God made Muhammad Ali a boxer, his younger brother Rahman Ali insisted in the hours after the great man’s death, which dominated the papers for the weekend and beyond, as a welcome change from coverage of the EU referendum debate.

Muhammad Ali, or Cassius Clay as he was at the time, learnt to box aged 12 in 1954 at the Columbia Gym, in Louisville, Kentucky. “It was God who took us to the gym,” the Sunday People quoted his brother Rahman (known as Rudolph Valentino Clay when he was a boy) as saying. “It was God who would make Muhammad great.”

“We just happened to stumble across the gym,” Rahman, two years his junior, remembered. “There was a policeman training all these young lads and we popped our head round the door. It was Joe Martin. He invited us back. We left but little did we know God was just about to take us back there. Our bicycles got stolen that night.

“Muhammad was furious. He went straight back to report it to Joe and was so angry he wanted to beat the thieves up. Joe was trying to calm him down and told him to go and punch a few bags. He started boxing there and then.”

The press coverage of Muhammad Ali’s death reflected the almost universal respect with which the boxer had come to be regarded. Unlike David Bowie, a celebrity whose death in January had been marked as that of a sort of guru of popular alternative culture, Ali’s story had a clearly godly side.