At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  “What high school did you go to?”

  “Central. I graduated high school when I was eighteen.”

  “Where did you live?”

  “12th and Oak,” she said.

  “When did you first meet Cash?”

  “On 12th and Oak—across the street at another girl’s house, Lorraine’s house. He was sittin’ out in the front yard one day.”

  “Tell me what happened,” my father said.

  “Oh, I don’t feel like talkin’ about it . . .”

  “That’s when you met a lot of trouble, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “Yep.” She laughed.

  “What did he do? Walk by?”

  “Yeah, he just came over and started talking.”

  “What church did you go to in Louisville as a little girl?”

  “Centennial. You went to the old one. I took you when you were a baby and you’d get to hollerin’, and I’d stick that milk bottle in your mouth, and the reverend would just laugh. Yeah, I took you to church every Sunday when you were a baby.”

  “You told me once the reverend used to kiss me,” he said.

  “Yeah, he’d kiss you because you were a baby. I took you to church every Sunday, and you were so cute everybody just wanted to hold you. You were a pretty baby.”

  “The way you remember who kissed me, all the people who gave me, Muhammad Ali, that baby, a kiss, they’ll always remember that, won’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me, William,” Dad said, “at your age . . . can you still chase a pretty woman—are you too old?”

  “I can do anything that I used to do when I was seventeen, boy! I just don’t do it as often.”

  My father laughed, then said into the recorder, “Cash is seventy and William is fifty-seven—still a baby. This is Muhammad Ali at my mother’s house. Mama, what’s your address?”

  “4032 Lambert Avenue.”

  “All of us are here making tapes. I just got in the mood to make some tapes for history. Cash is not here right now, but we’ll get him on tape later.” Dad looked at his mother. “Bird, what you got for me to eat?”

  “Steak and salad . . . Do you want to eat in here?”

  “Yeah . . .” He turned his attention back to his uncle. “William, where are you going to take me tonight?”

  “Where do you want to go, son?”

  They both laughed and spoke a little more about old times, then my father said for posterity, “Now I’d like to dedicate a little poem called ‘Truth’:

  “The face of truth is open; the eyes of truth are bright.

  “The lips of truth are never closed. The head of truth is upright.

  “The breast of truth stands forward. The gaze of truth is straight.

  “Truth has neither fear nor doubt. Truth has patience to wait.

  “The words of truth are touching. The voice of truth is deep.

  “The law of truth is simple; all that you sow you reap.

  “The soul of truth is flaming. The heart of truth is warm.

  “The mind of truth is clear, and firm through rain and storm.

  “Facts are only its shadow. Truth stands above all sin.

  “Great be the battle of life; truth, in the end, shall win.

  “The life of truth is eternal. The soul of truth is God.

  “Truth has the power to endure. Truth shall always last.

  “Signing off from Bird’s house in Louisville, Kentucky. Today is November 20, 1982 . . . I’m taping this for history.”

  I don’t remember too much about my paternal grandparents. My only clear memory of Mama Bird is of her sitting in her hot, humid kitchen at the square table just off the back-patio door at her house at 4302 Lambert Avenue. I remember the white-and-blue checkered tablecloth and the freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies piled on a large plate next to a stack of white napkins with pink flowers on them. I remember watching her put on her apron as she prepared to cook dinner for my father.

  “Are you hungry, Tinkie Baby?” she asked as he walked through the screen door and sat down at the small square table in the corner.

  Dad picked up a cookie. “Yeah, whatcha got for me, Bird?”

  “Steak and salad,” she said, firing up the stove.

  Although my grandparents were separated, they remained friends for the rest of their lives. Just as my father remained friendly with all his children’s mothers.

  On May 8, 2012, my father’s childhood home on 3302 Grand Avenue received a historical marker. I wish his parents had lived to see it. Cash and Bird died four years apart, both at the age of seventy-seven. Thanks to my father’s recordings, we’ll always have the sound of their voices, song and laughter.

  * * *

  “No!” My father had said. “I would never want to relive my life again . . . Now that I know, I say never again!”

