by Jonathan Eig
In October 1983, Ali returned to UCLA for more tests. This time, the signs of damage were impossible to ignore. A brain scan revealed an enlarged third ventricle in the brain, atrophy of the brain stem, and a pronounced cavum septum pellucidum. Neuropsychological testing indicated that he had trouble learning new material. When he was treated with Sinemet, a drug for patients with Parkinson’s disease, he showed immediate improvement.
In interviews, Ali insisted there was nothing seriously wrong. “I’ve taken about 175,000 hard punches,” he said. “I think that would affect anybody some. But that don’t make me have brain damage.” Even so, he said he wanted to find out why his body seemed to be betraying him. Ever since his fight against Joe Frazier in Manila, he said, he had felt damaged, and it was steadily getting worse.
In September 1984, Ali checked in to New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where he underwent several days of testing. He was seen by one of America’s leading neurologists, Dr. Stanley Fahn, who said Ali displayed a range of symptoms, including slow speech, stiffness in the neck, and slow facial movements. “He was a little slow in his response to questions,” Dr. Fahn told the writer Thomas Hauser, “but there was no hard data to suggest that he was declining in intelligence.”
Ali was discharged after five days because he needed to travel to Germany. When he returned and was readmitted, news of his hospitalization spread around the world. Floyd Patterson paid a visit, and Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had recently given up a campaign for president, visited twice. Ali had given Jackson his endorsement in the Democratic primaries, but in the general election the former boxer threw his support to Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. In 1970, as governor of California, Reagan had shot down Ali’s attempt to obtain a boxing license, saying, “Forget it. That draft-dodger will never fight in my state.” When Larry Kolb reminded Ali of Reagan’s statement, Ali shot back: “At least he didn’t call me a nigger draft-dodger.” Ali may have thought it was funny, but Jesse Jackson and others did not. “He’s not thinking very fast these days,” Jackson said after Ali’s endorsement of Reagan. “He’s a little punch drunk.” Atlanta mayor Andrew Young was so upset he arranged a meeting with Ali, attempting in vain to change the former boxer’s mind on the endorsement.
Kolb, Ali’s friend and manager, stayed in a hospital room adjacent to Ali’s to keep him company and handle his phone calls. Veronica arrived soon after. Every day, Ali looked out the window of his seventh-floor hospital room and saw reporters and fans gathered on the sidewalk.
One day, Ali ventured outside to greet the crowd. “I saw so many people waiting and thinking I’m dying,” he told reporters, “so I got dressed and looking pretty to show you I’m not dying.” He raised his chin and shouted, “I’m still the greatest . . . of . . . allllll . . . tiiiiimmmmme!”
While conducting his examination, Dr. Fahn spoke to reporters at a press conference, saying tests virtually ruled out Parkinson’s disease as the cause of Ali’s symptoms. Instead, he said, Ali was likely suffering from Parkinson’s syndrome — an array of symptoms similar to those found in people with Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Fahn said Ali would be treated with the drugs usually prescribed for Parkinson’s patients, Sinemet and Symmetrel. Ali’s condition, he added, was “very possibly” the result of blows to the head taken during his boxing career.
Only an autopsy could say for certain whether boxing had damaged Ali’s brain, according to Dr. Fahn. A British survey of more than two hundred boxers published prior to Ali’s diagnosis found that about 10 percent of all former boxers suffered symptoms similar to Ali’s. In neurology textbooks, Parkinson’s is listed as a degenerative disease of the brain. Nerve cells in the brain stem begin to die. As they die, the brain can’t produce enough dopamine, and the loss of dopamine leads to the shortened, unsteady stride; the slurred speech; the lost facial expression; and the trembling hands. These were the same symptoms that led to the description of the term punch drunk half a century prior and the same symptoms described by Sports Illustrated a year earlier in its special report on boxing and brain injury.
