MUHAMMAD ALI... THE GREATEST
From Esquire's 70th Anniversary Issue

Not a strong follower of Esquire, but I grabbed a copy while I was at the airport in the U.S. and came across this article on Muhammad Ali. Great article. I'm a sports fan like any American kid growing up playing little league, basketball, ice hockey, etc. And stories like this one just hit me in the heart. Like the Upper Deck baseball card commercials in the early '90s, which brought tears to my eye everytime I saw it on the tube (if you know which one i'm talking about, i know you're a fan that grew up in the era of Don Mattingly, MJ, and Joe Montana like me). Anyway, even if you're not a sports fan, it's a great article to read.


Ali Now

ESQUIRE
by Cal Fussman | Oct 01 '03

Muhammad Ali came through the double doors into the living room of his hotel suite on slow, tender steps.

I held out my hand. He opened his arms.

Ali lowered himself into a wide, soft chair, and I sat on an adjacent sofa. "I've come," I said, "to ask about the wisdom you've taken from all you've been through."

Ali seemed preoccupied with his right hand, which was trembling over his right thigh, and he did not speak.

"George Foreman told me that you were the most important man in the world. When I asked him why, he said that when you walked into a room, it didn't matter who was there—presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, movie stars—everybody turned toward you. The most famous person in that room was wondering, Should I go to meet him? Or stay here? He said you were the most important man in the world because you made everybody else's heart beat faster." The shaking in Ali's right hand seemed to creep above his elbow. Both of his arms were quivering now, and his breaths were short and quick.

I leaned in awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do. Half a minute passed in silence. I wondered if I should call for his wife.

Ali stooped over, and now his whole body was trembling and his breaths were almost gasps.

"Champ! You okay? You okay? "

Ali's head lifted and slowly turned to me with the smile of an eight-year-old.

"Scared ya, huh?" he said.

ALI WAS IN DUBLIN for the opening ceremonies of the Special Olympics. A van pulled up outside the hotel, and it was with much effort that he slowly lifted himself into the front seat. And yet as soon as the driver pulled out onto the road, the left-hand side of the road, Ali was waving his arms in a childish portent of doom and gasping, "Head-on collision! Head-on collision!"

There were four of us in the back: Ali's wife, Lonnie, who is fourteen years younger than Ali and who grew up across the street from his childhood home in Louisville; his best friend, Howard Bingham, a photographer he met in 1962 and who's snapped more pictures of Ali than anyone has ever taken of anybody; and a businessman named Harlan Werner, who's organized public appearances for Ali during the last sixteen years.

Jet lag had come to dinner with all of us as we took our table near a flower-filled courtyard at Ernie's Restaurant. Ali asked for a felt-tipped pen, and while the rest of us talked he pushed his plate and silverware out of the way, spread out his cloth napkin, and began to draw on it. First he sketched a boxing ring, then two stick figures, one of which he labeled "Ali" in a cartoon bubble and the other "Frazier." Then he began to set in the crowd around the ring in the form of dots. Tens of dots, then hundreds of dots, then thousands, his right hand driving the pen down again and again as if to say: And he saw it! And he saw it! And she saw it! And he saw it!

Occasionally, Ali would stop, examine his canvas for empty space, and then go on, jackhammering in more dots. It must have taken him more than twenty minutes to squeeze all of humanity onto the napkin. Then he signed his name inside a huge heart and handed it to me.

"Thank you," I said.

"That'll be ten dollars, please," he whispered.

And that was the way it was with Ali. You just couldn't help laughing, even when you knew he'd play that same line off the next hundred people. No matter how many times he told a fresh face, "You ain't as dumb as you look," it worked.

But watching him eat was awkward. His right hand picked up a piece of lamb and trembled as he tried to bring it to his lips. He did not eat very much. His sciatic nerve was paining him, he was tired, and it was best to go back to the hotel.

On the way to the door, the diners at the other tables—every one of them—stood and applauded. Ali moved gingerly, almost painfully, and then, all of a sudden, he bit his bottom lip, took a mock swing at one of the applauding men, and the restaurant roared with laughter.

