Muhammad Ali invented celebrity culture – and the selfie

It’s no coincidence that everyone – from Elvis to George W. Bush to Barack Obama – managed to get a selfie with Muhammad Ali.

Ali invented celebrity culture – and the selfie. He was the first global figure to throw aside the early 20th-century cults of self-deprecation and privacy, and fully embrace the modern gods of fame, brazen self-promotion and rampant publicity.

You can see it right at the beginning of his career, in 1960, when Cassius Clay supposedly hurled his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River after he was refused service in a segregated restaurant.

Ali later admitted to his biographer, Thomas Hauser, that the story was untrue: the medal was either lost or stolen, he confessed. But it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true or not – it’s the perfect story to illustrate the genuine plight of the world’s greatest boxer in a divided country.

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Again and again, Ali was a master of the story.