by Jonathan Eig
Love
Muhammad Ali
Your “Boy”
He drew a smiley face next to the word “Boy.”
Even as Ali continued to travel, his condition worsened. His hands grew shakier, his voice weaker, his gait more awkward. Before, he had always been too quick, too clever; now, scandal and sadness touched him.
In the early 1980s, he began working with a lawyer named Richard M. Hirschfeld. Ali wasn’t sure where or when he had first met the man, or what kind of law he practiced, but it didn’t matter, because Hirschfeld always seemed to have a lot of cash and a lot of money-making ideas. In partnership with Herbert Muhammad and Ali, Hirschfeld launched Champion Sports Management, with plans to train and manage boxers at Ali’s Deer Lake camp as well as another location in Virginia. But that wasn’t all. Through other business entities, the men planned to invest in a luxury hotel, a Brazilian car company, a Sudanese oil refinery, and a West German herpes vaccine. Hirschfeld promised he would make them all rich.
If Ali or Herbert Muhammad had checked Hirschfeld’s background, they might have kept their distance. Hirschfeld had already been charged once with stock fraud. In 1984, soon after entering into his partnership with Ali, Hirschfeld once again became the target of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which forced him to shut down Champion Sports Management. Gene Kilroy warned that Hirschfeld was “a bad guy,” one of the worst to ever come around, but Ali continued to do business with him.
The former boxer rented an office on Wilshire Boulevard. The place contained nothing but a phone. No desk. No chairs. No pictures. Nothing. Ali drove his Rolls-Royce to the office, stood at the window, lay on the floor, and sometimes fell asleep. He told one of his friends that he wondered if the world knew where he was.
Ali paid for the crummy downtown Los Angeles motel room where Drew Bundini Brown had gone to drink himself to death. In the fall of 1987, at the age of fifty-seven, Bundini took a fall and suffered serious head and neck injuries. Ali visited him one day in the hospital.
“I’m . . . so . . . sorry . . . champ,” Bundini said, looking up from his bed.
“Quiet, Drew,” Ali told him.
The men held hands.
Ali picked up a towel.
“My turn to wipe your sweat off,” he said.
Ali told Bundini he would soon be in heaven with God, or Shorty, as Bundini called the almighty. “And someday me too,” he said.
Bundini gave no answer.
“Hey, Bundini,” Ali tried again. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! Rumble, young man, rumble!”
He said it softly, not like they used to do it when they were young and defiant, but with a sense of nostalgia, with love. Ali concluded with an openmouthed “Aaaahhhh,” softly.
Bundini smiled.
Ali kissed him on the forehead.
Within a week, Bundini was gone.
In the fall of 1987, after Bundini’s death, Ali made a goodwill visit to Pakistan, where he visited mosques, shrines, schools, hospitals, orphanages, and government offices. Ali believed that such visits were an important part of his religious observance, that acts of charity were a means of purifying one’s soul and drawing nearer to Allah. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, he traveled hundreds of thousands of miles each year. Ali distributed countless autographed religious pamphlets on his journeys. He carried them in oversized briefcases, one in each arm, sometimes for hours a day. It kept him strong, he said. But the exercise was only a bonus. Ali said he felt a duty to explain Islam to Americans and to explain America to Muslims.
He’d conquered his fear of flying, enough so that he sometimes didn’t bother to wear a seatbelt. Once, when a flight attendant instructed him to buckle up, Ali replied, “Superman don’t need no seatbelt.” To which the flight attendant answered, “Superman don’t need no plane!” Ali loved being sassed and often repeated the exchange when he flew with friends.
