by Hana Ali
“That’s it, Hana!” he said. “You’re a good swimmer! The greatest swimmer of ALLLL time!”
I was pictured in People magazine handing him his boots one morning as he dressed in a nineteenth-century military uniform for his role.
“I see they finally got you into an army uniform,” someone joked as he walked on set.
“Yeah,” he grinned back. “But only from a hundred years ago.”
He complained to my mother once. He had waited all afternoon to shoot a scene with her. Mom had a cameo in the film, where she would pour him a cup of tea.
“I don’t like this acting!” he said again. “It’s too time-consuming.” He also didn’t like the fact that the films he was making weren’t blockbusters.
“You have to go to school for this. You have to study,” he said on one of his recordings. “I got out of acting because it’s silly making movies that aren’t big hits . . .”
So, quitting acting was a forgone conclusion. Dad enjoyed being himself far too much, anyway, to pretend to be anybody else. “I like being me!” he once said. “I enjoy living my life, as Muhammad Ali!”
He didn’t have the patience for acting in any form. When he was to film his third d-CON roach spray commercial, he got frustrated and walked off the set.
“That’s it! I’m through for the day!” he said after dozens and dozens of takes. “We can finish this tomorrow!” And with that, he was gone.
Like his father, Dad was restless. He could never stand still for long.
A friend of my father, Tim Shanahan, once told me the story of how in 1977 Warren Beatty rewrote the screenplay Heaven Can Wait with my father in mind for the leading role. The original 1940s version had a boxer as the main character. According to Tim, Warren thought Dad was a natural actor and perfect for the part. Sometime before moving to Los Angeles, Warren came to the house on Woodlawn in Chicago and offered him the part. I’m told Dad was excited about the film and loved the storyline about a young athlete who dies suddenly when an overanxious angel takes him to heaven—only to discover he wasn’t supposed to die. But his body is cremated before the angel’s mistake can be rectified, so he returns to earth to live in another man’s body. Dad was all in until Herbert Muhammad, Dad’s manager and advisor, told him it was a bad idea because Muslims don’t believe in reincarnation. My father always put his religion first. He didn’t want to advertise anything that would contradict the teachings of Islam. So he turned down the role.
Warren and Dad kept in touch and became friends of a sort. And on June 19, 1977, he was at my parents’ wedding.
“My main thing now is to try and serve God,” said my father in the same interview with People magazine. “So what if I make a movie? The odds are, forty years from now, we won’t be here. Forty years ain’t nothing to eternity. How many movies did Charlton Heston or Elizabeth Taylor make? They’re old now, life went by . . .”
He went on to tell the interviewer about his greatest project. An organization called WORLD—the World Organization for Rights, Liberty, and Dignity—an international service foundation.
“Everything has a purpose,” he said. “Trees have a purpose. Pigs have a purpose. Termites have a purpose. Surely God’s highest form of life has a purpose too.”
The interviewer asked if Dad was ready to hang up his gloves.
“I really don’t know right now,” he said. “I’m not worried about leaving boxing. I’m established now. Boxing wasn’t nothing. It held me back, kept me in training camp for six months. Six damn months of my life in a training camp. I’m free now . . .”
* * *
When he wasn’t traveling the world making films or training for fights, my father spent most of his “home time” padding around his office with bare feet, sipping coffee, and talking on the telephone—dreaming his dreams aloud—trying to generate world peace.
“There’s an organization I want to form called WORLD,” said Dad in a recorded interview. “It stands for World Organization for Rights, Liberty, and Dignity. I’m a little reluctant about pursuing it because it’s going to take a lot of work, but I have a lot of plans. I talked to Brezhnev when I was in Russia, and he gave me a spot inside the Kremlin if I want it. I’m not Russian; I’m just trying to make things better.
