by Hana Ali
My dad was a constant performer. The ever-present child within him loved to entertain and make people smile. Of all the titles he has acquired over the course of his life, the People’s Champion was his favorite. And it suited him.
As long as I can remember, people have told me stories about how my father changed their lives—they found the courage to face their fears, stand by their convictions, follow their dreams, or simply love themselves; he made them feel like they could do anything, and convinced them that they were the greatest too.
23
In July of 1979, the renowned film critic Roger Ebert spent a day interviewing my father. By the end of their time together, he would have a unique story to tell. And because my father let the outside world in, Mr. Ebert’s article would transport me back in time, allowing me to relive the moments I was once too young to remember.
On a Tuesday afternoon, Roger Ebert was standing in the entrance of Fremont Place, admiring the mahogany paneling, the stained-glass window in the stairway, and the Turkish rug on which he was standing, when an insect started buzzing near his ear. He slapped it away but missed. Then it started buzzing at his other ear. He struck at the air, but nothing seemed to be there. My father was smiling to himself, pretending to be looking down the hall. When Roger turned his back, the insect attacked again. Dad grinned mischievously as Mr. Ebert turned in circles, slapping at his hair.
Killer Bees was Dad’s signature prank. Kings and presidents all over the world had experienced the buzzing. After Dad had his fun, he always explained.
“Make sure your hand is dry. Then rub your thumb hard across the side of your index finger, like this, see . . .” Dad showed Roger, making a vibrating noise. “Then hold it behind somebody’s ear, sneak up on ’em, and they’ll think it’s killer bees. I catch people all the time . . .” He smiled. “It never fails.”
A black limousine pulled up in the driveway. Dad was on his way to the NBC studios to film The Tonight Show with Diana Ross. It was her first night as guest host. After the taping, he was taking Mom and me to the movies—a private screening of Rocky II. Throughout the film, my father would play movie critic with Roger Ebert.
“Rocky part II,” he said, “starring Apollo Creed as Muhammad Ali.”
The taping with Diana Ross went smoothly. Dad joked with her about her age, leaned over to read her notes, talked about his official retirement benefit, and asked her to sing at the party. Then he was back in another limousine, a blue-and-beige Rolls-Royce, heading home. My father sat in the front seat, next to the driver, with his window down. His face positioned in the frame, waiting. The entire seven-mile drive, not a single person failed to recognize him. People shouted his name as the Rolls passed, his fist clenched in a victory sign.
As Roger witnessed that day, riding down the road with my father was no ordinary venture—it was a hero’s parade.
When we were setting off for the private screening, five cars pulled out of the driveway like a presidential procession. Dad, Mom, and I were second in line. We were en route to the United Artists headquarters on the old MGM lot. As Mr. Ebert noted, all five cars’ emergency flashers were blinking the entire way: it was the day’s second parade.
When we arrived, a crowd of young kids was waiting for Dad in the parking lot. He shook their hands, spoke to them briefly, then we were inside a private screening room about to watch the most popular movie of the summer—the sequel to Rocky, which had won the Academy Award for Best Picture two years earlier, making Sylvester Stallone a household name.
Dad liked the original movie and was eager to see Rocky II, I’m sure. He settled down in the back row, with Mom and me on his right, and Roger Ebert on his left. If my father was reflecting on his career as the film began, he didn’t say so. And he made no mention to Roger that he was thinking of coming out of retirement to fight Larry Holmes. Dad knew how to keep a secret. Especially his own.
My father watched the opening scenes in silence. He didn’t speak until the moment when Apollo Creed, the heavyweight champion, delivers a televised challenge designed to lure Rocky back into the ring. And with that, his commentary began.
“That’s me, all right,” Dad said softly. “Apollo sounds just like me—insulting his opponent in the press to psych him out. That’s me exactly.”
Back at Rocky’s new house, the doorbell rang.
© Michael Gaffney
“You know who that’s gotta be,” said Dad. “That’s gotta be his trainer.”
