Muhammad Ali turns 65 on Wednesday. Let this be a lesson to you kids out there, because some day you’re going to be reading the same thing about the great you had growing up, whether it’s Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky or Lance Armstrong.

Those are some pretty good athletes with whose stories you will bore your grandchildren. But as great as they are, none will ever exert the influence across the years and the generations that Ali has. It’s not that they are lesser men, but that they have lived in lesser times.

Even today, according to the people who paid $50 million for the rights to market Ali’s name, no athlete has a higher profile around the world — or a more positive one.

With Ali ready to turn 65, the traditional age of retirement — 26 years after he last worked in a boxing ring — it’s a good time to look back on how he came to be so revered around the world. It certainly wasn’t anything he set out to achieve; Ali was a fighter, a kid from Louisville who took up boxing because another kid stole his bicycle.

He won a gold medal in the 1960 Rome Olympics, and although the potential greatness was obvious, the regard in which he would come to be held was well hidden. Ali was not a Boomer himself, having been born in 1942, three years before the first of that post-World War II generation emerged squalling upon the stage. But he led the Boomers through their youth and young adulthood, showing them at every turn a new way of looking at things.

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Before Ali, heroes were made of the stuff that society most admired; they were of their eras, not ahead of them. Babe Ruth was the Roaring 20s. Mickey Mantle was the blue-collar child of the 1950s. But not Ali. He was born into the insular black community of Louisville, but he didn’t follow the lead of other iconic African-American athletes before him. Whereas Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson worked so hard not to offend the white folks, Ali at first seemed intent on offending everyone. It was hardly the recipe for creating a legend.

But the times made it all possible; Ali would have been crushed by society if he had come along earlier; he would have been ignored if his day had come later. Jack Johnson tried being a proud and independent and unapologetic black man early in the 20^th century, and America wouldn’t let him.

He wouldn’t be possible today, either, not in an era in which no one gets points for standing on principle — if there are any left to stand on — and not in an era in which it is impossible to shock the masses with anything as simple as a name change and a conversion to Islam.

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What made Ali was that he stood for something new and brave at a time when the children of the Baby Boom were ready to forge an identity separate from their parents, when Vietnam and a new sense of personal freedom and political empowerment was sweeping the nation.

Heroes like Jordan and Woods will go down among the all-time great athletes. But they haven’t had a cause to take them beyond the arena. They sell shoes and clothing and athletic equipment; Ali sold an ideal. They got rich on their talents; Ali gave up untold millions by ticking off the establishment, millions that he’s only now starting to get back, thanks to a generation that wasn’t even born until after his career was over.

What Ali stood for was the power and the right of each individual to forge his own identity and to choose his own beliefs. It wasn’t a popular course to choose, and if he were around today, his agents and business consultants wouldn’t allow it.

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