US President Barack Obama said he "shook up the world, and the world's better for it". George Foreman called him royalty, but added that the "common man was his pal". Paul McCartney remembered his sense of humour and how he "would often pull a pack of cards out of his pocket, no matter how posh the occasion, and do a card trick for you".
In the full sentences of official statements and the terse, quickly typed prose of Twitter and Instagram, the world mourned the loss of the three-time world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who died on Friday at 74. Athletes, celebrities, lawmakers and artists paid tribute to a superstar famous for audacious self-confidence as he faced opponents in the ring and unanticipated bravery as he faced illness.
Ali's funeral is scheduled for Friday in Louisville, Kentucky, his hometown. The eulogies will be given by former President Bill Clinton, Billy Crystal and Bryant Gumbel.
Many echoed Ali's own description of himself as "the greatest" -- "If you asked him, he'd just tell you," the president and his wife, Michelle, said -- but not only in the ring. "A giant, an inspiration, a man of peace, a warrior for the cure," said the actor Michael Fox, who was 30 when he learned he had Parkinson's disease. Ali was given the diagnosis when he was 42.
US President Barack Obama drew strong online criticism for posting a photo of himself in his Twitter tribute.
"His may be the greatest of 20th-century American stories," said the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. And as reporters remembered enduringly quotable encounters with Ali -- like the time in 1964 when he promised to "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" -- Sports Illustrated said it planned to use a photograph of Ali on the cover of its June 13 issue. It will be the 40th time he has occupied that spot.
Some, like the boxer Floyd Mayweather, mentioned "your charisma, your charm and above all, your class". Some recognised Ali as a man willing to defy authority, and pay a price, as he did when he refused to be drafted as the Vietnam War was escalating. He lost his boxing title as a result and did not step into the ring for three years while lawyers appealed in court.
The White House issued a 564-word statement from the Obamas in which the president said he kept a pair of Ali's gloves in his private study off the Oval Office. The president said they were on display beneath "that iconic photograph of him" at age 22, "roaring like a lion over a fallen Sonny Liston". He added: "I was too young when it was taken to understand who he was -- still Cassius Clay, already an Olympic gold medal winner, yet to set out on a spiritual journey that would lead him to his Muslim faith, exile him at the peak of his power and set the stage for his return to greatness with a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden."
The president also said Ali "stood with King and Mandela, stood up when it was hard, spoke out when others wouldn't".
He also praised Ali's refusal to be drafted and his court fight, which ended in victory in the Supreme Court. The justices, reversing a lower court, gave him the conscientious-objector status he had sought after a draft board reclassified him available for military service.
"Ali stood his ground," the president said. "And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognise today."
The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, noted that Ali had grown up in Louisville and that Louisville was the site of the Muhammad Ali Centre, a museum that opened 11 years ago. "Inside the ring," Mr McConnell said, "he was graceful on his feet and packed a powerful punch. Outside the ring, he thrilled us with his exuberance for life."
The Senate minority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, recalled meeting Ali one morning in June 1972 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Reid was 32, and Ali was about two years younger. "That morning I was just a star-struck kid from Searchlight," Reid said, referring to the town where he was born.
"Muhammad Ali was everything the world had come to know and love -- funny, charming and one hell of an athlete," Mr Reid said.
On social media, there were reactions from boxers who followed him in the ring -- "God came for his champion. So long great one," Mike Tyson posted on Twitter -- and from people who remembered the conscientious-objector case. The filmmaker Michael Moore noted that Ali was "convicted as a felon simply because he refused to go to Vietnam".
The Appolo Theater in the Harlem district of New York City, was and is the showcase for black show-business talent. (AP photo)
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the former basketball star, recalled meeting Ali in 1967, soon after Ali's conviction for draft evasion. Abdul-Jabbar, then Lew Alcindor, said on ESPN that he was the youngest of the well-known black athletes who met with Ali and, after questioning him about his stand on the draft, appeared at a news conference together, expressing support for him.
Abdul-Jabbar said he and Ali became friends. He said they had "a difference in style with regard to how he presented his issues and his passion for them." But he added, "What it's all about was freedom and justice and equality for all Americans, equal opportunity for all Americans."
"One of his legacies, his outreach across the lines of religion, to remove all the obstacles and build bridges, you know, that's what he was about," Abdul-Jabbar said on ESPN. "He did that until he drew his last breath."
The boxing promoter Don King, whose career was jump-started by the Rumble in the Jungle bout between Ali and Foreman in what was then Zaire in 1974, told The Associated Press, "It's a sad day for life, man."
"Like Martin Luther King, his spirit will live on," King said. "He stood for the world."
Foreman sent several tweets. In one, he said, "Until Ali no one said 'I'm beautiful'." Adding that the "common man was his pal", Foreman said: "That is beauty. Greatest kind." He also said Ali did not beat him in the Rumble in the Jungle with the famous "rope-a-dope" tactic.
"No," Foreman wrote on Twitter, it was "his beauty that beat me."
Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the Broadway musical "Hamilton", posted an interview with Ali that was published in Playboy magazine in 1975 in which he said he would like to be remembered "as a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and who treated everyone right." Ali also mentioned helping "as many of his people as he could -- financially and also in their fight for freedom, justice and equality" and trying "to unite his people through the faith of Islam".
At the end he added, "And I wouldn't even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was." © 2016 The New York Times