Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Muhammad Ali turns 70 today, but please say it isn't so
LAS VEGAS — Don't try to tell me that Muhammad Ali is 70 years old this morning. No. Not him.
Tell me instead the calendar is a liar and a fraud. Tell me that the next time I see him the ravages of that obscenity called Parkinson's disease will have melted away, exiled to some dark attic room like the photograph of Dorian Gray. Remind me about what I knew and what I saw and what I lived in a time warp that still owns a major slice of the backroads of my mind.
Is it really 48 years since that night in Miami when Sonny Liston went out on his stool and Cassius Clay (about to become Muhammad Ali) stood in the ring and pointed down at us and screamed:
"You ... you ... you ... I fooled you all. ... I shocked the world."
And he damned sure did.
Is it really 37 years since the surreal pre-dawn moments on the edge of the Zaire jungle when Little David went to the ropes and Goliath hammered him there round after round. And all through it, Little David wasn't singing psalms. He was telling him what eventually was going to happen as sure as night follows day in the moment he willed it to be so.
It came in the eighth round ... a short, chopping right hand ... a hook ... another right ... and George Foreman came tumbling down just the way Muhammad had told me he would back in training camp when he insisted "I'm gonna knock that sucker out."
And he damned sure did.
Is it really 36 years since Ali and Frazier fought as no two heavyweights before them ... fighting in the blazing heat of an arena in Manila without air conditioning and under the hellish television lights that gave the ring the feeling of a fiery furnace ... a night when neither could surrender and neither really could have gone on much longer ... a night that linked their names and their psyches forever.
When I reach back in my memory to define Ali, my fondest memories are of the quiet times at his Deer Lake, Pa., training camp. I remember a day when we sat there in a fine drizzle and talked about how his view of America had changed.
"It's not about color," he said. "I know black people who are devils and white people who are good and caring. And I know plenty of both who are the reverse."
I brought my kids up there one day, and Ali shook hands with my son, then swooped down to pick up my little daughter and held her high over his head as she giggled.
"Is that your daddy? ... Don't lie to me. ... Is that your daddy? ... That's not your daddy ... That man is ugly and you are beautiful. The Gypsies musta brung you. Gimme a kiss."
It was here the famed entourage lived together like frat boys: Gene Kilroy, the personal business manager and camp facilitator, keeper of the checkbook, restorer of order, fierce guardian of Ali's integrity; Pat Patterson, the Chicago cop turned security chief; Angelo Dundee, the trainer who usually arrived the last week before they broke camp for fight; Drew Bundini Brown, the witch doctor/cheerleader who coined the phrase "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," and Wali Muhammad, the bucket man and timekeeper.
There never was and never will be a group that belonged together as much as this one did. In my mind's eye I can still see and hear them now. Once, decades ago, I went back to the camp at Deer Lake, long deserted.
I wandered into the old kitchen where the wall plaque with a list of Aunt Coretta's kitchen rules was thick with dust. The long wooden table and chairs were empty. I walked down the hill to the little gym that surely must remain a refuge to the ghosts and echoes of a younger Ali at work. The thump of gloved fist against heavy bag and the rat-tat-tat of the speed bag. The sound of the three-minute bell ringing and Wali Muhammad, a towel around his neck and a stopwatch in his hand, yelling, "Time."
The rickety sign was still there, swaying back and forth in the wind:
"Muhammad Ali Training Camp."
Beneath it, another wooden slat read:
"No Training Today."
In what proved to be the end, like all of us, Ali was trying to freeze the calendar. He came to Vegas to fight Larry Holmes, sporting a brand-new mustache, touting himself as "Dark Gable, a pretty man who looks a champion."
He had trimmed himself down through diuretics, shedding his middle-age puffiness so that he looked to be in great shape. But like the mustache, it was strictly cosmetic.
In the pre-fight press conference, he was glib and quick-witted. Holmes tried to keep up.
"Your ass is grass and I'm the lawn mower," was about the best Larry could do.
Ali retorted with a celebration of himself in what he called the world's shortest poem.
"Me? Whhheeeee!"
