Ali, like so many before him, was sure he would have the sense to get out of boxing in time. “I don’t intend to leave it with ugly souvenirs of my career,” he said when he was in his mid-twenties. “I won’t retire from boxing with cuts, cauliflower ears, and a busted nose. I’ll leave boxing physically intact, just as I am now. I will do this because my style of boxing protects me from cuts and injuries, yet it wins. I beat my opponents, you might say, gently.…”
Ali thought his style would go a long way toward saving him from the usual injuries and indignities. “I cannot be touched!” he always shouted. But when he returned from his long exile, his speed was limited; it came only in short bursts. He had to learn different ways to fight. Perhaps his most vexed discovery in his second career was that he could take a punch. And he took hundreds of them: from Frazier, Foreman, Ken Norton, Ernie Shavers, Holmes, Leon Spinks; from a parade of second-rung heavyweights like Jean-Pierre Coopman, Alfredo Evangelista, and Trevor Berbick; from a platoon of sparring partners who were instructed to bang away at Ali in the gym, the better to toughen him up for the bouts themselves. Learning to take a punch was a form of short-term survival for Ali—it was the secret to the great triumphs in Zaire and the Philippines—but it was a long-term disaster.
One spring afternoon, I visited Ferdie Pacheco, who lives in a gated community in Miami. He spends most of his time painting, writing fiction, and doing television commentary for the occasional fight. Pacheco resigned from Ali’s camp after the Shavers fight in 1977, which Ali won by decision only after absorbing enormous punishment. Pacheco learned after that fight that Ali’s kidneys were deteriorating; in fact, he had been convinced since the third Frazier fight in Manila in 1975 that Ali was in real danger of suffering brain damage if he didn’t retire. Pacheco sent medical reports to Ali, to his wife, Veronica, and to Herbert Muhammad. None of them responded except to brush him off. So Pacheco decided it was time to go. The rest of the entourage, including Angelo Dundee, stayed on. Everyone concerned—Ali included—was hooked on the money and the mainline thrills of the fights themselves.
“Angelo had a feeling—misguided—but a feeling that if you start out with a fighter you should end up with him,” Pacheco said. “Okay, but the fighter should listen to you when it’s time to leave. And if he doesn’t listen, then you should leave. With all great athletes, there comes a day when Babe Ruth is no longer Babe Ruth, when Joe Louis gets knocked out by an Italian sausage maker, and when John Barrymore can’t do the soliloquy from Hamlet There comes a day when you’re through, when age knocks you out.”
By the time Ali fought his last bouts, in 1981, against Larry Holmes in Las Vegas and against Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas, it is more than likely that his neurological deterioration had already begun. His speech was already slurred, and his reflexes were certainly not what they had been. Those fights were nothing short of criminal.
“But blame is a hard word,” Pacheco said. “I’m not blaming anybody. They all slid into what they did, because of their belief that somehow, as he always did, Ali would find a way to win. They didn’t understand that these victories were costing him physically, they didn’t accept it, in spite of the fact that the punch-drunk syndrome is common in any boxing gym you walk into. They couldn’t relate that to this big, wonderful, handsome guy who still looked the same. That’s the problem. They look the same. I worked in Sugar Ray Robinson’s corner in one of his last fights. He looked the same.
“The last time I saw Ali [medically] was in 1977. But I’ve watched his decline. Now I see him all the time. When I see him now, he says, ‘Hi, Doc, how ya doing,’ and he tells me that he’s responsible for my success, which I agree with one hundred percent. He says he’s surprised how we’ve progressed, he and I. But he says nothing. Platitudes and jokes and gags. I don’t try to have a conversation with him. I’ve had all the conversations with him I want. There’s nothing he can say to me or that I can say to him that can change what I know is going to happen to him.