“I’d like to set up office in about sixty countries. The sole purpose of the organization is to better relationships between people on a social, civilian level. For example, the common Russian doesn’t hate Americans, and the common American doesn’t hate Russians. It’s just the politics of leaders that cause the titles and the labels, which cause the prejudice or hate . . . Like Catholics don’t like Protestants, or Muslims aren’t with the Germans, or the Buddhist is not with the Hindus, or the Republican is not with the Democrat. God never named anything Catholic. He never named anything Baptist, Jehovah’s Witness, Muslim, or Judaism.
“Man gave the title, and that’s what separates and divides people. I’d like to get something started where there is no title involved. All people, all races, all religions fighting for one cause—the human cause. This is what I think I want to do because nothing can surpass what I’ve already done. I’ve been so popular and I’ve done so much in boxing that if I went out and just found one occupation or made movies or whatever I wouldn’t be satisfied. I’ve got to do something big—something that will change lives . . .”
8
I remember Kris Kristofferson and John Travolta coming to the training camp and the house on Fremont several times to visit my father. On one occasion Kris brought his daughter Casey with him. She was two years older than me (I was probably four or five at the time). What I remember most was the two-inch platform shoes she was wearing. It was the first time I’d seen high heels made for little girls. I asked her if I could try them on. Once the shoes were on my feet, there was no getting them off. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. If memory serves, she went home barefoot that night.
Over the years Kris and my father remained friends. He was at the opening of the Ali Center in 2005, Dad’s museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and he and his wife Lisa spent Thanksgiving with us a few years back.
John Travolta was a different story. By the mid-1980s, he’d disappeared. When Mom and Dad were in Texas, at the invitation of Adnan Khashoggi, a wealthy Saudi Arabian businessman, they found out John was staying in the same hotel. They left a message for him, but he never returned the call. They never knew why exactly, but they later discovered that John had cut off his close friends and associates, and fired all of his longtime employees.
A couple years earlier, John was at our house celebrating my mother’s birthday, asking my parents to fly to Las Vegas with him on his new airplane. Dad wasn’t comfortable flying in little planes, so he didn’t want to go.
“Come on, Muhammad,” said Auntie Diane. “It’s Veronica’s birthday. You’re always complaining that she doesn’t want to go anywhere. Now she finally wants to do something and you don’t want to go . . .”
Her speech worked. After a few slices of cake, the four of them flew to Las Vegas for the evening. Before they left, John came up to our rooms with my father to tuck us in. It was the last time I remember seeing him.
* * *
I pick up another article and my jaw drops. My father is on the front page of the Detroit News, standing on the ledge of a nine-story building. In the photo it’s Monday, January 19, 1981, two days after his birthday. The same time next year, one week after Dad’s last fight, Mom will throw a small surprise dinner party for him. A vague memory resurfaces.
I’m seven years old. Laila and I are peeking through the stair rails in our pajamas as my father and his guests—Cary Grant, John Travolta, Mayor Tom Bradley, Kris Kristofferson, Lou Rawls, Zev Braun, and friends—are gathered around a belly dancer. Mom and Aunt Diane are in black cocktail dresses, complete with ruffled white aprons. The evening was all jingles, cheers, and laughter. Glasses were raised, toasts were made, jokes were told, all in celebration of D
ad’s fortieth year. “I’m getting old,” he told them. “It all goes by so fast.”
I exhale slowly, lean back in my chair, and read the story. The photo is overwhelming. Dad is leaning over a balcony, his arms wrapped around a stranger, pulling him over the railing to safety.
Muhammad Ali reaches for a distraught man who was threatening to jump from the ninth floor of a Los Angeles building yesterday. The former heavyweight champion happened to be driving by the building while police were trying to talk the man out of jumping and asked if he could help. He leans out the window to speak to the man threatening to jump, then helps him back onto the balcony.
The man he talked out of plunging to his death was a twenty-one-year-old from Michigan who was convinced he was a “nobody.” At 2:20 p.m. the man climbed out on a fire escape balcony of a building at 5410 Wilshire Boulevard. He locked the door behind him and screamed that he was going to jump.
