In the millions of words said and written following the death of Muhammad Ali the relationship he had with two British journalists offered particular insight.

Ali’s interviews with Michael Parkinson did more than anything else to elevate him from sportsman to cultural icon in this part of the world and the broadcaster, whose chat show was compulsive viewing for those of us raised in the seventies, spoke tellingly of the peerless fighter’s contribution to popularising boxing last weekend.

“He did more for the sport than anybody I can think of,” said Parkinson.

“He attracted to boxing an audience that hitherto had regarded it as being barbarous, not even a sport… so from that point of view he was the boxer who reinvented the sport.”

Therein lay a crucial point because that is precisely what Ali achieved. His beauty and brilliance as an athlete blinded us to the brutality of boxing for many years and at what price?

His legacy could be seen in the similarly stylish Sugar Ray Leonard while there were muted echoes of Ali’s combination of wit and braggadocio in the self-promotion of Chris Eubank in the eighties.

However Ali’s spell-binding words and deeds were already a distant memory on 21 September 1991 when Eubank delivered the blow which shocked some of us back to our senses. The punch with which he struck Michael Watson that night was so evidently damaging that it was astonishing that the recipient returned to his feet so quickly, far less surprising when he subsequently collapsed and it became evident that he had become boxing’s latest serious casualty.

It is now impossible to see this as a purely sporting contest in spite of the defence put up by those who still see it as a valid activity.

Only a few days before Ali’s death I had found myself involved in one of many such conversations engaged in during the intervening years when a retired GP, of very similar age to Ali, sought to explain his on-going love of boxing by talking in terms of the character it builds in people and the health benefits it offers, while trotting out the usual claims about other sports such as rugby and racing, whether on horseback or in vehicles, being more dangerous.

The key issue is, however, that those justifications are rendered irrelevant by rules which means that rather than lethal injuries being an incidental consequence of competition, participants are rewarded for inflicting them, most obviously by virtue of inducing brain damage on opponents by rendering concussive knockout blows.

Gladiatorial metaphors have been hideously overused in relation to boxing, but they serve the most effective comparison in these terms. It is hard to imagine other than that only the strongest in terms of both physical conditioning and character could have survived long in the arena, but for all the best efforts of Kirk Douglas and Russell Crowe, we do not need to stretch our imaginations too far to see claims of some sort of nobility associated with such an evil form of entertainment as propaganda. A couple of millennia on the febrile atmosphere which surrounds boxing rings is an obvious descendant of what took place in Roman colosseums.

None of which need dilute the admiration we feel for the boxers themselves and there was only one place to turn for that last weekend as was impressively acknowledged by Parky when he used his broadcast platform to recommend reading the journalistic magnum opus that was the Hugh McIlvanney dominated Ali supplement produced by The Sunday Times, describing it as: “The most moving testament to a great athlete that I can’t improve upon so if they want to know what Ali was like then read that.”

The recently retired greatest sports writer of all time defining the career of the greatest sportsman of all time was not to be missed, mixing his contemporaneous coverage with modern-day perspective on a career that helped define his own, but there was one paragraph which looks to have been all the more prescient more than 40 years after it was written as he reflected on the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ between Ali and George Foreman.

“Ali will not retire, partly because he loves the drama of boxing and partly because the money is too good to refuse. In a sense, that is a pity, for Wednesday would have made a fine exit. As Coretta Clay (Ali’s aunt) says, he is boxing’s Alpha and Omega. Now we have seen him what can it offer us? Maybe both he and boxing should quit while they’re ahead,” McIlvanney wrote back in 1974.

Given all that we know now the death of Muhammad Ali offers another opportunity to consider whether any youngster, let alone those possessed of such intellect and talent, should have to punch others senseless to achieve success, incurring all the risk that ultimately took such a toll even on ‘The Greatest’.