THE NEXT MORNING, Ali went to meet Nelson Mandela. The South African leader was speaking at a summit for college students from around the world about freeing people with mental disabilities from a stigma that can be as heavy as a ball and chain.

The meeting was halfway through when Ali entered the room, and everybody stood and cheered as the two embraced like old kings. Mandela called the musician Quincy Jones onto the stage. As the three men hugged, I wondered if any of the kids in the audience could truly conceive of the day when a nineteen-year-old named Cassius Clay walked into a luncheonette in Louisville with a shiny Olympic gold medal around his neck, asked for a meal, and was pointed out the door by people who said they didn't serve niggers. Could they see him walking to the edge of the Ohio River and throwing his gold medal in? Could they imagine this same smiling Mandela breaking rocks as a prisoner on Robben Island? Yes, the young people knew they were in the presence of fame. But did they truly know what these men had lived through and stood for?

The kids asked questions. Mandela and Jones spoke. The owner of the most famous mouth in the world was silent.

Mandela introduced Cyril Ramaphosa, a man he called "the architect of the new South Africa." Ramaphosa came forward amid applause to greet Ali. Ali made a move to stand up from his chair, but the weight of his body held him down.

Mandela saw this and gestured that there was no need to make the effort, that Ramaphosa would come to him. "He's young," Mandela joked.

It was perfect diplomacy from a white-haired man who uses a walking stick, there was laughter all around, and Ali could have accepted this with a smile. But he gritted his jaw and rocked his body forward once, twice, and on the third try found the momentum to rise to his feet so that he could embrace Ramaphosa. Every kid in that room knew exactly what he or she had just seen. And until the day he dies, Cyril Ramaphosa will remember the day that Muhammad Ali rose to greet him.

THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE Ali's speech patterns is to imagine that Ali has two wells inside him from which he is able to draw words. The first well, the well of the whisper, is filled to the top. Ali can easily dip into this well, fill up a small cup of words, and extend it to you. But sometimes it's as if the Parkinson's makes his entire being shake and some of the whispered words spill out of the cup before they get to your ears. And he must reach in again, sometimes several times, before you can understand them.

The other well contains a deep voice, the voice you remember from decades ago, only raspier. This well seems half full, but the words are rich. Ali can haul up these words, but it's as if he has to yank on a rope that extends deep inside him and jerk a heavy bucket containing a few of them out of his larynx and through his lips.

There were about ten of us in the hotel restaurant for lunch. Ali had finished his Caesar salad (without bacon), the plates were cleared, and the waitress asked if we'd all like dessert.

She took several orders, but when she came to Ali, he simply drew a triangle in the air with his finger.

"Ali," Lonnie said, "just say what you want."

Again, he drew the triangle.

"Okay," Lonnie said, rolling her eyes and going along with him. "A piece of pie."

Ali sketched two circles in the air with his second finger.

"With two scoops of vanilla ice cream."

Ali drew two parallel vertical lines that connected at the ends to two parallel horizontal lines.

Lonnie squinched her eyes. Huh? Now it was like charades.

"A square?" someone suggested.

"A rectangle?"

"A box?"

For years, his rants, poems, and predictions made the world lean in. And now he was making us all lean in with his silence. Everyone's eyes were focused on Ali, and suddenly he yanked the words from the deep, rich well. "Woof! Woof!"

We all cracked up. He wanted the pie in a doggie bag.

THE IRISH SINGER Sinéad O'Connor was eating fresh berries in the hotel pub with her teenage son and Harlan Werner later that afternoon before the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics. O'Connor said that the only person in the world she'd ever wanted to meet was Muhammad Ali.

So many people feel a special and unique link to Ali. People he's never met send intensely personal mementos. George Foreman credits his transformation from a man who instilled fear to a smiling entrepreneur to Ali. O'Connor can still see herself as a girl watching Ali call himself beautiful on television. It amazed her, a kid from an abusive home, and she was never the same.

We went up to the Alis' suite, O'Connor carrying a painting she'd created just for Ali. Howard Bingham asked O'Connor if she'd like a photo with the champ. Yes, she nodded. And then something happened that I hope I can describe.

