That said; the young Ali—strong, vibrant, rebellious—was a glowing representation of youth. He was arguably the most handsome, most charismatic, most physically gifted person on earth. To see this man, who once floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, confined to a wheelchair, unable to lift his head, was heartbreaking.
We live in a world with sunsets and roses, Mozart’s music and the Sistine Chapel, happiness and love. But comcomitant with these glories is the knowledge that we will all die. If we live long enough, each of us will become physically and mentally impaired to some degree.
Some endings are sadder than others. There are good “golden years” and golden years that are not so good. Ali’s good years were great. His final years were not so kind. His very-public physical decline spanned three decades.
We could tell ourselves that this wasn’t our decline; that it was happening to someone else; that we didn’t take the blows to the head that Ali took. But for those who lived through Muhammad’s glory years, following the arc of his extraordinary life to its inevitable end was a reminder of our own mortality.
That’s the dark side of reality.
Twenty-five years ago, Ali told me, “I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, because I had a good life before and I’m having a good life now. It would be bad if I had a disease that was contagious. Then I couldn’t play with children and hug people. But my problem with speaking bothers other people more than it bothers me. It doesn’t stop me from doing what I want to do and being what I want to be.”
Lonnie Ali built on that theme, saying at the time, “It’s scary for anybody to experience a physical decline. But when the whole world is watching and so much of your life has been defined by your physical skills, to lose that is very difficult. And what happened was, for the first time in Muhammad’s life, he became intimidated. He stopped speaking as freely as before because he was afraid that, as soon as he opened his mouth, people would say, ‘Listen to Muhammad; he can’t even talk.’ Then other people tried in good faith to explain away the situation by saying, ‘Muhammad is bored; Muhammad is tired. Muhammad is fine; he’s just a little depressed.’ And those people might have been trying to help, but the truth is, Muhammad does have a physical problem. And that problem shouldn’t be treated in hushed tones as an embarrassment any more than cancer or a stroke. Muhammad faces up to his condition, and so should everybody else.”
Ali’s physical condition worsened markedly after that. His symptoms became more pronounced. In his final years, when he tried to speak, the words didn’t come out. He found it increasingly difficult to communicate, not just with the public, but with those he loved. It was sad for everyone who cared about Ali. And it was sad for Muhammad. But one had the sense that he was at peace with himself.
In early 2015, Rasheda Ali (one of Muhammad’s daughters) told me, “When my dad was first diagnosed, he was devastated. That would be true of anyone. But he doesn’t put a lot of meaning on what’s happening now. It’s the afterlife that matters to him. And how he feels about it transforms how we feel about it. The good days as far as his communicating effectively are fewer and further in between. But he can talk if you catch him at the right time. It depends on which day and what time of day you’re with him. The disease has its own mind.”
“He’s my dad,” Rasheda continued, “so I look at it differently from the rest of the world. I want to be able to talk with him whenever I want. Hey, Dad; what’s going on? Ask him for advice, and do all the things that a father and daughter do together. But for most of my life, my dad has had difficulty talking, so I experience it differently from the way other people who knew him way back when might experience what’s happening now. Every day presents new challenges. But he has a lot of love and support, which many people in his condition don’t have. And he never complains. It hasn’t destroyed his spirit.”
Ali’s faith ameliorated his suffering. He comforted himself with the belief that his final years were a transition period as he waited to enter heaven.
“I accept it as God’s will,” he said. “I know that God never gives anyone a burden that’s too heavy to carry. What I’m going through now is short in time compared to eternity.”
Rasheda Ali put matters in further perspective, saying, “I never ask, ‘Why him?’ because he never asks, ‘Why me?’”
Ali spent very little time in his life looking back with regret. One moment that I remember well from our experiences together came when Lonnie read a quotation from television boxing analyst Alex Wallau to Muhammad. Wallau had expressed the view that, even if Ali had foreknowledge of how boxing would affect his physical condition, “If he had it to do all over, he’d live his life the same way. He’d still choose to be a fighter.”
