the ’60s expressed support for Ali, who had refused as a conscientious objector to be inducted into the military. Brown, now 80, was asked on “Meet the Press” about the lessons Ali’s life holds for young athletes today.

“Money is not God, and human dignity is very important,” he said. “Your integrity is way up there. And as a single human being, if you carry yourself in a certain way, you can defy all evil that comes at us. I’d like to make one thing very clear: Muhammad Ali loved people, and he had white friends as well as black friends — and the only thing that he hated was discrimination and racism. And so that’s the way that I look at him, and that’s how I’d close out my talking to you today.”

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