At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  “Women’s clothes?”

  “No, women’s jogging trousers like your jumpsuit, and tennis apparel for women.”

  “Well, I don’t . . .”

  “I talked to Jabir [Dad’s manager] about it,” says Mr. Lomax. “And first, when they offered $200,000 he turned it down flat. Jabir said, ‘Muslim men don’t mind women wearing pants, so long as they wear them within the house for their man.’ And he said, ‘If Ali has any reservation about it, I’m not going to encourage him to do it.’ When they came back to me today with $400,000 and then again with $600,000 per year, Mr. Jabir said, ‘Well, maybe if at the end of the commercial you could say, “Muslim men don’t like women to wear trousers in public and I’m not endorsing this for Muslim women . . .”’ How do you feel about that?”

  “I don’t think they’ll let us say something like that on a commercial,” says Dad.

  “I think they want it so bad they’ll work with us, and all I need is for you to tell me to go ahead and work on it.”

  The other line clicks. “Damn it—shit—hold on . . .”

  “Hello . . .” No one is there. Dad returns to Lomax.

  “Yeah, I’m back . . .”

  “There’s so much money!” says Lomax. “For example, they said to me today—”

  Dad interrupts, “So much money is good, but—” His other line clicks in the middle of his sentence. “Damn it! Shit! Wait—hold on . . .”

  He could never resist a ringing telephone. Laila and I used to laugh watching him run back and forth from different rooms in the house to answer the phone. The only time he ever tried not to let it disturb him was during prayer. But even then it sometimes got the better of him.

  He clicks over hastily. Without asking who is calling, he says, “I’m on the phone. Call back in twenty minutes . . .”

  He returns to the other line, picking up where he left off. “When you’re talking about so much money and you’re talking about compromising on the beliefs of Islam, or something with Allah and the Muslim laws, I don’t care if they call back and say, ‘Here’s ten or fourteen million.’ That is just a test from God, to see if I’m going to like the money more. I hope Jabir isn’t getting weak over money . . .”

  “No,” says Lomax. “He’s not. This is my point of view, not his. My point of view is that they want you to do it so badly—”

  Dad interrupts. “Why? Why do they want me to do it so badly, if you don’t think they have nothing bad in mind . . . by getting me in trouble?”

  “Because they said the best TV commercial you ever did was d-CON. They said it was the best thing in the business and that if you could do that for d-CON, you might be able to do it for Vanderbilt.”

  After a brief pause, “I’m not turning down something good . . . Tell Herbert I’ll be in Chicago on the 8th and let me, uh . . .”

  “You want to think about it?”

  “Yeah, let me meet with Wallace, and if Wallace Muhammad tells me that, Islamically, it’s all right, I’ll do it. That’s all! I’ve got to go.”

  “Okay. Thank you, bye.”

  My father was very careful with how his image was used. He didn’t want to contradict the teachings of Islam. He knew he was the most famous Muslim in the world and had a huge Islamic following. He took his unique position very seriously and was always on guard so as not to do anything to embarrass his fellow Muslims.

  A month before Christmas, in November of 1979, he was on the phone with the State Department and the White House, trying to negotiate with a group of tyrannical Islamic students who had taken Americans hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran. The mere mention of my father’s name had opened the lines of communication.

  One morning stands out in my memory. Laila and I laughed as usual, watching Dad run back and forth from the living room to his office to answer the telephone—never knowing the importance of the phone call he was waiting on.

  26

  November 1979

  At five o’clock in the morning, a man rises. Careful not to wake his beautiful wife, he eases out of bed, slips on his house shoes, and wraps himself in a brown terry bathrobe. In the bathroom, he stares at his reflection in the mirror. He examines the smooth mocha skin that belies his age, thinking of how quickly time passes. After a moment, he brushes his teeth, washes his hands and face, and then heads down the hall to his daughter’s room. He sits on the edge of her bed and wakes her with soft kisses. “Wake up, Hana,” he whispers. “It’s time for morning prayer.” Yawning and rubbing her weary eyes, Hana reaches for her father. Muhammad Ali picks up his young daughter and carries her into the next room to wake her sister, Laila. Still in their pajamas, the two little girls walk downstairs holding their father’s hands . . .

  * * *

  Unlike our older siblings, Maryum, Jamillah, Rasheda, and Muhammad Jr., who had Muslim grandparents and grew up accustomed to the religion’s traditions, Laila and I were two wild little rascals. I never called my daddy “sir” like they did. When I was three, my father tried to teach me to do that, but all I would say was, “Yes, Poopoo Head!”

  “Poopoo Head!” he said. Then he laughed and gave up.

  One Sunday in November of 1979 stands out in my memory. The morning began as usual with my father waking us and walking us downstairs to the living room, where he had placed three prayer rugs on the floor facing east. Laila and I didn’t spend much time in the living room. It was where my mother displayed her Louis XVI antique furnishings, with the white ropes tied across like in an art gallery in front of priceless masterpieces to let you know that they weren’t meant for touching.

  My father probably chose this room because of the large picture window centered on the east wall. When the sun rose, the room took on a beautiful, spiritual ambience as the first glimmers of daylight shimmered across the horizon.