“Luckily, he has what all of us would like to have: spiritual serenity. He’s the only guy I know who’s got it. He’s got total peace of mind, because he’s convinced himself that here isn’t where it’s at. Heaven is where it’s at. And he’s working hard as hell to get there, and he has the absolute knowledge he’s going. See, Ali was unique. Ali and boxing are two different subjects. The only thing that Ali did that was pure boxing was the tragic end, which all boxers have if they’ve been too good and they won’t quit. Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sugar Ray Robinson, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, Tommy Hearns. They just won’t stop! So their end is tragic. That’s the one thing, the only thing, that makes Ali just another boxer.”
UP IN MICHIGAN, ALI SITS IN THE OFFICE ON HIS FARM. THE office is on the second floor of a small house behind the main house, and it is the headquarters of the company known as GOAT—the Greatest of All Times. Outside, geese glide along the pond. A few men are working in the fields. Someone is mowing the great lawn that rolls out from the house and up to the gates of the property. There are various fine cars around, including a Stutz Bearcat. There is a tennis court, a pool, and playground equipment sufficient for a small school in a well-taxed municipality. Ali is father to nine children; his oldest is Maryum, who is twenty-eight, and the youngest is Asaad Ali, a six-year-old boy, whom Lonnie and Muhammad adopted. “Muhammad finally found a playmate,” Lonnie said. “He wasn’t around much for his other children, but now he gets to play with Asaad all the time.” The Alis have loved living on the farm, but they are looking for a buyer. They talked to some people who wanted to buy the place and convert it into a wellness center; they even tried to unload it on a television home-shopping network. Eventually, Lonnie said, the family will move back to Louisville, where they hope a Muhammad Ali center will be built. Ali’s parents have died, but his brother still works in Louisville.
Ali’s days begin before six with the first of five daily prayer sessions. Sometimes he prays in a gazebo out on the lawn or inside in the living room. Lonnie is also a Muslim believer and generally wears modest, if not entirely traditional, clothing. Ali’s religious course has shifted with time. Elijah Muhammad died in 1975 and the Nation of Islam split between the followers of Muhammad’s son Wallace, who sought to soften the Nation’s doctrine by denying his father’s divinity and moving closer to traditional Islam, and Louis X (now Louis Farrakhan), who considers Wallace a soft-minded heretic. Ali stayed with Wallace Muhammad, and one of Wallace’s first gestures of reconciliation was to rename the New York mosque in honor of his father’s old antagonist Malcolm X. In many ways, Ali has followed Malcolm’s path. At first, Ali’s membership in the Nation was largely political—a gesture of self-assertion and racial solidarity—but, like Malcolm, he has become more inclusive in his rhetoric and more devout. Everything about the Nation of Islam that was once so threatening or obscure—the separatist rhetoric that was greeted so heartily by the KKK, the talk of “big-headed” Yacub and mysterious spaceships—all that, for Ali, has been forgotten long ago.
Ali is intensely proud of his past, but if there is anything he looks back on with regret it is his cruel and hasty rejection of Malcolm. One of the first things Ali did when I met him in Berrien Springs was to open an enormous attaché case and pull out a photograph of himself and Malcolm taken by Howard Bingham in Miami just before the first Liston fight.
“That was Malcolm, a great, great man,” he said in his low, whispery voice.
At home and on the road, Ali plays out certain routines with the people he meets every day. He certainly played them out with me. He likes to do magic tricks: he “elevates” on one foot; by rubbing two fingers together, he makes you think you’re hearing a very annoying cricket behind your ear; he makes a small ball disappear. It’s as if in doing these simple tricks he is reminding you, and himself, of the greater stunts of his career: the mock nervous breakdown at the weigh-in before fighting Liston, the pop-eyed poetry recitals, his sleight of hand in the ring. But then, because
a Muslim cannot deceive anyone, he deflates his own magic, he explains to you how the tricks are done, he shows you how to raise yourself on one toe to “elevate.”
