by Hana Ali
My father used to say, “Courage is acting in the face of your fears—not the absence of them.” But he still traveled by ground whenever he could, driving back and forth from Michigan to Chicago, and Chicago to Pennsylvania on Blue Bird, his Winnebago bus. The land is also my preferred choice of travel. I’m more comfortable on a cross-county train ride than a three-hour flight.
“You got that from your father,” my mother once said. “We were on a small four-seater plane once in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was shaking and bouncing so hard we both thought we were going to die.” I think they were coming back from Show Low, Arizona. It was the day after my father made the tape on which he sang to my mother. I was just one month old.
“On another flight you were in your father’s arms when he jumped out of his seat,” said Mom. “He started shouting, ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar! [God is Great!]’” I laughed out loud, picturing his animated expressions, his furrowed brows, and the wide-eyed look he wore when he was excited, surprised, or fearful.
Then I imagined the panic people would go into today if someone started shouting “Allahu Akbar” in the middle of a commercial flight. It saddens me to think that this spiritual phrase my father so often said, which brought peace to his heart, has come to invoke fear in the hearts of so many due to its misuse by those who claim to love the faith they so tragically misrepresent.
* * *
“When is the fighter coming in?” Dad asked.
“He’s coming in tonight to go to this fight tomorrow and to meet you. You told me to bring him over at nine o’clock in the morning,” said Harold. “You know what he did, down in New Orleans? He fought the number four contender in the world, from the junior middleweights, which is heavier than he is. He knocked the guy down five times and broke his jaw in four places!”
“Sounds like a bad brotha!” said Dad.
“Oh, he’s bad! They call him ‘Hit Man’!”
“Hit Man—that’s gangsta!” said Dad.
“They call him Tommy ‘the Hit Man’ Hearns.”
“Tommy ‘the Hit Man’ GANGSTA Hearns!” Dad shot back.
“Yeah, he’ll knock Sugar Ray Leonard and all of them out!” said Harold.
“This land I want is bothering me,” said Dad, “and I’ve got to meet this fighter . . .”
Harold chuckled. “Then we can go up and see the land Sunday morning—that’s even better.”
The line clicked. “Okay, Harold, my other line is ringing . . .”
“Okay, Champ. I’ll see you in the morning.”
By January of 1981, Harold Smith had promotional contracts with Ken Norton, Gerry Cooney, Thomas Hearns, Aaron Pryor, Michael Spinks, and Wilfred Benitez, among others. The future of his organization looked promising, and the whole thing might have worked out. What my father didn’t know was that his friend had a dark secret. One that would ultimately end the organization and land him in prison.
“Harold was very outgoing and charismatic,” said my mother. “Your father liked that about him.”
According to reports, “From the late 1970s through early ’81, more than $20 million was embezzled from the Wells Fargo Bank in California. Two Wells Fargo executives, who were high enough in the bank’s hierarchy to do so without attracting attention, put the money in Harold’s pockets . . .” It was also reported that his “inside” man at the bank had given him more money in one day than Bonnie and Clyde stole in their lifetimes.
No one else was aware of the scam, and they might have gotten away with it had it not been for the minor slipups that led to their exposure.
Dad called Tim to let him know the FBI wanted to question them. Of course, my father wasn’t involved in the embezzlement in any way, though he was paid $500,000 of Wells Fargo’s money. My father couldn’t understand how a con of this magnitude could succeed. A lot of others didn’t understand either, including the FBI agents, who spent a day at Wells Fargo for a briefing on how the con was pulled off.
Dad, who allowed Harold to set up a company using his name in return for payments by means of Wells Fargo cashier’s checks, was asked by a reporter what he thought of Harold Smith’s dealings. Harold had once ordered a rush-order check for $223,000 made out to my father, whose lawyer insisted on the payment before Dad would fly to Australia for one of Harold’s promotions. He walked into the bank and came out ten minutes later with the money.