  This morning the sound of my father reciting the traditional prayer, “All praise be to Allah, the magnificent, the graceful. He alone we worship, he alone we seek for help . . .” was interrupted by the sound of the telephone ringing from his den. The sound was relentless, but this was not unusual. The phone rang often, and when it happened during prayer, Daddy tried his best to ignore it. But this morning he could not resist, and several times he rushed down the hall as if his life depended on it. I didn’t know at the time that my father was waiting on a call from the US Embassy, and if it went his way, that call would change hundreds of lives and jeopardize his own. The week before, he offered to fly to Tehran to negotiate for the release of the American hostages being held by militant Islamic students.

  But the callers at that early hour were not the people my father was waiting for; instead, they were more of the same calls he’d been receiving all winter. Like the news reporters from overseas wanting to know his future plans; heads of state inviting him to their country; the president requesting his presence at the White House to be briefed on my father’s recent trip to China; politicians, such as Ted Kennedy, calling for my father’s support; The Jacksons, asking him to introduce them in their final concert. The list went on.

  Laila and I couldn’t sit still or be silent for ten seconds, let alone a ten-minute prayer, and watching our father bustle back and forth muttering “Shit” and “Damn it” under his breath every time he stopped to answer the phone appeared hilarious. He would speak quickly to whoever was on the line, then return to us, picking up where he left off.

  We were both “cuttin’ up,” as Dad put it, before he reentered the room. I’d taken my chance to get up and bounce on the forbidden furniture. I knew when my father was coming back down the hall because my mother’s parrots would screech in unison, “Bye, Champ! Bock Bock!” But my guilty pleasure—thinking I’d gotten away with something naughty—was short-lived. My father had an inner knowing, and perhaps my flawless memory of that morning and all the mornings that followed over the years has more to do with the lessons he taught me than the pleasure I experienced watching him run back and forth to answer the relentless telephone.


  On one occasion when we were a little older, after a few minutes of enduring our giggles and whispers, Dad turned to face us both and said something I’ll always remember.

  “Hana! Please stop cuttin’ up,” he said. “There’s an angel on each of your shoulders. The angel on the left is writing down all of your good deeds and the angel on your right is writing down all of your bad deeds.” Now he had my attention. I listened wide-eyed. “When you die and go to heaven,” he explained, “God is going to present you with both lists. Make sure that the good list is the longest.” My eyes grew wider. “Always remember,” he advised, “even when your mother and me aren’t watching you, God sees everything that you do.”

  My father always had a way of getting his message across in a profound way. As many reporters experienced over the years, verbal sparring with The Greatest was no contest. He was way ahead on points before they even warmed up, and he was impossible to corner.

  The idea that we all die was not new to me. My father had told me this many times over the years. He would sit Laila and me down on the sofa in his den and explain how everything God made has a purpose. “Birds have a purpose, trees have a purpose, ants and cows have a purpose, and you have a purpose too . . . When you’re about twelve years old,” he said, just as he had told my siblings, “you should know what your purpose is. I discovered my purpose when I was twelve, after my bike was stolen . . .” I was only six years old the first time he told me this, and Laila was five. “So you still have a few years to figure it out,” he explained.

  “Nothing lasts forever,” he’d say. “We’re all going to die one day. I will die, your mother will die, and you and your sister will die. But there is another life after this one—the eternal life. This life is short—it goes by so fast. Thirty years ago I was a little boy running around with my brother. You’re just little girls now, but before you know it, you’ll be all grown up with your own children. Remember, this life is the preparation for the eternal life. What we do for God is all that matters. It’s all that will last.”

  After our many talks, I had become anxious about life and death. As I grew, my father’s words stayed with me. When walking barefoot in the grass, I was careful not to step on ants. I never killed a spider or a fly, and when riding my bike with childhood friends Kim and Karen, I warned them not to roll over the snails in our driveway. “All life is sacred!” I shouted, flying down the driveway on my red bicycle past the swimming pool and my father’s parked Rolls.

  “That snail has a purpose!”

  But I was mostly obsessed with the idea that my father would die—that I would one day lose him. The thought was too much to face. I remember sitting in my first-grade class and thinking about how much I loved him, how I wanted everyone to know how much I loved him, and that when he went to heaven I would be so sad I’d want to go with him. I know it sounds melodramatic, but children’s minds are imaginative and at times unreasonable.

  I could never imagine ever loving anyone as much as I loved my father, and I assumed he felt the same about me. But when I was five years old I discovered I wasn’t the greatest love of my father’s life, and it broke my heart. Dad had taken Laila and me to the mosque with him for Friday prayer, and since we were so young, he took us into the men’s prayer section with him. It’s customary for men to sit in the front of women, so as not to distract the men from prayer. Dad found a quiet place in the corner and did his best to keep us quiet. But as usual I was messing about, giggling and laughing.

  “Hana, Laila, please stop cuttin’ up,” he said. “You have to love God more than anyone, even me. I love God more than I love you.”

