Love’s Always Been In Ali’s Corner
In a small basement cafeteria at St. Mary’s Catholic school in Lynn, Mass., Muhammad Ali sits patiently while the world whirls around him. His waxy face is stoic and impenetrable. He responds to hugs, kisses, backslaps with the same stony silence. Then, like a blinding sun blasting through a closed window, his smile builds. The champ has a trick he’d like to show you.
Because of the Parkinson’s, his right hand moves as if it was pounding an invisible drum. He pulls a bright crimson handkerchief from his pants pocket, stuffs it into his fist, opens both hands and - voila! - the handkerchief’s gone. “One more time?” he asks, in a voice that is slurred and grainy yet unmistakably his. Three times he confounds a room of wily journalists and even wilier kids, before pulling off the fake thumb that made the whole thing possible. “Show you how easy it is to be tricked,” he says, his eyes dancing wildly now, reveling in his ability to still rope a few dopes.
Frustrated now by his slow movements and silence, how easy it is to be tricked into thinking that the former heavyweight champion of the world - the maniacal motormouth, the war resister, the vainglorious wordsmith who once entertained a Harvard commencement audience with the shortest poem on record (“Me? Whee!”), the man who bullied and blustered and butt-whupped his way into history - is somehow diminished, that his fevered heart now labors inside a shell.
“There’s always the tendency, especially when you first see him, to say that he’s wounded or ill or mentally affected,” says Ali biographer Thomas Hauser. “But the Parkinson’s syndrome is a motor problem. There are no intellectual deficits. The man is as happy with each day as any person I know. He loves being Muhammad Ali, and truly believes that he is doing God’s work.”
Last week, God brought the champ to Massachusetts to preach the gospel of “Healing,” a tiny volume promoting racial tolerance co-authored with Hauser.
Ali, 55, doesn’t have to preach what he practices. In his tireless forward motion, in the way he hugs small children and presses his lips firmly against their faces, he is living it. Fighting racism doesn’t take fists, and he won’t hear that it’s a losing cause. He has said, “I’m not looking at the world and what they say - my God controls the universe.”
Outside the schools he visits, shivering neighborhood residents wait for The Greatest to emerge. “We love you,” they chant, reaching for the trembling hand. One man jumps in front of Ali’s departing bus and does a quick shuffle in the street, jabbing the air with his fists. Ali’s blank stare is reflected in the front window. His 5-year-old son, Asaad, asks “Mommy, why do people keep calling daddy an icon? Maybe now all he has to do is say ‘Hi, I’m an icon.”’
“He embodies the goodness of man, the generosity of man, the eternal hope man has that things will get better,” says Wilbert “Skeeter” McClure, a teammate of then-Cassius Clay at the 1960 Rome Olympics. “He’s a man of conviction - and we’d better look hard, ‘cause we won’t see many of them.”
And yes, Ali is different now. “In the early days, he was a photographer’s dream, always animated, always on,” says the fighter’s best friend, photographer Howard Bingham. “Now sometimes there’s this mask on his face like nothing is getting through. It makes me put the camera down because I don’t want to show him in a bad light.”
Impossible. No bad light surrounds him. You gravitate toward Ali. You can’t help it.
“I notice how big my father is, and then see other so-called ‘famous’ people who aren’t near his spiritual and emotional level,” says his daughter Hana, a student at Mount Ida College in Newton. “He feels so much, and they’re just clueless. They reach a certain stature and automatically pull back from the world. ‘Pulling back’ never occurred to my father.”
In the upcoming film “When We Were Kings” a Zaire native remembers Ali preparing to defeat George Foreman in the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle”: “He was like a sleeping elephant, a sleeping elephant. You can do whatever you want around a sleeping elephant. But when he wakes up, when he wakes up, he tramples everything.”
On Wednesday in a Mount Ida reception hall, the elephant seemed to sleep. In the middle of signing autographs, posing with Patriots and nodding to gushing kudos, Ali’s head drooped and his eyes closed. But then his head rose slowly and those laughing eyes popped open. He’d tricked us again. “I’m in here,” the eyes said as they blazed a loving line across the room. “Still fighting.”
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