For boxer Barry McGuigan, Muhammad Ali was the inspiration for taking up the sport.

The 55-year-old, who lives in Dargate near Faversham, told how Ali had just had his titanic fight with Joe Frazier in New York in 1971 when he began to take boxing seriously.

"Like many a kid just getting into boxing at the time, I wanted to be like Ali," McGuigan wrote in his column in The Mirror.

"I was enthralled by him, and became utterly absorbed as I looked back at his early career and all the political stuff. "He was so much more than just a fighter.

"The United States convulsed in political upheaval in the Sixties, arguably a decade like no other with all sorts of social divisions at home and conflict abroad in Vietnam.

"Ali was at the centre of it all, first with his engagement in the civil rights movement and his conversion to Islam, ditching his birth name Cassius Clay, and then with his refusal to take the draft.

"This was explosive stuff and defined his career. No athlete before or since has put his career on the line in that way, risked so much."

Ali died age 74 at his home in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday night. He been suffering from respiratory illness complicated by Parkinson's Disease.

McGuigan, who is the current President of the Professional Boxing Association and a former WBO world featherweight champion, met Ali five times.

One one occasion he recalls that Ali's illness had already robbed him of the power of speech.

He said: "The saddest thing of all, for one so articulate, was to be silent. It’s like God put a spell on him. What greater pain can fate inflict on the great orator than to take away his voice."

From inside the ring, McGuigan argues that Ali exercised a gigantic influence on the sport.

"He borrowed from his idol sugar Ray Robinson stylistic elements that we had never seen in a heavyweight before.

"You had technical guys in the early gloved era like Bob Fitzsimmons and then in the modern era you had the Rock, Rocky Marciano, who just swarmed all over you, Floyd Patterson with his peek-a-boo style, the bear-like Sonny Liston, but Ali was the first 15 stone man to get up on his toes and dance around the ring.

"It was all so new and fresh. Coupled with the poise, balance and speed in the ring he had the personality to go with it, and searing intelligence.

"There will never be another like him."