“He said he couldn’t find a job, that he was depressed,” Dad told the reporter. “He said his mother and father don’t love him, that nobody loves him. He asked, ‘Why do you worry about me? I’m nobody.’ I told him he wasn’t a ‘nobody.’ He saw me weeping and he couldn’t believe I was crying, that I cared that much about him . . . I’m going to help him go to school and find a job, buy him some clothes. I’m going to go to Michigan with him to meet his mother and father. They called him nobody, so I’m going home with him. I’ll walk the streets with him and they’ll see he’s BIG.”
He did the same thing for my sister Miya. She called him crying one day after school. A few of her classmates had been teasing her. They didn’t believe her father was really Muhammad Ali because she didn’t look like Dad and they never saw them together. My father was on the next flight to New Jersey. He drove her to school and called an assembly. When all of the kids were in the auditorium, he told them all he was her father. Then he took her home and walked up and down the streets of her neighborhood holding her hand, so everyone could see them together.
Dad escorted the man to the police station in his Rolls-Royce. Then he rode with him in the police car that took him to the hospital for a seventy-two-hour psychiatric observation.
Saving the man was neither a quick nor an easy task. As my dad’s involvement began, he went to the nearest window on the ninth floor and began to talk to the man.
“You’re my brother,” he said. “I love you, and I couldn’t lie to you. You got to listen. I want you to come home with me, meet some friends of mine . . .” A few breathless minutes later, the man opened the door and my father walked out onto the fire escape with him.
He put his arm around the man, then took it away when he became apprehensive. They talked for a while longer, and with a suddenness no one had expected, it was over. The man relaxed, hugged my father, and wept as he led him to safety.
I don’t know what became of the young man or his troubled soul, but my father kept his promise.
“What did you say to get him off the ledge?” Mom asked later that evening.
“He thought nobody loved him,” said Dad. “I told him I loved him or I wouldn’t be there.”
As I stared at the image of my father pulling the man to safety, a story he liked to tell came to mind. There was once a hunter who was walking through the forest. He saw two birds sitting on the branch of a tree. He shot one and it dropped to the ground. It took a few minutes for him to arrive at the spot where the bird fell. While he was walking, the other bird had come down to look at his fallen mate. The bird touched his companion with his beak and realized he was dead. When the man arrived, he found both birds dead.
“One was such a friend to the other,” said Dad, “that when it discovered there was no life in its mate’s body, it died on the spot. From that day on, the huntsman gave up shooting birds. He said, ‘I found a friendship among birds and animals that cannot be found among mankind.’
“This is a simple lesson that we all must learn. Today, when nations are against nations, races against races, one community against the other, one religious group bombing the other, now is the time when friendship is most needed. For someone who learns the lesson of friendship in this world, this lesson, in the end, develops into a friendship with God himself.”
I thought about another story—one my mother had told me.
One morning in 1979, when she and my father were staying at my grandmother’s house near downtown Los Angeles, they were jogging together up Beverly Boulevard when a homeless man approached them.
“I must be losing my mind,” he said. “You look like Muhammad Ali.”
“You’re not losing your mind—it’s me!”
“Will you sign your autograph for me?”
Dad reached into his pocket for his black marker—he was always ready for occasions like these. Sometimes he stood for hours signing autographs, telling jokes. It was the common everyday people who he enjoyed most. He knew the effect his presence had on them and he seized every opportunity to connect with people. Sometimes in the most unusual places—places you would never dream of bumping into Muhammad Ali, like an abandoned alley or street corner in the slums of Chicago or New York City. He’d walk down the street shaking hands with all who crossed his path.
“I’ve made so many mistakes,” he once said. “I’m just trying to get to heaven.”
The homeless man handed my father a crumbled piece of paper.
“What’s your name?” he asked. Knowing Dad, he probably drew a smiley face and heart next to one of his favorite inscriptions: Love is a net where hearts are caught like fish.
