Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  “He was extremely naive,” Frank said. “Beyond belief.” When a businessman came to Ali and suggested they form a partnership to manufacture their own automobiles, Ali loved the idea. Think about how many people bought cars, he marveled. Millions! Surely there would be hundreds of thousands of people if not more who wanted to own cars made by Muhammad Ali. But Ali didn’t understand or didn’t realize the contract required him to invest $1 million of his own money toward the development of the product, nor did he understand how complicated the business of designing, manufacturing, and selling cars would be. “He was strangely unaware of what was going on in the world,” Frank said. “He never understood. He thought Don King was just another black man trying to eke out a living like he was. He was overly impressed with a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills and not sufficiently impressed with a check. He knew what you could do with hundred-dollar bills. He didn’t fully understand checks. He did understand it, but emotionally, gut-wise, it didn’t have the meaning that a suitcase full of dollar bills did.”

  Veronica grew frustrated at times, too. Chauffeurs would enter the house to fetch the couple’s luggage and steal jewelry from her dresser or nightstand, but Ali wouldn’t fire them. He possessed “the kindest, most pure heart of anyone I know,” she said. He didn’t care how much money he had in the bank. He didn’t care if he stayed at a Ritz-Carlton Hotel or a Holiday Inn. Didn’t care if his watch was a Rolex or a Timex. He did have one quirk when it came to shopping — he judged objects like furniture and appliances by their weight, the heavier the better, and would walk through his own house urging guests to pick up objects and measure their impressive heft. But other than that, Veronica said, he showed few signs of materialism.

  Once, the boxer phoned Michael Phenner from a car dealership in Beverly Hills and asked for money to buy another Rolls-Royce. Phenner advised Ali to leave the showroom. The lawyer said he was confident he could negotiate a better price for the car once Ali had departed.

  “Mike, how much do you think I’m going to save?” Ali asked.

  Phenner said he could probably save ten thousand dollars, maybe more.

  “Mike, do I have the money?” Ali asked.

  Phenner said yes. Ali got in the car and drove it away.

  At one point, Phenner and Abboud talked about hiring a twenty-four-hour financial security guard for Ali, someone who would be by his side to intervene when he was approached with business offers. It proved impractical.

  In 1979, a man calling himself Harold Smith (real name: Eugene Ross Fields) set out to become the new Don King, the biggest promoter in boxing, and he tossed around enough cash to make it happen. Smith persuaded Ali to lend his name to an operation called Muhammad Ali Amateur Sports, which sponsored track meets and boxing tournaments, as well as Muhammad Ali Professional Sports, which promoted professional boxing matches. With Ali’s endorsement, and with a seemingly limitless supply of cash, Smith quickly signed some of boxing’s top talent, including Thomas Hearns, Ken Norton, Gerry Cooney, Michael Spinks, Matthew Saad Muhammad, and Eddie Mustafa Muhammad. The FBI eventually discovered that Smith had embezzled more than $21 million, with the help of insiders, from Wells Fargo Bank in California, making it one of the largest cases of bank fraud in American history at that time. While Ali was never accused of conspiring with Smith, the boxer did receive at least $500,000 of Wells Fargo’s money. When news of the scam hit the press, Ali held a press conference to explain that he knew nothing about the crime. He joked about it, saying, “A guy used my name to embezzle $21 million. Ain’t many names that can steal that much.”

  In addition to the bad business deals, there were also paternity suits and threats of paternity suits, enough of them that Phenner and his colleagues joked that they might wind up defending Ali in a class-action case for all his extramarital affairs. Phenner adored Ali. It was impossible not to, he said. But no matter how he tried, he could not protect the fighter because Ali would not or could not protect himself. A reporter for the New York Times witnessed one all-too-typical scene. Ali was stretched out on a bed in his suite at the Meadowlands Hilton in New Jersey — he often conducted interviews and business meetings while lying in bed, clothed or unclothed — as a woman showed him a brown bottle full of Muhammad Ali vitamins. “And they’ll be in the stores as soon you sign as this contract,” the woman said. Without getting up, Ali signed the contract. The woman put the document in her briefcase and left. Soon after, a man handed Ali a pamphlet. He explained to Ali that it was an advertisement for a proposed new school, the Muhammad Ali Institute of Technology and Theatrics. “Yeah, man,” Ali said. “Thanks, man.” He still didn’t get out of bed.

  “It got to the point where we felt we were at risk as a law firm,” Phenner said, “because someone would say why didn’t Sutter & Hopkins stop this?”

  Phenner and Frank told Ali he would probably make about $8 million from his farewell tour, but before it began they found reason to worry. Ali was inviting everyone he knew to come along and offering to pay their expenses. Phenner and Frank insisted Ali pare down his list of travelers, which he agreed to do, settling on Veronica, Howard Bingham, and a few others. But when the boxer went to the airport to begin his journey, he encountered an uninvited guest: Bundini Brown, who was dragging an oversized trunk full of Muhammad Ali T-shirts, Muhammad Ali cigars, and other Muhammad Ali products he hoped to sell on the tour. Bundini did not have a plane ticket, but he begged, and Ali agreed to buy him one — at a cost of about $1,500 in each direction.