Ali said he enjoyed retirement more than he had enjoyed life as a boxer. No longer did he have to wake up at five in the morning to exercise. No longer did he have to absorb punches from big, strong men. Now, all he had to do was bask in the love of his fans. Everywhere he went, people chanted his name — “Muhammad Ali Clay,” they called him in the Middle East, to differentiate him from the many Muhammad Alis who lived in Muslim countries. People tossed flowers at his passing car and laced garlands around his neck. Dignitaries presented him with expensive gifts, which Ali would often leave behind for the hotel cleaning crews. Late at night, when he couldn’t sleep, he would knock on the door of one of his traveling companions and spend hours talking about his favorite subjects: religion, power, money, and sex. “If I had one dollar from everybody that loves me,” he sometimes said, “I’d be a billionaire.” He seldom talked about boxing and engaged in surprisingly little bragging. “He was relentlessly sunny,” Kolb said. “He made you feel safe . . . Deep down, he was one of the humblest guys I ever met.”
In Pakistan, as his chauffeur-driven Mercedes rolled through village after village, Ali couldn’t stay in his seat, same as he hadn’t been able to stay seated in his stroller as a baby, and same as he hadn’t been able to tolerate riding the bus to school with the other children at Central High in Louisville. Even though he had his window rolled down and was waving, most of the people in passing trucks and buses couldn’t see him, so he wedged his big body through the window, sat on the sill, and hung far enough outside the car for almost everyone to catch a glimpse as he passed.
One day, a military band dressed all in white serenaded Ali with an instrumental version of “Black Superman.” He heard the song everywhere he went in the Arab world. At the Khyber Pass, on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, Ali congratulated Afghans for fighting Soviet intervention in their country and promised the Afghani people his support. That night, an hour’s drive down the mountain road from the Afghan border, he spoke again, this time in a rickety old auditorium in Peshawar. His voice was slurred but easily understood. “Many people in America know nothing about Muslims,” Ali said. “Many people in America know nothing about Prophet Muhammad. America is a big country. America is a beautiful country. All peoples, all races, religions are in America, but the power structure and the news media present a bad picture of Muslims. Whenever Muslims are mentioned, people think about Palestini guerrillas — whenever Muslims are mentioned they think about Khomeini, they think about Colonel Qaddafi, and whatever he may do that they consider rebellious. My fight in the boxing ring was only to make me popular. I never enjoyed boxing. I never enjoyed hurting people, knocking people down. But this world only recognizes power, wealth, and fame — according to their procedures. And after hearing the powerful message of Islam, and seeing the beautiful unity in Muslims, after seeing how the children are raised, after seeing the procedures of prayer, after seeing the way we eat, the way we dress, just the whole attitude of Islam, it was so beautiful — I said this is something more people have to know about, this is something more people would accept and join if they really understood. Whether they be black or white, red, yellow, or brown, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist, if he hears Islam, reads the Koran, hears the plain truth about Muhammad, he’ll have to be affected in one way or the other.”
Larry Kolb had commissioned a video covering Ali’s weeklong tour of Pakistan. On the video, during Ali’s speech in Peshawar, seated in a sea of men wearing traditional Afghani and Pakistani clothing, a thin man with a long beard stands out. He’s wearing an Arab thobe with a white ghutra on his head. He sits two rows from the back of the auditorium, listening to Ali speak. It appears to be Osama bin Laden, who lived in Peshawar at the time of the speech. After bin Laden became the prime suspect in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Kolb said he provided the videotape to experts in the U.S. intelligence community and that they told him the man was most likely bin Laden.
By the late 1980s, Lonnie and Muhammad had moved from Los Angeles to Ali’s farm in Berrien Spr
ings, Michigan, a place that had once been owned by Al Capone, according to local legend. Ali celebrated his forty-sixth birthday with a party in New York attended by dozens of celebrities, including Don King and Donald Trump. Ali still loved seeing old friends, loved talking about old times. It wasn’t the fights he liked to recollect; it was the memories peripheral to the fights, the friendships he’d forged. His eyes would brighten and he would giggle like a little boy talking to his brother or Jimmy Ellis about their all-night drives from Louisville to Miami, recalling the way they had fiddled with the radio to find their favorite Atlanta radio station and sung along to the Motown hits of the early 1960s. He didn’t brag like he used to, but his happiness was never in doubt.
