That voice: "I'm free to be who I want to be, and I'm free to think what I want to think."

Muhammad Ali's voice, his words. The words said softly, near a whisper, spoken when he was, perhaps, the most reviled man in America.

Those words made Muhammad Ali important. They constituted a declaration of independence that rang inspirationally true to millions of people who had no reason to believe such words until they heard Ali define the possibilities of freedom.

To hear those words, go to Louisville. There, where Ali was born, cross over Main Street and go down to the Ohio River, where white men once set up pens into which they put black men who were for sale. At the river's edge, go into the Muhammad Ali Center, a $70 million building as amazing in its story as the man whose name it bears.

Amazing. A museum. An educational building. A meeting place for world leaders. Built in the name of a man who as a boy in this town could not buy a ticket to a movie theater downtown, who could not try on clothes before he bought them, whose mother could not sit in the finest department store's tea room for lunch.

In the Ali Center, you'll hear his voice dozens of times in full cry of celebration, in self-mocking comic declarations of immodesty, in righteous raging rants born of racism. You'll hear it, and if you're old enough to have heard it the first time, or if you're curious enough to have heard it on old-guy television or have heard Will Smith do it in the movie, Ali, maybe you'll think what I thought:

How wonderful to hear that voice, to hear it now when his life has rendered him silent, to hear again the music of his soul.

I was in Louisville to do a signing for my book, Sound and Fury, a dual biography of Ali and Howard Cosell. Suddenly, I heard them both.

It's 1967. "Muhammad, you're being extremely truculent."

"Whatever truculent means, if that's good, I'm that."

Then it's 1974. "Cosell," Ali is shouting. Word has reached Zaire that Cosell, the ABC earache, Ali's antagonist/partner/friend, has predicted a George Foreman victory over Ali in their heavyweight championship fight. "That thing on your head is phony." The famous toupee. "And it comes from the tail of a pony."

Ali is a simple sweetheart who for years, even decades, was led into bad things by bad people, persuaded to act as a frontman for con artists running scams ranging from religion to robbery to philanthropy. At my signing, a man who gave me his name only as Woody asked a series of barbed questions based on Ali's deviations from legitimacy, such as: "Isn't it true that in a 1974 Playboy interview, Ali advocated the lynching of interracial couples?"

Just moments earlier, an Ali Center executive, Fronda Yancey, assured me the Center was eager to hear irreverent questions. "We're all about the truth," she said, and I answered Woody truthfully: "Yes, he did. And that Ali has disappeared."

Since lighting the Olympic torch in Atlanta in 1996, Ali has been led by good people into good things. The news of the moment is Ali has sold his name and image to a marketing outfit for $50 million.

The Center itself seems sensitive to the charge, maybe too much so, with many exhibits overselling the idea that Ali is a sage philosopher. To some Ali observers, that news is saddening. They see the sale as a bow to commerce that diminishes Ali's moral authority. One man e-mailed me, "He's become Elvis," which is to say he's now a commodity, not an idea, now a hologram, not a man.

But to others, the arrival of a windfall in Ali's old age prompts this thought: It's about damn time.

Those happy folks include John Ramsey, a longtime Louisville friend of Ali who sees the old champion not as a commodity, not as an idea, not as a hologram. Ramsey sees Ali as a sweetheart and tells a story to prove it.

"Muhammad is at dinner when this firefighter says, 'Mr. Ali, could I get an autograph? You've been my hero forever.' Muhammad says, 'No, you're the hero. Go into burnin' buildings, pull people out. I was just a boxer. Nothin' like you.'

"The firefighter says, 'C'mon, Mr. Ali. You fought Sonny Liston, George Foreman, Smokin' Joe Frazier.'

"So Muhammad whispers into the firefighter's ear. 'Between you 'n' me,' he says, 'Joe wasn't really smokin'.' "

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