Do you know the poses that we all have, whether for snapshots with friends or when we're having a photo taken with somebody famous? Any photographer will tell you the same thing: As soon as the camera comes out, so does your pose. Well, there was no pose here. Sinéad tucked her head into Ali's left shoulder, and slowly her right arm moved around his waist. It was unmistakably the hug that a six-year-old girl gives to her father, and I know this very well because I have a six-year-old daughter.

It is amazing to see someone lose thirty years right before your eyes and the eyes of her own teenage son, and—well, I didn't do it justice.

A LUXURY SUITE atop Croke Park was reserved for the Alis to watch the opening ceremony. It offered a splendid view of the athletes from 156 countries triumphantly entering the stadium in Olympic fashion, but there was one problem. The suite was at the end of a long corridor, and its location made for a difficult trip to the elevator that would take Ali down to the floor of the stadium, where he was scheduled to get into a golf cart for a victory lap around the track when the U. S. team entered. The corridor was packed with people, and because Ali never, ever, brushes anyone off, this could extend a two-hundred-yard walk into a two-hour journey.

To scoot through the masses, it was suggested that Ali be pushed along in a wheelchair to the elevator. Yet this created a dilemma. If one television camera was to capture the image of "poor old Ali" confined to a wheelchair, it would be replayed over and over until it was quite obvious to everyone who saw it that this was, in fact, what had become of poor old Ali.

When the time came, security guards made way for the wheelchair, which cut through a swath of people. There were no video cameras. Ali stepped out of the wheelchair at the elevator, which descended to the stadium floor where the golf cart was waiting. He sat in the front seat. Howard Bingham got in the back with his cameras and motioned for me to hop aboard.

We're so accustomed to looking from a distance upon Ali in moments like this that it's hard to consider, or even imagine, Ali's vantage point. As the cart hit the track, our ears filled with the roar of "Ahhhhh-lee! Ahhhhh-lee! Ahhhhh-lee!" and I began to understand the drawings Ali does over and over again—the ring surrounded by all those dots. In that stadium, there were eighty thousand dots circled around him, all focused on him. All these dots released a burst of energy that came down upon the golf cart like a tidal wave. It's hard to describe, hard to even think in a moment like that, but the sensation made you feel like a child first becoming aware of the power of the ocean. And then Ali sent this enormous energy back with a wave of his trembling right hand. And as soon as it climbed all of the dots to the top of the stadium the wave folded and cascaded down upon him again. The energy climbed and crashed, over and over and over, until the golf cart turned into a tunnel and everyone was awash in affection.

A few days later I turned to the editorial page of a British newspaper. A cartoon depicted a giant Statue of Liberty wearing sunglasses and clutching a bayoneted machine gun towering over tiny Iraqis, who were throwing back stones. There were a lot of ways to feel about that cartoon. But it made me realize just how large Ali is. There are very few people in the history of the planet who could make everybody in the world stop for a moment, forget their differences, smile, and applaud in unison. Perhaps Ali was the only one left. I wondered if there'd be anyone after.

LONNIE WAS WAITING with the wheelchair when the elevator arrived back at the top of the stadium. A crowd converged, and a blond-haired woman slithered through, leaned in, and kissed Ali. Not a kiss on the cheek, but a Hollywood smacker on the lips that seemed to go on for half a minute. Lonnie stood by shaking her head and chuckling.

Of course, after sixteen years of marriage she must have gotten used to this. But still it must be hard sharing your husband with six billion people. When we reached the suite, she told me that it was difficult for some folks to realize that Ali actually had a family life. Lonnie and Muhammad have a son named Asaad who plays baseball, does yard work, and has the concerns of any normal twelve-year-old kid. And while Ali will always belong to the world, people cannot expect to ring his doorbell at the crack of dawn, as some have done in the past, and find a genial Muhammad rubbing sleep from his eyes to say hello.