“I saw him with all those beautiful girls, planes, boats . . .” Dad said. “I don’t know where he got his money. I’m still wondering . . .”
Harold Smith was convicted of passing hundreds of bad checks in twenty-one states under the name Ross Fields. According to Tim, Harold used his connections at the Wells Fargo branch near our house on Wilshire Boulevard to set up the Muhammad Ali Pro Sports account. He convinced the bank manager to give him a line of credit, which he used up quickly. Allegedly, he started writing bad checks. The bank covered for him, allowing the scam to proliferate.
“One morning, I got a call from your father,” said Tim, “asking me to come to the house the following day: ‘The FBI wants to talk to us about Harold . . .’”
Tim walked into the house and saw two FBI agents seated in front of Dad’s desk. They started to question Tim about his connection with Harold Smith and MAPS. He told them everything he knew. Which was nothing about the scam.
“What did Harold do?” Dad asked.
“He embezzled over $21 million from Wells Fargo,” said one of the agents.
“Man, that’s crazy! I don’t believe it,” said my father. “You mean to tell me Harold tricked all those smart white folks with college degrees? One nigga couldn’t pull that off— $21 million! Ten niggas couldn’t embezzle that much money from Wells Fargo. All of those smart college graduates guarding our money; Harold Smith isn’t smarter than those bank executives. No way. I can’t believe it.”
He was serious. He didn’t believe it. Dad never believed anything extraordinary—good or bad—about anyone, until it was proven. He had to see it with his own eyes. And in the months to come, he would.
“Harold had an office at his gym in Santa Monica,” said Tim. “The FBI set up their field office there. They had a blackboard with a flow chart of all the people who were involved with Harold Smith, and my name was near the top. I was scared for a while, but it all worked out.”
My father attended the last day of Harold’s trial. He tried to act as a character witness for him before his conviction was delivered. When most people had turned their backs on Harold Smith, my father remained a loyal friend.
Ross Fields, aka Harold Smith, received a ten-year sentence but only served six of those years. He’s captured on some of my father’s tape recordings, calling collect from prison. Dad always accepted the call.
After Harold was convicted, that was the end of Dad’s idea of a Triple Crown World Headquarters for fighters. My father never bought the ranch in Paso Robles. His lawyer, Mike Phenner, advised him against it. It wasn’t a wise investment.
But in 1979, Dad’s dream hadn’t been crushed yet. It was very much alive and would be the ultimate incentive for his final return to the ring.
* * *
The morning after his call with Harold Smith, my father was preparing to leave for Paso Robles when the phone rang. It was my eleven-year-old sister May May. Dad put her on hold for a moment to turn on his tape recorder before returning to the line.
“Maryum! I’m so surprised you called me. Boy, you really surprised me—caught me off guard.”
“What were you doing?” she asked.
“I was just getting dressed. I’m getting ready to go look at another place like Deer Lake.”
“You are?”
“Yes. It’s out here in California, near the mountains, with all the trees. It’s got a lake. There’s a river by it and there’s a lot of log cabins already built where I can put another training camp and I can start training fighters . . . Did you go to school today?”
“It’s Saturday!”
“Oh, that’s right . . . Maryum, you were born in 1968. Daddy won the title in 1964, so four years after I won my title you were born. I was in exile at that time. They took my title because I didn’t go to Vietnam. You were too little to remember, but it’s history now . . .”
“Yeah, but I know about it . . .”
“So, I’m going to ride up to look at this place and it might be possible that if I like it . . . I might fight again.”
“Nooo! Don’t fight again, Daddy, please!”
“I might come back to challenge the new champion, Larry Holmes, and take the title back for the fourth time. Can you imagine that?”
“Don’t fight again, Daddy, you’re getting old!”
“I’m getting what?”
“Old!”
“How old is your daddy?”
“Are you thirty-seven?”
“That’s right . . .”
