At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  We drove home, my mission accomplished. Another adventure with my father. Wonder Woman would have been proud of my perseverance.

  Laila (left) and me in our Wonder Woman outfits in Dad’s office.

  14

  I hear Kevin turn on the shower as I leaf through the pile of newspapers and magazine articles on my lap: Los Angeles Times, South China Morning Post, The Star, The Journal, US Caribbean Voice, and Jet, whose headline reads, “Muhammad Ali Takes a Beautiful Bride.” I set this one aside. The photos on the front page of the Los Angeles Sentinel catch my eye. Bo Derek, the beautiful blonde actress who played in the movies 10 and Tarzan, is pictured strategically beneath my mother. Curious, I read the caption:

  The Main Event—Muhammad Ali, the former boxing champion of the world, is the honored guest during “The Main Event” dinner, which was given for him May 22 in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel by José Sulaiman, president of the World Boxing Council . . . In photo top left, Mayor Tom Bradley presents a citation from the City of Los Angeles while Sugar Ray Robinson, another former world champion, looks on . . . At top center is Mrs. Veronica Ali, the former champ’s wife . . . In the photo bottom left, Mayor Bradley, Robinson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Ken Norton, Ali, and flamboyant fight promoter Don King talk over old boxing times . . . In center photo, bottom, is actress Bo Derek who, per USA Today, had been invited by Ali as his special guest but who was “stood up” when Ali brought his wife . . .

  I shake my head. The press can be so misleading, even mischievous at times. Bo Derek visited the house when I was a little girl. She was a nice lady. She let me run my fingers through her long blonde hair and played patty-cake with me. John Derek, her husband, asked my father if Bo could accompany him to the event for publicity. Dad agreed, but apparently the Dereks didn’t realize that my parents were on good terms throughout their divorce proceedings and that the three of them would be arriving together in the limousine.

  I checked the date beneath the caption: Thursday, May 30, 1985. The same evening that Dad received Mayor Bradley’s Muhammad Ali Day Proclamation and one year before the divorce was final. I was nine years old, and they were already sleeping in separate bedrooms. My mind traveled back to my first clue something was wrong—when the fairy tale began to crumble.

  One morning I had woken up to find my father in the guest bedroom. Dad was normally up by 5 a.m. and working in his den. It was unusual to find him in bed in the morning, though he sometimes took a nap in the middle of the day.

  It was the room my stepsisters Jamillah and Rasheda slept in when they flew in for the summer. A room full of memories of slumber parties and dance competitions, of singing “Billie Jean,” “When Doves Cry,” and “Purple Rain” as we jumped on the bed.

  “Daddy,” I said, my heart thumping in my chest at the sight of him sleeping alone, “why aren’t you in bed with Mommy?”

  “I snore too loud,” he said, his smile belying the sadness in his eyes. “I don’t want to disturb her.”

  He wasn’t lying; it just wasn’t the whole story. My parents started sleeping in separate bedrooms before their marriage was officially over—possibly before he wrote the first letter.

  One night, after Dad was up late working in his office, he walked through the house. I imagine he was turning off lights and checking the windows and doors, which was something he always did before he went to bed. He’d roam the halls of Fremont Place making sure we were safe, then head to the kitchen for a midnight snack, standing at the counter eating cake and vanilla ice cream in the dim light, unaware that on this night when he got upstairs he would find the bedroom door locked.

  There had been a few burglaries in the neighborhood and I guess Mom wanted to feel safe.

  All those months leading up to their official separation, my mother assumed my father wasn’t coming to bed. She had grown accustomed to him working late in his den. And he thought she intentionally locked him out. If only he had knocked on the door, or called her name, she would have opened it—and he would have known. But neither of them said a word. Knowing my father, he didn’t want to wake her. Dad had a thing about letting people sleep peacefully—free of disturbance. And he didn’t seem to face personal issues in the same way that he confronted the issues of the world. I think maybe it was because, with the world, he was fighting for something greater than himself. And there was a part of him that had never felt worthy of my mother—as if he had deserved to lose her. Or maybe he never knocked on the bedroom door because he knew what was coming—that it was the beginning of the end, and he wasn’t ready to face the inevitable.

