At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  After J. J. came Jamal, Jaleel, Jabriel, and then Jazen, the youngest. Jamal went on to play for the Atlanta Falcons, among other teams, and is known for creating the Dirty Bird celebratory touchdown dance, which he did for the first time during the 1998 Super Bowl.

  The Anderson boys had three sisters, Kenia, Keisha, and Little Zenobia. When I visited, I would make Kenia nervous by going outside to the ice-cream truck, chatting to people sitting in their cars. “Hi,” I’d said, licking my dripping popsicle. “My name is Hana . . . My father is Muhammad Ali.”

  “Hana, don’t do that!” shouted Kenia. “You might get kidnapped or something!”

  Everyone was afraid I’d get kidnapped—including my father. I’m not sure where the fear came from, but it was a constant concern throughout my childhood.

  “Don’t worry, Muhammad,” Cruella reminded him time and again. “If anyone took this child, they’d bring her right back!”

  I never did see Michael Jackson at the house again after that visit. I often wondered if Jamal was right—if it was because of the question I had asked him. But it may have been because the divorce was imminent and we were leaving Fremont the following year.

  My father often spoke to Michael and his brothers over the telephone, but at that time I was too young to know who they were. I was three years old and sitting in his lap dripping my popsicle all over him as Dad’s ever-rolling tape recorder captured one of their conversations, on December 8, 1979:

  “Hey, Marlon,” said my father. “Do your kids like popsicles?”

  “Yeah, they love them.”

  “Mine too!” he said. “I don’t know what it is about them. My little girl, Hana, is only three years old, and she’s always asking for a popsicle . . .”

  “So does my little girl,” he said.

  Marlon had called my father to see if Dad would introduce them onstage. They were performing at The Forum in Los Angeles.

  “I wish I could,” he said, “but I’ll be in Hong Kong . . .”

  A few days later Marlon called back to see if anyone in the family wanted tickets to the show.

  “Marlon Jackson of The Jackson 5!”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No . . . you all aren’t The Jackson 5 anymore, are you?”

  “No, we had to change our name when we left Motown because they claimed they owned it. Now we’re just The Jacksons.”

  “Who are you with now?”

  “We’re with CBS—Epic Records.”

  “I thought y’all were with Kenny Gamble.”

  “We used to be with Kenny Gamble, we were with CBS and they wanted us to record with him, but we’re doing our own stuff, we’re writing and producing our own songs. The Temptations just rejoined and signed with Kenny Gamble.”

  “They’re not doing anything much now, are they?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah, they’re getting ready to come back out—the original Temptations . . .”

  “Hold on . . . Put those back, Laila,” he said in the background. “My two daughters are in here cuttin’ up, tearing up and drawing. Talkin’ about ‘Daddy, I want to write,’ then they take my pen and scribble on paper.”

  “That’s sweet,” said Marlon.

  “I take all that stuff and mark the date on it. When they get older, I’m going to show it to them. It’s valuable.”

  “Yeah, we save our little girl’s drawings too. She goes to nursery school . . .”

  “Yeah, keep all that stuff . . . So, what’s up, Boss?”

  “We just wanted to know if anyone in your family needed tickets to the show.”

  “Yeah, when is the show?”

  “December 18th, which is next Tuesday, at The Forum.”

  “Hold on—let me see where I’ll be . . .” He reached for his datebook.

  “No,” said Marlon, “you’ll be in Hong Kong. I wanted to know if your in-laws wanted tickets.”

  “Yeah, man, I’d like to get five of them—my sisters and brothersin-law would love to go to the show. Can you mail them to me?”

  “Yeah, no problem, I’ll mail them. I have your address . . . You live on 55 Fremont?”

  “Yeah, man, the zip code is 90005.”

  “Okay, I’ll get you five tickets. My wife, Carol, wants to know if Veronica is going to Hong Kong with you?”

  “Yeah, she’s going . . . Well, I sure am thankful you’re calling me and are going to give me those tickets. I’m so honored I’m going to give them to my sisters and brothers-in-law. They’ll want to go see you.”