In an interview years later, Dr. Fahn said it was possible that Ali had been afflicted with these symptoms as far back as 1975, when he fought Joe Frazier in Manila, although the damage was certainly not caused by one fight. Ferdie Pacheco, having watched Ali fight through the years, expressed much the same opinion. Ali’s boxing record also offered evidence to support Fahn’s theory. In the early years of his career, before his three-year ban from the sport, Ali had absorbed an average of 11.9 punches per round, according to an analysis by CompuBox. In his final ten fights, he had been hit an average of 18.6 times per round. The numbers don’t prove that Ali suffered brain damage, but they strongly indicate that he was losing his speed and his reflexes, and that the cause may have been more than age.
“My assumption,” Fahn said, “is that his physical condition resulted from repeated blows to the head over time. One might argue that his Parkinsonism could and should have been recognized earlier from the changes in his speech. That’s speculative. But had that been the case, it would have kept him out of his last few fights and saved him from later damage. It was bad enough to have some damage, but getting hit in the head those last few years might have made his injuries worse. Also, since Parkinsonism causes, among other things, slowness of movement, one can question whether the beating Muhammad took in his last few fights was because he was suffering from Parkinsonism and couldn’t move as quickly as before in the ring, and thus was more susceptible to being hit.”
The good news, Fahn said, was that Ali seemed as clever and intelligent as ever. His life was not threatened. And medication would ameliorate some of his symptoms.
Ali’s medicine kept his symptoms in check, but Ali didn’t always take his daily doses.
“I’m lazy and I forget,” he said. In truth, the pills made Ali so nauseated that he often preferred to endure his symptoms.
He continued traveling, continued boxing in exhibitions around the world, sometimes not sure where he was going one day to the next but trusting Herbert Muhammad to guide him. His ego, at least, was undiminished. “I’m more celebrated, have more fans, and I believe am more loved than all the superstars this nation has produced,” he said. “We have a saying, ‘Him whom Allah raises none can lower.’ I believe I have been raised by God.”
Even with his extensive travels, Ali spent more time at home now than ever, but he did not adjust easily to domesticity. The manly entourage had been his family most of his adult life. Now, he seemed unprepared for and perhaps uninterested in the life and work of parenthood. Rather than settling down with Veronica and their two girls — Hana, age eight, and Laila, age six — Ali entertained an endless stream of guests at his home and took every invitation to travel as an opportunity to escape boredom. Laila said she hated entering her father’s study because there were always so many people — “advisers, friends, fans, hangers-on.” After years of watching him on TV, she longed for her father’s company, and she did not wish to share him with the strangers surrounding him. Ali was like a big kid, and his girls loved that. He took them to Bob’s Big Boy and let them order “a whole dinner of desserts.” He hid behind doors when they entered rooms and chased them around the house wearing scary masks. He swallowed all the kids’ vitamins so they wouldn’t have to. He tape-recorded conversations with his children, telling them they would be happy one day to have a record of their time together. He was enormous fun, but, as Laila told it, he did not provide the kind of warm, safe, and loving environment she craved.
“I never heard my parents fight,” Laila wrote in her memoir, “but their separate bedrooms said it all.”
In the memoir, she refers to her childhood home in Los Angeles as “the mansion” and “my father’s mansion.” With the exception of Thanksgiving, there were no family dinners. Maids and cooks kept the children clothed and fed. Laila was not impressed when celebrities such as Michael Jackson and John Travolta appeared in the living r
oom. “I was drawn instead to another black family who lived down the street,” she wrote. “They ate together every night . . . The parents gave the kids rules and made sure they were obeyed. All this made me envious. I longed for such a family.”
Ali’s children from his first marriage saw their father two or three times a year. Jamillah, in a recent interview, said that she and her sisters, Rasheda and May May, got along nicely with their stepsisters, Hana and Laila. Ali did a good job of making sure Khalilah’s children got to know Veronica’s children. When Veronica and Muhammad were married, the children often spent summers together at the house in Los Angeles. Sharing her father with her stepsisters was not difficult, Jamillah said. “We had to share him, anyway,” she said. “We had to share him with the world.”