  While I look upon my childhood with fond memories, I can’t say that I’d want to relive it entirely either. The year leading up to and following my parents’ divorce was no fairy tale. There were times when I’d wake my mother in the middle of the night with my cries and screams, having to breathe in a paper bag until I calmed down and fell back to sleep. My night terrors didn’t begin until after Mom, Laila, and I moved into our new house in 1986, but the seeds were planted at Fremont Place a couple years after my father’s last fight.

  Being a parent and being married is hard. My father may not have done everything perfectly, but he learned from some of his parents’ mistakes, and my mother learned from hers, just as Laila and I will learn from their missteps and do better with our children. I guess that’s what we all hope will happen until someone, someday, many years from now, finally has a perfect childhood.

  Farewells

  Oh, yes, he knows the butterfly’s secret. Knows it and doesn’t even know he knows it. In order to transform himself, a man must first be able to lose, able to keep letting his old self die. Part of such a man will never grow old.

  —Gary Smith, Sports Illustrated, November 15, 1989

  34

  I sat on my bed separating all the newspaper articles into three piles: things I’d already read, things I hadn’t, and things I wanted to ask my mother about. My notes and doodles were circled around the headlines that interested me most. Such as “Ali Is Grilled in Federal Court,” USA Today. What in the world was my father doing in federal court? The articles were beginning to frustrate me. They left me with more questions than they gave answers. Unlike my father’s tape recordings. As I listened to them, I learned so much about him that I never knew.

  I learned about his fears, faults, dreams, and plans for his future—the reason behind his fight with Larry Holmes. Like most people at the time, I always thought my father came out of retirement in 1980 because he needed the money. It was true, to some degree—he had documented as much in his recorded conversations with his lawyer, Mike Phenner, expressing his anxieties about his finances. But the more tapes I listened to, the more I learned and discovered that there was more to the story.

  On December 7, 1979, Harold Smith, a friend of my father’s from back east, with an exuberant personality—who drove around Los Angeles in a black vintage car that resembled an old British taxicab—called my father with news about their business. Dad always engaged in lively banter with his friends, and this conversation was no different.

  “Hello!”

  “Maaaaan!” said Harold Smith.

  “MAAAAAAN!” Dad shot back.

  Harold laughed. “MAAAN!” he repeated.

  “AW, MAAAAAN!” said my father. “I’M GOING TO MESS YOU UP, MAN!”

  Chuckling, “What happened, Ali?”

  “Oh, you’re messed up now!” said Dad. “I’ve got something that’s going to mess you up, man! You’re really going to be messed up! This messes up everything!”

  “What’s happening? What you got going on, Champ?”

  “I’ve got a whole boxing training camp, already built on fifty-five acres! It’s a four-hour driv
e from here, man! The guy sent us the pictures of the place—the land, the layout, and everything. Man, we’ve got to drive out tonight, man. Aw, maaan! We’ll come back for this! If this place is like I want it, I’ll come back and we’ll take $100,000 and have some trees cut down, and we’ll build a gym that’s going to equal two Deer Lakes! We’ll train there. I’ll come back for that—only for that! They’ll ask, ‘Why are you fighting again, Ali?’ and I’ll say, ‘Because I can’t afford this camp. I want this camp . . .’”

  “Where is it?”

  “Paso Robles [northeast of Santa Barbara].”

  “Ali, that’s the place I told you about earlier today!” said Harold.

  “The place you told me I could put a camp? That’s the same place?”

  “Yeah! I brought that to you. They want $900,000 cash for it!”

  “Yep, that’s the same place! MAAAN! AW, MAAAN!”

  They both laughed and Harold said, “You’re crazy! I’m the one that told you about it, Ali!”

  One year earlier, in 1978, when we were still living in Chicago, my father called Tim Shanahan and asked him to pick up someone at O’Hare Airport and bring him to the house on Woodlawn. “His name is Harold Smith,” said Dad. “He’s coming in from Tennessee on an American flight.”