When Lonnie read those words, Ali responded immediately, “You bet I would.”
In that vein, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar long ago observed, “When I see Ali, part of me feels sad, but I know what it’s all about. It’s the result of his having had every bit of fun that he wanted to have.”
George Foreman holds to a similar view. In December 2014, George told me, “We’re all born with our own personal journey. To me, what’s sad is if a person never had a gleam in his eye. Ali has had a wonderful life. And he has lived his life with a gleam in his eye. He’s a beautiful man. I’m still jealous of him.”
But certain realities are hard to ignore.
Jerry Izenberg knew Ali as well as any writer. “We had a pretty good idea of what Ali once was,” Izenberg observed as 2014 drew to a close. “We don’t know what he is now. There’s a person inside. I know that. And he carries his personal history in him. But I don’t care what anyone says; he’s not Muhammad Ali anymore. I’m fighting to block what I see now from entering my mind any more than it has to. This isn’t the way I want to remember him.”
Ali’s second wife also struggled with what she saw.
Khalilah Ali Camacho grew up in the Nation of Islam. She married 25-year-old Muhammad Ali on August 17, 1967, when she was seventeen years old. They had four children together; three girls (Maryum, Rasheda, Jamillah) and a son (Muhammad Jr.). Ali was a womanizer at that time in his life and was unfaithful throughout the marriage. There were public liaisons with other women and several children out of wedlock. Ten years later, they were divorced.
I spoke at length with Khalilah on December 19, 2014.
“The way it started for me in terms of seeing Ali’s illness,” Khalilah recalled, “was I hadn’t seen him for a while. Then I saw him at Maryum’s wedding [in the mid-1990s]. He was shaking and he was talking funny. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. It scared me. I said to him, ‘Something is wrong. You shouldn’t be like this.’ And he told me, ‘Sometimes I don’t talk clear. But I ain’t fighting no more. It will be okay.”
It wasn’t okay.
“He didn’t deserve this,” Khalilah said during our interview. “In his heart, Ali is a good man. It hurts so much to see him like this. If he hadn’t gotten old so fast, who knows what else he might have done. People make choices. Sometimes the choices are good, and sometimes they’re not. Ali did so many crazy things. Good crazy, bad crazy. Some of the best choices he made were when he was young. He made bad choices as a family man, but most of the other choices he made when he was young were good. The struggles he went through and conquered were an inspiration. He lost his way for a while, but I believe that, spiritually, he’s in a good place now. His faith has gotten stronger. He prays that he goes to Heaven, that he’ll spend eternity in a happier place.”
Then I asked Khalilah when the last time was that she’d seen Ali.
“I think it was at Joe Frazier’s funeral [on November 15, 2011]. Lonnie and her sister, Marilyn, were trying to walk Ali in. I’m thinking, ‘Don’t try to walk him. Get a wheelchair. That’s what wheelchairs are for. He was suffering, trying to walk. I worked in a hospital. I know what it is to be a caretaker. Don’t make him struggle to walk. Get him a wheelchair. Finally, they got him in his seat, an
d I went over to say hello. Whenever I see him, I try to say something happy. He kept looking at me. He was trying so hard to be nice, but he couldn’t talk. It brought tears to my eyes, seeing him struggling to communicate. And you know what’s really sad to me. Ali doesn’t laugh or even smile anymore. He used to laugh a lot, and he had the prettiest smile ever.”
Larry Holmes was also at Joe Frazier’s funeral. Like Frazier, Holmes hit Ali hard in the head. Although as Larry is quick to point out, Muhammad hit him too.
“Joe’s funeral was the last time I saw Ali,” Holmes told me in December 2014. “I went over and shook his hand. I’ve seen him on TV a few times since then. Each time, he looks worse than he did before.”
“It’s a shame,” Holmes continued. “But it was all up to him. Ali should have stopped fighting when he couldn’t get away from punches anymore. But he did what he wanted to do. I thought I’d be twenty-five for the rest of my life too.”
