Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest

by Thomas Hauser

  JERRY IZENBERG: Inside the ring, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier brought out the best in each other. Outside the ring, they brought out the worst.

  DAVE WOLF: It’s possible that, by the time Ali and Joe reached Manila, neither one of them was the best heavyweight in the world anymore. Joe was nowhere near the fighter he’d once been, and neither was Ali. But as occasionally happens in boxing, their declining curves crossed at exactly the same spot. They were so evenly matched and put so much of themselves into the fight that it was historic.

  MUHAMMAD ALI [in an Ali-Frazier III post-fight interview conducted while sitting on a stool in mid-ring]: I was surprised Joe had so much stamina. There was too much pressure. He’s the greatest fighter of all times next to me. This is too painful. It’s too much work. I might have a heart attack or something. I want to get out while I’m on top. And one more thing. I want everybody to know that I’m the greatest fighter of all times, and the greatest city of all times is Louisville, Kentucky.

  BOBBY GOODMAN [A PUBLICIST FOR ALI-FRAZIER III]: After the Thrilla in Manila ended, Ali went to his dressing room and collapsed on a couch. He was completely exhausted. I told him the media was waiting for the post-fight press conference. And he said, “Tell ’em I’m too tired. I can’t move.” I’d never seen him like that before, where he couldn’t do anything but lie there. But I had to do my thing as a publicist and get someone to the press conference, so I ran across to Joe Frazier’s dressing room. Joe and Eddie Futch were there, very down, very depressed. I said, “Joe, I know it’s tough, but we need you for a post-fight interview. Muhammad is finding it hard to get there. Can you help me out?” They said they’d do it. That gave me the opportunity to run back to Muhammad’s dressing room and say, “Champ; Joe Frazier’s down at the press conference.” Ali found that hard to believe. But finally, he said, “All right; get me my robe. If Joe Frazier’s there, I’m gonna be there too.”

  JOE FRAZIER: Ali was the one who spoke about being nearly dead in Manila; not me.

  MUHAMMAD ALI: I got tired of seeing Joe Frazier in the ring. And I guess he got tired of seeing me too, because I whupped him two out of three times that we fought.

  LARRY MERCHANT: Ali was a warrior. He was in a hurting business, a hard business, the toughest game there is. And no matter what his style was, underneath it all he was one tough son-of-a-bitch. Most people never thought of him that way. If you looked at how people saw Muhammad Ali, that wouldn’t be high on the list. But I’m telling you, in the ring he was as tough a son-of-a-bitch as anyone who ever lived.

  DICK GREGORY: We live in a society where we claim we don’t want our children to drink. Even drinkers say they don’t want their children to drink. But when the World Series, the basketball championships, any great athletic competition is over, there’s always champagne. Little kids see their heroes pumping champagne, guzzling champagne, pouring champagne on each other’s heads. And until Ali, you never heard praise to God. He was the first great athlete to show the world the importance of prayer. After his fights, right in the ring, the whole world got to see the spiritual Ali. When they put that television microphone in front of him, the first thing Ali always did was give thanks to God, and then the interview could begin.

  LEROY NEIMAN: I did a life-size painting of Ali once. It was eight feet tall. John Condon presented it to Ali at some big Madison Square Garden boxing dinner. When the dinner was over, Ali’s not going to walk out with an eight-foot painting. So Don King said to him, “Don’t worry, Ali. I’ll take care of it for you and see that you get it.” And of course, the next thing you know, the painting is in King’s office at Rockefeller Center behind King’s desk. Ali asked him about it at one point, but all he got was a lot of double-talk. And Ali acted like he didn’t care, because that’s the way he is. Then, about a year later, I went to Don’s office and the painting wasn’t there. I asked what happened to it and he told me Herbert had it. Herbert had taken a shine to the painting and put the screws to Don to get it. And a little while after that, I got a phone call from Ali. Ali actually called me up and said, “Veronica [his wife at the time] really wants that painting.” I told him Herbert had it, and he said, “Well, if Herbert has it, I can’t get it from him. But if you call Herbert and tell him it’s my painting, maybe you can get it.” He gave me Herbert’s home telephone number. So I called Herbert and said, “Ali really wants that painting. He must want it pretty bad, because he asked me to call you. And it’s Ali’s painting.” Herbert didn’t want to give it up. He said, “How do you know it’s Ali’s painting? I got it from Don King.” I told him, “Herbert; I know it’s Ali’s painting because I gave it to him. I didn’t give it to Don King. I gave it to Ali.” Herbert said, “Well, Ali doesn’t really want it. It’s Veronica who wants it.” And I told him, “Herbert, it doesn’t matter. I gave that painting to Ali.” Finally, after much pushing and prodding, Herbert sent the painting to Ali. Then, after the divorce, Veronica sold it to Joe Weider.