As we spoke, a boy was wheeled into the suite. He had a sort of palsy and couldn't control the movements of his limbs or his head. His parents asked if he could meet Muhammad. Ali moved close and put his lips against the boy's cheek. The boy's head was turned the other way, and he couldn't see Ali, but he felt his lips. His body spasmed toward Ali, and his right arm reached out over his body, found the back of Ali's head, and stroked it.

Three hours after Ali knocked out George Foreman in the middle of Africa, Ali was doing magic tricks on a doorstep in N'Sele for a group of Zairean children. Once, about twenty years ago, when he was walking on a street in Los Angeles, he saw a man threatening to commit suicide by jumping from a fire escape, and he hurried inside the building and talked the man to safety. The embrace with this boy in the wheelchair lasted for more than two minutes.

As the ceremony neared conclusion, we were alerted so that Ali could leave before the crowd flooded out of the stadium. On the way to the elevator, though, we were slowed down in the corridor, and by the time we got downstairs to the exit, a wave of people was beginning to surge upon us. Either we had to move fast or we'd be swallowed by it.

Ali's stride immediately opened, and the burst of power and speed was exhilarating. He was walking, but walking as if he were on a treadmill set at top speed. I smiled as we reached the van, recalling the way he used to steal rounds that appeared lost by flurrying for the last fifteen seconds before the judges penciled in their scorecards.

And I thought: One Irishman could have gone home that night and said, I just saw Muhammad Ali. Pity, he was in a wheelchair.

While another could have gone on to meet his buddies at the pub and boasted, I just saw Ali sprinting out of Croke Park. What's this about Parkinson's disease? My God, he looked fabulous.

ALI HAS ALWAYS BEEN a walking contradiction. Somehow we'd all grown to accept that he could be about color and beyond color simultaneously. But the contradictions in the sixty-one-year-old Ali were baffling. How could his mind be so nimble one moment and then drift off to sleep the next? How could he struggle to get into a van and then streak out of a stadium like an Olympic walker? I wondered if a couple of days with him at his home would explain.

Ali's home and office are on a serenely landscaped eighty-eight-acre farm in Berrien Springs, Michigan. In the hallway outside his office, I walked past a copy of his overturned conviction in the conscientious-objector case against the government, a copy that is framed and signed by eight Supreme Court justices. As I stepped into his office, I found Ali on the floor like a four-year-old, inspecting a huge pile of ropes, coins, decks of cards, dice, balls, and other paraphernalia of the magic tricks he loves.

Two other guests entered, and Ali immediately held out a velour pouch, which he showed to be empty. Then he produced a long strip of yellow cloth, which he carefully stuffed into the pouch. There were none of the normal distractions provided by a magician's words. Ali simply nodded for one of the men to pull out the cloth. Gone! The guests exulted, not only at the trick, but that it could be performed by a man whose movements were slow and shaky. Ali pulled out a handful of pennies, made sure they were seen by all, inserted them into one of his guests' hands, then immediately made him close it. When the guest opened his fist, he gasped. He was holding dimes. On and on the tricks continued. But before his guests departed, Ali showed them the ruse behind every trick he had done.

"Never do a trick twice," he whispered after they left. "And never show them how you do it."

"I don't get it, champ," I said. "If that's the case, then why did you show them?"

"To prove to them . . . how easily they can be deceived."

Ali turned to a Bible on a long conference table—there was always a Bible around Ali—and began highlighting contradictions on its pages with a yellow marker, contradictions that he had listed on a sheet of paper and xeroxed so that he could hand it out to just about everyone he met.

One passage would call a woman Abraham's wife and another his concubine. One would describe forty thousand stalls of horses for Solomon's chariots; another would list the number as four thousand.

I had seen Ali examining these contradictions often in Dublin.

"Why," I asked, "do you spend so much time on them?"

"To show people . . . how easily they can be deceived."

We went over some more, and at one point he whispered, "In a hundred years . . . they'll turn me white."

"What?" I asked. "How could they do that?"

"They did it to Jesus."

HIS RESPONSES to questions were always short and simple, and sometimes profound.

"What was more important, saying, 'I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong' or not stepping forward when your name was called for draft induction?"

"The action," he whispered.

