Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest (24 page)

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 as 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.

ALEX WALLAU:
I’d pick Ali over every other heavyweight in history and that includes Joe Louis. Louis was a more complete fighter and certainly he had a better punch than Ali. But Ali had one extraordinary skill that distorted the equation, and that was his speed. He had the speed to make opponents miss throughout a fight; and the few times they connected, he had the chin and heart to see him through. Also, Louis avoided a lot of tough fighters, particularly the other black heavyweights. And Ali really fought everybody.

FERDIE PACHECO:
If you add it all up, Muhammad Ali reigned officially as heavyweight champion for less than seven years. There were three years in the mid-sixties before they took away his title; three years in the mid-seventies after he beat George Foreman; and a few months in 1978-79 after he regained the championship from Leon Spinks. But he dominated boxing for twenty years, and boxing isn’t the same without him.

ALI’S NICKNAMES FOR OPPONENTS

Sonny Liston—The Big Ugly Bear (“Because he’s ugly and smells like a bear.”)

Archie Moore—The Old Man (“He’s old enough to be my grandfather.”)

Floyd Patterson—The Rabbit (“In the ring, he’s frightened like a rabbit.”)

George Chuvalo—The Washerwoman (“He punches like a woman who’s washing clothes.”)

Ernie Terrell—The Octopus (“He grabs and holds a lot when he fights.”)

Joe Frazier—The Gorilla (“He’s ugly and looks like a gorilla.”)

George Foreman—The Mummy (“George is slow. Clomp! Clomp! He moves like a mummy.”)

Earnie Shavers—The Acorn (“He’s got a shaved head that looks like an acorn.”)

Leon Spinks—Dracula (“The man is missing his front teeth.”)

Larry Holmes—The Peanut (“His head is shaped like a peanut.”)

MUHAMMAD ALI RATES HIS OPPONENTS

• The most skilled as a boxer—Floyd Patterson

• The scariest—Sonny Liston

• The most powerful—George Foreman

• The roughest and toughest—Joe Frazier

MUHAMMAD ALI RATES HIS FIGHTS

• When I was at my best—against Cleveland Williams

• The best fight for fans—against Joe Frazier in Manila

• The fight that meant the most to me—beating George Foreman to win the championship of the world again

MUHAMMAD ALI RATES THE GREATEST HEAVYWEIGHTS OF ALL TIME

1. Me

2. Jack Johnson

3. Joe Louis

MUHAMMAD ALI’S LIST OF “THE TEN BEST-LOOKING HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONS EVER”

I’m number one. After me, it don’t matter.

DAVE KINDRED:
There’s no cruelty left in him. As a fighter, it was necessary. As a fighter, you’re supposed to be cruel. In the ring, if you’re a nice guy, you get knocked out in a hurry. But that cruelty is no longer a part of him.

JOSE TORRES:
The only bad thing that Ali left behind was his boxing style. His style—hands down, chin up in the air—is detrimental to fighters who try to imitate him because they don’t have the timing, the genius, and the magic that Ali had. So they try to imitate him and they get knocked out.

EARNIE SHAVERS:
Ali did things that nobody did before in life. Never did them after, neither.

TEDDY ATLAS:
People talk about Ali being a hero. But a lot of people lose sight of the fact that one of the most heroic things about Ali was his almost complete unselfishness. I’ll give you an example. In the 1988 Olympics, Greg Louganis cut his head on the diving board. At the time, Louganis knew he was HIV-positive. Now Greg Louganis is a magnificent athlete. I give him all the credit in the world for his athletic skills and the fact that he continued to live a full life after learning that he was carrying the AIDS virus. But Louganis took the easy selfish way out. Instead of telling the doctor who treated him, “Look, you’d better get some gloves,” he put his own personal interest ahead of the safety of the doctor. Now ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the people in the world would have handled that situation the same way as Louganis. They wouldn’t have jeopardized their public image or their chance to win an Olympic gold medal. But by acting the way he did, Greg Louganis knowingly put another man’s life at risk. And I don’t think Ali would have done that. Muhammad Ali always put other people first. I believe that, if it had been Ali on that diving board, regardless of what it cost him, he would have told the doctor to put on a pair of gloves before he allowed the doctor to suture him up.

HAROLD CONRAD:
Ali is a decent man, a kind man; and it doesn’t do you any harm to be around one of those. You’ve got to pick up some of it. Sometimes I wish I could be more like him.

