By Jeff Powell for the Daily Mail
Published: 15:58 GMT, 25 January 2019 | Updated: 19:20 GMT, 25 January 2019
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Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier defined the greatness of each other. Just as it has been with Borg and McEnroe, Palmer and Nicklaus, Prost and Senna, Federer and Nadal, Coe and Ovett, Messi and Ronaldo.
A genius can stand alone in the admiration of the world, but not unless he engages in mighty battle with an opponent of comparable brilliance can the two of them scale immortality.
Nor, in sport, are such rivalries confined exclusively to the men who take to the ring, the court, the course, the track or the field.
Former Observer and Sunday Times journalist Hugh McIlvanney has died aged 84
The exceptions are rare but we are reminded of one glorious example by the death of Hugh McIlvanney, coming as it does 12 years after the passing of Ian Wooldridge.
For three decades around the turn of the century these doyens of Fleet Street pitted their literary talents against each other - McIlvanney for the Observer and Sunday Times, Wooldridge for the Daily Mail.
The contract was unsigned but the unspoken sense of competition drove their writings to ever greater heights.
Both reported on the epic duels between all the legends coupled above, dignifying those exploits with their masterly prose.
The beauty of it was, as with Ali v Frazier and those other match-ups, that the contrast in styles made the fights.
