Muhammad Ali lost everything in opposing the Vietnam War. But in 1968, he triumphed

 It was a sad sight: Stripped of his crown, the former heavyweight champion of the world was reduced to making a paid appearance at a boat show in his hometown of Louisville, Ky.

“I am not allowed to work in America and I’m not allowed to leave America,” Muhammad Ali said in February 1968, at the start of his first full year of exile from boxing. “I’m just about broke.”

Married a year with his first child on the way, Ali was so desperate his manager tried to arrange a bout in Arizona on an Indian reservation – outside the reach of state boxing commissions that wouldn’t let him fight. But the Pima tribe rejected the proposal, saying it would defile the memory of Indian veterans who’d fought for their country.

The previous April, Ali had declared himself a conscientious objector and refused induction into the U.S. Army, famously saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

By 1968, 19,560 Americans had died in the Vietnam War and another 16,502 would die that year alone. It was the year the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army mounted the Tet Offensive, an ambitious campaign that helped persuade the American public that the war wasn't going as well as the generals and politicians had led them to believe.

Source: usatoday