Ali’s illegitimate children enjoyed even less time with their father. Miya, Ali’s daughter with Patricia Harvell, said her father phoned her regularly and invited her to Los Angeles from time to time. Once, Miya said, when children at school were teasing her because they didn’t believe Ali was her father, Ali flew in, took her to school, and addressed an assembly of students, introducing himself as Miya’s father and speaking individually with some of those who had doubted his daughter’s claim. “That meant more to me than words can explain,” Miya said.
Veronica had to share Ali, too. Often, she remained in her room, feeling like a prisoner in her own home. She was never comfortable coming into the kitchen or living room unless she was fully dressed because she never knew who might be there. Veronica possessed a shyness that people mistook for frostiness.
“I became numb,” she said in an interview years later. “Yes, it was so much hurt. Too much hurt.”
Ali cheated on Veronica throughout their marriage. “He’d bring a woman right in front of you,” she recalled, “and later you’d find out he was fooling around with her.” Even when she learned that Ali maintained a steady relationship with Lonnie Williams, Veronica said she accepted it because she didn’t think her husband was really in love with the other woman.
Ali’s second wife, Khalilah (formerly known as Belinda), had also moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, which further complicated matters. In 1979, Khalilah had landed a part in The China Syndrome, which starred Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon. But after that, her acting career foundered, and she burned through most of the money she had received in the divorce. By the 1980s, she was working as a housecleaner in the same Los Angeles neighborhood in which her ex-husband and his new family resided. She had also been reduced to selling her plasma for ninety dollars a week.
Lonnie arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. She was fifteen years younger than Ali. She had first met the boxer in 1963, when her family had moved to a house on Verona Way in Louisville, across the street from the home Ali had purchased for his parents. Lonnie was a pigtailed first grader at the time. Her mother, Marguerite Williams, became one of Odessa Clay’s dearest friends. Through the years, Ali brought each of his wives to Louisville, and Sonji, Khalilah, and Veronica each dined at the Williams’s table. Lonnie watched them come and go. In 1982, on a visit to Louisville, Ali had invited Lonnie to lunch. During the lunch, Lonnie became disturbed by Ali’s emotional and physical condition. “He was despondent,” she told Thomas Hauser. “It wasn’t the Muhammad I knew.” Soon, a plan was made and agreed upon by Veronica: Lonnie would move to Los Angeles to help care for Ali. In return, Ali would pay all her expenses, including her tuition for graduate school at UCLA.
Ali made no effort to hide his new relationship from his wife and children. In fact, Laila wrote, “He’d sometimes bring us along when he visited . . . her Westwood apartment . . . At the time, I didn’t know anything was wrong. It took me years to realize the inappropriateness of a married man introducing his kids to a special friend like Lonnie.”
In the summer of 1985, Veronica and Muhammad decided to divorce. Ali told his lawyers to ignore the prenuptial agreement, saying he didn’t want to be stingy. Some of Ali’s friends believed that Veronica was divorcing Ali because he was ill, but Veronica strongly denied it, saying she believed her husband’s condition was stable and he would enjoy a long and active life. She said she still loved Ali but left him because she’d been hurt too many times by his affairs with other women. “You cannot do that and then expect someone’s love,” she said.
On November 19, 1986, Ali married Lonnie before a small gathering of friends and family in Louisville. Lonnie’s parents were there, as were Cash, Odessa, and Rahaman.
Lonnie was twenty-nine. Ali was forty-four. He was starting over, not only in marriage but also in his body. All his life, his body had done everything he’d asked of it. He had been beautiful and strong almost beyond measure. As a young fighter, he had danced and dodged out of danger, stinging his opponents so quickly and sharply that he seemed never in peril. After his three-year layoff from the sport, he had lost some of his speed but made up for it with cunning and power, making George Foreman his fool. In the final phase of his fighting career, he had lost his legs, lost his reflexes, lost his quick hands, lost everything but his guile and his willingness to suffer and endure.
Now, with his body abandoning him, with his voice a whisper, his feet shuffling, he would have to reinvent himself one more time.
