Chicago ? Long after he no longer could sting like a bee in the boxing ring, Muhammad Ali’s legacy beyond the ropes continues to float like a butterfly.

Ali’s birthday is today. He has been such a charismatic presence for so long, arguably the best-known American in the world, that it is hard to believe he is just turning 65.

That is the most common retirement age for those of us in more mundane professions. Ali stepped away from his pugilistic career in 1981, fighting his last bout just before his 40th birthday.

The man who beat him, Trevor Berbick, was 51 when he was murdered late last year. He got most of his notoriety for his victory over Ali and for later losing his heavyweight title to Mike Tyson.

By contrast, Ali has built a wondrous public life after boxing.

An amalgam of religious and humanitarian efforts have kept him in the public eye even as problematic symptoms of Parkinson’s disease have led him to shun the spotlight.

In his heyday, he insulted the likes of Sonny Liston and Joe Frazier before facing them in the ring. He embraced the Nation of Islam and the notions of black beauty and black power in the face of racial inequality.

And he rejected the U.S. Selective Service before being convicted of draft evasion for refusing to face the Viet Cong on the battlefield. He remained free on appeal until the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.

Nobody enunciated his views louder, more controversially or more often than Ali.

Now, however, he barely speaks a word. But that does not mean his words are no longer in circulation.

In addition to all that was written about him decades ago, a new wave of books re-examining Ali and what he once said has hit bookstores. Among them are Mark Kram’s “Ghosts of Manila” and Jack Cashill’s “Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King’s Dream,” critical of Ali’s demeaning of Joe Frazier and Ali’s allegiance to the Nation of Islam; and the far more flattering “Ali Rap,” in which editor George Lois suggests Ali’s rhymes qualify him for recognition as the original rapper.

Former heavyweight champion muhammad Ali gestures toward photographers in this 2006 file photo. Ali's legacy still is being written as he turns 65 today.

Thomas Hauser, author of the definitive 1991 biography “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times” and a follow-up “The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali,” is less troubled by the recent critical looks at Ali than by a flip side that he sees as a “sanitation” of Ali’s beliefs.

“What we’re seeing now really is a commercial packaging of Ali, and it is sad,” he said.

He cited current TV clips that “give us this picture of someone who says, ‘I am young, I am handsome, I am fast, I can’t possibly be beat.'”

What is ignored, Hauser said, is that what young Ali stood for is inconsistent with the Ali who was among those receiving a Medal of Freedom from President Bush in 2005 and those commemorating the New York Stock Exchange closing out the millennium on Dec. 31, 1999. Hauser also felt the 2001 film “Ali” minimized Nation of Islam doctrine and “made the man like a Disney character.”

The Ali makeover began with the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Hauser believes. While Ali’s lighting the Olympic torch was “a glorious moment” shared by billions worldwide, he said, it spurred efforts to “round off all the rough edges of his life.”

As a result, he said, “Young people today know he stood up for principles, but they don’t know what those principles were. They don’t have a clue about Ali much as my generation didn’t have a clue about Joe Louis. … Even less so, because Louis’ history wasn’t rewritten.”

Boxing historian Hank Kaplan knows Ali’s history intimately, having spent long hours in the man’s company. He believes Ali remains “such an iconic figure, even with the younger generation, because they have seen him at public moments like the Olympic flame and because of stories they were told by their parents.”

Perhaps those recollections also have been revised benignly over time, as the man who might once have been among the most hated in America became one of the most beloved.

Kaplan claims no precise insight into how the man he calls a friend became an icon.

He recalled sitting with promoter Chris Dundee at a Miami Beach Convention Center banquet honoring Ali when the guest of honor strolled over and was surrounded immediately by a crowd that engulfed the table.

“We’d known him since the day he walked into the (now defunct) Fifth Street Gym as Cassius Clay, fresh from winning the Olympic gold medal in 1960,” Kaplan recalled.

As he and others watched Clay dance through sparring against a decent heavyweight named Tony Alongi, “rearing back, hands down, making Tony miss by inches, not everybody was all that impressed.

“(Trainer Lou) Gross walked up to me and said, ‘That kid is going to get killed.'”

Thereafter, Kaplan and Dundee, brother of Ali’s trainer Angelo, were there for nearly everything Ali did, from sparring to winning titles to losing and retiring.

“Still, Chris and I were amazed as we sat at that banquet and looked at all the people around him and our table,” Kaplan said. “We asked each other, ‘How did all this happen?'”

That was two decades ago. Kaplan still marvels that “the circumstances that made Ali who he is are lasting, just not going away.”

During the past year, more than 100,000 visitors have toured the Muhammad Ali Center that opened in late 2005 in his hometown of Louisville.

Ali, who has moved with wife Lonnie to Phoenix, has visited his namesake museum about a dozen times but will celebrate his birthday privately, Center spokesperson Jeanie Kahnke said.

Invitations have been sent worldwide to encourage friends and fans of Ali to e-mail birthday wishes that will be compiled and given to him at the end of January, Kahnke said. In addition, she said guests who come to the Center on Wednesday can pose in groups with a “happy birthday” banner for photos that also will be presented to Ali.

If he once was reviled as a truculent firebrand whose bragging veered into racism and sexism, the muted ex-fighter long has been respected as a hero undefeated by disease.

In “Ali Rap,” both of those sides are quoted.

Before losing his first bout against Joe Frazier: “Anybody black who thinks Frazier can whip me is an Uncle Tom. Everybody who’s black wants me to keep winning. I’m proving you can be a new kind of black man.”

After the Olympic torch ceremony: “My left hand was shaking because of Parkinson’s, my right hand was shaking from fear. Somehow, between the two of them, I got the thing lit.”

The book also contains a reminder that Ali’s boasts were not always taken seriously by average citizens … and he did not always get in the last word.

When a flight attendant instructed him to buckle up, he said, “Superman don’t need no seatbelt.” She replied, “Superman don’t need no airplane, either.”