It was a golden age – medical miracles, colour TVs, space travel, ALI the Beatles... and MUHAMMAD
IT WAS a few minutes after 5am in Dublin when the world stopped. The worst news always seems to creep up on us in the early hours. Our defences are down. So too, for the first time, were Muhammad Ali’s. The Greatest was gone.
It wasn’t so much a shock. We knew it was coming. The warning signs were writ larger than ever. The anxiety following his latest, and as it transpired last, hospitalisation had nagged at us through the night. Sleep was fitful. The TV was on. The fateful words flickered across the foot of the screen. The heart missed a beat.
It was the sense of loss. It wasn’t only we who had been fortunate to have sometimes kept his company who felt it. Millions around the world sensed a fatal disturbance in the force. Suddenly, there was a void in our lives.
Not only those of us old enough to have watched Ali bestride the golden age of mankind — civil rights, colour television, medical miracles, space travel, Third World emergence, Sinatra to Pavarotti via the Beatles.
Also those too young to have seen him fight but who are informed of his magnificence in the ring and aware of the part he played in one of humanity’s most profound struggles, the black man’s fight for freedom.
Just before the loquacious lad from Louisville discarded Cassius Marcellus Clay Jnr as a ‘slave name’, he had, as he put it, shaken up the world by beating Sonny Liston.
From the moment he won the first of his three world heavyweight titles and promptly assumed his Islamic identity he flew in the face of American convention. Thus he began not only writing his legend in the ring but weaving himself into the tapestry of our life and times.
More than any president or prime minister — John F Kennedy even — Ali was the iconic, majestic figure of fascination around whom the world turned through its most extraordinary era of turbulence and change. Such was the vaulting personality for whom they were finally left with no option but to switch off the life-support machine.
It was not the first time he had been ferried in haste to that hospital in the capital of the state of Arizona. The frequencies of those traumas had been accelerated by the advance of Parkinson’s disease but on every previous occasion he climbed from his sick-bed, just as he had done from the canvas of the ring.
This time there would be no rising like the Phoenix after whom that city is named. The family braced for the inevitable.
Lonnie, the high-school sweetheart who would become his fourth wife and then devote herself to the care which prolonged his life, sent for his daughters.
Like the family, we feared the worst when they reported respiratory problems.
So often the cruelest diseases end in a failure of the lungs.Still they carried him out in triumph. Staving off Parkinson’s for 32 years, no less, is a victory as noble any as any of those won against such formidable heavyweights as George Foreman and Joe Frazier.
It has been the most brilliant of all the magic tricks he loved to perform, even in latter days when his hands were at their most shaky. It serves also as a heroic source of inspiration to all who are similarly afflicted. That message reverberates around this planet upon which he is still the most recognisable face of all.
He held London in thrall through his two fights with Henry Cooper. Especially the first, at Wembley, in which he had to rise from a hammer blow from the Englishman only just in time to fulfil his typically brash prediction of a fifth-round stoppage.
My first conversation with him took place in the English capital. He was back in town for a spying mission on a future opponent. As he made a hurried exit from amid the opulence of the Royal Albert Hall, I followed him out to request a few quotes. He was about to step into his limousine but paused, held the door open and said: ‘Climb aboard.’
We started talking on the ride to the Park Lane Hilton, carried on in the elevator and became increasingly animated in his penthouse suite. Then I thanked him and made to leave.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked.
‘To send these words of yours to my paper,’ I replied. ‘How long will that take?’ ‘Twenty minutes if I write it down. Five if I adlib to a copy-taker.’
‘Get your skinny white ass back here in five. We got a lotta talking to do.’ So we did. Through to the dawn. Him doing most of the talking, of course. About boxing, life, putting the world to rights. How he loved an audience. Even if it had to be a mesmerised young English hack he hardly knew.
The last time we could converse was ringside at a junior boxing tournament in Louisville. The voice was down to a whisper but when I asked how he felt there were no complaints or regrets about that diminished faculty. Rather he talked about its advantages, saying: ‘Now I am at peace to reflect on my life and all that is going on in the world around us. I’m good.’
How good to have met and known him. How thrilling to have watched him transform boxing into a work of art, drama, poetic movement, passion, speed and courage.
How honoured to have been invited to his 70th birthday dinner in Louisville four Januarys ago.
The Louisville Lip had been silenced by his condition. That Adonis body was wasted almost to the bones. He was no longer The Prettiest, a reality in which he and his ladies had revelled.
Yet that kaleidoscopic mind was still burning bright. You could see it in the light in his eyes, the sparkle which made them glitter all the more when something tickled that mischievous sense of humour.
That spirit is still alive. Everywhere.
You can feel it at the splendid exhibition of timeless Ali film and priceless memorabilia — ‘I Am The Greatest’ — which he was not well enough to visit but which is about to turn that section of London’s O2 arena into a shrine of pilgrimage for the thousands upon thousands who worship Muhammad Ali.
Get your skinny white ass back here in five minutes... we got a lotta talking to do