54
“He’s Human, Like Us”
Ali’s hands shook. His face masked his emotions. His voice shushed and blurred. He nodded off at inconvenient moments. He was not an old man, but he gave the appearance of one at times. As he had in the ring in the latter stages of his career, Ali adapted; he turned weaknesses to advantage.
When he grew bored with an interview or a meeting, he pretended to fall asleep. When the person who had been boring him left the room, he sprang from his chair and sang a line from the old Platters tune: “Yes, I’m the great pretender!”
He also feigned sleep during interviews. With cameras rolling, he would act as if he were dreaming about one of his fights, and he would begin throwing punches, slowly at first, and then faster and with more force. Lonnie or Howard Bingham would play along, urging the stranger in the room not to wake Ali from his dream. That’s when Ali would throw a punch that stopped mere inches from the face of his interviewer, open his eyes, and make it clear that it had been a show. It was a clever way to entertain without speaking and to disguise his genuine fatigue, giving the impression that he was in control — a rope-a-dope for the weary and middle-aged.
Despite his physical challenges, Ali loved to travel. The entourage was gone, but he still had Lonnie, Bingham, Larry Kolb, Herbert Muhammad, an assistant manager named Abuwi Mahdi, and others to accompany him. He did the rubber-chicken dinner circuit and never complained when he couldn’t eat two consecutive bites without stopping to sign an autograph or pose for a photo. He told old jokes and stories as if they were new. He promoted products. He raised money for charity. He let reporters into his home and sat with them for hours, watching replays of his old fights, insisting he felt fine and had no regrets. He received standing ovations just for entering or exiting a restaurant. No matter where he went, he was the most famous person in the room, and even in his diminished condition, he made pulses quicken and left lasting impressions.
Kolb recalled a favorite moment. Ali was at a black-tie charity dinner in New York, seated next to Jersey Joe Walcott, the former heavyweight champion. Walcott was in his seventies at the time, wizened, tiny compared to Ali, and unnoticed. A long line snaked from Ali’s seat right past Walcott, as dozens of men and women waited for Ali’s autograph. Ali signaled for Kolb and whispered in his ear: “Larry, get up and go to that line and tell every one of those people that the man seated next to me was a great boxer, too. His name is Jersey Joe Walcott, and he was the heavyweight champion of the world. Tell them if they want my autograph they gotta ask Jersey Joe for his first.”
In 1985, Ali went to Beirut along with Kolb, Herbert Muhammad, and others, including Robert Sensi, a CIA agent introduced to them by Vice President George H. W. Bu
sh, according to Kolb. They were trying to win the release of more than forty hostages, including four Americans, held in Lebanon by Muslim extremists. News reports at the time described the mission as a fiasco, but the journey was more complicated than journalists covering the story were aware. Led by Sensi, Ali and his group flew first to London, where Ali met with Iranians said to be close to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini — believed by the White House to be the hidden hand controlling the hostage-takers in Lebanon. From London, Kolb said, Ali spoke by phone with Khomeini — or someone who said he was Khomeini. Soon after, one American hostage was released. But when Ali told a reporter that his conversation with Khomeini had won the hostage’s release, the American mission bogged down. Khomeini aides told Ali that Iran had nothing to do with the hostages taken in Lebanon; they suggested Ali go to Lebanon if he really wanted to free more captives.
In Beirut, the Americans were taken in the middle of the night to a Hezbollah safe house, where they met with shadowy figures who presented conditions for releasing more hostages. No additional captives were freed. From his suite at the beachfront Summerland Hotel, and from the mosques and schools he visited, Ali heard the daily rocket fire, the whizzing bullets and explosions. On Middle East Airlines stationery, he wrote a letter to his old friend Gene Kilroy, who had moved on from his job as Ali’s facilitator to one as a Las Vegas casino host, taking care of VIP guests with the same care he had long given Ali. The letter was dated February 20, 1985. It read,
Dear Gene
I’m just leaving Lebanon for Zurich, and I wanted to drop you a note. When you hear bombs go off around you it makes you think how much you like to be with the people you care about.
I hope to see you soon, but in the meantime, I Want you to know that I appreciate your loyalty over the years.