It was the last delightful episode of the Muhammad Ali Flying Circus. But even as we were entertained, those closest to him began to detect the slur in his speech. And we were afraid of this truth: On fight night, he would emerge not as the Ali of old but as an old Ali, a burned-out and weary shell of a fighter who was risking permanent injury.
He had no chance. Holmes opened and held firm as a 3-1 favorite, but as the fight drew closer, a strange thing began to take shape. Holmes' advantage in the betting line began to erode.
The guys who ran sports books tell me they had never seen anything like it. This wasn't the smart money. It was the heart money. It was an avalanche of minimal bets so strong it actually swarmed over the ''smart money''. It came from the bellhops and desk clerks, the blackjack dealers and craps table stickmen, the bartenders and waitresses, the car parkers and chambermaids.
By fight time, the odds were almost even. In the town that invented legal fight bets, the least-powerful economic group in Vegas had moved the odds. It never happened before. It hasn't happened since.
On fight night, the glitter crowd, the high rollers and the people who scraped together a week's pay for the cheap seats came together to will Ali through one more big fight.
And physically, Muhammad did look good. I had been in Ali's room the night before the fight and he suddenly stripped off his shirt and said, "How do you like my chances now?"
It was eerie. He looked like he did the night he won the title from Sonny Liston, 16 years before. But I knew his conditioning was only skin-deep: cosmetic deception at its health spa best. He was in beach shape, not fighting shape.
It didn't take long for Holmes to exploit the difference. He revealed what we all knew. The footwork that had bewildered dozens of opponents was gone; his legs had turned old. The red tassels on his white boxing shoes never danced. He was a man too old to fight and too proud to quit.
But in a men's room, of all places, at Caesars Palace, I heard a tribute I will never forget. It came from an attendant who was handing me a towel.
"Did you bet the fight?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said, "Ali."
"Pardon me for asking, but why?"
"Why? Why? Because I owe him for a piece of my dignity. Because he's Muhammad Ali, that's why."
For a lot of Americans — black and white — who lived through perilous times, that said it all.
LAS VEGAS — Don't try to tell me that Muhammad Ali is 70 years old this morning. No. Not him.
Tell me instead the calendar is a liar and a fraud. Tell me that the next time I see him the ravages of that obscenity called Parkinson's disease will have melted away, exiled to some dark attic room like the photograph of Dorian Gray. Remind me about what I knew and what I saw and what I lived in a time warp that still owns a major slice of the backroads of my mind.
Is it really 48 years since that night in Miami when Sonny Liston went out on his stool and Cassius Clay (about to become Muhammad Ali) stood in the ring and pointed down at us and screamed:
"You ... you ... you ... I fooled you all. ... I shocked the world."
And he damned sure did.
Is it really 37 years since the surreal pre-dawn moments on the edge of the Zaire jungle when Little David went to the ropes and Goliath hammered him there round after round. And all through it, Little David wasn't singing psalms. He was telling him what eventually was going to happen as sure as night follows day in the moment he willed it to be so.
It came in the eighth round ... a short, chopping right hand ... a hook ... another right ... and George Foreman came tumbling down just the way Muhammad had told me he would back in training camp when he insisted "I'm gonna knock that sucker out."
And he damned sure did.
Is it really 36 years since Ali and Frazier fought as no two heavyweights before them ... fighting in the blazing heat of an arena in Manila without air conditioning and under the hellish television lights that gave the ring the feeling of a fiery furnace ... a night when neither could surrender and neither really could have gone on much longer ... a night that linked their names and their psyches forever.
When I reach back in my memory to define Ali, my fondest memories are of the quiet times at his Deer Lake, Pa., training camp. I remember a day when we sat there in a fine drizzle and talked about how his view of America had changed.
"It's not about color," he said. "I know black people who are devils and white people who are good and caring. And I know plenty of both who are the reverse."
I brought my kids up there one day, and Ali shook hands with my son, then swooped down to pick up my little daughter and held her high over his head as she giggled.
"Is that your daddy? ... Don't lie to me. ... Is that your daddy? ... That's not your daddy ... That man is ugly and you are beautiful. The Gypsies musta brung you. Gimme a kiss."