LARRY HOLMES:
If you treated Ali right, he’d treat you right. And if you didn’t treat him right, he’d still treat you right. That’s just one reason why people love Ali.

DICK GREGORY:
If people from outer space came to Earth and we had to give them one representative of our species to show them our physical prowess, our spirituality, our decency, our warmth, our kindness, our humor, and most of all, our capacity to love—it would be Ali.

LARRY HOLMES:
Ali opens his arms right up to people. They don’t have to approach him. He approaches them and makes them feel comfortable.

EARNIE SHAVERS:
Ali’s got a heart as big as all outdoors and a love that encompasses all people. He’s as pretty on the inside as he is on the outside. Always has been; always will be.

DICK GREGORY:
If I wanted to teach a little grandchild of mine about the universe, I’d go and get Muhammad Ali’s story and say, “Here is what happened to the universe. One day, something went from nothing to BOOMMMM. The big bang. And it keeps getting bigger.

LOU DIBELLA:
Ali’s style has been taken to extremes in ways that I’m sure he never intended it to be. Now you have boastfulness and bragging, but with no sense of irony and no principles behind it. These guys—Deion Sanders, Barry Bonds, all of them—they just don’t get it. Ali was the best “sound bite” in history. Ali was “prime time” before Deion Sanders was born. Ali did that schtick better than anyone. But with Ali, there was social relevance and substance behind it.

MUHAMMAD ALI:
I used to daydream all the time about being successful in boxing and being famous. One time I remember; Floyd Patterson was heavyweight champion of the world. I was at the Olympics in Rome and I went to sleep in my room, pretending I was heavyweight champion. This was even before I won the gold medal. But I lay in bed, pretending I was famous, pretending everyone liked me and looked up to me the way I looked up to Floyd Patterson. And God blessed me. My dream came true. But I got different dreams now. Now I dream about doing something to stop all the hating in the world. I dream about feeding people who are hungry. I dream about children learning how to read and write. And sometimes, when I’m really dreaming, I dream about being a rock star like Elvis or Little Richard.

JOHN THOMPSON [FORMER GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY BASKETBALL COACH]:
In 1989 before the start of the NCAA tournament, I played a tape of Ali for the team. It was a tremendous piece, a documentary that I wanted them to see as an inspirational thing. Then, in the locker room right before the first game, I talked with them about motivation and confidence. And just before they went out on the floor, the kids put their hands together and shouted, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Rumble, young man, rumble. Ahhh!” Then the game started, and we came within a basket of losing to Princeton.

KWAME TOURE:
Muhammad Ali has a responsibility, and he knows what that responsibility is. His image must be used for positive reasons. His image must be used to advance humanity; his image must be used in the struggle against injustice; and his image must be used to harness souls toward a belief in God.

JEFFREY SAMMONS [PROFESSOR OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES]:
One of the things that troubles me about Ali is his association with conservative Republicans. And finally, I came to the conclusion that Ali likes power; real power. In fact, I don’t have any question about it. He likes the spotlight, the attention, the stage; that’s part of it. But there has always been something more. I think Ali has always wanted power. When he was boxing, he had a legitimate power base outside of the political system because of his affinity for people and skill at media manipulation. Because of the political and racial climate, he was an important figure. But that political and racial climate has passed him by, and boxers rarely have much influence after they leave the game. Yet, in his mind, Ali still seeks power. And I believe he feels the only way he can have that power now is by associating with powerful people. But it’s no longer on his own terms. It has to be on theirs.

JULIAN BOND:
Watching Ali with Ronald Reagan and Orrin Hatch was worse than watching him against Larry Holmes.

JERRY IZENBERG:
During the [1991] Persian Gulf War, there was virtually no resistance from the Iraqi military. And as speculation about Saddam Hussein’s strategy continued to mount, you began to hear that maybe he was conducting some form of “rope-a-dope” defense. Now the use of that phrase tended to obscure the fact that tens of thousands of people were dying. But it also said something about the way in which Muhammad Ali has transcended sports and entered the world’s consciousness.

DAVID HALBERSTAM:
One of the great things about this country is that you can invent yourself and reinvent yourself many times. And Ali was a true American original in every aspect of his life. I mean, really; what other country in the world could have created Muhammad Ali? If you look at his childhood, his rise, his complexity and contradictions; he’s unmistakeably American. He might be a Muslim, but he’s a hell of an American too. And it speaks well for this country, not only that we created him, but also that we came to understand what he was about in time to admire him; that he’s not a prophet without honor in his own land.