  The tour was a success. Ali sparred with Jimmy Ellis. He went for long walks through new cities. He signed countless thousands of autographs. He ate countless slices of pie and cake (and proudly showed off his ballooning belly, joking that people were starting to ask if he was pregnant with twins). He sat with television interviewers and gave long interviews, recalling his earliest fights and favorite poems. His hair had begun to gray. His voice was slower and softer — a fact that became more obvious as television interviewers showed footage from earlier Ali television appearances and then cut back to Ali live in their studios — but his memory remained as sharp as ever. He recalled in vivid detail not just particular bouts but even particular rounds and particular punches. He said he was getting $75,000 to box exhibitions and thought he could get $1 million for going a few rounds with Teofilo Stevenson, the Cuban heavyweight who had won the past two Olympic gold medals for boxing. In July, Ali fought an exhibition against Lyle Alzado, a defensive end for the Denver Broncos football team and a former Golden Gloves boxer. Ali got $250,000 for the fight, which was supposed to be an eight-round affair. But when it became clear that Alzado was taking the fight seriously and hurting Ali at times, the fighters agreed to skip the seventh round. Ali weighed 234 pounds for the Alzado exhibition and admitted that he hadn’t run one mile or spent one day in the gym in the six months since he had beaten Spinks.

  It was easy to imagine going on this way for years, touring the world, picking up paychecks for giving speeches or endorsing products, offering interviews, putting on the trunks and pretending to box a few rounds, telling jokes. (One of his favorites at the time: “What did Abraham Lincoln say when he woke up after a three-day drunk? He said, ‘I freed the who?’ ”) As long as he was making people happy, Ali seemed happy. During an interview in New Zealand, one of the announcers had to apologize to his audience that the rest of the regularly scheduled news would have be postponed because Ali had gone on longer than expected, reviewing his whole life, his whole career, for more than eighty minutes.

  “I’m through boxing,” he vowed. “You’ll never see me in the ring again.” But he said he would continue to conduct exhibitions for ten more years to make sure that young people would always know his name and know, as he told one interviewer on the tour, that he was “the greatest fighter of all times, the most talked-about fighter of all times, the most controversial, and the fastest and the prettiest, dancing master, the greatest fist-fighter in the history of the whole world.” He pa
used to admire himself in the television monitor, laughed, and asked the cameraman to move in for a close-up. He said he looked forward to getting on with his life: “Look how good I feel on your show. How I can brag, and how I can talk. All my life I have it made, ’cause I go out a winner. If you go out a loser, it worries you . . . I want to go out as champion, I want to retire as three-time champion . . . I’m just glad to be able to get out on top.”

  When he returned from his so-called farewell tour, Ali announced once again, in case there was any uncertainty, that he was formally and officially retired. The heavyweight title belonged to Ali’s former sparring mate Larry Holmes, who’d been tearing apart every man he faced, showing flashes of Ali’s fine footwork and a jab that was perhaps even superior to that of his mentor.

  Some reporters greeted Ali’s latest retirement with skepticism, but Red Smith, who had always been one of Ali’s toughest critics, gave the fighter a fond farewell. “The fact is,” Smith wrote, “Ali was a remarkable athlete, almost surely faster on his feet than any other heavyweight of any era. He was an imaginative and inventive showman, a tireless entertainer. He postured and clowned and faked it, and his speed compensated for his sins as a pure boxer. He was a fair puncher and could take more punishment than anyone of his era could inflict. An excellent fighter, he was great only against Joe Frazier, who brought out the champion in him . . . He defended the title more often than any other heavyweight and against more bums, starting with Liston. Whatever happened in their first meeting, Liston went in the water when they met again in Lewiston, Me. Of that there is no manner of doubt, no possible, probable shadow of doubt, no possible doubt whatever. Ali hasn’t made a really good fight since Manila, though he was called the winner after eight of them. It is time to say goodbye. It is past time, but that’s all right. He was an ornament on the sports scene. If he stayed too long, that was partly because we hated to see him go.”

  51

  Humpty Dumpty

  One day in the fall of 1979, Ali squeezed into a blue plastic chair and addressed a roomful of students at the New School for Social Research in New York City. The students were enrolled in a class designed to explore Muhammad Ali’s favorite subject: Muhammad Ali.

  On this day, the final meeting of the seven-week course, students would hear from the man himself.

  “My knowledge,” he said, smiling as he set up the rhyme. “You can learn more from me than from any college.”

  Ali offered the students more poems. He told jokes. He also spoke at length about the crisis occurring in Iran. A month earlier, Jimmy Carter had allowed the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, to enter the United States for cancer treatments. In response, some of the Shah’s political opponents had overrun the U.S. embassy in Tehran and seized fifty-two American hostages. Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had labeled America “the Great Satan” and refused to negotiate the hostages’ release. The attack on the embassy hit Americans hard. Just years after the country’s demoralizing retreat from Vietnam, and with the economy increasingly damaged by oil shortages, here, it seemed, was another example of American weakness. Ali expressed eagerness to help. He offered to go to Iran and trade himself for the hostages. At one point, he struck a patriotic chord, saying, “No country is as great as America. Even our smallest city is greater than any country in the world.” At another point, he argued that America deserved many of its problems. “This is a country based on lies,” he said.

