Fourth Coming of the Greatest —or the last hurrah for Ali?

Press, 9 April 1980, Page 19

Fourth Coming of the Greatest —or the last hurrah for Ali?

Is it for the money, or to regain lost prestige, or simply because he cannot bear to drop out of the limelight? HUGH McILVANNEY, of the "Observer,” London, reveals the thoughts and ambitions behind Muhammad All’s attempt to recover his legendary place at the top of world boxing, at the age 'of 38.

He tells rambling stories about being “wined and dined” by Brezhnev and Mrs Gandhi, but on several days last week he stepped out of the hard sunlight of midday Miami and walked up a stairway that smells of cheap wine and urine to go- to work in one of the rawest boxing gyms in America. Muhammad Ali, at 3S, with the unique record of having won the heavyweight championship of the world three times, is preparing to fight again. A fungus of sadness is growing over a legend. It was always likely to happen, this Fourth. Coming of the Greatest, but predictability does not lessen the sense of dread it engenders. He may contrive another of his mir-s acles and rejuvenate himself sufficiently in the next two or three months to beat Mike Weaver, the 27-year-old who knocked out John Tate last week for the World Boxing Associaation title that was given up by Ali when he retired last year. The odds would be against such a feat, but it has been his lifelong habit to make nonsense of the odds; so much his habit that some might even bet on him to come back and defeat Larry Holmes, the World Bo.ing Council champion, who is far more talented and experienced than Tate or Weaver but has betrayed

evidence of late that his legs are going. However, it seems a much safer bet that Ali, whether he emerges battered or improbably successful from any” fight that may be made with Weaver or Holmes, is on course to provide a miserably anticlimactic ending to the most extraordinary career sport has known. He is,, clearly, exposing himself to the risk of physical and mental damage ■ and, perhaps more devastatingly from the point of view of his own nature, he is in real danger of becoming a bore. Admittedly, that Ganger receded almost out of sight during a day spent in his company as part of the effort to gauge which

of several obvious influences contributed most significantly to his decision to come out of retirement. Was if simple shortage of money? “He’s not broke, but he’s Ali broke.” one of his more perceptive chroniclers had told me. But could a man who has already grossed something like 55 million dollars in purses really have emptied the biscuit tin? Wasn’t it more likely that he had been driven back by the realisation that nothing outside boxing could ever come close to replacing the excitement and the glory of his days as the number, one athlete on earth?

In his attempts at acting he hasn’t won a

round. And a far more distressing humiliation befell him when he responded earlier this year to Jimmy Carter’s request that he should tour African countries as an ambassador-at-large, canvassing support for America’s boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games. As he hopped in a United States Air Force jet through Tanzania, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and Senegal, with a few of his surviving acolytes and a battery of. State Department advisers, he encountered reactions ranging from chilly indidfference to outright hostility.

. Efforts to brief him were doomed from the start. His trainer, Angelo Dundee, always had trouble getting him to listen for a minute between rounds in a title fight. What chance did the chaps in the button-down collars have?

The thought of what such a comprehensive putdown on African soil must have done to the most flamboyant of black egos was uppermost on the

elevator ride to the ninth floor of the Newport Resort Motel at the northern end of Miami Beach. But, once inside the cramped and almost seedy quarters that were trying to masquerade as a suite, it was the financial issue that forced itself back into the mind.

The sitting-room was small enough to be just about filled by a few pieces of luggage (Ali was on the point of leaving to visit his wife and children in Los Angeles after nearly a week of having his runners make and cancel a dozen plane reservations) and by a large paleskinned negro who was watching Barbara Stanwyck on a television set whose images lost definition in the hot morning glare that was pouring through the window. Opulent the place was not, but the word is that the management was courteously forgetting to ask for rent. The Greatest is apparently in the market for bargains.

Ali was behind the bedroom wall but his presence could be sensed, and after a while he began the performance in a way that recalled all the other audiences granted over the years in places as far apart as Pennsylvania and Kuala Lumpur, New Orleans and Kinshasa. “I have returned,” he called out in a theatrically high portentous voice. “I have returned.”

Soon he was ready to elaborate on the theme, was sprawled on the bed, his great bulk making the bedroom seem as spacious as a phone booth. He wore only' tracksuit trousers and when he moved on to his side the soft rolls of his midriff flopped across the sheet. But he was not as grotesquely

out of condition as recent pictures and newspaper stories had suggested. His weight, he claimed, was about 17st 21b, still at least 151 b more than he would want it to be for fighting, but 101 b less than he had brought to Miami eight days before. Those figures were believable, although it was instantly clear that tije IS months he has spent away from the ring since recapturing the championship from Leon Spinks in New Orleans have not reduced

his enthusiasm. .or his genius for fantasy. During three-quarters of an . hour of monologue there was the feeling that if facts were metallic you couldn’t have found one with a Geiger counter. But such utterances are the most informative despatches from a life that is lived mostly at the level of a dream.