Rocky opened the door to find his old trainer, Mickey, standing on the doorstep.
“That’s how Angelo Dundee used to get me,” Dad remembered. “A good trainer knows a good fighter can’t stand to have people talk about him badly on TV.”
Now Mickey was giving Rocky advice: “We’ve got to get you fighting with your other hand. Use your right, save your left, protect that bad eye . . .”
“Maybe it could be possible,” said Dad. “If you started on a kid early . . . he might be able to change the hand he leads with, but it doesn’t happen overnight.”
Now Mickey was making Rocky chase chickens to improve his footwork. “That one goes back to the days of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis—chasing chickens,” said my father. “You don’t see chickens at training camps anymore—except on the table.”
Mickey was shouting fiercely at Rocky, “JAB! JAB! JAB!” as he pounded the heavy bag.
“You don’t have to tell a great fighter to jab,” said Dad. “He goes at the bag like a robot. I never had anybody telling me to jab. If you don’t want to jab, what are you doing being a fighter?”
There was a wider shot of the gym, with Rocky in the foreground. A dozen fighters were working out, jumping rope, and sparring in the background. “What you see here, if you know how to look for it,” he explained, “is the difference between real fighters and actors. A real boxer can see Stallone isn’t a professional; he doesn’t have the moves. It’s good acting, but it’s not boxing. Look in the background—at that guy in the red trunks. He’s a real fighter.”
Now Rocky was in the ring with a sparring partner. “The other guy’s a real fighter,” he said again. “Stallone doesn’t have the moves, but it’s perfect acting. The average layman couldn’t see what I see. And the way they’re painting the trainer is all wrong. Look at him, screaming ‘Do this!’ and ‘Do that!’ No one told me what to do—I just did it. Shouting at the fighter that way makes him look like an animal—like a horse to be trained.”
“Is the character of Rocky inspired by you?” asked Mr. Ebert.
“No way,” said Dad. “Rocky acts nothing like me. Apollo Creed, the way he dances and jabs, the way he talks—that’s me.”
And he was right. Stallone would later reveal that he wrote Apollo Creed’s character based on my father.
On the screen, a moment of crisis unfolded in Rocky Balboa’s personal life. After giving birth to their son, his wife had slipped into a coma. Rocky had just left her bedside and was praying in the hospital chapel.
“Now he doesn’t feel like fighting because his wife is sick,” said Dad. “The same thing happened to me when I was in training camp—during one of my divorces. It’s hard to keep your mind on fighting when you’re thinking about a woman. You can’t keep your concentration.”
He must have been referring to his divorce from Belinda. Mom was pregnant with me before it was final. Toward the end of her pregnancy, she had a complication. At the hospital, the doctors had to deliver me by C-section. After I was born, Dad flew to Show Low, Arizona, and Mom stayed in Michigan at the farm to recover. My grandmother, being a registered nurse and mother of six, taught my mother how to care for me. The following week, Mom and I flew to Show Low. And a few days later, he made the tape of him singing to my mother.
“You feel like sleeping all the time,” he continued. “I’m going to make a prediction. Rocky’s wife is going to get better, then he’s gonna beat the hell out of Apollo Creed.”
Back in the hospital room, Rocky’s
wife opens her eyes. Dad nodded. “My first prediction is proven right,” he said.
Then Rocky’s wife turned to Stallone and said, “There’s one thing I want you to do for me. Win.”
“Yeah!” said Dad. “Beat that nigga’s ass!”
The nurse walks into the room with little Rocky Jr. The baby had a head full of thick black hair. “They got a baby in line to win the Academy Award,” Dad laughed. “Look at that Italian hair!” he said. “Rocky couldn’t deny the baby in court—in real life!”
In an inspirational montage, Rocky threw himself into his training regimen with renewed fury. “That’s right,” said Dad. “He’s happy now that he’s got his woman back. Now I’m gonna further predict that, in the big fight, they’ll make it look like Rocky’s losing. His eye will get cut, and he’ll look the worst before he wins. And after the movie the men will be crying louder than the women.”