"You've made a lot of people smile and laugh for a long time. But what makes you laugh?"

"Something that's funny."

"What is goodness?"

"My mother."

"What's your definition of evil?"

"Unfriendliness."

"What did you learn from trying to come back from retirement at age thirty-eight, when you were badly beaten by Larry Holmes?"

"Stay around too long and you get whupped."

"What makes you most proud?"

"My family."

But sometimes there would be no response.

"Do fears diminish with time, or do they increase?"

Nothing.

"What are your biggest regrets?"

Silence.

He circled the large rooms in the office as if he were moving around a boxing ring. Nearly everywhere there was some kind of scrapbook. Ali would pick one up and leaf through, showing me kids and grandkids. We came across a photo of one of the first meetings between him and Lonnie on a Louisville stoop. Even then, at twenty, he was holding his arms out to the six-year-old freckle-faced girl from across the street. He looked at the photo and smiled, then asked an assistant to make fifty copies.

Ali's first wife, Sonji, had a taste for revealing clothing, which conflicted with his notion of a Muslim wife. He courted his second wife, Belinda, who was raised in the faith, when she was a teen working in a Muslim bakery. It was Belinda who went after him in a hotel room ten years later, just before the Thrilla in Manila, when she found out that Ali had taken the modelesque Veronica Porche to meet the president and first lady of the Philippines. That divorce, and the divorce from Veronica after his boxing career, ultimately led him back to the freckle-faced girl who'd grown up across the street.

"What's the secret to a successful marriage?"

"Agreement. . . . Agree on everything."

"But, champ, if you had to agree on everything to make a marriage successful, there'd be no successful marriages."

"The first three . . . taught me how to do the fourth."

LONNIE ASKED MUHAMMAD if he'd shown me the gym. In the half-humorous tone a wife might use to remind a husband reclining in a La-Z-Boy that the grass needed to be mowed, she mentioned that Muhammad had never really used it.

The gym is adjacent to the office, and Lonnie was right. It seemed like a museum. There was no smell of sweat, the boxing ring in the center of the room looked as though it had just been assembled, and the exercise machines appeared as if they had just been removed from boxes. The walls were decorated with photos of Ali fighting Frazier and Foreman. There were nostalgic shots of his trainer, Angelo Dundee, and shaman/cheerleader Bundini Brown. There was a recent photo of the one child of Ali's who boxed, his daughter Laila.

Ali slowly walked over to the dangling speed bag and turned it into a staccato drumroll that didn't miss a beat. His hands moved in a circle, and now that the bag was vibrating, his hands, arms, and the rest of his body looked very, very solid. After about twenty seconds he stopped and sat down.

"You've got such a beautiful gym," I said. "Why don't you work out every day?"

"What year were you born?" he asked in a whisper.

"Nineteen fifty-six," I said. "That makes me forty-six."

"I started boxing in 1955." There was a long pause. "That's a long time. . . . I'm tired."

MEDICINE COMES in the form of porridge that turns orange when left in the open air for a few minutes. And when he lifts the spoon to his mouth, it turns his tongue orange for a little while.

Sometimes it seems to make him sluggish and drift off. Once he napped sitting up on a couch, his left leg jangling my right. I wondered if that was the feeling of Parkinson's.

"What does Parkinson's feel like inside?" I asked when he awakened about ten minutes later. "Does it hurt?"

"No."

"Does it feel like a part of you is in jail?"

"Hard to explain . . ." he whispered. But he tried in his way. "All great people are tested by God. . . . I'm being tested . . . to see if I'll keep praying . . . to see if I'll keep my faith. I'm being tested."

THE NEXT MORNING I met one of Ali's nine children, his twenty-six-year-old daughter Hana, who has written a tribute to her father and is at work on another book in his own words.

Hana speaks in a blizzard of sentences that makes you lean forward and blink because they come in the same cadence of a very famous voice of forty years ago. While Ali highlighted biblical contradictions, she smiled and nodded when I brought up some of the confusing physical contradictions.