  Those final two years of my parents’ marriage, they traveled the world together, making appearances, always friendly and cordial with each other, “like brother and sister.” Everything appeared normal to the press. All the while, my father clung to hope as he wrote his letters: I’m so sorry for the way I treated you. It hurts me that I cannot sleep with you . . . I’m having a difficult time, and for me the meaning of this is not clear . . . if you give me one more chance . . . I love you so much . . .

  Twenty years after the divorce, Mom’s sister, my aunt Diane, who lived with us at Fremont Place while she was going through her own separation, casually mentioned the day she found my father sleeping on the sofa in the third-floor media room. “He was just lying there,” she told my mother over Thanksgiving dinner. “Beside the aquarium, with your exotic fish, without a pillow or blanket to comfort him.”

  Lying there uneasily, I imagined, in the company of his trophies and boxing memorabilia.

  “Muhammad, why are you sleeping up here?” Diane had asked him.

  “Veronica locked me out.”

  Maybe he thought, Tomorrow will be different, tomorrow she might forgive me . . . I’ll give her the letters tomorrow. But as time passed, my mother kept locking her bedroom door, distancing herself from my father. And he kept sleeping on the sofa, eventually moving into the guest bedroom across the hall from my room, where he would read me bedtime stories and we would fall asleep together, and I learned what my father learned: hope hurts.

  I picked up another article: Detroit News, 1975. The more I read, the more I understood. “The Great Man looked out at us at a press conference and said that we [reporters] always miss the big point about him. He said everybody always asks him what’s the toughest part of fighting and nobody has ever figured out what it really is. What it is, he said, are women: millions and millions of women—one more striking than the next. All so alluring and so beautiful.”

  “Women are the destruction of men,” said Dad. “They have destroyed all the great men in history.” This would have been base coming from anyone else, noted the reporter, but as he stood up there and smiled that angelic smile and told them of the great temptations of his life, the room shook with uncontrollable laughter.

  He said, “Do you know what it’s like to be desired by the most desirable women in the world?” And, of course, none of them really knew what he was talking about because it had never happened to any of them. But as he spoke, they knew that it was something he must live with. “And it can’t be easy,” noted the reporter. “Especially being married and portraying himself as a family man and devout religious figure.”

  He called a few ladies up to the podium and teased them about their beauty. To one he said: “Look at the skin . . . so tan, so smooth . . . and the pretty black hair, those eyes, those lips. Do you know what I say to women like this? I say, ‘It’s nice meeting you. Goodbye.’ And that’s so difficult to do!”

  Everyone howled. It didn’t come out dirty, lewd, or in bad taste. It was just plain funny. Dad leered at the girls: “That’s my big problem. That’s what you reporters never write about—never ask me about. It’s not getting hit. It’s all these beautiful women in every city in the world. That’s the big problem in my life . . .”

  “When your father was a teenager,” my mother will tell me the day after the storage-room discoveries, “he only thought about boxing. There were only a few gir
ls he had crushes on, but he was always shy and innocent. He fainted and fell down the stairs the first time he kissed a girl. It was the people around him who tried to corrupt him. If he had been left to be his natural self, he might have remained innocent.”

  I think I know why my mother had fallen so deeply in love with my father. He was charismatic and handsome. He made her laugh and feel beautiful. He said he adored her for all her grace, class, intelligence, and beauty. He gave her declarations of storybook love. He spoke of heartfelt emotions, feelings he claimed he had never felt for another woman. It was a promising beginning to a beautiful love story, with one major flaw: he was already married.