After hanging up the phone with my sister, Dad, Harold, Bundini, and Herbert Muhammad, my father’s manager, flew up to see the land. When he returned home, he’d fallen even deeper in love with it. Later that evening my father was sitting behind his desk in his office when the phone rang. It was Jeremiah Shabazz, a former Muslim imam from Pennsylvania, who was sometimes involved in my father’s business dealings.
“Man, I went to see a training camp today,” said Dad. “God is my witness—it’s ten times better than Deer Lake! There are twenty-five cabins, a coffee shop—real big. All the cooking utensils and stoves are there, with old English furniture—all brand new. It has enough tables to seat a hundred people. There’s a big rec room, a big office . . . a place to build a gym. It has private roads on it with parking lots . . . For the whole place, the man wants one million six, but he said he’d take $900,000 cash! Mountains all around—real pretty—a four-hour drive from my house in LA!”
“Where you could really run,” said Jeremiah.
“Oh man, that would make me want to fight! If I bought that thing and got up and saw it. Jerry, it’s so pretty—there are trees . . .”
“It may be pretty, Ali, but you don’t want to buy it. Why don’t you just lease it? Why put out that kind of money for one or two more fights?”
“It wouldn’t be for the fight—it would be to train fighters. They’d live there—to manage them.”
“Oh, you mean like a camp.”
“Yeah . . . a business—a world headquarters for fighters . . .”
“That’s nice; it’s almost as big as your farm,” said Jerry.
“You wouldn’t believe it!” Dad started dreaming again. “Hills and trees and rocks . . . Fifty-five acres of rolling hills with a big stable—with horses. It has a big heated swimming pool and a big tennis court on top of a hill. Each individual cabin has two rooms in it—a bedroom, a living room, and two bathrooms in each cabin. Twenty-five cabins encircled all over the place. It’s pretty, man! I’m telling you, there’s nothing in the world like it . . . I’ll fight just for that!
“Then we’ll have a press conference there—call the world and tell them, ‘Ali is making an announcement. Do you want to come see his camp?’ Then, after I’m through, it will be a Triple Crown World Headquarters for all boxers. I took Herbert up to see it in a small plane and he said if I fought again I could get it easy. Oh yeah . . .” he said distractedly, as if he were suddenly reminded of something. “If I fought again, I could get it easy! Then I could build a gym there out of real logs where at least 300 people could watch me train. Maaaaan, then I could run all of that as a business when I’m through fighting!”
“Well, look,” said Jerry, “does Herbert have anything better than eight million for you to fight Larry Holmes?”
“No. He said realistically he was looking at about seven million, but an out-of-state fight would make it more, but eight million to fight Holmes, where?” asked Dad.
“Anywhere . . .”
There was a pause . . .
“Tell them to challenge me . . .”
* * *
Both movies about my father’s life, The Greatest, in which he played himself, and Ali, which starred Will Smith, end the same way: in 1974, after he won the world championship title for the second time in an eighth-round TKO over George Foreman. Perhaps this is because that is when the people who love and admire him wish he’d retired. If he had, Shakespeare himself could not have written a better ending. But he did not.
Two years later, in 1976, after winning a controversial decision over Ken Norton, during a Sports Illustrated interview my father was reflecting about a suitable ending to his unequaled career. He suddenly turned to his host and said, “Maybe I should reach up and pull down the mike in the middle of the ring and announce, ‘Laaaaadies and gentlemen, you have seen the last of the eighth wonderrrrrr of the world. Muhammad retires!’”
“No,” replied Harold Conrad, a journalist and fight promoter who helped get my father his title bout with Sonny Liston. “You did that in Manila; you did it in Malaysia. Who would believe you?”
Again, my father announced his retirement. In 1978, after losing—then regaining—his championship title for an unprecedented third time against Leon Spinks, Dad retired once more.
In less than two years, he was back . . .
“I want Larry Holmes!”
Soon after, Dad left for Deer Lake.
“Hana . . . I have to go soon. Give me a kiss goodbye.”
“You’re not my daddy,” I had said. “You’re Muhammad Ali!”
The following week he sent for Laila and me.