Now Rocky was weight lifting: “That’s the worst thing a boxer can do,” said Dad. “It tightens the muscles. A fighter doesn’t lift weights, but it looks good in the movie.”
In an inspirational scene, Rocky was running through the streets of Philadelphia, as a crowd of cheering children followed him up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“Now, that’s something people will think is artificial—all the crowds running after him—but that’s real,” said Dad. “I had the same kind of crowds follow me in the streets of New York.”
It was now time for the climactic fight scene—more grueling and violent than in the original Rocky. In his dressing room, Apollo Creed is jabbing at his image in a mirror.
“The way he’s fighting in the mirror, those aren’t real fighting moves,” said Dad, “but for the movie, they look good. And the motivation here is right. Apollo won the first fight, but some people thought Rocky should have won it. If you lose a big fight, it will worry you all of your life, plague you until you get your revenge. As the champion, almost beaten by a club fighter, Apollo has to have his revenge.”
I was asleep in my father’s arms as Rocky Balboa was on his knees praying in the locker room. Dad was absorbed in the scene. When Rocky stood up, Dad told Roger, “The scariest time in a fighter’s life is the moment before the fight—in your dressing room. All the training is behind you. All the advice in the world doesn’t mean a thing. In a moment, you’ll be in the ring. Everything is on the line, and you’re scared.”
Now Apollo Creed and Rocky Balboa came dancing down the aisles of the Philadelphia Spectrum, Apollo taunting Rocky: “You’re going down! I’ll destroy you! I am the Master of Disaster.”
“Those first two lines should have been my lines,” Dad mused. “That ‘Master of Disaster’ . . . I like that. I wish I’d thought of that.”
On the screen, the big fight was in progress. Between rounds, in the fighters’ corners, their trainers pumped out instructions.
“Angelo doesn’t tell me nothing between rounds,” said Dad. “I don’t allow him to. I fight the fight. All I want to know is if I won the round. It’s too late for advice.”
“How long do you predict the fight will last?” asked Roger.
“Hard to say. Foreman, they stopped in eight. Liston, they finished in eight . . . The movie might take something from that. I can’t predict. But look at that . . .” Dad pointed at the screen. “Apollo is using my rope-a-dope defense.”
In the tenth round, Dad leaned in: “Here’s where the great fighters get their second wind,” he said. “Where determination steps in.” On the screen, Rocky was taking a beating, and his eyes, as Dad had predicted, were severely swollen. “In a real fight,” he said, “they would never allow the eyes to close like that and let the fighter continue. They would stop it.”
But in Rocky II they didn’t stop it. The fight would go the distance. And my father continued his commentary, explaining how in real life no fighter could absorb as much punishment as Apollo and Rocky had. A minute later the theater filled with the Rocky theme. When the lights came on, my father’s entourage was applauding the movie. Dad stood carefully, so as not to wake me, and handed me to my mother.
“That was a great movie,” he said. “It will be a hit. It has all the ingredients: love, violence, emotion—the excitement never dulled . . .”
* * *
Three years later, in 1982, our house and its furnishings were used in multiple scenes in Rocky III. Sylvester Stallone was sitting on the bench in the Southern Room in one of the scenes. Mom and Dad’s bedroom and the back patio that I used to wait for my father on was also featured in the film. They even captured our courtyard furniture and my parents’ lace bedspread and blue moire headboard.
They say life imitates art. But sometimes it’s the other way around. While there may not have been an intentional connection between Stallone’s character, Rocky Balboa, and my father, ironically in Rocky III he loses the championship fight, just like my dad did in 1980. And Rocky and his family had to move out of the beautiful mansion, just as we would four years later.