"Sometimes it has to do with him taking his medicine. But you've got to understand: He doesn't let Parkinson's be an excuse for not doing anything in his life. He loves to travel, and he'll be on a plane out of here again tomorrow. That's really tiring.

Also, my dad gets up in the middle of the night—at four or five. Gets up and eats, goes back to bed. He doesn't get a full night's sleep. People say he always looks so tired. But when you see him at home for a while, you see a difference. He might wake up with a clear voice because he got a full night's sleep."

She talked nonstop for an hour on myriad subjects, and I could not help but glance at her silent dad and smile at the irony.

"Champ," I turned to him, "she talks like you!"

Ali looked at his daughter, rolled his eyes, shook his head, and, with a disbelieving smile, moved his thumb against four top fingers in that gesture of a mouth that can't stop yakking.

WHEN YOU LOOK BACK at Ali's life, so much seems to have been fated. For instance, I've heard a lot of stories about boys, but only one of a boy who asked his little brother to throw rocks at him so that he could practice avoiding them with the movements of his body. Was there some divine purpose in this?

Two years after Ali was born, another child came into the world, in Beaufort, South Carolina. People coming to see this newborn actually leaned into the crib to see if the boy had only one arm like his daddy, failing to understand that the daddy's missing left hand and forearm came not from heredity but from being shot off in an argument over a woman.

The little boy was Joe Frazier. And the boy worked a farm in Beaufort with his father, cutting trees with a two-man cross saw, his daddy using his only hand, his right hand, forcing Joe to muscle it back and forth with his left. The left hook that was developed in those muscles, the lunging left hook that circled around from beyond the corner of your right eye, was the one punch that a boy who could avoid rocks in the street by simply moving his head would be vulnerable to. Watching the two confront each other in the ring was fated to be like watching lightning go at thunder.

I helped take off Ali's watch. I pulled gloves off a rack and helped set them over Ali's hands. Then I took two gloves and pulled them over my own fists. Years ago, I trained to challenge the best fighter in the world, Julio Cesar Chavez, to go one round with me. That round actually came to be, but that is another story. What is important here is that I trained to fight that one round for three hours a day for more than six months, trained my short arms and compact body in the exact style of Joe Frazier.

Now, ten years later, in Muhammad Ali's gym, my legs began pumping up and down like a creaky locomotive warming up, and I began bobbing and weaving in a crouch, my right hand figure-eighting in front of my face for protection. Then I launched a left hook into the heavy bag that the city of Philadelphia would have been proud of. In the relentless style that Joe loved to call smokin', I began to beat on the body of the bag. I had watched so many tapes of Joe Frazier that I could even sound like him.

Ali's eyebrow arched like that of a sleeping lion awakened by an old familiar scent—and I slammed the bag harder.

"You good!" Ali said.

He stood, moved me out of the way, and began to pepper the bag with jabs. Pop! Pop! Pop! He steadied himself and threw a left-right and some more jabs.

"You think that's going to keep me off?" I snorted. "I'm still coming!" I moved in on the bag in a crouch and launched a cannonade of body shots. At the time of the first fight, on March 8, 1971, you were either for Ali, as I was, or for Frazier. But as their three fights unfurled to the Thrilla in Manila, those who loved Ali discovered that they also had to love Joe Frazier. Because Joe was the one guy Ali could not chump in the ring.

Ali would be trying to mess up Frazier's head as Frazier's punches flew, trilling, "You can't beat me. I'm God!" And Joe would come back with, "Oh, yeah, then God's gonna get his ass whupped tonight!" and keep punching. Ali once said there was a point in the third fight that took him to the border of death, and it forced him to pull everything out of himself to shut Frazier's left eye and keep him in the corner when the bell rang for the fifteenth round. I slammed four straight hooks into the bag to see what it would bring out of him now.

Ali stepped in, but he did not punch. And suddenly I saw something I thought I'd never see again: Muhammad Ali was dancing. Dancing! Moving around the bag, not like when he was twenty-two, but with rhythm and grace.