Dad trained hard and sculpted his body into remarkable condition for a man of his age. According to reporters who were there, “In terms of physical appearance, he looked like the Ali of old. He even dyed his hair to hide the gray.”
While he had defied seemingly impossible odds his entire life, people could see my father no longer belonged in the ring.
“I wouldn’t come back if I thought I’d go out a loser,” he said in an interview given around that time. “I know I can whoop Holmes. We all live in a world of limitations, but some people can see further than others. When people judge what I’m doing with their logic, they say, ‘It can’t be done.’ Their reasoning says it can’t or shouldn’t be done. Their knowledge of history says it can’t be done.”
He leaned forward in his seat. “So, their reasoning, their knowledge, and their logic clashes with my superior belief. And the result is they don’t believe. But I’m on the mountain, and they are looking up at me. Being so high, I can see further than them. But everyone is looking up at me saying, ‘Ali, don’t do it! Ali, please stop! You might get hurt . . .’ I’m at such a high level that I don’t think like them. I’m not like them; I can see further—I believe.”
As I watched the interview, I realized that if Dad hadn’t contracted Parkinson’s he may have never stopped fighting. When you’ve lived a life defying impossible odds and performing miracles, the only place to learn the odds have turned against you and that you’ve run out of miracles is in the arena where you once performed them. For my father, that was the boxing ring.
We all run out of wonders, sooner or later. But it was a lesson my father had to learn on his own. He knew this. He realized it on his mountain at Fighter’s Heaven. His arms were tired and his legs were sluggish, but he kept climbing—toward the echo of victories long past.
When he stepped into the ring, his boxing skills were a shadow of what they once were.
“All that remained was the courage which had sustained him through three championship reigns,” said one reporter, “and sixty fights against the best heavyweights that a three-decade career could offer.”
My father once said, “I’m not Superman. If the fans believed I could do everything I said I could do, then they’re crazier than I was.”
He also said, “Life is a fair trade, where all adjusts itself in time. For all that you take from it, you must pay the price sooner or later. For some things, you must pay in advance. For some things, you mu
st pay on delivery. And for others, you pay later, when the bill is presented.”
35
“Ali against Larry Holmes . . . Oh God, that was painful,” said Sylvester Stallone in The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali. “Like seeing your child playing on the railroad tracks with a train coming, and you can’t get him out of the way. I just sat there and watched. And I also felt for Larry Holmes because he had a terrible job to do, and he knew it. He had to go out and dismember a monument.”
I’ve never seen my father’s last two fights and I probably never will. I don’t want the images imprinted in my mind. It was an emotional victory for Larry Holmes, who wept in the ring afterward and told my father, “I love you, man.” Larry was his sparring partner for four years.
After losing the bout, Dad sat solemnly in his dressing room, then came a knock on the door. It was Larry Holmes.
“I’m sorry, Champ,” he said again, tears falling. “I love you.”
Dad looked up at him, somehow mustering a smile. “Then why did you beat me up like that?” he said.
Larry also burst into tears at the press conference after the fight. And again when he talked to Howard Cosell. He adored my father—respected him and looked up to him.
“When you fight a friend and a brother, you can’t get happiness,” Larry said. “All I achieved was money. I fought the best heavyweight fighter in the world. Ali is a hell of a fighter and a hell of a man. He proved he could go for the title a fourth time, and that’s a great achievement . . . I was trying to knock him out, but I couldn’t. If I could have got rid of him in the first round, I would have. He tried to psych me, but I worked with the guy for four years and I knew everything he could do. Ali fooled some of the writers, but he couldn’t fool me.”
After the fight, there were reports in the paper about Dad not feeling well. How he had drained his body of energy by taking his prescribed thyroid pills while he was training. His doctor had prescribed them for him to help him lose weight. Which he did quickly—going from about 251 pounds to 216 pounds. The rapid weight loss was no doubt the main factor in his loss of energy and endurance. If he had not taken the pills, the world would have seen a better performance.