  “Okay, I’ll get this right out to you.”

  “We’ve got to hang out one day, you hear?”

  “Okay, we will.”

  “Okay, take care,” said Marlon. “I love you.”

  “I got your phone number. I’ll call you as soon as I get free,” said Dad.

  “Thank you, brother.”

  Dad hung up the phone and spoke into the recorder: “That was Marlon Jackson of The Jackson 5; they left Motown, so they’re now called The Jacksons. This is December 8, 1979. I’m downstairs with Hana and Laila . . . What’s Laila doing, Hana?”

  “She’s messing with your papers . . .”

  * * *

  Like I said, there were always interesting people visiting Fremont Place. Actors, athletes, rock stars, politicians—even royalty. And they all wanted my father’s time and attention. They enjoyed being at home with Muhammad Ali. One afternoon Dad’s friend Tim Shanahan carried me into his office after taking me out for ice cream. “Tim Shanahan! My Main Man!” Dad greeted him exuberantly as always. He did that often, shouted Tim’s first and last name whenever he walked into the room or called on the telephone, especially when he was with people Tim didn’t know. I guess it was to make him feel good and to announce he was a friend. Tim loved to tell the story about what happened that afternoon.

  “To my surprise, your father was sitting behind his desk talking with Don Henley and Glenn Frey, the lead members of the Eagles singing group,” said Tim.

  Of course, at the time I had no idea who they were. I ran right past them and jumped into my father’s arms to kiss him. Then I jumped back down and ran out of the room to find Laila.

  “Tim Shanahan!” Dad repeated. “Do you know who these guys are?” He knew that he did because Tim played the Eagles in Dad’s Rolls all the time. Ron Levin, a friend of my parents, had brought them over to the house.

  “Wow! Don Henley and Glenn Frey!” said Tim. “My all-time favorite singers. It’s great to meet you guys. Has Muhammad talked you out of taking drugs yet?”

  Dad cracked up laughing. He thought Tim was joking. When he realized he was serious, he turned to Don and Glenn, who looked as though they had just seen a ghost.

  “Are you two really into drugs?” asked Dad.

  At a loss for words, they remained silent.

  “That’s bad stuff, man . . .” he said. Then he talked to them for a while about why drugs were bad for them and ended with saying, “Why do you need drugs? You should be high on life. You’re singing to thousands of fans all over the world [they were getting ready to tour South America], all the girls are screaming and fainting for you . . . Maaaaan, you don’t need no drugs.”

  When he was finished, Glenn Frey looked at Don Henley and said, “I don’t know about you, but I want to quit usin’ right now!”

  Trying to lighten the conversation with a joke, Dad pointed at Tim. “He looks white, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he does,” said Don, looking Tim over.

  “He’s my cousin,” said Dad. “He’s been passin’ for years—look at him closer . . .”

  Tim Shanahan met my father in the spring of 1976, before the third Ken Norton fight. One warm April night in Chicago, Tim peered through the window at 4944 Woodlawn Avenue and saw Dad standing on top of the red stairs that greeted you as you entered the front door.

  “He was wearing his gray and maroon Egyptian cotton bathrobe,” said Tim one night over dinner. He and his wife, Helga, became friends o
f my parents and spent a lot of time with us at the Woodlawn house in Chicago, sprawled out on the white carpet in the living room in front of the fireplace, and eventually at the house on Fremont Place. After my parents’ divorce, we saw less of Tim and Helga, but they always kept in touch, with regular phone calls, emails, and occasional dinners when Tim was passing through town on business. Tim is old enough to be my dad, but we always had one thing in common, our love for my father, and he always had stories to share. But until that night in 2010, over dinner, I hadn’t heard the story of their first meeting.

  Tim had gotten my father’s address somehow and, like so many fans before him, had heard stories about people from around the world who had bumped into my father on the street and were invited home with him. Tales of admirers who walked right up to Muhammad Ali’s doorstep and he invited them in, signed autographs, and performed magic tricks. So, on that fateful evening in April of 1976, four months before I was born, Tim decided to walk up and knock on my father’s door.