Then Holmes’s thoughts turned to Ali’s relationship with Joe Frazier.
“You have to separate out Ali the man and Ali the symbol,” Holmes said. “People put Ali on a pedestal, but he had flaws just like everyone else. Look at the way Ali treated Joe. Joe was my man. I liked Joe. Joe and I used to hang out. The last time I saw Joe was a few weeks before he died. I was in Philly and saw him before he went into the hospital. It was two buddies, just hanging out, talking about people, music, everything. And you know what happened to Joe. He was broke, living in a room above his gym. And they were selling the gym. I feel sadder about the way Joe ended than I do about Ali. None of us is promised tomorrow. What happened to Ali can happen to anyone. But it’s more likely to happen if you do what a fighter does.”
Lennox Lewis is well aware of that.
Lewis retired from boxing in 2004 while still heavyweight champion of the world. In the years that followed, as was the case with Ali, he was offered tens of millions of dollars to fight again. Unlike Ali, Lennox stayed retired.
“It’s a bad feeling to see Ali the way he is today,” Lewis told me shortly before Christmas 2014. “I grew up watching Ali. He was my hero. When I was boxing, people would say to me, ‘Look at the condition Ali is in.’ It saddened me, but it also made me look ahead and understand that it was important that I leave boxing with all of my faculties.”
“We’re not just boxers,” Lennox continued. “We’re fathers; we’re husbands. We’re sons and brothers and friends. I have a different life now, and I enjoy my new life just as much as I enjoyed my old one. I’m getting old, but I’m getting old in a good way. To see Ali, my hero, my icon, the way that he is now saddens me. But I learned some very important lessons from him. One of those lessons is that time is always going forward. That has special meaning for boxers because boxing is such a dangerous sport and we’re dependent to such a great degree on our physical skills.”
As Ali became increasingly disabled, more and more people tended to think of him as a symbol and forget that there was a person inside. But unlike many infirm aging people, he wasn’t avoided or ignored.
The 1960s were the foundation of Ali’s importance. The 1970s were a victory lap and vindication for what he represented. By the time he defeated George Foreman in 1974, his most important work in and out of the ring was complete.
Lighting the cauldron at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta was the last building block for the Ali legend. It gave people from all over the world the opportunity to celebrate his life on a grand stage and tell him how much they loved him.
The cauldron was slow to light. The flames from the torch licked at Ali’s hands and arms. His body was shaking. But he wouldn’t submit. He refused to let go of the torch until the job was done.
That was two decades ago. There were celebratory moments after that, but most of them were bittersweet.
In his final years, Ali made numerous public appearances, many of them in conjunction with fund-raising events to benefit The Ali Center in Louisville and other charitable organizations.
On February 19, 2012, he attended a 70th birthday party in his honor at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Six weeks later, Ali was at the opening of the new Florida Marlins baseball stadium in Miami. That was followed by an appearance at the London Olympics in July 2012 and an unannounced visit to a Baltimore Ravens practice in September. 2013 saw a fundraiser in Phoenix to benefit research dedicated to finding ways to better treat Parkinsonism. On October 30, 2014, Ali attended a Louisville versus Florida State college football game.
All of these appearances were marked by people showing their adoration for Ali. They wanted to be in his presence to pay homage to him. He was old. He was mute. But he was still Muhammad Ali.
Each time that Ali appeared in public, the images were transmitted within minutes around the world. The fact that he couldn’t talk publicly in a way that was understood underlined his problems. The silence was deafening.
As Ali’s voice was stilled, the world was subjected to a stream of public statements and tweets in his name. The words were attributed to Ali, but they were written in ways he never spoke and didn’t come close to matching his spirituality or what had once been his fire and trademark wit.
“They might speak in Ali’s name,” Khalilah Ali observed. “But I know how Ali thinks. I’ve known him for more than fifty years, and that’s not Ali.”
