At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  My father was always thinking about what to do after he retired. He had been boxing since he was twelve; it was all he knew. Dad didn’t do well in school. He barely graduated. He taught himself how to read and write by studying life and the Quran, and he had an extraordinary memory. But he was a terrible speller. He used to have my mother correct his writing. I’m not sure who helped him when he wrote her letters, as he stated in one: I had someone help me with the big words . . . There was a smiley face at the end of this sentence.

  “In terms of reading and writing, I may be considered illiterate,” he once told a reporter. “But when it comes to matters of the heart, [or] worldly and spiritual knowledge, I’m rich . . . When you look at history, all of God’s prophets were considered illiterate by today’s standards. God took them empty and filled them up with his knowledge so no one else could take credit for it.”

  At the Vatican with Pope John Paul II

  © Howard Bingham

  In the Kremlin with Leonid Brezhnev.

  © Howard Bingham

  My father was dyslexic, as am I, so I know how challenging school was for him. In sixth grade, my favorite subjects were history and English, but I hated reading aloud. You know how the teacher goes around the class having each student read a paragraph? Well, I used to count the students ahead of me, then I’d run my finger down the page trying to find my passage ahead of time so I could familiarize myself with the words. If I didn’t, I’d stagger on the big words, trying to sound out the syllables.

  “Pro-cra-sti . . .”

  “Procrastinate!” another student would blurt out, impatient.

  In third grade, I didn’t even try. I just raised my hand and asked to use the bathroom before it was my turn to read. I’m not sure how my father dealt with reading aloud in school, but he had a friend named Ronnie who let him copy his homework and gave him answers to test questions. Dad said Ronnie was always a little smarter than him and could read and spell good.

  Ronnie King was my father’s best friend from grade school to his second Sonny Liston fight. They first met when he was walking to school to enroll in classes at Duvalle Junior High, down on the west end of Louisville, Kentucky, on Thirty-Fourth Street, fourteen blocks from his house.

  “Will you walk with my little grandson?” asked a heavyset woman with gray hair. Dad agreed, she introduced my father to Ronnie, and they became fast friends.

  “This is my lunch,” said Ronnie, noticing Dad staring at the brown paper bag in his hand. “You want it?”

  “What is it?”

  “An ole hamburger.” He frowned.

  According to my father, Ronnie’s grandmother always made him hamburger sandwiches on homemade wheat bread with mustard and onions and pickles. But he wanted a peanut butter bun and some cookies and milk. Dad said, “I thought to myself, this boy must be crazy. He has a juicy hamburger with mustard, onions, and a pickle, and he’s talking about some cookies and a peanut butter bun.”

  “How much do you want for it?” asked Dad.

  “Gimme a nickel,” said Ronnie.

  At lunch, Ronnie got his peanut butter bun with milk and cookies, and my father ate the burger. Every morning for the next couple years Dad was on the corner, waiting to get that hamburger. As they walked to school together, Ronnie was always talking about his uncle, Tootie: “Tootie gonna take me fishing . . .”

  “Tootie goin’ huntin’ . . .”

  “Tootie got a motorcycle . . .”

  “He was always talking about Tootie,” said Dad, “so I started calling him Tootie.”

  It was a good thing he was sitting beside Ronnie in class. Whenever he had trouble with his test questions, Dad would lean over and ask, “What’s the answer to question number two?”

  Ronnie always knew the answer. Dad often said that if it wasn’t for his friend Tootie he might not have passed. He wished he had paid closer attention in school and had a better education. His mind was so wrapped up in boxing that he didn’t work as hard as he should have. All he could think about was getting home and going to the gym. He shadow-boxed every morning on his way to a little drugstore, where he’d buy a carton of milk and two raw eggs because someone told him it would build his wind and lungs.

  The only time I’ve ever heard my father refer to anyone as his best friend was when he spoke of Ronnie King. He was with Dad when his bike was stolen at the age of twelve. He was there six years later when Dad came home from Rome with an Olympic Gold medal around his neck. He was standing beside him when he threw his medal into the Ohio River after they were both asked to leave a restaurant where they’d tried to order hamburgers because it “didn’t serve Negros.”

  And Ronnie was watching in 1964 as my father ran across the ring at the age of twenty-two, having won his first heavyweight championship against Sonny Liston, shouting at the top of his lungs, “I AM THE GREATEST!”

  I don’t know how or why they lost contact after the second Liston fight. I guess life happened to them both. They had gone down different paths.

  In 1977, an old classmate of my father’s visited his training camp in Deer Lake and told him that Ronnie King had been killed in the streets of Louisville.

  “How did it happen?”

  “In a drug deal gone bad . . .”

  Dad wrote and recorded a beautiful speech once about the importance of friendship. It was a topic of great interest to him. There were so many people around him with their hands out—always needing something from him—he probably never knew who he could really count on. I’m sure his childhood friend, Ronnie King, came to mind when he recited the speech and poem:

  Friendship is a priceless gift that cannot be bought nor sold,

  but its value is far greater than a mountain made of gold.

  For gold is cold and lifeless, it can neither see nor hear.

  In times of trouble it’s powerless to cheer.