But at that moment, while everyone sat there applauding the film, the house on Fremont Place was still home. The phone in Dad’s office was ringing off the hook with endorsement offers and greetings from friends. And Sylvester Stallone’s next movie, Rocky III, along with my father’s last two fights, were yet to be seen.
24
Whenever I asked my father which fight meant the most to him, he always said the Rumble in the Jungle. “Nobody believed I could do it. They thought Foreman was too strong—too big. ‘He’s got youth on his side,’ they said.” George Foreman had beaten two of my father’s toughest opponents, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton, fighters to whom my father had lost one out of three bouts each.
“I didn’t know how,” said Dad, “but somehow I just knew in my heart that, with God’s help, I could do it. I had to.”
I think the secret to my father’s success was how he always believed it was never him but God working through him—and the fight was always for something bigger than himself.
“If I had walked into that ring only for myself, yeah, then he would have seemed scary, he might have got me. But when I thought of all the good winning the title could do, when I thought of all the people I could help . . . George seemed small by comparison.”
As Foreman fell to the ground in an eighth-round knockout, the crowd burst into a thunderous roar—as did the heavens. Rain poured from the sky, drenching the people of Kinshasa as they danced in the street. He had done it; Dad had achieved the impossible. That night he’d regained his world championship ten years after he’d first won it in 1964—showing himself and the world how great he really was.
“My God, he has done it!” the commentator shouted over the radio, as Foreman fell to the canvas. “The great man has done it! Muhammad Ali has regained his heavyweight title at the age of thirty-three! He must be The Greatest!”
The moment my father stepped onto African soil, he felt a kinship with the people there. After the fight, he saw a group of kids playing barefoot near the Congo River. He told them they had a dignity in their poverty that American blacks had lost. He told them he would use his title for good, that he would use it to bring awareness of their country, and that he would never do anything to disgrace them.
And he didn’t.
Five years later, on December 3, 1979, Dad picked up the phone and called George Foreman at home in Houston, Texas.
“George Foreman!”
“Praise God, man! It’s a miracle,” said George.
“How you doin’, George?”
“I’m doin’ just fine, man. I’m just thinking about you every day . . . just sitting down here, working for the Lord . . .”
The fated encounter that inspired this phone call and friendship is a story in itself. Dad, Howard Bingham, and my mother were driving down a road in Houston when they suddenly spotted George Foreman. Following his devastating defeat by my father, George fell into a deep depression, eventually leaving boxing and emerging with a newfound
purpose. Foreman was a changed man. Realizing the true meaning of his life, George sold everything he owned and embarked on a spiritual path.
“It was unbelievable,” said my mother. “Like something out of a movie. He was just standing there on top of a wooden crate in the middle of a vacant dirt lot, preaching to a small crowd of people.”
My father had heard rumors about George after losing the title to him in Africa. Shortly after that fight, George retired from boxing. My father was shocked to hear that George sold all of his material possessions, his houses and his cars, and devoted himself entirely to preaching the word of God. His sacrifices were so extreme that it caught my father’s attention. The details were different, but until then, Dad thought he himself was the only person to take such a noble stand—walking away from worldly riches in the name of his principles and faith. Now he heard George had done the same. The fact that he belonged to a different faith intrigued Dad further. He wanted to know what had happened to him.
That night in Texas my father couldn’t believe his eyes; he was mesmerized at the sight of George Foreman, former heavyweight champion of the world, a man who was once invincible, now standing humble in the street, in the middle of nowhere, with an open Bible in his hand. Naturally, Dad wanted to know more about what motivated George to such an extreme. He parked the car and eagerly walked across the street. After a brief discussion, photographs were taken. Telephone numbers were exchanged. Then Dad got back into his car and promised George he’d call.
“Hey, George,” said Dad. “Have you ever thought about getting some type of building—somewhere you can get a lot of people in one place and not on the street—where they can hear you good?”
“Well, see, this Gospel here is, ‘Preach to the poor people.’ And the way you find them is where you and I used to be when we were little kids, just hanging around the streets.”
“Right.”