It was here the famed entourage lived together like frat boys: Gene Kilroy, the personal business manager and camp facilitator, keeper of the checkbook, restorer of order, fierce guardian of Ali's integrity; Pat Patterson, the Chicago cop turned security chief; Angelo Dundee, the trainer who usually arrived the last week before they broke camp for fight; Drew Bundini Brown, the witch doctor/cheerleader who coined the phrase "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," and Wali Muhammad, the bucket man and timekeeper.
There never was and never will be a group that belonged together as much as this one did. In my mind's eye I can still see and hear them now. Once, decades ago, I went back to the camp at Deer Lake, long deserted.
I wandered into the old kitchen where the wall plaque with a list of Aunt Coretta's kitchen rules was thick with dust. The long wooden table and chairs were empty. I walked down the hill to the little gym that surely must remain a refuge to the ghosts and echoes of a younger Ali at work. The thump of gloved fist against heavy bag and the rat-tat-tat of the speed bag. The sound of the three-minute bell ringing and Wali Muhammad, a towel around his neck and a stopwatch in his hand, yelling, "Time."
The rickety sign was still there, swaying back and forth in the wind:
"Muhammad Ali Training Camp."
Beneath it, another wooden slat read:
"No Training Today."
In what proved to be the end, like all of us, Ali was trying to freeze the calendar. He came to Vegas to fight Larry Holmes, sporting a brand-new mustache, touting himself as "Dark Gable, a pretty man who looks a champion."
He had trimmed himself down through diuretics, shedding his middle-age puffiness so that he looked to be in great shape. But like the mustache, it was strictly cosmetic.
In the pre-fight press conference, he was glib and quick-witted. Holmes tried to keep up.
"Your ass is grass and I'm the lawn mower," was about the best Larry could do.
Ali retorted with a celebration of himself in what he called the world's shortest poem.
"Me? Whhheeeee!"
It was the last delightful episode of the Muhammad Ali Flying Circus. But even as we were entertained, those closest to him began to detect the slur in his speech. And we were afraid of this truth: On fight night, he would emerge not as the Ali of old but as an old Ali, a burned-out and weary shell of a fighter who was risking permanent injury.
He had no chance. Holmes opened and held firm as a 3-1 favorite, but as the fight drew closer, a strange thing began to take shape. Holmes' advantage in the betting line began to erode.
The guys who ran sports books tell me they had never seen anything like it. This wasn't the smart money. It was the heart money. It was an avalanche of minimal bets so strong it actually swarmed over the ''smart money''. It came from the bellhops and desk clerks, the blackjack dealers and craps table stickmen, the bartenders and waitresses, the car parkers and chambermaids.
By fight time, the odds were almost even. In the town that invented legal fight bets, the least-powerful economic group in Vegas had moved the odds. It never happened before. It hasn't happened since.
On fight night, the glitter crowd, the high rollers and the people who scraped together a week's pay for the cheap seats came together to will Ali through one more big fight.
And physically, Muhammad did look good. I had been in Ali's room the night before the fight and he suddenly stripped off his shirt and said, "How do you like my chances now?"
It was eerie. He looked like he did the night he won the title from Sonny Liston, 16 years before. But I knew his conditioning was only skin-deep: cosmetic deception at its health spa best. He was in beach shape, not fighting shape.
It didn't take long for Holmes to exploit the difference. He revealed what we all knew. The footwork that had bewildered dozens of opponents was gone; his legs had turned old. The red tassels on his white boxing shoes never danced. He was a man too old to fight and too proud to quit.
But in a men's room, of all places, at Caesars Palace, I heard a tribute I will never forget. It came from an attendant who was handing me a towel.
"Did you bet the fight?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said, "Ali."
"Pardon me for asking, but why?"
"Why? Why? Because I owe him for a piece of my dignity. Because he's Muhammad Ali, that's why."
For a lot of Americans — black and white — who lived through perilous times, that said it all.
http://www.nj.com/sports/index.ssf/2012 ... ns_70.html
5 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