  HAROLD CONRAD: Ali’s old man was completely nuts. He always fancied himself a singer; always wanted to sing The Star Spangled Banner before Ali’s fights. We never let him, but I got him a gig once. We were in Puerto Rico for the Coopman fight. They had a half-assed lounge in the hotel, and I asked the manager, “Do you want to have Muhammad Ali’s father singing here?” The manager said all right. So we put him in the lounge and he sang “My Way” every night.

  JERRY IZENBERG: Jean Pierre Coopman, who was known as “The Lion of Flanders,” was probably the worst fighter that Ali ever fought. Someone involved in the promotion said to me, “Listen, don’t be deceived. This kid can fight. He could hurt you.” And I pointed out, “Coopman ain’t fighting me. He’s fighting Muhammad Ali.”

  MICHAEL KATZ: Ali looked awful against Jimmy Young, but I go crazy every time somebody tells me they think Young won that fight. You can’t win a round by sticking your head out of the ring, which is what Young did all night. Each time a fighter sticks his head out of the ring, that should be a two-point round. It’s like seeking shelter during the middle of a fight. You’re not allowed to do that in boxing.

  RANDY NEUMANN: I was a fringe contender in the mid-1970s. The name of the game was, play your cards right and maybe you could make a couple of hundred thousand dollars by signing to fight Ali. Probably he would have beaten me, because basically I was a jabber and he had the best jab in the business. But if I’d gotten outpointed, so what. That happened in the gym all the time. And Ali wasn’t an intimidating fighter like Foreman or Frazier who’d beat the crap out of you. In fact, at the end of his career, he was going fifteen rounds with guys like Alfredo Evangelista and Jimmy Young, and I was better than they were. In fact, I beat Jimmy Young, and Young almost beat Ali. So Ali was the brass ring that kept me and a lot of guys like me going. I’m sorry I didn’t have the chance to fight him. I’d have made a fortune and had a ball.

  IRVING RUDD: Madison Square Garden wanted to match Ali with Duane Bobick in 1977. They even had a verbal commitment from Herbert to do the fight for $2,500,000. But then Bundini got to Ali and said, “The Garden is trying to get you knocked off by a white guy. They want a white guy to win the title.” So Ali told Teddy Brenner that he wanted Earnie Shavers instead. Teddy told him, “Shavers is a much tougher fight.” But Ali was insistent, so they made Ali-Shavers. And while we were waiting for that fight to happen, Ken Norton destroyed Bobick in 52 seconds. I watched Norton-Bobick with Ali and some of the other entourage members. As soon as it ended, Ali got up, walked over to Bundini, and said, “You dumb nigger; you told me that white boy could fight.” Slap. Slap. “You dumb nigger; what’s wrong with you? I could have fought that white boy for $2,500,000.”

  EARNIE SHAVERS: The Acorn. Yeah, I remember. You see, Ali nicknamed a lot of the fighters he fought, and he called me The Acorn because of my shaved head. Well, Ali found out that night that The Acorn is a hard nut to crack.

  WILT CHAMBERLAIN: I always felt that the worst chink in Muhammad’s armor was that he had no
close friends who he trusted, who cared enough about him to give him good advice and help him in the right direction. If he’d had friends like that, they’d have told him, “The time has come for you to do something besides boxing. Use everything you’ve got going for you outside the ring, because right now whenever you fight you’re getting your head beaten in.” I know for myself, I’ve been fortunate to have friends with the balls to tell me when it’s time to give something up or not do something else, and I’ve listened to what they had to say. Ali had nobody like that advising him in the right direction. He fought long after he should have retired. And from what I’ve heard, he was used and continues to be used in ways that aren’t very nice.