  Gold has no ears to listen, no heart to understand.

  It cannot bring you comfort or reach out a helping hand.

  So, when you ask God for a gift, be thankful if he sends not diamonds, pearls, or riches,

  but the love of real true friends.

  My father once said that if he hadn’t been a boxer, he would have liked to be a businessman. I think he was more in love with the idea of wearing suits and carrying a briefcase—looking intelligent—and receiving a consistent paycheck that wasn’t dependent on his fleeting physical talents. Like so many athletes before him, he was running out of time.

  After regaining his heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire, Harvard University asked my father to deliver a speech to the graduating class of 1975—an honor usually reserved for politicians. Students from Oxford University had asked him to become their professor of poetry a couple years earlier, after his loss to Ken Norton in 1973, but the invitation sparked rumors of the end of his boxing career. To these, Dad replied, “Pay heed, and you will see why this is not the time for your university. It’s not the pay, although that’s small, but I have to show the world I can still walk tall.”

  While he gave a number of speeches at leading colleges—The Purpose of Life, The Real Cause of Man’s Distress, The Intoxication of Life, The Art of Personality, The Art of Friendship, and The Heart—he wasn’t interested in becoming a professor. He’d always wanted to be seen as more than just a boxer. It was enough for him that Oxford had made the offer.

  As he said on one of his recordings: “I’m trying to be a new man and get into something new. I don’t want people to think I’m going to be another old champ hanging around fights all the time . . .”

  Dad was approaching the end of one road, and he knew it. He had to decide the new course his life would now take, weather the storm of uncertainty, and find a new place in the sun. But my father would soon discover how, sometimes, a path leading away can twist and return you right back to the place where you first began.

  And wherever his path led, as I grew, I learned how to share him with the world.


  10

  By the time I was four years old, I realized my father did not belong to me. He belonged to the world. I can remember as a little girl looking down from the top of the staircase at his luggage gathered by the front door. He was preparing to leave for Deer Lake to train for the Larry Holmes fight in 1980. According to family friend Tim Shanahan, he and my mother stayed up with my father the night before, trying to convince him not to go. No one wanted Dad to come out of retirement. Even he was reluctant in the beginning. He struggled with the prospect for months, carefully documenting the reasons that led to his inevitable, and habitual, return to the ring.

  “I’m going to come back!” he told an old friend over the telephone. “Win the title for the fourth time!”

  “What do you need with it, Muhammad?”

  “Can you imagine FOUR-TIME CHAMPION?”

  “Yeah, but what do you need with it? You’ve conquered the world already.”

  “You’re right; I don’t need it.” He came down from the mountain. “I’m just talkin’ . . .”

  Three-time heavyweight champion of the world, at thirty-eight he’d secured his place in boxing history after regaining his title the year before, on September 15, 1978, against Leon Spinks. He was the first African American fighter to get out clean, “at the top of my game,” as he put it. But, as with most great athletes, that old feeling stirring within, the one responsible for making him that champion, accompanied by the irresistible prospect of defying seemingly impossible odds, ran too deep for him to resist. Not even “The Greatest” stood a chance against himself.

  “Time magazine said you do it for pride,” said Barbara Walters in an old interview. “Some said you do it for money, others thought you do it for the glory. But why does Muhammad Ali feel the need to return to the ring, again and again?”

  He leaned forward in his seat. “It’s not pride,” he told her. “If I fought for pride, I’d be a sad person. I’m through fighting, but I love boxing. I’ve been boxing since I was twelve—it’s all I know. I like defending my title. I like the idea of staying the world’s greatest fighter—the most popular person. As soon as you quit, that’s over. I also like the idea of setting records. I want to set a record that will take someone years to break. I want to go out a winner too, I really do. Sometimes I wonder myself why I didn’t quit sooner. It’s too late now . . . what’s happened has happened . . .”

  But there was another, more pressing reason—one he didn’t mention that day.

  “Let me tell you something you don’t know,” he said to a friend in need. “My mother calls me all the time with all her problems. My father calls me with his problems. They’re both separated, so two houses must be maintained. My brother calls me—he’s got a baby and he needs help, so I’ve got to support him. I take care of all my children and their mothers. Belinda gets me for $10,000 a month. I’ve got this house here and these children I’m taking care of. When I add all this up . . . you won’t believe it.

  “I just came back from a trip. I made $70,000, so I’m squeezing that. I paid taxes on it and kept $35,000. That’s got to sustain me for another couple months. That’s all it’s going to last. Then I’ve got to get out and go somewhere else to work. I’m getting to a point where I have to sell my farm in Michigan before I lose it to taxes. I’ve got so much on me, and I know you’ve got problems too, but mine are so big. If I just took care of myself and my present family, I’d be all right. But everyone will be suffering if I don’t help them.

  “So this is what I’m trying to do every day. I listen to people telling me about their problems all the time. But I’m at the point now where I’ve got all these people to take care of and I don’t know what I’m going to do . . . Send me your bills,” he said. “I’ll have Marge mail you a check . . .”

  “It’s too bad Muhammad Ali didn’t have any real friends around him,” NBA player Wilt Chamberlain presumed in an old interview, “to give him good advice and tell him to stay out of the ring.”