But tricks are tricks, they are nothing much for him anymore. Ali is serious about faith. One way he likes to talk about faith and Islam is to prove the “consistency” of Islamic texts compared to the Bible, which he does in a deadly serious scholastic sort of way. He carries around a long list of textual “inconsistencies” in the Old and the New Testaments. When I was with him, he spent at least as much time slowly thumbing through his worn Bible looking up these inconsistencies as he did talking about race or boxing or anything else. He would point out a difference between, say, the gospels of Mark and Matthew as if, in one stroke, he had undermined an eon of Christian belief.
“There are thirty thousand of these!” he said. “Someone found them.”
Ali’s religion orders his life and helps him cope with his illness. A lesser man could be forgiven some hours of darkness, for here is a performer who was robbed of what had seemed to be his essence—his physical beauty, his speed, his wit, his voice—and yet Ali never betrays self-pity. “I know why this has happened,” Ali said. “God’s showing me that I’m just a man like everyone else. Showing you, too. You can learn from me that way.”
It’s not as if Ali has put the past behind him. He earns his living signing pictures that are then sold at auction and at dealerships. He has various agents and lawyers working on his behalf, and Lonnie coordinates everything.
Sometimes, when he is sleeping, Ali dreams about his old fights, especially the three fights with Joe Frazier. He is not immune to celebrating the past. When the documentary film about his triumph in Zaire, When We Were Kings, opened, Ali watched the tape many times over. He was there in Hollywood when the film’s director, Leon Gast, collected an Academy Award. As always now, Ali stood and wordlessly accepted a standing ovation.
His greatest triumph in retirement came on the summer night in Atlanta when, to the surprise of nearly everyone watching, he suddenly appeared with a torch in his hands ready to open the 1996 Summer Olympics. Ali stood with the heavy torch extended before him. Three billion people watching on television could see him shaking, both from the Parkinson’s and from the moment itself. But he carried it off. “Muhammad wouldn’t go to bed for hours and hours that night,” Lonnie Ali said. “He was floating on air. He just sat in a chair back at the hotel holding the torch in his hands. It was like he’d won the heavyweight title back a fourth time.”
Ali is an American myth who has come to mean many things to many people: a symbol of faith, a symbol of conviction and defiance, a symbol of beauty and skill and courage, a symbol of racial pride, of wit and love. Ali’s physical condition is shocking not least because it is an accelerated form of what we all fear, the progression of aging, the unpredictability and danger of life. In Ali we see the frailty even of a man whose job it was to be the most fearsome figure on the globe. But Ali’s illness is no longer news, no longer quite so shocking, and even though he is stiff in his movements, even though he barely speaks in public settings, he can still inspire every person in every room, every arena or stadium he is in, anywhere he goes. By the time Ali returned from exile and became champion once more, nearly all of the anger directed at him had dissipated. Partly, that was because most people could see how sincere he was, even if they could not accept the Nation of Islam or his reasons for refusing the draft. He made them laugh. And, after all, the times had changed, they had changed, or some had. For instance, Red Smith, whose columns had been so hostile to Ali early on, was just one of many Americans who came out of the late sixties and early seventies seeing the world in a different way, seeing Ali in a different way. After Ali became champion again in 1974, DC Comics published a special issue in which he took on Superman and won. Ali is a living symbol, as ambiguous and free-floating as many symbols are, but he remains important.
“Clay was my slave name,” he said quietly to me as the afternoon wore on and he grew more tired. He was beginning one of his oldest riffs. “You hear ‘Khrushchev’ and you know it’s a Russian. ‘Ching’ and its Chinese. ‘Goldberg,’ Jewish. What’s ‘Cassius Clay’? So plain. So true. George Washington is not a black man’s name. So plain. So true. Islam was something that was powerful and strong. It was something I could touch and feel. I grew up and learned that everyone was white. Jesus Christ was white. Everyone at the Last Supper, white. Now these Muslims, they come along and question things. And I think I helped. Now you see a commercial on TV. There’s three kids—two black, one white. Or the other way around. It wasn’t like that back then. Things changed. Things changed. And I helped. Cassius Clay was my grandfather, Cassius Clay was my father, too. But I changed that. I changed that, too.”