“One of the saddest things to me,” Khalilah continued, “is that Ali lost the control of his own life. Even when he was healthy, he let people control him if they knew how to play the religion. They manipulated him. They controlled what he did and they controlled the money. Now, because of the illness, people control him in a different way. He can’t talk anymore, not at all. So they can say he said whatever it is they want him to say.”
In February 2013, Rahman Ali (Muhammad’s brother) told The Sun, “My brother can’t speak. He doesn’t recognize me. He’s in a bad way. He’s very sick. It could be months, it could be days. I don’t know if he’ll last the summer. He’s in God’s hands. We hope he gently passes away. It’s best he goes now. The longer he goes on, so does his suffering and misery.”
In January 2014, Muhammad Ali Jr. stated publicly that there was “no chance” his father would survive the year and said, ““I just want, hope and pray to God that this awful disease takes my dad sooner rather than later.”
On December 20, 2014, Ali was hospitalized with pneumonia. He was living a long drawn-out end game as a prelude to the time when he would be forever young. Yet through it all, his incredible heart kept beating.
Did what the world saw in Ali’s final years impact upon how he’ll be viewed by future generations? This wasn’t how he wanted to be remembered. What will the lasting image of Ali be?
Ali has special meaning for those who lived through the 1960s. “You have no idea how much he meant to us” is a refrain that’s often heard. He was an important part of the fabric of so many lives.
Jim Lampley recounted for this author being at an American Broadcasting Company function the night that Ali fought Larry Holmes.
“It was one of those luxurious happenings where they showed the fight on closed-circuit television in a big room with exquisite food and as many A-list celebrities as possible,” Lampley recalled. “The fight had reached a point where it was hard to watch. Ali was getting brutalized. Sometime around the eighth round, Mick Jagger, who was there, tapped me on the shoulder and said to me, “You know what we’re watching, don’t you? It’s the end of our youth.”
Younger generations have no firsthand memories of Ali in his prime. People under age thirty today might have respected Ali. But they didn’t love him the way preceding generations loved him because they didn’t live through his time. The images from recent years of a physically debilitated Ali will always exist as part of the world’s consciousness. These images are how two generations experienced Ali in “real time.” Anything more is history to them and the shared memories of people who are older than they are.
It will take
time for the image of the aging Ali to fade away and for the image of the young Ali to be restored. But endless video of Ali in his prime is available for the watching. As time passes, the healthier, more vibrant, electrifying man he once was will return to focus through the lens of history. Future generations may well see Ali more clearly than young people do now.
For many years, I’ve been asked what I thought Ali’s legacy would be, apart from his greatness as a boxer. Each time, I pointed to his being an exemplar of black pride and his refusal to accept induction into the United States Army.
“He stood as a beacon of hope for oppressed people all over the world,” I’d say. “The experience of being black changed for tens of millions of people because of Ali. Every time he looked in the mirror and said, ‘I’m so pretty,’ he was saying black is beautiful before it became fashionable. When he refused induction into the United States Army, he stood up to armies all over the world in support of the proposition that, unless you have a very good reason for killing people, war is wrong.”
But in recent years, I’ve come to believe that there’s an equally important component of Ali’s legacy. He was the embodiment of love.
Ali doesn’t need eulogies. The way he lived his life is tribute enough. In the ring, he epitomized the romance of boxing and also the horror of it. As a fighter, there was something almost spiritual within him that allowed him to go beyond the physical limitations that most fighters have. He evoked the words of Lord Byron: “There is that within me which shall tire torture and time and breathe when I expire.”
Boxing brought glory to Ali, and Ali brought glory to boxing. But his reach extended far beyond the sweet science. Most fighters are remembered by history for what they did in a boxing ring. Ali will be remembered just as vividly for what he did outside the ropes. He elevated his sport into a metaphor for American society. Over time, the entire planet became his stage. May his life be fairly remembered. He was a hero to the heroes of our time.
Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest Page 23
