Farewell to Muhammad Ali.

There are so many sides to the man. Now, at news of his passing, so many people have expressed their own impressions of this transcendent figure. So many different words have shown up in articles and posts.

Of course, people often speak first of his athletic skill. A writer in The New Yorker said he had “physical wit.” A clever phrase but maybe still an understatement. He was a physical genius who, in his prime, raised heavyweight boxing up to the level of art. Others speak of Ali's bravery, confidence, humor, grace, kindness.

To me, Ali seemed to always be coming back from defeat. If I was ever aware of him as Cassius Clay, I don't remember that. I was only 9 when he refused to serve in Vietnam, and my earliest memories of him are of the controversy that followed and his unjust exile from the career he had rightfully earned with his fists.

Another word we're seeing is “sacrifice,” and few other public figures in our time have proved their beliefs by sacrificing as much as Ali.

He had all the riches and power that America had to offer him. He was “King of the World,” as he said. Yet he was willing to give it all up, to go to prison if necessary, in accordance with his conscience. It's something he gave us all to think about – which requires more courage, to follow the crowd to battle, or to stand alone and question the fight's purpose?

When he came back, I listened to his first fight against Jerry Quarry on my bed with my ear pressed against a handheld transistor radio. When he lost to Joe Frazier, I watched in the local theater. When he rope-a-doped George Foreman to finally regain the championship in 1974, I was 16, listening in the driveway on the radio in my first car, a 1962 Ford Fairlane.

Of course, he lost again. And he came back again. In the ring and in the world. Against younger boxers, against a doubtful public and against cruel disease.

He became possibly the most well known, and certainly one of the most admired men in the world. The word “icon” gets thrown around too casually these days. Ali was the real deal. To quote the dictionary, “a person regarded as a representative symbol of something.”

Yes, a representative symbol of those many words showing up repeatedly upon his death: skill, grace, wit, kindness and the rest. But each of those words by itself seems to be reaching for a more complete summary. There must be something about the man that encompasses yet exceeds all those words, such that, even though we might not agree with his every word or action, we see that something about him represents the best in us.

I think what finally seals Ali's indelible power in our hearts, what we see in him that we wish for ourselves, what he truly symbolizes – is triumph over injustice. That is what Muhammad Ali is and will remain to me – an icon of triumph over injustice.

And then there is my all-time favorite Ali quote – and I'm sure I won't be the only one to recall this now, because it so captures Ali's wit, charm and fierce sense of self.

In one of their many post-fight interviews, Howard Cosell reacts to Ali's bravado. “You're being extremely truculent,” he says. And Ali comes back without missing a half-beat: “Whatever truculent means, if that's good, I'm that.”

And so much more.

Roy Dufrain Jr. lives in Kelseyville, Calif.