He looked at himself in the mirror that covered a distant wall, and his head and chest rose as he circled. Then he stopped, planted, swiveled, and threw a combination of rapid punches. The corner of my eye caught a glimpse of that photo of Bundini Brown, his cheerleader in his corner for all those years, and I began chanting: "Float like a butterfly, / Sting like a bee. / Your hands can't hit, / What your eyes can't see!"

The breaths coming through Ali's nose were deep and focused, and an intensity radiated from his eyes as he threw volley after volley, and I howled, "Go to the well once mo', champ!"

He moved around the bag, stopped, fired an eight-punch combination fast enough to shine your shoes, then planted himself and ripped a left hook. If that heavy bag had been a sixty-one-year-old man, I would have had to start counting.

Ali stumbled away from the bag, and I realized just how deeply he was breathing and wondered if I'd goaded him too far.

He walked toward a rubbing table covered with mats, and I thought he might collapse on it, but instead he grabbed the mats, put them off to the side, rested his backside on the table, then lay back on the table and started to do sit-ups. When he finished, he remained on his back, lifted his legs in the air, and began bicycling, and then, without halting the pedaling motion, he rocked forward with synchronized stomach crunches. Try that for a few minutes—just to know what it feels like.

Ali got off the table and walked to a stationary bicycle, where he pedaled for a few minutes, then over to the super leg press. He set it for two hundred pounds, gripped the handles with his hands, and ordered the thick bars of weight to rise by extending his legs. He adjusted the clip to 250, grimaced, and pushed his legs out again and again.

"That's a lot of weight," I said, my way of asking him to relax.

"Feels good," he whispered. Then he locked his jaw and pushed his legs out once more.

WE RETURNED TO THE OFFICE and put on a tape of some interviews Ali had done in 1971 and 1974, and it was like watching a peacock spread its feathers at the height of its plumage. Ali stared at the smooth and smiling round face of his prime. He stroked his mustache and whispered, as if amazed, "Gray hair." Then, as the afternoon turned into early evening, he focused again on contradictions, highlighting them in Bibles on the big conference table.

I looked at this quiet, even studious man and wondered about all the conflict that had blown across his life. What must the insides of a man feel like preparing to fight Sonny Liston or George Foreman? To stand up against a government for his beliefs even if it meant he'd lose his livelihood and/or go to jail? To go on television—a young man who'd failed an army intelligence test—and match wits with the medium's quickest minds? To stand on a street corner in front of a television camera after he'd received death threats and announce his exact location?

Lord knows, Parkinson's disease is enough weight for any man to carry. But I couldn't help but wonder if it was the winds of conflict, more than Ali himself, that were missing in his encroaching old age. Ali reached into his cabinets in search of more contradictions and handed me a piece of paper that, at the top, said: words of wisdom. There were hundreds of phrases, little gems to live by. As I looked them over, he disappeared, then came back with a bowl filled with vanilla ice cream.

"Enjoy life," he whispered. "It's later than you think."

He handed me a Koran and asked me to read. He sat back and enjoyed the prayer coming off my lips, then dozed off like a six-year-old.

I watched him sleep and recalled a moment in the Dublin hotel when I sat alone eating breakfast and heard a song over the radio, a song that Ali himself had recorded in the early sixties, and as the words played forty years later I heard them in Ali's youthful voice.

When the night has come,
And the land is dark.
And the moon is the only light we'll see.
No I won't be afraid,
Oh I won't be afraid,
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.
If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall,
Or the mountains,
Should crumble to the sea.
I won't cry, I won't cry
No I won't shed a tear,
Just as long as you stand, stand by me . . .

I'd felt tears at the corners of my eyes when the violins came in. But there were none now. And that's what you need to know about Ali.

No matter how much his hands or legs shake, no matter how many words tumble and fall before they reach your ears, you don't feel sad when you're around him. He doesn't feel sorry for himself, and he won't let you, either. This is a man who, when asked what age he wanted to live to, said one hundred.

Of course, things will go downhill, just as they do for all of us. And a day will come when the wells will run dry and the world will no longer hear Ali's voice.

But it won't matter. Actions have always spoken more eloquently than words. And if you need words, well, the wisdom he's taken from life can be reduced to one.

Give.