Muhammad Ali

Cassius Clay started boxing because someone stole his bicycle. He was twelve, it was 1954, and he went to report the theft to a Louisville police officer, Joe Martin, telling him he wanted to beat up whoever had taken it. Martin, who also ran a boxing gym, suggested he learn how to fight first. Six years later, the boy from Louisville won the light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

He was born at 6:35 p.m. on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky, a time from his birth certificate, and Leo is on his Ascendant. Leo is the showman of the zodiac, proud, theatrical and made for an audience, and few public figures have embodied a Leo Ascendant more completely. "I am the greatest," he told the world, along with rhymes, predictions of the round in which he would win and "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." He turned boxing promotion into performance art.

His Sun is in Capricorn in the sixth house, the area of daily work, training and discipline, with the Moon and Mercury in Aquarius beside it. Capricorn is disciplined and enduring, and Aquarius is the sign of principle, independence and the outsider's conscience. Astrologers would read this as a fighter whose dazzling public persona sat on top of relentless training and stubborn convictions, and his convictions ended up costing him more than any opponent.

In 1964 he beat Sonny Liston to become heavyweight champion, then announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. In 1967 he refused induction into the Army during the Vietnam War, citing his religious beliefs. He was convicted, stripped of his title and barred from boxing for three and a half years during his prime. In 1971 the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.

Jupiter and Saturn both sit in his tenth house, the zone of career and public standing. Jupiter magnifies fame; Saturn imposes trials and limits. The combination describes a public life of enormous reach and enormous cost, and Ali's had both: global celebrity alongside exile, then the long years of illness after his diagnosis with Parkinson's disease in 1984.

Mars in Taurus falls in the ninth house, the house of religion, belief and principle. Mars is the fighter, and in the ninth it fights for what it believes. Ali's refusal to be drafted, on religious grounds, may be the single most famous act of his life outside the ring.

He returned to win back the title against George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, the "Rumble in the Jungle," using the "rope-a-dope" to exhaust a younger, stronger man, and fought Joe Frazier in the brutal "Thrilla in Manila" a year later. In 1996, his hands shaking from Parkinson's, he lit the Olympic cauldron in Atlanta, and the stadium stood. He died in 2016. The Leo rising had told the world he was the greatest; the Aquarius Moon spent his life showing what that cost.