“I’ve got Parkinson’s syndrome,” he told the writer Peter Tauber. “I’m in no pain. A slight slurring of my speech, a little tremor. Nothing critical. If I was in perfect health — if I had won my last two fights — if I had no problem, people would be afraid of me. Now they feel sorry for me. They thought I was Superman. Now they can go, ‘He’s human, like us. He has problems.’ ” If he had the choice, he said, he would do it all over again.
He continued making news, but it was not always good news; it was the kind of news made by humans. In 1988, Dave Kindred, now reporting for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, broke a story that would have seemed preposterous had it involved anyone but Ali. Someone who sounded an awful lot like the former champ had been phoning politicians, journalists, and Capitol Hill staffers, talking about politics and lobbying for legislation. When Kindred received one such call, he knew immediately something was wrong. The voice sounded like Ali’s, but Kindred strongly suspected a mimic. After twenty-one years of reporting on the boxer, Kindred knew that Ali usually did all the talking; he seldom listened to what reporters had to say. But the Ali who called him in 1988 engaged in a “pleasant back-and-forth conversation” and used words such as “fallacious” and “dispossessed,” which were not normally a part of Ali’s vocabulary. Not only that, his slurred speech was gone. He sounded sharp as ever.
It didn’t take long for Kindred to solve the mystery. Ali began visiting U.S. senators at their offices in Washington, DC, five of them in all. Each time, the former boxer stood in silence while his attorney, Richard Hirschfeld, did the talking. Back in 1971, when the Supreme Court had overturned his draft-evasion conviction, Ali had been asked if he intended to sue the government for damages. He’d said no, that the prosecutors had only been doing what they had thought was right. But on Ali’s behalf, Hirschfeld filed suit against the federal government in 1984, seeking $50 million in damages resulting from his lost wages. When the suit was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired, Hirschfeld began lobbying in Congress for legislation that would give Ali a second chance.
Kindred suspected that it was Hirschfeld imitating Ali on the phone. The reporter asked Ali if he’d made the calls to the senators.
“I didn’t call ’em,” Ali said. “Why would a Black Muslim fuck with politicians? I don’t care.”
“Who made the calls?” Kindred asked.
Ali said he didn’t know.
Was it Hirschfeld? The men had been virtually inseparable. They’d been involved in a long list of business deals. And Hirschfeld had been entertaining friends for years with his impersonation of Ali.
“I can’t see Richie doing it.”
“Why did you go to Capitol Hill with him?”
“The senators, Richie said they wanted to see me.”
At one point, when Kindred persisted in asking questions, Ali warned him: “You’re gonna get your ass sued.”
“I just want to get the story right,” Kindred said.
“That little Jewish lawyer’s gonna sue your ass,” Ali said.
Kindred’s stories in the Journal-Constitution described a bold hoax perpetrated by Hirschfeld in an attempt to squeeze money from the U.S. government. But Hirschfeld denied impersonating Ali in phone calls, insisting he merely coached Ali on what to say. Ali was not accused of any crime, but it was hard to believe from reading Kindred’s articles and other coverage of the scandal that Ali was entirely innocent. Larry Kolb, who was one of Ali’s managers at the time, said Ali and Herbert Muhammad both knew exactly what Hirschfeld was doing. “I know for a fact that Muhammad was in on it,” Kolb said. “I also know Muhammad didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.” Kolb said that Ali believed it was appropriate to let his attorney speak on his behalf. Ali was never accused of wrongdoing, and his public image suffered only a glancing blow. Hirschfeld was eventually convicted of income tax evasion and securities fraud. He spent eight years as a fugitive from the federal government. After his capture, he died in prison, apparently by suicide.