  AL BERNSTEIN: Boxing is like everything else. Nobody quits when they’re on top. Frank Sinatra is still singing long past the time when he could sing. There are dozens of aging sportscasters running around, doing mediocre play-by-play. The only reason Steve Carlton and Tommy John aren’t playing baseball anymore is that no team would let them. Unlike other sports, boxing has no cuts to make and it doesn’t have to put its best players on the field. Promoters are happy to put anyone in the ring if they can make money off them, and most boxing commissions let them. So it’s sad, really. Ali should have been one of the guys who got out okay, but he didn’t. In the end, even though it was his own fault, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

  SYLVESTER STALLONE: The people around him were bad people. They used him as a payday and badgered him to go on and on long after he should have quit. They all saw him coming apart. It didn’t happen in one night.

  BILL RUSSELL: I never saw him fight. I would never go to a fight. I just wouldn’t. I went to one a long time ago and I told myself I’d never go back. They’re much cleaner on television.

  JOHN SCHULIAN: Laughter was constant when you were in Ali’s presence. Yet as I think of the pieces I wrote during the last five years of his career, I cannot ignore the capacity he also had for turning a smile upside down.

  HUGH MCILVANNEY: No one has been able to explain to Ali that fooling around with dreams of immortality can shorten your life.

  JERRY IZENBERG: Ali has a huge head. That made for wonderful photographs. But once his legs began to fail him, it also made a pretty good target.

  GIL ROGIN [FORMER EDITORIAL DIRECTOR FOR TIME, INC.]: I was lucky. I never had a bad moment with Ali. I wasn’t there at the end.

  REX LARDNER: It is one of the illusions of Muhammad Ali that, no matter how bloody the carnage in an endless series of battles fought, he will be the last to leave the field.

  HUGH MCILVANNEY: The ring activities of Muhammad Ali now have all the grace and sporting appeal of Russian roulette played with a pump-action shotgun. The unquestionable lesson is that it is no longer his time. Muhammad Ali can still preach and philosophize, boast and charm. What he can’t do is fight. The genie is gone from the bottle forever.

  JERRY IZENBERG: As far as Ali-Holmes is concerned, Ali had come to the right town. If you want to be deluded, go to Las Vegas. That’s the place where, whatever you want, they’ll pander to it. Whatever dream you have, they’ll let you pursue it; but with the clear understanding that, when it’s all over, the house wins. So if you wanted to dream that Ali could be heavyweight champion of the world again; that’s okay, suckers. Pick a year and we’ll freeze the calendar for you—until the bell rings.

  JOHN SCHULIAN: What awaits us [in Ali-Holmes] may be a mismatch on the order of cockroach versus heel.

  ALEX WALLAU: I’ll never forget walking with Howard Cosell two or three days before the Holmes fight. There was an atmosphere in Las Vegas that gave Ali a chance. His physical skills had diminished; his reflexes were shot; his motor skills weren’t the same. But there were intelligent ringwise boxing people who thought he might win. I can take you to the exact spot in the parking lot at Caesar’s Palace where Cosell said to me, “You know, Holmes is vulnerable to the right hand, and Ali has always been able to land the straight right. I think the old master is going to do it one more time.” And I told him, “Howard, not only is Ali not going to win the fight; not only is he not going to win a round; he’s not going to win ten seconds of any round.”

  MICHAEL KATZ: When Ali fought Larry Holmes, he wasn’t in condition to shadow box for fifteen rounds.

  DR. DONALD ROMEO [WHO EXAMINED ALI FOR THE NEVADA STATE ATHLETIC COMMISSION BEFORE ALI-HOLMES AND OKAYED THE FIGHT]: So he takes some blows to the region of the kidneys and there’s blood in his urine. Big deal. It clears up in a day or two; end of story. They talk of brain damage. That’s a bunch of bunk.

  BOB ARUM: Greed is the essence of boxing. And it wasn’t only the promoter’s greed; it was the regulators’ greed. The State of Nevada allowed that fight to happen.

  LLOYD PRICE: I was in Vegas for Ali-Holmes and it sickened me. I couldn’t handle it. And what I thought about all through that fight was a day I’d spent in New York with Ali and Joe Louis maybe ten years earlier. Joe had been with me because there was a little bird singing in my band who he liked a lot, and Ali and I had been friends for years. Somehow or other, we got together and they were talking, mostly about boxing. I was listening. They got along well that day; no tension of any kind between them. Ali asked, “Joe, tell me something. What happens in the ring when you get old?” He was asking about Joe’s fight against Rocky Marciano, when Joe was 37 years old with that bald spot in the middle of his head; when he got knocked through the ropes and was counted out. Joe said, “Ali, let me tell you something. When I was young and wanted to throw a punch, I could throw it as fast as I wanted. But when I got old, my brain would tell me to do something and my arms just wouldn’t do it.” Ali was listening, but I don’t think he understood what Joe was saying; not until he fought Larry Holmes.