  It’s no secret my father fooled around. After all, he met my mother when he was still married to his second wife, Belinda Boyd, aka Khalilah. What the world, back then, didn’t know is my father’s marriage to Belinda was already on the verge of divorce before he met my mother in 1974. Contrary to the suspicions of my father’s entourage, and rumors circulating at the time, my mother was neither a model nor a beauty queen, and she wasn’t a spy sent over by the George Foreman camp, as some of Dad’s entourage suspected and even tried to convince him.

  She was an eighteen-year-old pre-medical student on a full scholarship at USC who entered a poster-girl contest that won her an unexpected trip to Salt Lake City and Africa. It’s odd to think that if George Foreman hadn’t cut his eye during a training session, the fight my father dubbed “The Rumble in the Jungle” would not have been postponed thirty days and my parents may have never found the time to get to know each other.

  “I remember the moment I knew I had fallen in love with him,” Mom continued. “It was several weeks before the Foreman fight. We were in the living room of your father’s private villa in the presidential compound in N’Sele, outside Kinshasa, Zaire. He was reciting several of his speeches and reflections about love and friendship. My favorite was ‘The Heart’: ‘People look for miracles; people look for wonders; people expect surprises of all kinds. Yet the greatest miracle, the greatest wonder, the greatest surprise is to be found in one’s heart . . .’ As he spoke, the look on his face was so ethereal, my breath caught in my chest, and I knew.”

  They took long walks along the Congo River. He drew sketches of her and brought her dinner at night before going to bed. They hugged, cuddled, and did all the things people do when they’re in love. My mother’s beauty was overwhelming, but my father has repeatedly said how he admired her inner beauty more than her looks. “She was so sweet, classy, and intelligent—a real lady. I just couldn’t let her go. I had to find a way to keep her with me.”

  Mom and Dad, 1975.

  He feared she would go back to college and forget about him, and fall in love with someone else—someone more intelligent and less complicated than him.

  “Marry me,” he said, a week before the fight. “Do you believe in one God?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you submit to his will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re a Muslim.”

  The following evening they were married in a spiritual ceremony under the African moon, the only witnesses the African Muslim minister who performed the service and my father’s bodyguard.

  “This is for you and for me,” he told her on the walk back to his villa. “So that I know you’re mine, and you know I love you and intend to marry you officially when I’m free.”

  That was the beginning of their love story. But his freedom was to be three years out. Before he could make good on his promise, he’d need to get his wife to agree to a divorce, and not wanting to embarrass her or their four children, Maryam, Rasheda, Jamillah, and Muhammad Jr., he asked Belinda to file for it. But it was a path with more twists and turns than he or my mother imagined.

  15

  After winning the Foreman fight and regaining his championship title, my father talked my mother into taking a semester off from school. When she agreed, he called her parents and convinced them to let Mom stay with him. “I want her to be in my movie . . . She can travel with me for a while—see the world. I’ll take good care of her.” And he did. The Porche family had no idea what they were in for. In the coming years, after my parents were officially together, he sometimes sent my grandmother money to help with bills, and years later he paid off the mortgage on their house. He flew my mother’s parents, sisters, and brothers first class on several trips around the world.

  He gave them front-row seats to his fights and spent money on them, giving them gifts and introducing them to heads of state and celebrities. My aunt Diane even dated a couple, comedian Richard Pryor and the actor Jimmie Walker, best known for his role as J. J. Evans in the hit show Good Times. While my father and mother mostly kept the company of everyday people and only occasionally hung out with celebrities, the Porche family’s life had changed overnight and would be a constant adventure for the twelve years that my parents were together.

  My father’s generosity didn’t begin and end with my mother’s family. After every fight, Dad sent people money: his mother, Belinda’s mother, all my siblings’ mothers, his father, his brother, etc. And he gave bonuses to everyone who worked for him. The year after he met my mother he just included my grandmother to the already very long list.

  “Steven,” he said to my mother’s youngest brother, “the baby of the family. You’re so tall, you might be the next Larry Bird!” Everyone laughed. “Tony,” he said to my favorite uncle, “I bet you’re the ladies’ man of the family, with those bright blue eyes.