  But he did. And they tried.

  “Hello, Muhammad,” greeted his lawyer, Mike Phenner, on a different night. “I promised you I’d go over your 1980 income. I was just adding up what I know is coming in from existing contracts, and it exceeds one million dollars.”

  “If I were a man that just took care of my wife, my baby, and myself, I’d be worth millions.”

  “Yes, you would.”

  “But I’m not even worth ten thousand cash. It would be embarrassing if that ever got out—that Muhammad Ali doesn’t even have ten thousand in the bank. That happened once, remember . . . Something in the papers saying I was broke? And they gave a list of all my fights. Joe Louis was known for not being smart because he made four million and wound up broke—four million! Just one million, to an ordinary man, you know, going to work, if you said that man once had one million dollars and now he’s broke, you would look at him kind of funny.

  “Here’s a man who had sixty million dollars, and I don’t know where it went. I mean, you see how I take care of Aaisha [Khaliah’s mother], how I take care of Pat [Miya’s mother], how I take care of my brother, my mother, my father, Belinda [his former wife]. Then there’s this expense, that insurance, taxes—so much is on me, I see myself falling, but I don’t know when it’s going to be.

  “If someone, like my mother, got sick, and the bill was thirty thousand, I’d have to mortgage something or borrow it. Then I would owe the bank. So I’m just thinking . . . You tell me we have about one million coming, and that’s a lot of running to get that million. Then after taxes, lawyers’ fees, and expenses, that might leave four hundred thousand . . .

  “Let’s face it, the people are getting used to me and getting tired of me. I’m not getting any more famous, and things are slowing down. Marge gave me $21,000 worth of bills last night and I paid them. That almost broke me. I just laid in bed thinking, it’s good I haven’t gone crazy. I think some people would have jumped out of windows.”

  © Tim Shanahan

  “Well, they have, when they get upset,” said Mike.

  “I’m not that upset. My faith keeps me going. I’m not jumping out no window. But one thing I know . . . I know myself better than anybody. I know what I can do. I know if I got my weight down to 220—Herbert Muhammad negotiated eight million to fight Larry Holmes. I know I can whoop Holmes. I trained him. I know I can beat him.

  “Then, after all my taxes, I should have about four million. It’s worth the gamble.

  “I don’t want my wife embarrassed, losing the house. I don’t want my children with nothing. If I can get myself four million, keep one million, and put three million in bonds, and become the four-time heavyweight champion—I know I’m going to win. But if I lose, I’ll just deal with it. But if I do this fight, people will be asking me if I’m broke.”

  “I remember Johnny Carson asked you that once,” said Mike.

  “What did I say to him?”

  “You just said, ‘Why do you ask me that?’”

  “Let me tell you something,” said Dad. “Evel Knievel is going to jump out of an airplane with no parachute and land on a haystack. If he can do that, I can fight!”

  They both laugh.

  “Well, Muhammad, there is just one part of your equation I don’t think is correct, and that is the money situation. It’s not nearly as bad as you think it is. If you were to liquidate your assets—you’ve got real estate that’s worth three or four million dollars—so you’re not broke. The Woodlawn house and the farm and Deer Lake . . . if handled correctly they’re worth a hell of a lot of money.

  “So, if you’re down to a cash position of ten thousand, I want to tell you, my good friend, I’m down to probably one thousand myself. Lots of people in their lives have periods where they don’t have much cash. You have a huge income stream. The million dollars you have coming in, you don’t have to do anything for that. It’s all under the current endorsement contract, and you know that things are coming along every day.

  �
�I think the one part of the analysis you may be wrong about is this: When you announce you are going to fight again, I think you might get a lot of adverse publicity. You’ve been through adverse publicity, and it doesn’t bother you, but one thing it could affect is . . .”

  “My credibility.”

  “Yes, your credibility, your position of leadership in the world, and your income. That’s the part of the analysis I think you’re being a pessi mist about. In the sense that you worry about money, with good reason, because everybody demands it of you—but it’s not nearly as bad as you think. So, my point is, Champ, I wouldn’t presume to advise you as to whether you should fight or whether you can beat Larry Holmes—I have no doubt you could—but whether it’s the right thing for the man Muhammad Ali, who has a unique position in this world, particularly, as you know, among the black community, and that’s at stake here. You have to think about that.”

  “You’re right,” Dad said. “But if I okay the fight—I don’t care how bad the news is—it’s old in a few days. This fight is not as serious as the Iran hostage crisis, and people have taken this unnatural circumstance and they have adjusted to it.”

  “That’s true.”

  “They say, ‘What’s going on in Iran today?’ First, it’s big news. If President Carter died, after a while it would be old news. So, once this thing gets out, they’ll criticize, they’ll talk, and I’ll be in my place hiding, and after a week it will be old news!”

  “I think that’s right, and you had a lot worse publicity than that. Hell, the Vietnam thing was worse. The only thing I’m saying is, don’t do it only for the money . . .”

  “I hear you. You have a good point. I know myself and I believe I can make money, but I wonder—what will I do?”