  Despite the contradictions in his remarks, Ali was convinced he could be an effective diplomat — the “black Henry Kissinger,” as he put it. In fact, soon after the hostages were taken in Iran, President Carter had considered using Ali as an intermediary, perhaps because he was America’s best-known Muslim, and perhaps because he was so extraordinarily well liked. It never happened. But Carter did send Ali on a different diplomatic mission. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the United States, in protest, announced a boycott of the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow. Ali was in India on a charity mission at the time. Carter called and asked the boxer if he would travel to Africa with a team from the State Department and explain to Africans why the United States would not participate in the Olympics and to see if he could persuade other nations to join the boycott.

  There was irony in it, of course. The same government that had once prosecuted Ali for refusing to fight in an American invasion of Vietnam was enlisting his help now in trying to pressure the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan. Still, the job seemed simple enough. State Department officials briefed Ali: all he had to do was remind Africans that America was the land of the free, and that America would not stand by silently and let the Soviet Union overrun Afghanistan. Ali was widely admired in Africa, not only for his triumph over George Foreman in Zaire but also for his visit to the continent in 1964 after he had beaten Sonny Liston. If he had shown up and not a uttered a word, if he had merely waved to crowds, thrown punches at the air, and let State Department officials do most of the talking, his mission might have been a success. But Ali was highly impressionable, and this character trait undermined his diplomacy. He arrived by State Department plane in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the first stop on a five-nation tour, and quickly embarrassed himself. When a Tanzanian reporter asked Ali why Africans should support a ban on the Moscow games given that Moscow provided aid to a number of popular liberation movements in black African countries, Ali reacted with surprise, saying he hadn’t been told of the Soviet Union’s support for black African freedom fighters. “Maybe I’m being used to do something that ain’t right,” he said. “If I find out I’m wrong, I’m going back to America and cancel the whole trip.” At the same time, Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere refused to meet with Ali, saying he was insulted that President Carter had sent a boxer.

  Next stop: Kenya, where Ali went a step further in undermining President Carter’s cause, arguing that African athletes should feel free to decide for themselves whether or not to compete in the Moscow games. “I’m not here to push nothing on nobody,” he said. Later, Ali was asked why the United States had failed to back an African boycott of the 1976 Montreal Olympics — a protest set off by the presence of New Zealand, which had sent a rugby team to South Africa. Ali said no one had told him about the 1976 boycott and if he’d know about it, he never would have undertaken his African campaign. Time magazine labeled it “the most bizarre diplomatic mission in U.S. history.”

  Less than a month after his return from Africa, Ali said he wanted to box again. He told promoter Bob Arum that he wanted to fight John Tate, who held the World Boxing Association heavyweight crown. Larry Holmes, Ali’s former sparring partner, was the champion in the eyes of the World Boxing Council, the title having been divided as boxing’s two governing bodies vied for supremacy.

  The news of Ali’s possible return thrilled some members of his entourage and dismayed others. It certainly upset the businessmen who had recently sold an Ali farewell tribute to network television and a series of Ali farewell performances to cities in the United States and Europe. The notion of a return to boxing for Ali also upset those who were concerned about the fighter’s health. Ali had gained twenty pounds in retirement. Angelo Dundee warned that losing the weight and getting in condition to fight would be more taxing than ever. “I still don’t think he’ll come back, I hope not,” the trainer said, “but if he wants me, I’ll work with him again.”

  Ali was thirty-eight years old. His weight exceeded 240 pounds. He hadn’t fought in eighteen months. The year before that, he’d only fought twice. It had been nearly four years since he’d knocked out an opponent and four and a half years since his last truly impressive win, that coming in the punishing battle with Frazier in Manila. Since his defeat of Leon Spinks, it was not clear that Ali had worked up a good sweat, much less labored to stay in shape. There was no reason beyond nostalgia to believe Ali belonged in the ring with John Tate or Larry Holmes. “Ali can’t fight no more,” said Freddie Brown, a seventy-three-year-old tra
iner who’d worked with Rocky Marciano, Rocky Graziano, and a lot of other Rockys nobody had heard of. “He can’t go two good rounds in a row good . . . It’s too bad he hung on too long like he did. If he’d have quit after Manila, then I’d say he was the best heavyweight we ever had.”

  And yet Don King, Bob Arum, Herbert Muhammad, and others promised to help if Ali decided to fight again. Arum said he tried to dissuade Ali but failed. But what if Arum and the others had refused to help? What if they had told Ali that no amount of money would change their minds? What if they had said his health was their top concern? Would he have changed his mind?

  Veronica Ali said she opposed her husband’s return to boxing.

  “The last three fights or so,” she said, “he fought because he had to fight, because he would’ve been broke if he didn’t fight.” Veronica blamed Herbert Muhammad and others who had made great fortunes and had never cared enough to help the boxer properly invest and protect his income. “People like Herbert were happy to keep him where he needed to keep working,” she said.