  “As I stood there, waiting for him to open the door, I thought, Oh, Lord, what do I call him?” said Tim. “Mr. Ali? Muhammad? Champ?”

  When the door opened, he froze, but eventually got the words out. “Hello, Mr. Ali, my name is Tim Shanahan . . .”

  “Come on in . . .”

  “I sat next to him on the stairs,” said Tim. “Wow, I thought. Muhammad Ali asked me to sit next to him in his home. He made me feel like the luckiest person in the world.”

  As they talked about upcoming fights and his movie, The Greatest, Dad reached over to the telephone table and picked up his black book filled with celebrity names and phone numbers. He opened it and said, “Do you know him?” Leonard Bernstein. “Do you know him?” Johnny Carson. “Him?” Bill Cosby. “How about him?” Paul Newman. “Let’s call her . . .” Diana Ross. He dialed the number, the maid answered, so he left a message. “Let’s try this one.” Tony Orlando.

  He answered.

  “Tony, I have a friend here that I want you to talk to. He is a big fan of yours.”

  “Hi, Tony, I just met Muhammad a few minutes ago, and here I am on the phone with you.”

  “So, Tim,” said Tony. “You, too, are now one of those special people who are one of Muhammad’s 10,999 closest friends, as am I!”

  “It was unbelievable, Hana,” said Tim. “One of the most memorable moments in my life.”

  I knew exactly how Tim felt. My life is full of unforgettable moments and stories. My father made his mark on so many people’s lives. I often wonder about all the stories I have never heard.

  “You should write a book one day,” I said.

  “Maybe I will.” Tim smiled.

  A few years later he wrote Running with the Champ: My Forty-Year Friendship with Muhammad Ali.

  Dad loved pulling out his phone book and calling his famous friends to amuse people. But there were times when he and my mother were hanging out at home when he’d pick up the phone just to call and say hello.

  “Hello, may I speak to Mr. Newman?”

  “He isn’t home right now. May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Tell him, MUHAMMAD ALI called!”

  “Hello, Muhammad, this is his wife, Joanne . . .”

  Paul Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, was also a famous actress but had chosen to keep her maiden name. Not realizing this, Dad replied, “Joanne Newman—nice to meet you.”

  One of my favorite celebrity stories involving my father was one he liked to tell about the night he spent with Elvis Presley. On February 14, 1973, Elvis Presley presented my father with a white jeweled robe. On the back, rhinestones and jewels spelled out “The People’s Choice.” It was meant to say “The People’s Champion,” but Dad didn’t mind. He loved the robe and was grateful Elvis had taken the time, that he cared enough to have it made. On March 31, 1973, when he fought Ken Norton, my father entered the ring proudly wearing the robe.

  “A few years ago, Elvis came to my training camp in Pennsylvania,” Dad told reporters. “Nobody knew about it. I said, ‘Elvis, please do me a favor. I got a guitar. Come with me down to Pottsville, a little town nearby, to this redneck place called Spoonies.’ I called the owner, told him to let us come in the back door. It was Saturday night, dancing inside. Elvis went up to the mike with a towel over his face, then I snatched off the towel and he started singing ‘Hound Dog.’ Then we jumped off the stage and flew out the back door again.

  “Can you imagine being in that little one-horse town and Elvis Presley runs on stage?” he asked the reporters. “Man, people ran all outta the place, looking, getting in cars, trying to find us. Elvis said, ‘Champ, I’ve never done that before in my life.’”

  I think my father was joking. But you could never tell with Dad. People were always doing things for him that they wouldn’t normally do.

  When he was filming Freedom Road, he asked Kris Kristofferson to play the part of Abner Lait, which he did as a favor to my father. And Dad once had John Travolta dancing in the streets of Mississippi with random people, in hotel lobbies and taverns around town. I don’t know about Elvis, but Dad did that sort of thing all the time—and his friends readily indulged his whims. He liked to shock and amaze, turn up in places and on street corners where they’d never expect to see Muhammad Ali. If he had told the reporter that he and Elvis walked off the stage and signed autographs, I would not have questioned it. But there’s no way Dad would have run out the back door without talking to the people.