  My heart sank. I didn’t completely understand the concept of God yet, but I could not believe that there was something my daddy loved more than me. I remember wanting to understand why my daddy loved God so much. My father prayed all the time—five times a day. I didn’t know that anyone else prayed, so I assumed God and my father were telling each other things. When you’re little you try to make sense of stuff, and to me, it seemed that Daddy was extra special in God’s eyes. I thought this was why there were crowds everywhere he went. He was like my own personal superhero, with love and attention coming at him from all directions. I remember thinking, God must really love my father, so I clung to his every word, and for that reason, along with the fact that he told me the same stories year after year, I never forgot my father’s words about the angels on my shoulders.

  When I was nine years old, one year before my parents’ divorce was final, I was playing with José. He was a couple of years older than me, and I had a small crush on him. This afternoon we were playing hide-and-seek, and as Laila counted to ten, José and I hid in the bushes together.

  “Ready or not, here I come . . .” Laila shouted.

  “Hana,” José whispered.

  “Be quiet.” I said. “She’s done counting.” I tried not to make too much noise pushing aside the branches that were scratching my arms and tearing small holes in the pretty pink shirt that I had snuck out of Mom’s closet. I’ll have to throw this one away, I thought. It was torn in too many places, and there was no way soap and water would get those stains out. I always wanted to look pretty, like my mother. For me, that meant wearing her clothes. As you can imagine, a lot of Mom’s belongings went missing over the years.

  “Hana . . . can I have a kiss?” José asked.

  Without a second thought, I offered my cheek. But he wasn’t satisfied. He looked at me with puppy-dog eyes.

  “I want to kiss you on the lips,” he said.

  “I can’t kiss you on the lips. Daddy wouldn’t like it.”

  “Your dad isn’t here. He can’t see us. He’ll never know.”

  I looked at José as though he were clueless. “But God will see,” I said, “and God tells my daddy EVERYTHING!”

  27

  Monday morning, November 12, 1979

  The call my father was waiting for finally came on the morning of November 12, 1979. Eight days earlier, on November 4th, a group of Iranian college students and militants had stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and had taken hostages. Some escaped, others were freed, but 52 people remained in captivity for 444 days before it was over. The students refused to communicate with our government, demanding only that President Carter return the Shah of Iran to Iranian authorities for trial and execution for the alleged mistreatment of the citizens.

  The shah was King of Iran and the descendant of a great dynasty that stretched back generations. Known for having his lunch flown in by Concorde and his wife rumored to have bathed in milk, the shah was overthrown during the Islamic Revolution in January of 1979. Having lost his country, the shah fled to New York in exile, where he was given diplomatic immunity by President Carter and received treatment for cancer.

  In the shah’s wake, one of his political opponents, the Ayatollah Khomeini, seized power, allowing the students to take over the embassy.

  On November 7th, after my father heard the news, he went on national television and offered to go over and speak to the students personally. The mention of his name alone opened the lines of communication between the United States and Iran. As you can imagine, the telephone was ringing relentlessly at home. The State Department, the cultural counselor to the Iranian embassy, news reporters, concerned family and friends, and—in the days to come—even the White House would call.

  Eager to resolve the country’s troubles and help bring the hostages home safely, as he waited for the call confirming his visa for Iran, my father made a few calls of his own.

  * * *

  Dad spoke into his recorder as he dialed: “This is November 10th, 1979, the time is around twelve noon. I’m calling Washington, DC, for Mr. Farhay, concerning the problem in Iran and doing whatever I can to help . . .”

  “Hello, Mr. Farhay, this is Muhammad Ali calling.”

  “Hello, Muhammad, how are you?”

  “I’m good. I’m very happy to hear your voice. How are you?”

&nbs
p; “Good, thank you. I talked to your assistant in Chicago, Mr. Lomax, and he gave me your message. This afternoon we are going to send the message home, and as soon as we hear from them we will inform your office.”

  “Thank you. Who are you representing, sir?”

  “The embassy.”

  “You’re the ambassador?”

  “No, I am the cultural counselor to Iran.”

  “Thank you. What message did you send?”

  “It said that you, Muhammad Ali, were interested in going to Iran and seeing Iranian authorities, including Khomeini, if possible, and you’re interested in taking part in, if possible, resolving the present crisis.”

  “Yes. What I suggested, sir, was that if Brother Khomeini or the students didn’t want to negotiate with no Americans or nobody, I figured that maybe I could go in and if there is any message to be brought back to President Carter, or I could take something from President Carter to them. I figured that they would know my sincerity, being a Muslim. I would not do anything to betray them or nothing that was considered wrong. According to Islam, probably, they could trust me better than they could a Christian American.”

  “Well, they know you, so it is not necessary to write the details. You are very well known in Iran. As soon as they get the message, they will respond to us and we will inform your office.”

  “Okay, thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you, Muhammad.”

  “Salaam alaikum [Peace be with you].”

  My father made another call and spoke into the recorder as he dialed. “I’m calling Mr. Wayne Grover of Miami, Florida—a newsman—concerning helping me to get to Iran, and he’s doing a good job.”

  “Hello . . .”