A few years later, in 1989, Lonnie and Muhammad went on a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. It moved him in much the way the Hajj had moved Malcolm X in 1964 and in much the way it had moved countless Muslims throughout history. “It was a spiritual journey for both of us,” Lonnie recalled. “He was happy because it is one of the pillars of Islam that every Muslim who can afford it must do. He was awed by the thousands of Muslims who were gathered from all over the world to make Hajj . . . He delighted in the fact that Muslims of all colors from all over the world were coming together. He met and knew many men, Sheiks and others, of immense wealth who were dressed the same and enduring the same physical challenges of the Hajj as everyone else. Wealth had no influence. He was also struck by the number of young children who were making Hajj with their parents, some being carried on the shoulders of their fathers. Muhammad used this time to learn more about the meaning of Hajj, the life of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam. There would be long discussions in the evenings with those who were making Hajj with us or who Muhammad had befriended that day. People were very happy to see Muhammad but remained focused on why they were there. In other words, they didn’t allow their fondness or physical proximity to Muhammad to distract them from their religious duty. Muhammad continued to speak about Hajj many weeks after returning home. He was so happy and relieved he was able to fulfill that obligation before he died.”
Religion filled much of the space in Ali’s life that had once been occupied by boxing. “When Muhammad started to get sick and realized he was no longer invulnerable,” the writer Thomas Hauser said in an interview years later, “he started to get scared. That was one factor that led to his taking his religion more seriously.”
One day, Ali was hired to sit at a table and sign autographs to promote a new television enterprise — Classic Sports Network — at a cable TV convention in New Orleans. His pay was five thousand dollars for four hours. Ali did more than sign autographs. He posed for photos and performed magic tricks, and, because he spent so long with each of his fans, the line to meet him stretched far out of sight. At 3:50 p.m., when Ali’s time was almost up, the man who had hired him, Brian Bedol, began apologizing to the people standing in line and telling them that the champ would have to leave in ten minutes. Bedol heard a loud whisper from behind. “Hey boss man, what are you doing?” It was Ali. “These people are here to see me!”
Ali stayed two more hours, until everyone had an autograph or a picture. When he was done, he joined Bedol and his team for dinner — and insisted on picking up the two-thousand-dollar tab. When the meal ended, Ali invited Bedol and the others to his hotel suite, where he passed around a Bible and discussed the contradictions contained in the texts. There were thirty thousand contradictions in the Bible, he said, and he went on to offer examples. As the night stretched on, Bedol had the feeling Ali was going to mention every one, but he didn’t. He was trying to make the point that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam sprang from the same set of beliefs. Muslims, Ali explained, believed that Jewish and Christian holy books were divinely revealed, but those books had lost their integrity through countless revisions over the years, and only the Koran offered a perfect and complete account of God’s words as revealed to the prophet Muhammad. After midnight, Ali stopped talking, pushed bac
k his chair, rose, and walked to his bedroom. After ten minutes, when Ali didn’t return, Bedol and his colleagues looked at one another and quietly exited the suite.
In an interview after his retirement, Ali was once asked who had helped him most in his career. “In my career, everything . . .” He paused and smiled. “Allah. All my success, all my protection, all my fearlessness, all my victories, all my courage: Everything came from Allah.”
On February 8, 1990, Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr. suffered a heart attack in the parking lot of a Louisville department store and died. He was seventy-seven. Ali’s relationship with his father had always been a complicated one. For years, Cash had drunk too much and mistreated his wife and children. But, at the same time, he’d been a steady fixture in his son’s life — never far from home, always in attendance at his son’s fights or hanging around his training camp, and traveling the world as part of his son’s adventures. He had not been an ideal father, and in later years the father-son roles sometimes had seemed reversed, with Ali relishing opportunities to show his father who was really in charge. Upon news of the death, Ali told reporters: “He was a father, a friend, my trainer, and my best buddy.”
In November 1990, Ali traveled to Iraq to meet its president, Saddam Hussein, in an attempt to win the release of hundreds of American hostages. Ali was mostly silent during the meeting, but when it was over, Hussein released fifteen Americans and allowed them to travel home with the boxer.
The following year, Ali toured in support of his new biography, written by Thomas Hauser with Ali’s cooperation. The book put Ali back in the spotlight and began the work of placing his achievements in historical context. By including interviews with Ali’s doctors, who had been granted permission by Ali to speak openly, Hauser also called attention to the damage boxing had done to his story’s hero. But even as he promoted it, Ali expressed ambivalence about his authorized biography.
“Book makes me look like a fool,” he told Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times.