  “And, Leonard, your Afro is so neat and shiny.” He clowned with the third brother, patting his own hair. “It almost looks as good as mine!”

  “Michelle and Diane . . .” His eyes enlarged as he greeted my mother’s sisters. “You’re both so beautiful, if I’d seen you first I might have married you instead of Veronica.” He looked over his shoulder at my mother as he hugged them, teasing and hoping to rouse a reaction, but she was always good at ignoring his flirtatious behavior. She had heard that line many times before, and would hear it many times after.

  “Look, Veronica,” he’d say, hugging random women who asked for his autograph in airports, restaurants, or wherever. “I bet this will make you jealous.” If it did, she never showed it. Mysterious and indifferent, she’d turn her head, seemingly unaffected. She’d grown used to his demonstrative behavior and fun-loving, flirtatious personality. It was part of the package. You couldn’t separate one from the other, and she never tried. She let him be himself.

  While my mother’s family enjoyed the perks of being associated with the most famous man in the world, she would have a much different, and more difficult, experience. Portrayed as the beautiful temptress that seduced a legend and broke up his family, the press and Belinda loyalists were relentless in their condemnation of my mother. She was insulted and ridiculed by my father’s staff and members of his entourage, and Dad’s constant praise of her didn’t help the situation. “I’ve been all over the world and I’ve never seen a woman as beautiful as Veronica,” he said. “Pictures don’t capture it.”

  Every day members of Daddy’s crew brought countless women before him, hoping to change his mind and lure him from my mother. “Look at this one, Ali. She’s a real beauty.”

  “Not more beautiful than Veronica,” he’d always say.

  This went on for years. I don’t know how she handled it so gracefully. I never could have.

  On the way home from Zaire, my mother boarded a separate flight, accompanied by my father’s head bodyguard, Pat Patterson, who was also a Chicago policeman. “I’ll meet you in Chicago,” my father told her. “There are too many reporters on my plane.”

  Mom and Pat stopped in Spain and Italy, and spent the day sightseeing before catching their connecting flight to Chicago, where she reconnected with my father and was put up in the Continental Hotel, downtown, while he shopped for a more comfortable and suitable place for her. From there, she and my father spent a few nights at his busi
ness manager C. B. Atkins’s high-rise before settling into the two-bedroom condominium he bought for her on Hyde Park Boulevard.

  My father, always wanting my mother with him, traveled everywhere with her. He based his fights out of Chicago for a while, and they drove Blue Bird, his Winnebago motorhome, up to Fighter’s Heaven in Pennsylvania—until Dad bought a forty-foot customized Greyhound bus, which was his pride and joy. “This is the BIG BOPPER,” he’d shout over the radio. “I’m heading up the highway. Over and out!”

  My parents spent a lot of time on that bus, as would I, driving to Florida, New York, Louisville, Pennsylvania—all over the place. Mom use to sit up late at night watching Dad drive, worried, after he’d almost driven into a house.

  “The road was pitch-black,” said Mom. “The house was at the end of the street. Your father made a sharp left turn just in time.”

  Sometimes they drove to his eighty-eight-acre farm in Berrien Springs, Michigan. I was born there, at Berrien General Hospital at 2:01 p.m. on August 6, 1976. Daddy flew Mom’s family in to visit and built her a large pond for her ducks. They rode his Clydesdale horse and went fishing on the lake.

  In the city, Mom spent her free time shopping for furniture with Evelyn Potter—the decorator Dad hired to fix up her new condominium in Chicago—who would later become her matron of honor.

  “Drive her around,” he told Evelyn. “Let her pick out what she likes.”

  Mom chose a zebra rug and a light-blue tufted sofa, which was eventually refurbished in tan suede and placed against the wood-paneled wall of my father’s home office at Fremont Place. She painted the living room her favorite color, baby blue, and chose peach for the walls of the bedroom. The second bedroom, an office, was the original home of the large wooden shelf that housed my father’s trophies in our third-floor media room. It now stands on the main wall of my grandmother’s family room.