Service Is the Rent We Pay: Muhammad Ali's Legacy of Compassion, 10 Years On

Ten years after his death in June 2016, Muhammad Ali is being remembered less for what he did inside the ring and more for who he tried to be outside it. In Louisville, Kentucky — the city that once watched a brash teenager named Cassius Clay shadow-box his way to Olympic gold — commemorations this month have focused not on left hooks but on a quieter inheritance: compassion, service and the moral courage to speak when staying silent would have been easier.

For Australian readers who grew up watching grainy footage of the Rumble in the Jungle, or who know Ali only as the trembling figure who lit the Atlanta Olympic cauldron in 1996, the global reach of these anniversary tributes is a reminder of something easy to forget. Ali's most enduring contribution was never sporting. It was a way of thinking about how to live in public — and that template is being borrowed, debated and reapplied by activists, athletes and ordinary citizens a decade after his passing.

A Hometown Reframes Its Hero

Louisville's commemorations this month, reported by News.com.au, deliberately leaned into Ali's humanitarian work rather than his championship belts. The week-long programme of events organised around the Muhammad Ali Center centred on what the city calls his “six core principles”: confidence, conviction, dedication, giving, respect and spirituality. The framing was intentional. Ali's hometown wanted visitors to understand that the man who came home from Rome in 1960 with a gold medal eventually came to believe that medals weren't the point.

That message has been echoed in commemorations elsewhere. Al Jazeera, marking the same anniversary, titled its tribute with one of Ali's favourite borrowed phrases: “Service is the rent we pay for the room we occupy here on Earth.” It is a sentence Ali repeated for decades, lifted originally from the African-American educator Marian Wright Edelman. He treated it less as a slogan than as a job description.

Compassion as a Discipline, Not a Mood

One of the more interesting threads to emerge from the ten-year retrospectives is the argument that Ali's compassion was practiced, not innate. Writing in USA Today, commentators have framed his kindness as a kind of discipline — something he trained for the way he trained for fights. He signed autographs for hours when he didn't have to. He visited sick children he had no professional reason to meet. He travelled to Iraq in 1990 to negotiate the release of American hostages, at a time when his Parkinson's was already advanced and the trip was widely criticised.

His widow, Lonnie Ali, captured the underlying philosophy in an interview with ESPN this month. “Muhammad was a person who did not judge others,” she said, recalling a man who, in her telling, refused to sort the people he met into categories of useful, important or worth his time. In an era where public life is increasingly organised around the opposite instinct — sorting, ranking, dismissing — that refusal looks more radical than it once did.

The Activist Athlete Template

Ali's other major bequest is the modern idea of the activist athlete. When he refused induction into the US Army in 1967 — “I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong” — he forfeited his heavyweight title, his boxing licence and, by some estimates, the most lucrative years of his career. He was 25.

That decision created a template later borrowed by Colin Kaepernick, by Naomi Osaka, by the WNBA players who walked off courts in 2020, and — closer to home — by Australian athletes such as Adam Goodes and Pat Cummins who have used their platforms on questions of race, climate and refugee policy. None of these figures faced the legal jeopardy Ali did. But each operated inside a public expectation Ali essentially invented: that an athlete is allowed, and perhaps obligated, to be a citizen first.

The ten-year anniversary coverage has been notably willing to revisit just how unpopular Ali was for taking that stand. He was widely vilified in the late 1960s — not the universally adored icon he became in old age. The retrospectives serve as a useful corrective for anyone tempted to believe that moral clarity is rewarded in real time. It usually isn't. It tends to be rewarded retrospectively, often after the person who showed it is no longer around to enjoy the applause.

Why the Anniversary Lands Differently Now

It would be too neat to claim Ali's legacy maps cleanly onto any particular contemporary issue. But the anniversary lands in a moment when several of the questions he spent his life on — religious tolerance, the cost of dissent, the responsibilities of fame, the politics of war — are once again unsettled.

Ali was the most famous Muslim convert of the 20th century. He changed his name in 1964 at a time when much of America was openly hostile to Islam, and he spent decades quietly correcting misconceptions about his faith. The Al Jazeera tribute notes how that work continues to matter in a global climate where Muslim identity is still routinely politicised. For Australian Muslims navigating their own version of that climate, Ali's insistence on representing his faith with humour and patience — rather than defensiveness — remains a useful model.

He was also, by the end of his life, deeply opposed to the idea that any community should be defined by its worst members or its loudest extremists. After the September 11 attacks, he made a point of saying publicly that the hijackers did not speak for his religion. That instinct — to defend the dignity of a group without excusing the wrongs done in its name — is harder than it sounds. It is part of why his hometown chose to organise this month's commemorations around “respect” as a stated principle.

What Australians Can Take From It

For an Australian audience, Ali's legacy is not an imported curiosity. The questions he wrestled with — who gets to belong, who is allowed to dissent, what athletes owe the public, what the famous owe the unfamous — are recognisably ours too. The Goodes booing saga, the debates around the Voice referendum, the recurring arguments about athletes “sticking to sport” — all of these are conversations Ali would have recognised instantly.

The ten-year retrospectives suggest a few practical inheritances worth holding onto. The first is that compassion can be a habit you build, not a feeling you wait for. The second is that public courage is almost always punished before it is praised, and that this is not a reason to avoid it. The third — and perhaps the one Lonnie Ali pointed to most directly — is that refusing to judge people is itself a form of activism, possibly the most demanding form, because it has to be practiced every single day with every single person you meet.

The Rent, Still Being Paid

Ten years on, the Louisville commemorations, the family interviews and the global tributes all converge on a single, slightly uncomfortable point: Ali's legacy isn't really about Ali anymore. It is about whether anyone is willing to do the work he modelled. “Service is the rent we pay,” he liked to say. The rent, as anyone who has ever paid it knows, is due monthly. The anniversary is a reminder that the bill is still arriving.

Related on Bleen

Sources