  Harold had met my father in 1969, when he was a track star at the University of Tennessee. Dad was giving one of his college lectures there, after he was forced into an early retirement by the Supreme Court between 1967 and 1970. Only Harold’s name wasn’t Harold Smith back then. It was Ross Fields. Dad didn’t discover this until two FBI agents showed up at Fremont Place in 1981.

  Tim waited outside the terminal, looking for a man who matched the description my father had given him. “He’s a tall black guy—about six foot one—with a beard.”

  Harold Smith walked off the flight wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a briefcase. His plan was to get my father to sign an agreement for him to start a promotional organization called the Muhammad Ali Amateur Sports Program, which would seek out low-income-area black athletes who were good enough to make the Olympic team but didn’t have the support, or the grades, to earn a college scholarship to compete in their sport. The focus was mainly track and field and boxing.

  Sitting on the sofa in Dad’s office, Harold said, “I’ll seek out the best young black athletes in the country from low-income neighborhoods. Your name will be immortal with this organization.”

  “Ali’s name is already immortal,” said Tim. “He doesn’t need your organization for that.”

  “I like that idea,” Dad said. “Helping kids in low-income areas. I used to be one of them. This can be a route to wealth and fame for the underprivileged.”

  Harold opened up his briefcase, which contained $40,000 in cash, and offered it to my father as seed money for the organization. He then asked Dad to sign a contract that gave Harold the right to use his name as CEO of the organization: Muhammad Ali Amateur Sports.

  Dad didn’t know it at the time, but Harold Smith’s goal was to set up Muhammad Ali Professional Sports, where he was intending to be a promoter of professional heavyweight fights.

  “Harold gained your father’s confidence and support, acting as if he was doing it all to honor his name,” said Tim. “By helping poor black kids in the ghetto get an education, which may have been genuine, but—in reality—his goal was to become the godfather of fight promoters.”

  A few months later, Harold showed up with another contract, naming himself the fight promoter for Muhammad Ali Professional Sports (MAPS). Dad would receive 25 percent of each fight or $10,000, whichever was higher. This led to my father’s idea of building a Triple Crown World Headquarters, where he could train the fighters that Harold signed.

  “You know what I’ll do,” Dad said. “On my property that I have now, if I like the place, I’ll borrow it and then I’ll get it. We’ll put in about $100,000 and build a gym. It will be worth it! Then we’ll announce the fight and we’ll stay there and train and we won’t go nowhere! We’ll tell the world to go to hell! Now, look, man—we’ve got to go up and see it tonight!”

  “We don’t have to go tonight,” said Harold. “Let’s go up early in the morning. We can leave at 5 a.m.—I’ve got to pick up Tommy Hearns at the airport in an hour.”

  Dad thought about it. “Okay, that sounds better . . . So, you’re going to get Tommy Hearns? Is he really good?”

  “Champ, he’ll knock Sugar Ray Leonard and all of them fighters out!”

  “Well, then he’s got to see it too! He isn’t going to fight for us, is he?”

  “They’re having a championship title fight tomorrow. He wants to do the guy just like you did Sonny Liston. I got some tickets for you. They’re fighting at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. I got ringside tickets for us.”

  “What’s today’s date?” Dad asked.

  “December 7, 1979.”

  The line clicked. “Hold on, Harold . . .”

  * * *

  “HELLO?”

  “Salaam alaikum. Where’s my girl, Veronica?”

  “Wa-alaikum salaam, Lana [his old fight cook]. Boy, these calls are coming in just right. Something might happen. I’m not going to say it is—but it might . . . We’ve got another Deer Lake four hours from here; a man is up there lookin’ to sell it now. It’s got log cabins on it, it’s already got a kitchen that will hold one hundred people, and it’s got a big gym . . .”

  “Doesn’t that sound good!” said Lana.

  “Aw, man . . . they’re asking $900,000 cash for it.”

  “Listen, Ali . . . think before you buy something else.”

  “Before I do, I’ll fight again. I’ll fight for it! And you’ll come back and cook for us . . .”