The man watched in awe as he signed. “I can’t believe it’s really you . . .” he said.
Before Dad could look up, a clenched brown fist hit him in the face. And with that, the homeless man took off running, shouting all the way up the street, “I hit Muhammad Ali! I hit Muhammad Ali!”
After the initial shock wore off, both my parents laughed.
“I guess that’s a better story than an autograph,” said Dad, rubbing his chin. “He never would have got me in my prime.”
“No one will even believe him,” said Mom.
“Probably not,” said Dad. “But he’ll know—and that’s all that matters.”
Someone once said that my father was what God meant people to be. Kind, loving, generous, and good. He was 100 percent sincere in what he said and what he believed. He used to say, “You can’t serve God, because he doesn’t need you. You serve him by serving people. When you reject and turn people away, you’re rejecting the one who created you.”
As much as my father loved his faith, he raised us to respect all religions, all people, and to judge no one. He always used his wisdom and fame to help as many people as he could. His whole life was a prayer for peace, justice, and human dignity. He gave so much and asked for nothing in return—only love.
“Everyone is trying to live the best they can with the hand they’ve been dealt,” he once told me. “It’s not always easy. Life is not equally kind to us all. Remember to treat everyone with respect and equality, and God will always bless you.”
“Muhammad Ali is an international treasure,” said Thomas Hauser in his book The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali. “More than anyone else of his generation, he belonged to the people of the world and is loved by them. No matter what happens in the years ahead, he has already made us better. He encouraged millions of people to believe in themselves, raise their aspirations, and accomplish things that may not have been done without him. He wasn’t just a standard-bearer for black Americans. He stood up for everyone. And that’s the importance of Muhammad Ali.”
9
I picked up the Afro-Caribbean Post. My father is pictured in the Kremlin, shaking hands with Brezhnev. It’s June of 1978, Dad had just lost his world title to Leon Spinks, but he would regain it in their second meeting, three months later.
I read the headline: “Ali the Ambassador.”
MOSCOW: Muhammad Ali, the former world heavyweight champion, hugged and kiss
ed Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin last week and said the “quiet and meek” Soviet president invited him to be his Ambassador for Peace to the United States.
“It’s hard to believe he is a warmonger,” Dad said at a press conference after the meeting. “All he spoke about was peace and love for humanity. He made me an unofficial Ambassador for Peace to the United States. Don’t be surprised if you see me in the White House.
“He’s so stately and dignified,” continued my father. “He received me for thirty-five minutes, sitting there looking at me in the eyes like I was the president. He made me feel good to be a little black boy from Louisville, Kentucky, who couldn’t meet the mayor of the city a few years ago.”
My father was impressed by Brezhnev’s desire for peace, and he told the Soviet leader, “President Carter and the American government want nothing but peace.
“Our country is too beautiful to be destroyed by bombs and killing people,” said Dad. “Nobody wants war. Nobody can win. I used to worry about the Russians attacking America. And I am convinced now that there will be no war because America is too intelligent, and now I see the Soviet Union is intelligent too . . . So many races and people are living here in peace.”
As I read, I thought about my father’s plan of starting a world organization, how he wanted to gather children of all ages, one from every nationality, culture, and race, and fly around the world together on a jumbo jet, meeting with various world leaders, hoping to inspire world peace. It was an improbable but beautiful dream—a dream he spent a lot of time trying to realize until something out of his control altered his course.
* * *
My father woke up every morning, put on his suit and tie, and opened his black briefcase full of his notes, speeches, and ideas. Then he’d set out to realize his dreams, searching for his new purpose in life. “I’m confused,” he admitted to numerous reporters in 1979. “I don’t know what to do in life now. I don’t know what the purpose of it all is. But I know there’s something waiting for me. I haven’t heard no voice. A lot of preachers say God called them; well, I haven’t heard it, but I want to figure out something that’s never been done before in the world of religion. Just like I’ve done something that’s never been done before in the world of boxing . . . I enjoy ministering.”