While we were still watching tapes of the Liston and Patterson fights, I asked Ali how he’d like to be remembered. He didn’t answer. But a long time ago, when his body still allowed him free speech, Ali answered the same question:
“I’ll tell you how I’d like to be remembered: as a black man who won the heavyweight title and who was humorous and who treated everyone right. As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could—financial and also in their fight for freedom, justice, and equality. As a man who wouldn’t embarrass them. As a man who tried to unite his people through the faith of Islam that he found when he listened to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And if all that’s asking too much, then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people. And I wouldn’t even mind if folks forgot how pretty I was.”
The phone rang. Ali picked up the receiver, though it took several seconds for him to lift it to his ear. He barely had the strength now to say hello. There were many calls, and each time Ali told whoever it was to call later, call tomorrow, call next week, Lonnie’ll be here later. It took him a long time to return the phone from his ear to the cradle. It took him a long time to do nearly everything.
“The only thing important now is to be a good Muslim,” he said. “Help others.”
Then he stopped talking entirely. He closed his eyes. And for a few minutes it seemed he was sleeping. Then he opened his eyes and smiled. He was joking.
“Got you!” he said.
He paused awhile and then he said, “Sleep is a rehearsal for death. One day you wake up and it’s Judgment Day. I don’t worry about disease. Don’t worry about anything. Allah will protect me. He always does.” He has said this many times.
Then Ali said he was tired. It was a nice way of saying goodbye. He walked with me down the stairs and out to the driveway.
“This your car?” he said.
“Well, it’s mine for today,” I said.
“Not even that,” Ali said. “You don’t own nothing. You’re just a trustee in this life. Take care of yourself.”
I said goodbye and drove down the long road to his gate. In the mirror, I could see Ali still standing out on the gravel. He waved once, very slowly, then turned around and walked back inside the house for his afternoon prayers.
NOTES ON SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The heavyweight championship fights of the early sixties fall in a strange crevice between history and recent events. To readers over forty, the early Ali fights are the stuff of early (or not-so-early) memory. To those who are younger, they are as distant as Agincourt. Many participants and witnesses who figure in the story of the rise of Muhammad Ali have died, including Sonny Liston, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Betty Shabazz, Willie Reddish, Jimmy Cannon, Cus D’Amato, Joe Martin, Odessa Clay, and Cassius Clay, Sr. But with the exception of a few living sources who refused to be interviewed, the main actors who are still alive were uncommonly generous with their time and recollections. I am especially grateful to Muhammad and Lonnie Ali, who invited me to their farm in Michigan, and to Howard Bingham and Thomas Hauser for helping to make that meeting possible.
I am grateful for interviews to Maury Allen, Dave Anderson, Teddy Atlas, Milt Bailey, Lem Banker, Gary Beckwith, Jack Bonomi, Kirby Bradley, Dennis Caputo, Gil Clancy, Foneda Cox, Stanley Crouch, Gordon Davidson, Angelo Dundee, Henry Ealy, Gerald Early, Beverly Edwards, Jimmy Ellis, Ralph Ellison, Sam Eveland, Leon Gast, Truman Gibson, Pete Hamill, Tom Hauser, John Horne, Jerry Izenberg, Lamont Johnson, Murray Kempton, Neil Leifer, Robert Lipsyte, Jack McKinney, Larry Merchant, Archie Moore, Toni Morrison, Jill Nelson, Jack Newfield, Gil Noble, Ferdie Pacheco, Floyd Patterson, Davey Pearl, George Plimpton, Ed Pope, Pat Putnam, Gil Rogin, Harold D. Rowe, Jeffrey Sammons, Sonia Sanchez, Dick Schaap, Mort Sharnik, James Silberman, Bert Sugar, Gay Talese, Ernie Terrell, José Torres, Mike Tyson, and Dean Weidemann.
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