  They reminisced about old times for a minute. Then Dad clicked back over to Harold, picking up where he left off.

  “So, Tommy Hearns is coming in tonight. How old is he?”

  “Twenty-three. Champ, he’s undefeated. Tommy Hearns is the one that none of them will fight! He’s the one Joe Louis came in to see—Joe loves him! He’s got twenty-four fights and twenty-four knockouts . . .”

  “All this is good, Harold, but I’m thinking about this camp—this place is bothering me.” Dad looked at Bundini, his corner man, who was sitting on the sofa in his office. “How many log cabins does it have again?”

  Bundini told him.

  “Damn!” said Dad. “It’s got twenty-five cabins!”

  “Champ,” said Harold, “my man here has a two-engine plane. He can get us there in 30 minutes tomorrow. He said we could leave at 6:30 a.m.”

  “Who?”

  “The pilot I was telling you about. He’s flown a lot of places. It’s a nice safe plane. It’s a million-dollar plane. I can have him ready to go at 6:30 in the morning.”

  Dad considered it again. “I’m not messing with that small plane.”

  “Champ, if you see it . . .”

  “Look—forget the airplane!”

  Harold laughed. “You want to drive. All right. What time do you want to leave tomorrow?”

  “We’ll leave in one hour . . .”

  “No, Champ! Don’t drive up tonight! You can’t see the scenery. Let’s leave at five thirty, six o’clock . . . something like that. I’ll meet you at your house. I’ll pick Bundini up on my way over there.”

  “He’s already here.”

  “Oh, he’s already with you—okay.”

  “I don’t know if it’s possible to get this place,” said Dad. “I’ve got so much property that I can’t sell. If I sold something, it would make it easy.”

  “That’s right. See, Champ, that’s another reason you should fly up there to see it—because you may not like what you see, then we’ve got that long drive back.”

  “Well, I’d rather drive than go by private plane. I don’t care for those private planes.”

  “It’s a good plane, Champ—I’ve flown in it ten times . . . Ask Bundini. He’s been in it too.”

/>   Dad looked at Bundini. “The plane looks good?”

  Bundini replied, “Yep . . .”

  “It’s got two good motors?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah!” said Harold, adding, “The plane cost a million dollars.”

  “Where would we land?”

  “At the nearest airport. Do you want me to call the pilot and tell him to get it ready? Champ, this cat’s good—he flew us all the way to Mexico!”

  Dad took a moment to consider it. “I’d still rather drive.”

  Once more, Harold laughed. “You’d still rather drive!”

  “Is that your conscience laughing?” said Dad.

  “No! It’s my wife,” said Harold.

  “I thought I heard your conscience . . .”

  “That’s a good plane, Champ!”

  “I know, but still, I’d rather drive . . .”

  My father developed a fear of flying when he was sixteen years old. He’d experienced an especially rough flight on his way to Chicago for the Golden Gloves tournament. When he landed, he vowed never to board another plane. A couple years later, after he secured his place in the 1960 Rome Olympics, he almost didn’t go.

  “That’s a long flight. I’d rather take a train or boat,” he said to his father, Papa Cash, after reading his acceptance letter.

  “Son, if you’re going to be the champion of the world one day, you’ll have to face your fears. You’ll have to fly to Italy.”

  I remember watching Dad in old interviews talking about what scared him, and being surprised that he even had fears—he was always so strong and confident.

  “I’ll tell you what I really fear,” he said. “Airplanes! Whenever the plane starts shaking, I look out the window and think: What if one of the wings breaks off!? Where would we land? What if we have to land in the water? What if my life raft doesn’t inflate? And then, what if a shark comes and pokes a hole in it? Or worse—THINKS I’M DINNER! During the entire flight all these scenarios run through my head and I say to myself, Man, you could have taken a bus or a train!”

  Dad always had a vivid imagination. It’s a good thing he learned to face his fears early in life. He boarded his flight to Rome wearing a backpack stuffed with a parachute. Several days later, he won his gold medal.