He began with muted declarations, whispered between yawns. The first was so muted that it was in sign language. Asked to give the basic reason for fighting again, he held up

four fingers. “Four million dollars? Shit, no. I wouldn’t fight for no four million dollars. The Taiwan Government is offerin’ me ten million to meet Tate over there. “No, I meant I want to win the title for the fourth time. Nobody else ever got it three times but somebody might do that, so I want to move out of reach, take it four times, maybe even five. I’m after the impossible. If there’s something that’s not supposed to be done, I’ll be there.

“I got enough sense to know that one day I really got to quit and I realise what it will mean to millions of people around the world if I got out losing. I know what I’m riskin’, but it’s man’s nature to be daring. Evel Knievel is gonna jump 20,000 feet from an aeroplane on to a pile of hay 10 stories high. He jumped the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle.

“You white folks are explorers, y’all daring. People thought the world was square till Columbus showed them different. What is unusual with me is that I’m black. In the white world everythin’ good is supposed to be white. Jesus Christ is made to be white. At the Last Supper ain’t no Chinese, no Mexicans, no Africans. They all white English people at the Last Supper. Tarzan swinging through the jungle is white.”

Here he broke off for a few Tarzan yodels, handicapped slightly by the fact that he was still lying on his back.-Then, abruptly, he softened his line on colour. ■ “Colour don’t mean a thing to God. When the Honourable Elijah Muhammad started out the Muslims, bp had to teach black people pride, so he told how white men was actin’ like devils. But things change. We know colour-don’t make a devil. There are black devils too. We got White members in our mosques, some of our ministers are married to white women. Calling white men devils is silly now,; out of 'date.”

Questions about the African ordeal elicited only mumbled vagueness, but the residual pain was unmistakeable, and his increasingly strident insistence that he could happily abandon boxing for ever conveyed exactly the opposite impression. “Miss boxing? What’s miss? You may miss things but I don’t miss nothin’. I’m the most famous man in the recorded history of earth. I can’t miss nothin’.

“I went on my own to see Brezhnev in Russia and Deng Xao Ping in China. I spent two days staying with Mrs Gandhi. President Carter called me to represent America, gave me a jet and secretaries. I left the sports pages behind, and went on the front pages. I’m the most recognised and loved man that ever lived. There weren’t no satellites when Jesus and Moses were around, so people far away in the villages didn’t know about them.”

An hour later, in the large, bright and shabby, room that is the business area of the Fifth Street Gym, he was sweating to make himself smaller around the waist and hips. Watched by Angelo Dun-

dee and his silent Cuban masseur, Luis Sarria, Ali danced off a pint or two of sweat in the ring, made the statutory primises about how easily he would demolish all opponents, then brought Moses back into the act. “Remember Moses. Moses opened the waters, freed the Hebrews. . .

Moses proved that he was from God, that he was the man. Right? He went away and when he came back the people were worshipping golden calfs. ' “It’s happened in my lifetime. I did all kinds of miracles. I been away and when I came back you were worshipping false idols, John Tate and Larry Holmes. I'm gonna destroy those idols. That’s why I’m back.”

Afterwards, talking face down on the massage table in the tiny, grubby dressingroom of the gym where the great Ali era began all those years ago, he again insisted that the dream is more important than the money. “OK, if I’m broke I’m broke. A lot of people are broke. Rolls-Royce got broke for a while. The Welfare is broke. Nations go broke. So what if I’m

broke? You should see how I live if I’m broke. My house in Los Angeles, the neighbourhood I live in, the three Rolls-Royces in my garage.

“You should see my four million dollar bank ’ account, my bonds, alt the, real estate and properties I got around the countryYou should see the oil allotment I just got from a country I can’t tell you. I’m in with the Onassis. people. We start pickin’ up crude oil next week in ships. Seventy ships.”

Within a minute he was telling us, more convincingly, that to him money was simply something to be given away. “I only got one pair of shoes, just two suits, one ring, and no watches. At home I drive’ a Volkswagen.”: . ■ Hyperbole, downbeat or upbeat, is still par for the course.

Soon Muhammad Ali was on his way to the airport and Los Angeles. But there IsVa heavy - :, - feeling,,j., that* he haS set - but pn a 7" longer, grimmer journeyHe, and all of us who admire him, are heading down to where the bad times are. . .