  My father loved his fans so much that when there weren’t any people around he went looking for them. “Let’s go outside and stand on the corner, see how long it takes for people to recognize me.” He said this one day when we were sitting in his hotel room in New York City.

  “Okay.” I grabbed a handful of his pre-signed autographs, then we walked out of his hotel through the revolving doors onto Fifth Avenue.

  “What up, Ali!” said one man.

  “Look! It’s ‘The Greatest’!” said another.

  In less than a minute, people had gathered around him, like moths to a flame. As always, Dad stood patiently handing out his autographs, performing magic tricks, and taking photographs for as long as his health would permit. He could still walk on his own back then and seemed to have bursts of stored energy he probably conserved for moments like those.

  “I’m the King of New York!” he had said as our private jet landed at JFK International Airport. It was my first trip to New York City. I was seventeen at the time. “They love me here.”

  “They love you everywhere, Daddy,” I said. “But I thought you were the king of the world,” I teased.

  “I had to start somewhere,” he shot back with a wink.

  A couple of hours later, a police officer on horseback was escorting us out of the crowd. They were all chanting my father’s name as we made our way back to the hotel. Daddy’s eyes lit up, and he raised his fist, giving them the old victory sign. He was always most alive in moments like those. When we were back in the hotel room, a look of serenity washed over his face as he sat back in his chair. “We did a good deed today, Hana,” he said. “You helped me make all of those people happy. God will bless you.”

  While most celebrities spent their time finding ways to escape their fans, Dad went searching for his.

  “When your father and I were guests of the ruler of Bangladesh, President Rahman,” my mother once told me, “he hosted an elaborate dinner in our honor. Halfway through the banquet, your father disappeared. Do you know where we found him? In the kitchen, performing magic tricks for the staff. People tell stories about legends and superheroes all the time,” she said. “But your father was real.”

  I often wondered about the stories Dad told about Elvis. I asked three of his friends about it once. Tim, who was acquainted with Elvis Presley’s best friend, Jerry Schilling, Howard Bingham, and Gene Kilroy. All of them had spent a considerable amount of time with my father at his training camp in Deer Lake, especially Howard and Gene. If Dad took Elv
is out for a night on the town, surely one of them would have known of it, I thought.

  “No, that wasn’t true,” said Howard. “He probably made that up.”

  “No, that never happened,” said Gene.

  “I don’t think so,” said Tim. “But who knows.”

  Elvis called my father at the farm in Michigan a couple months before he died, to congratulate him on his recent marriage to my mother. Dad missed the call. He and Mom were on their honeymoon in Hawaii.

  “Tell him he married a real beauty this time,” said Elvis.

  “I’ll give him the message,” said Lana Shabazz, Dad’s fight cook. “He’ll be home in a couple of days.”

  Howard Bingham and his camera went almost everywhere with my father. He captured unforgettable images over the years. He even took the only pictures of my father and Elvis together. But no one I asked seemed to think there was any truth to Dad’s story, so I wrote it off as an amusing tale and forgot about it.

  Years later, I was up late surfing the internet for old photos of my father when I came across a statement he once made to the press.

  “Elvis was my friend,” he said, after hearing of his passing on August 16, 1977. “He came to my camp in Deer Lake about two years before he died. He said he didn’t want anybody to bother us. He wanted peace and quiet, so I gave him one of the cabins in my camp. When the cameras started rolling, watching me train, he was up on the hill sleeping in the cabin, and nobody even knew it. I don’t admire anyone, but Elvis Presley was the sweetest, most humble, and nicest man you would ever want to know.”

  I guess some things will always be a mystery.

  * * *

  Bundini Brown, who was portrayed by Jamie Foxx in the movie Ali, was my father’s friend and corner man. He coined the phrase that would become permanent in Dad’s repertoire, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Bundini once said my father had seven people inside him, but only three were around all the time: the fighter, the prophet, and the little boy.