Muhammad Ali’s appearances in Baltimore left lasting impressions
Kweisi Mfume remembers stepping into the boxing ring at the Baltimore Civic Center almost 40 years ago, a selfconfessed 160-pound weakling wearing borrowed trunks that barely stayed on his waist, to face off against the world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali.
It was 1977, and Ali was in town for an event to raise money for a Nation of Islam mosque in West Baltimore. His team had offered any media organization that promoted the event the chance to send a representative to try their luck against the Champ. Mfume, then a radio personality, stepped up.
“We were goofing off and having a good time,” Mfume said. For two rounds, Ali allowed him to get a few jabs in but then, Mfume said, “he threw a punch and I happened to be in the way.”
The event was one of several visits Ali made to Baltimore over the years. There was the exhibition fight in 1972 when Ali defended the steep $10 ticket price as a bargain; a 1992 swing through Leakin Park on an anti-drug and anti-crime campaign; and a visit with the Baltimore Ravens before their Super Bowl-winning 2012 season. Those who met him, however briefly, recall being inspired by his boxing skill, political ideals and cheerful personality, anecdotes fresh in their minds even years later.
Ali, 74, died Friday after being hospitalized last week in the Phoenix area. A family spokesman said Saturday he died of septic shock “due to unspecified natural causes.”
The Baltimore Orioles held a moment of silence at Camden Yards to honor Ali before their Saturday evening game with the New York Yankees. “He was a guy a guy who stood up for his rights … stood up for what he truly believed in, and lived a pretty good life,” said center fielder Adam Jones. "It’s a pretty good [legacy], one that is going to be passed on for years and years to come.”
Orioles Manager Buck Showalter, said he admired Ali long before it was socially acceptable to do so. “I was a huge fan of his growing up in a time and part of the country where it wasn’t popular to be a Cassius Clay – at that time – fan. My dad was a huge fan of him and I followed suit. I followed every fight. He was something. He was the greatest heavyweight ever, but I’m biased.”
Once a deeply polarizing figure, Ali became a hugely popular one, a three-time world heavyweight boxing champion known and admired as much for his political principles as his physical prowess. His death marks not just the end of a life lived large and out loud but one that encompassed the sweep of major American historical markers, chief among them the Vietnam War and the civil rights era.
The 1977 fundraising event in Baltimore brought together a number of men who became influential local figures. Mfume survived the blow from Ali and was later elected to the House of Representatives and became president of the NAACP. Del. Curt Anderson, then a junior reporter at WBALTV, also fought Ali that day.
Lawyer A. Dwight Pettit was there. Pettit said he had traveled in Ali’s entourage many times because Baltimore’s Muslims thought the young attorney looked like the boxer. Ali disagreed, telling the lawyer he “isn’t as pretty as me,” Pettit recalled.
Pettit said he was under consideration to be Maryland U.S. attorney and let the White House know he was doing a mock bout with Ali. The president’s team told him not to and he dropped the idea, which Pettit said is “one of my biggest regrets.”
Anderson taped a goofy four-minute video in which he fought and defeated the boxer after Ali taunted him with the words “Curt is dirt.”
“Initially we went into a small room with Ali’s lawyers and they made us sign an affidavit that we wouldn’t try to hurt him,” Anderson recalled. “I was wondering where his affidavit was.”
In the video, the WBAL anchors laugh at Anderson’s antics in the ring. Anderson said that by the late ’70s the controversy over Ali’s refusal to be drafted during the war in Vietnam and his conversion to the Nation of Islam’s unorthodox version of the Muslim faith had faded, making the charity event comfortable fodder for the evening news.
“It was right in the middle of his growing admiration around the world,” Anderson said. “Had this been 1969, it might have been a different story.”
Anderson had already helped bring Ali to the campus of Rutgers University that year. The boxer was in the midst of a 31⁄2-year ban from fighting and a leading figure in the anti-war movement. Anderson was involved in Rutgers’ black student union and was stunned when thousands — most of them white — turned up to hear Ali.
“My political acumen was formed then, and Muhammed Ali was a big part of it,” said Anderson, a Democrat who now represents Baltimore in the state legislature.
Despite Ali’s iconic status as a fighter and his activist role in the social upheavals of the late 1960s, those who met him described him as easygoing and personable. Pettit recalled him sitting on the floor of attorney Billy Murphy’s house chatting like he’d known them for years.
Boxing trainer Mack Allison III met Ali when he was working at the now-closed Baltimore Sports Bar in the Inner Harbor. Allison was in his early 20s at the time and only starting to learn how to fight. When he learned Ali would be coming to the bar, he brought his boxing shorts and asked for an autograph. Ali shook Allison’s hand and signed the shorts.
“I would smile, and he’d be like, ‘What are you smiling at?’ So I kept smiling,” Allison said. “He was just nice to everybody. I mean, really nice.”
Ali’s one-on-one warmth was in stark contrast to his brash media personality — on full display in 1972 when Ali fought in an exhibition at the Baltimore Civic Center against four opponents in front of a crowd of more than 6,000 fans.
A reporter asked him if he thought the $10 ticket price — about $57 in today’s money — was excessive.
“Ten dollars, that’s cheap,” Ali said. “Why, people pay that much to see just an ordinary fighter. But this time they’ll be seeing the greatest athlete — not boxer — in the world. I’m the most talked-about, most publicized and highest-paid athlete ever. I’ve met and fought before kings, queens and sheiks. In fact, I’ve been invited to Peking next month. Yes, by the same people who invited Nixon. Now tell me, isn’t $10 cheap?”
As his health failed, Ali retained his bravado. He returned to Baltimore in December 1992 to promote an anti-crime and anti-drug event the following year at Leakin Park. Fifty years old, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he was asked if he could have defeated then-heavyweight champion Riddick Bowe in his prime.
Ali smiled. “You must be joking. You know I’m still the greatest in the whole world.”
His last visit to Baltimore was in 2012, at a final Ravens practice before the team began its Super Bowl-winning season. The workout was closed to the press but word of the legendary boxer’s presence leaked out in giddy social media postings. Many of the
Kweisi Mfume
Ravens players acted like star-struck teenagers meeting one of their sports heroes.
As they learned of Ali’s death, some of the players who were there went online to share their condolences.
“If he taught me nothing else live life your way,” Ray Lewis wrote on Instagram. “Because he was the only one putting in hrs that nobody else could see, rest in Peace Champ I’m honored the time I got to spend with you on this earth. God has much work waiting on the other side.”
At the what is k=now known as the Freddie Gray Empowerment Center in Bolton Hill on Saturday, Brian Elzey and Calvin Ford held the first Boxing For Life event, a competition between the area’s best youth boxers.
When Elzey heard the news of Ali’s death, he recalled a famous Ali quote: “I am the greatest. I said that before I even knew I was.” Elzey hoped the same for the center’s young boxers, some of whom started training at age 5.
Elzey and Ford, who train boxers at the Upton Boxing Center, started the free event to engage local youth. They planned a similar event last year, but it was sidetracked by the unrest over the death of Freddie Gray. This year, the Boxing For Life event commemorates not just the death of Gray but also Ronald Gibbs and Angelo Ward, two boxers the club lost to street violence in recent years. “If we can save one life,” Elzey said, “it’s worth it.”
Fellow coach Kenny Ellis added: “It’s to let kids know that there’s a better way. If you dedicate yourself to something and stick with it, big things can happen.”
“He threw a punch and I happened to be in the way.”