IF Muhammad Ali was boxing in an Australian ring today he would be booed out of it.
If Muhammad Ali, as history suggests he would have, had stood up for his people, his causes, his religion, his beliefs in Australia today he would have been told to shut up and be a little more grateful for what the country has given him.
Then, if Muhammad Ali, in Australia today had dared point out the racism he had heard from spectators, or from radio hosts, or experienced on any number of social media platforms, he would have been called a sook, a whinger. That he brought it upon himself. 
How do we know this? Because we have the example of Adam Goodes. Goodes was hounded out of the game last year because he was racially targeted by thousands of football supporters who booed and jeered every time he touched the ball while playing for the Sydney Swans.
Now, even after he has retired, he is still being targeted by the mindless, the racists, the deeply stupid. Which must come as a surprise to all the apologists last year who were claiming Goodes was being booed because people didn't like the way he played and it was not racially motivated.
Strangely, no one booed him for the first 13 years of his career. It was just after he made his stand on racism and became Australian of the Year that the idiocy started.
Over the weekend Goodes deleted his Twitter account. Last week he was subject to a racist meme on Facebook which compared the dual Brownlow medallist to a gorilla.
That followed a remarkable column in the Financial Review a few days earlier, when a bloke called Rowan Dean, the editor of the right-wing Spectator magazine, compiled a Poor Me awards list which included Goodes, or Adam Baddes as he called him. That's some pretty funny humour right there.
Goodes' crime, in Dean's world view, was to "pour scorn on all privileged, white male Anglo-Saxon, non-indigenous Australians" while accepting his Australian of the Year award.
It's almost like Dean didn't read, or see Goodes', speech that day. What did Goodes' say that Australia Day? He said he had experienced racism in his life. Not a great shock. Does anyone think he is lying about that? Goodes said he wanted to eradicate racism and wanted the community to work together to enable that. Seems reasonable.
He also said: "My hope is that we as a nation can break down the silos between races, break down those stereotypes of minority populations, indigenous populations and all other minority groups. I hope we can be proud of our heritage regardless of the colour of our skin and be proud to be Australian." It's hardly a call for revolution.
Perhaps, there is hope in the long run. Ali, of course, was an extraordinarily divisive figure in his time. He changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, he swapped Christianity for Islam, he refused to join the military and fight in Vietnam.
Of course he did it all with a swagger, an arrogance, a way with words that few others could hope to match. But he stood his ground even though it cost him what could have been his most productive years in the ring. By the time of his death on the weekend Ali had become one of the most loved figures on the planet. Admired for his principles, his courage, his compassion.
There was an outpouring of love and gratitude for a man who once said: "I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want." What had changed?Ali or society?