A Celebration Of Muhammad Ali

As a writer, I want it to go on and on. I'm riding in the front passenger seat, watching the nose of Muhammad Ali 's luxury car begin to drift back and forth across the center lane of a Los Angeles freeway, feeling the traffic slash by closer and closer, seeing the slit of eye between his lids grow smaller...and smaller...and smaller, thinking that in five more seconds I might really have something to write here.

As a human being.... The fa-dump, fa-dump of the tires striking the little reflective lane dividers is up in my stomach, and I can feel on my skin the speed and nearness of the cars on our flanks.

It is 1984, Ali is 42. He skipped the medicine he is supposed to take for Parkinson's syndrome, then exhausted himself hitting the heavy bag and shadowboxing for an hour and a half in a gym. He is fading, fading.... I glance at him again without turning my head. Holy ——...fa-dump, fa-dump. His eyes look shut, fa-dump, fa-dump, his breathing is slow and even, his hands barely touch the bottom of the wheel.

A white sports car lurches away from his right fender; my fingers choke my notepad. We drift again toward the left. Should I do it? Snatch the champion's steering wheel, snatch the champion's dignity? I can't, fa-dump, but I must, fa-dump, because now we are....

I see two scrawny brown arms snake over Ali 's shoulders. Ali 's eyes open to a squint, barely enough to see his 12-year-old son reaching forward from the back seat and taking the wheel—then he lets his eyes droop again. I blow out a long breath and then feel sick inside—sick and sad about everything.

I was younger then, and I didn't understand.

What was this but metamorphosis? What was this but another face of that which made Muhammad Ali the most dominant figure in sports of the past 35 years, of any 35 years, of all time. All of his life was transformation: Ali 's soul knew the butterfly's secret as well as his feet knew its dance. From Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali , from Christian to Muslim. From the man who told the government where to stick its draft to the one who endorsed Ronald Reagan . From the boxer women loved, the dancer who whirled and flitted so his pretty face was never touched—to the boxer men loved, who stood and took the thunder from the thunder throwers, from the Foremans and the Fraziers. From the king of the world—to the man on his knees with his forehead pressed to the prayer rug. From madman to poet to circus barker to preacher to clown to magician to....

What other great athlete has done this? Willie Mays hit the ball a half mile and ran the bases like a gust of wind when he was 23—and when he was 33. Joe Namath played football and lived life with the same young bachelor's abandon when he was a teenager and when he was a man. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, who changed, who grew, who tried on all the shirts and slacks and shoes of human possibility as Ali did?

Who else elevated an audience, who else made it feel what Bundini Brown once felt as he moved with Ali from the locker room to the ring—that his feet were not touching the ground? When Joe Frazier beat Ali in 1971, the thousands of closed-circuit viewers around me applauded or jeered for a few moments and then the night fragmented, the people went their separate ways. But each time Ali won, people laughed and hugged, there was communion.

To give oneself over to Frazier 's greatness—or to that of Mays or Namath or any of the other great ones—yes, that was a gratifying way to spend an evening or an afternoon. But it was a walk into a closed room, a drive into a cul-de-sac. Ali was a doorway, an opening into something beyond. He spoke of God before his fights, he spoke of man. he spoke of hungry children, he cared about the sick and the old; he raised the game to drama. And because he stood for something greater, the people who climbed upon their chairs for him felt it: They stood for something greater, too.