Leonard Bernstein, the great composer who gave the world "West Side Story" and knew a thing or two about culture, once called Elvis Presley the greatest cultural force of the 20th century.

In light of the passing of Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight who died on Friday at the age of 74, it’s worth reassessing that.

Ali was at once a boxer, self-promoter, ambassador, racial activist, Muslim, wit and iconoclast.

Yes, Ali was a boxer. He won a gold medal at the 1960s Olympic games in Rome and the heavyweight championship of the world in 1964, the first of three times he held that crown.

Ali was unquestionably the greatest sports icon of the 20th century and was the last heavyweight champion of an era when earning that title meant the titleholder was automatically a household name. He was a boxing descendent of a line that stretched from the Jacks – Johnson and Dempsey – to Max (Schmelling) and from Joe Louis to Sonny Liston.

But while Ali was the heir to all of that boxing royalty, he was different in a way the world had never seen. He changed his sport and he changed his country by using his fists and his mouth.

He wasn’t the first African-American heavyweight champion, but he was the first black champion – the first to make the color of his skin central to the role. And he did so at a time when the country was still coming to grips with vast civil rights inequalities.

But how he did it was the thing.

Whereas Joe Louis had quietly gone about his business in dispatching the latest pretender thrown his way as part of the "Bum of the Month Club," Ali brashly told the world the round in which he would knock out his opponent. Then he went out and delivered.

His gift for shameless self-promotion earned him fame as "The Louisville Lip."

Ali may not have invented patter, but he perfected it with phrases such as "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

Unlike Elvis, perhaps, Ali was known on every continent even as he was white America’s window into the Muslim world, simply because for decades he was the only member of the Islamic faith most of white America could even name.

And when he was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam era and felt military service conflicted with his religion, he outraged the establishment by refusing to be inducted.

"I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong," he famously said to the approval of millions who were against the war and to the disgust of millions of others who thought that made him a coward or worse.

Ali was banned from the ring and stripped of his title while his case wound its way through the legal system, but he was ultimately vindicated by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld his conscientious objector claim.

He returned to the ring and fought some of his sport’s most most epic battles – the original "Fight of the Century" (vs. Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden, which Ali lost), then the "Rumble in the Jungle" and the "Thrilla in Manilla," and he won his title back twice.

He was born in an era when lynchings were still common and he died with an African-American president sitting in the White House. In between, he was, if not the greatest cultural force of his century, then at least one of them.

But always on his own terms.

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