Ali Awed Poitier With Theatrical Talent

Former champ to receive Ashe award for courage NEW YORK Sidney Poitier says that when he first met Muhammad Ali, the athlete’s star quality so overwhelmed him that he considered changing careers.

“I was the actor - or so I thought. And then he walked in,” Poitier said Sunday, while rehearsing for a television special honoring the former heavyweight champion with the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage.

Poitier is to make the presentation to Ali at the fifth annual ESPY Awards ceremony, airing live at 8 p.m. tonight on the ESPN cable sports network. The award is named after tennis player Arthur Ashe, the first black to win Wimbledon, who died of AIDS in 1993.

At the rehearsal, Ali and Poitier awaited their turn together, two American icons sitting side-by-side under the stage at Radio City Music Hall.

Quietly chatting, they leafed through a book of Ali photos by the champ’s friend, photographer Howard Bingham. The two stopped at one image showing them together in New York in 1965, and smiled.

Then the actor scribbled above the photo: “To a great artist. May the wind be at your back in all your undertakings. Sidney Poitier.”

They met three decades ago, Poitier said, when Ali was 20 and already had “such presence and theatrical energy that I started rethinking my professional choice.”

Though Parkinson’s disease has robbed him of his vigor and impaired his speech, his eyes still blaze with life. “And his mind is 100 percent,” said Bingham.

Asked which moment had tested his courage most, Ali, 55, said: “Resisting Vietnam.”

At the podium, Poitier said the first thing he remembers about the boxer was “his voice. At first, I thought it was just loud. But as the years went by, I learned to hear the sound of passion and strength.”

In opposing the war, Poitier said, Ali “paid a price, emotional, financial and professional.

“But isn’t that what courage is all about?” asked the 69-year-old actor.