I am too young to have watched Muhammad Ali fight live in the ring. I was born four years after he retired from boxing – 10 years after the legendary Rumble in the Jungle. But more than anyone, Ali, who died Friday at 74, is responsible for my love of journalism and the art of political writing and dissent.

Boxing has enraptured writers for almost for almost a century – Ernest Hemingway and AJ Liebling both wrote eloquently about the sport well before Ali became the most famous person on the planet. But it was Ali who became a singular force for journalists, not only eliciting brilliant writing from some of the best-known writers of the mid-20th century, but forcing them to confront much more than just sports.

I first stumbled upon my obsession when, as a teenager, I found David Remnick’s 1998 book King of the World on the floor of my house. Remnick, now the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, captivatingly followed Cassius Clay’s early career: his underdog fights with the ferocious Sonny Liston, his conversion to Islam and his humiliation of the fading former champion Floyd Patterson, who refused to call Ali by his new name.

I was hooked. I read volumes of material by Thomas Hauser, who chronicled Ali’s career in more detail than anyone else, including writing his definitive biography. Hauser, who clearly admired the man, was also not afraid to puncture myths for the sake of truth – whether it was writing that Ali didn’t throw his Olympic gold medal over a bridge in protest (he lost it) or discussing his taunting of Joe Frazier, often portrayed as playful, but which was actually dark and disturbed.

Then there were the dozens of magazine articles, including Mark Kram’s gorgeous piece on the third Ali–Frazier fight, “the Thrilla in Manilla”, which the longtime Sports Illustrated reporter Richard Deitsch has called “the greatest deadline story” in the magazine’s history. Kram’s “Lawdy, Lawdy, He’s Great” recounts in vivid detail how the two fighters were quite literally on the verge of death after pummeling each other for 14 rounds but refusing to give up. Reading it today, four decades later, will still give you chills.

But it was during the rise of New Journalism in the 1960s – first person narratives that illuminated the writer as much as the subject – that Ali became a go-to subject for writing that soared. Dick Schaap, one of the forerunners of the style, became friends with Ali and captured his political side with more nuance than any other writer. His many pieces, written with a wit and wisdom, are classics of sportswriting.

George Plimpton was another who latched on to the larger-than-life hero to produce some of his greatest essays, both during Ali’s fighting career and long after. Norman Mailer’s book The Fight is often considered among his best. Hunter S Thompson, who infamously missed the Rumble in the Jungle – floating in his Zaire hotel pool, drunk, with a pound of marijuana, because he was so afraid Ali would be beaten to a pulp by George Foreman – wrote one of the most underrated pieces on Ali years later.

In death, just as in life, Ali has been an inspiration. Robert Lipsyte, who chronicled the legend for years, wrote a soaring obituary in the New York Times. Keith Olbermann, in his recollections of crossing paths with Ali, reminded us just how brilliant a writer he still is. The Nation’s David Zarin convincingly captured how radical a political force Ali really was.

There are so many more: Deadspin collected some of these essays in a post called The Greatest Writing on the Greatest after Ali died this past weekend. Bill Simmons’ new site The Ringer also put together an Ali syllabus.

More than anything, the journalists who covered Ali remind us just how brave he was at the time to forfeit his athletic prime in the name of a political principle: his refusal to go fight in the Vietnam War. No athlete had ever done so, let alone the most famous athlete in the world. It’s hard to fathom the climate at the time, with virtually every editorial board in the country condemning Ali’s decision as he was stripped of his titles and way of life. The columnist Jerry Izenberg, one of the few writers then to defend Ali’s decision on free speech grounds, wrote this weekend about what happened after he did so:

Some papers that carried my column regularly dropped it. Bomb threats emptied our office, making the staff stand out in the snow. My car windshield was smashed with a sledgehammer. Among the thousands of pieces of hate mail I received, two required the attention of postal inspectors. One turned out to be nothing but a ticking alarm clock, and the second contained what I hoped was dog feces – as opposed to the alternative.

Ali certainly brought the best out of sportswriters, lifting their prose to new heights. But more than that, he forced them to grapple with the fact that sports are never just that. He taught a generation that political and social events are often intertwined, and they should be confronted head on rather than shunted or ignored. It was Ali who occasioned this reckoning, and it’s a lesson even those of us who never saw him fight should never forget.