VETERAN BOXING WRITER TREASURES ALI MEMORIES
Highly respected writer Jerry Izenberg was about to be inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in June 2016 in Canastota, N. Y., when he heard the news he had been expecting yet dreading about Muhammad Ali.
“The day before I got inducted into the Hall of Fame and learned about Ali’s death was a great strain on me,” Izenberg, still an active writer at 86, told USA TODAY Sports. “Then when I got inducted I almost broke down.”
Ali died a year ago Saturday at age 74, and Izenberg had collected a fabulous treasure chest of stories about the boxer during a career of covering sports for the Newark
Star- Ledger that began in 1951. Many are in his recent book, Once There Were Giants: The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing, a 35- year- period that began in 1962, really got going in 1964 when then- Cassius Clay shocked the world by upsetting Sonny Lis- ton, and ended when Mike Tyson bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear in 1997.
Izenberg was asked how a big- mouthed kid from Louisville, who got into boxing after someone stole the 12- year- old’s bicycle, went on to become one of the most revered men on the planet. He said, simply, “He evolved. He grew. He saw the flaws in certain things and realized things that were better and went along that path. And he turned out to be a very, very substantial man.”
In order to understand the simplicity and complexity of Ali, Izenberg related a few anecdotes that better explain the man, not the myths.
The Rumble in the Jungle: After Ali beat George Foreman ( 40- 0 and viewed as unbeatable) in Kinshasa, Zaire, on Oct. 30, 1974, Izenberg and New York Times writer Dave Anderson went looking for Ali a few hours later. They found him by the Congo River, but he didn’t see them.
“He’s standing at the water’s edge, gazing across the Congo River, towards what was once French Congo,” Izenberg said. “He can’t see us, we can’t hear him, we don’t know what he’s doing. He’s standing there staring across the river. What he does next is fascinating to me, because there was nobody there, and as far as he knew, we’re not there. Suddenly, he raises both arms up to the sky in a Rocky pose. And, of course, there was no Rocky at that time. He stands and holds the pose. Seemed like an hour, but it was maybe three or four minutes.
“Then he turns around and starts to walk up the bank and sees us. And he said, ‘ Fellas, don’t ask me about tonight, because I don’t know if I can explain it and I’m not sure you would understand it. All I can tell you is, this was the most important night of my life.’ ... That’s the way I’ll always remember him, because with that tableau outlined against the sky, he was definitely at that moment the king of the world.” The Larry Holmes fight: “He’s about to fight Holmes, and I know he shouldn’t fight Holmes and he knows he shouldn’t fight Holmes, but the reason — and everybody said the money, well, the money didn’t have ( expletive) to do with it — was that people were his opium. When Frank Sinatra lost his voice, he couldn’t get off stage. Muhammad couldn’t get off the stage, either. So I went to his room the night before the fight, and he said to me, ‘ You don’t think I can win this fight, do you?’ I said, ‘ Muhammad, this will be your last fight.’ Well I thought it would be, but it wasn’t. ‘ I came over here just to tell you what a pleasure it’s been to cover you. How much I enjoyed all the things we did together and how I gained an appreciation of a different side of you that most people don’t see.’ He jumps up and rips his shirt off.
“It was scary. He looked exactly the way he looked the night he fought Sonny Liston for the title. He said, ‘ Now what do you think?’ What I didn’t know is that a couple of morons had him on a diuretic diet. That’s how he lost the weight. He could barely lift his arms that night, and he’s lucky he couldn’t, because if he’d been able to make it into a real fight, I think he’d have gotten badly injured. So after the fight, I walked around Caesar’s Palace and gambled some and lost.
“I go into the men’s room at about 3 a. m. An elderly African- American gentleman in a white coat hands me a towel. I said, ‘ Can I ask you a question? Did you bet on this fight?’ He said, ‘ You bet I did.’ I said, ‘ Who did you bet on?’ He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘ Come on, mister, you gotta know I bet on the man who first gave me my dignity, Muhammad Ali.’ When I thought about it later, Ali gave a lot of people dignity.”
The Muslim and the rabbi: Izenberg, Ali and Ali’s business manager, Gene Kilroy, heard a story about a Jew- ish old- age home in Bronx, N. Y., that was going to have to shut down because of lack of funding. “It’s December and it’s snowing, and this old- age home doesn’t have enough money to finish the year,” Izenberg said. “They have grants for the following year that would carry them through. Unless they could come up with money in 20 days, they were all going to be put out in the snow, walkers and all. So Ali says to Kilroy, ‘ Get the checkbook, we’re going up there.’
“They ring the bell and a rabbi answers the door and recognizes Ali right away. Ali says, ‘ Where are they going to go?’ The rabbi says, ‘ I don’t know. But if we can just make it to Jan. 1, we’ll all be OK.’ Ali says, ‘ How much do you need?’ The rabbi tells him, and he turns to Kilroy and says ‘ Write them a check.’ And now it’s time to leave. Ali turned to the rabbi and said, ‘ Next year, go to the Jews. They got a lot of money.’ I’ll tell you that check was for six figures. But that was Ali. He would do things like that. And didn’t want people to know about it.”
Defying Army induction: Ali went to Canada in 1966 to fight George Chuvalo. “I go to this rundown gym in Toronto, and Ali is getting a massage. He looked at me and said, ‘ What are you do- ing here?’ I said, ‘ I’m here for the fight.’ He said, ‘ Aw, you know this is no fight.’ I said, ‘ Muhammad, a lot of American boys who choose not to go to Vietnam for various reasons are coming to Canada to seek political asylum. And I want to see whether you’re going to go home.’ It was the closest thing to an argument we ever had.
“He jumped off the rubbing table and got in my face and said, ‘ How can you ask me that? America’s my birth country. No one’s chasing me out of my birth country. I don’t make the laws, and if I have to go to jail, I’ll go to jail. But I’m going home, and you better tell everyone that.’ And he would have gone to jail, there’s no question in my mind.”
A year later, Ali was suspended and stripped of his titles, and did not box for the next three years, before the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.
Said Izenberg of Ali, “He was not a great man. He was a good man. He was not a genius as his supporters made him out to be. And he was not the devil that the anti- Ali clique made him out to be. He was just Muhammad Ali.
“That’s all he ever wanted to be. That’s all he was, and that’s good enough for me.”