He lived the Swinging Sixties, even if he didn’t recognise the Beatles
trainer Angelo Dundee. When Ali returned in 1966, however, things were different. Again he defeated Cooper, but though the outcome was the same, the bond between the American fighter and the British public had been transformed. It was Dundee who summed it up best:
“He [Ali] loved being with the British public. When we first went to London you could have shot the kid from a cannon and no one would have known him. Three years later, when we went back, we could not walk the streets without being mobbed, there were never less than 500 people waiting outside the hotel.”
Ali held court in his suite, summoning the national newspaper men of the day and inviting them up for tea. They were all too eager to oblige, and from the mid-Sixties onwards a dozen-strong group of British media men followed the threetimes heavyweight champion around the world, charting his every move.
Not that the young Cassius Clay had always had his finger on the pulse of the Swinging Sixties. Early in the decade, when he was in training for one of the Sonny Liston fights, a photoshoot was arranged in Miami. According to the late boxing historian Bert Sugar, Dundee was told that his fighter would “be there with a few other celebs”.
“So he gets there, and there are four kids there with long hair. They get into the ring. Clay climbs in. They all get this picture taken. Someone says: ‘Cassius – this is John, Paul, George, and Ringo’. He puts his fist out for the shot, and they fall down. The Beatles leave. Then Clay goes over to the journalists and says ‘Who are those guys?’ He had no idea who they were, and yet it’s one of the iconic photographs.”
Much later in Ali’s life he was to discover far more profound links with the British Isles. In 2009, aged 67, he was united for the first time with relatives in Ennistown, Ireland. It had been discovered that Ali’s greatgrandfather, Abe Grady, was born and grew up in Ennis before he emigrated to America in 1860, where he married an Afro-American woman, an emancipated slave.
Ali’s mother, Odessa Lee Grady, was Grady’s grand-daughter. Ali finally met hundreds of extended family members of the Grady clan as the entire town turned out on what was ‘London made him feel like the toast of the town. He loved it and got a taste of true manhood there’ to be a highly emotional day.
And in a way it was only fitting that Ali should rediscover his family roots, for there was no doubt that the man who at times felt so victimised in America never felt anything less than at home on this side of the Atlantic.
As Ali’s old adversary George Foreman explained yesterday, Ali “loved England – and especially London. If he had been born and raised and boxed over there he never would have changed his name, because they made him, even as Cassius Clay, feel like the toast of the town. He loved it and got a taste of true manhood there.”