  LARRY HOLMES: Don’t think that I went to bed those nights and had a good sleep, because I didn’t. I was fighting Muhammad Ali. I knew I could beat this guy, but I never knew what trick he had up his sleeve. It was mind-boggling. Everywhere I went, there was Muhammad Ali. I got on the airplane, and who do I see on the airplane? Ali. I get to Las Vegas; and all these newspaper people, camera people, critics; who do they run to? Ali. We went through the casino, and all I heard was, “Ali! Ali!” And Ali could put a lot of things on your mind if you listened to him. He’d shadow box and show you how quick he was. He’d pull his shirt up and show you how thin he’d gotten. He was always saying, “Hey, I told you with Sonny Liston; I told you with George Foreman.” And if you listened, you’d believe him. You’d say, “What the hell am I fighting this guy for?” So it was rough for me to sleep at night. I was fighting Muhammad Ali.

  SYLVESTER STALLONE: Ali against Larry Holmes. Oh God, that was painful; like seeing your child playing on the railroad tracks with a train coming and you can’t get him out of the way. I just sat there and watched. It was like an autopsy on a man who’s still alive. And I also felt for Larry Holmes because he had a terrible job to do and he knew it. He had to go out and dismember a monument.

  RED SMITH: If it had been any fighter except Muhammad Ali, he would have been thrown out of the ring and his purse withheld. Only a deity or a myth could get away with the performance Ali gave against Larry Holmes. Sluggish on feet of lowgrade clay, unable to throw a respectable punch or ward off Holmes’s circumspect attack, Ali struggled through the unappetizing charade long enough to fulfill the contract worth six million dollars to him and then quit. When they speak of someone going out with a whimper, it’s impossible to recall a champion or former champion who came up so empty at the end. There has always been a certain amount of con man in Ali along with his skills. Now only the con was left.

  LOU DIBELLA [BOXING PROMOTER AND FORMER TELEVISION EXECUTIVE]: Ali wasn’t tarnished by his fight against Larry Holmes. By that point, Ali was above and beyond being tarnished by anything that happened in a boxing ring. But that fight tarnished boxing terribly, and it troubles me enormously that it was allowed to happen. Still, I have to say, it infuriates me whenever people use Ali a
s an example of why boxing should be banned. What would Cassius Clay have become without boxing?

  BILL CAYTON [MANAGER AND FIGHT-FILM COLLECTOR]: They didn’t have “punch-stats” when Ali was fighting. But I’ve reviewed all the films of his fights, and they tell a story that’s quite remarkable. When Muhammad was young, he was virtually untouchable. The two hardest punchers he faced in that period were Sonny Liston and Cleveland Williams. There was no clowning around in those fights. The last thing Ali wanted was to get hit. In the first Liston fight, if you throw out the round when Ali was temporarily blinded, Liston hit him with less than a dozen punches per round; most of them jabs. In the second Liston fight, Liston landed only two punches. When Ali fought Cleveland Williams, Williams hit him a grand total of three times the entire night. But if you look at the end of Ali’s career; in Manila, Joe Frazier landed 440 times, and a high percentage of those punches were bombs. In the first Spinks fight, Spinks connected 482 times, mostly with power punches. Larry Holmes scored 320 times against Ali, and 125 of those punches landed in the ninth and tenth rounds when Ali was most vulnerable and Holmes was throwing everything he had. Those numbers alone tell you that Ali fought on long after he should have retired from boxing.

  JIMMY ELLIS [ALI’S CHILDHOOD FRIEND AND, LATER, WBA HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION]: We can all look back and say, “Well, Ali might have fought too long or he might have got hit too many times. But it’s hard to give boxing up when you’ve been doing it for a long time, and you know you were good, and you know you can still whup some of the guys that’s out there, but you just can’t beat guys that’s on a certain level. It was his decision, you know. He knew what boxing was all about and he knew what he wanted to do. He made his life what it was. And I got to give the man credit. He showed the world he could come back. He won the title three times.