Meeting Muhammad

When we met, Muhammad Ali was – after, or along with, Elvis and The Beatles (who John Lennon had claimed to be ‘more famous than Jesus Christ’) – probably the most celebrated man in the world. Certainly, ‘the greatest’.
Correction: “I'm not only the greatest; I'm the double greatest. Not only do I knock 'em out, I pick the round that I do it.”
He was 23 years old, and I was 20. But I was a young reporter and he was the Heavyweight Boxing Champion Of The World, having twice beaten Sonny Liston (knock-outs in the seventh and first rounds) thereby removing the sport from the clamp of control by the mafia. It had been replaced by Ali’s own mob – who would eventually persuade him to persist in the sport he loved, long after the world knew that he should have packed it in.
Outrageously handsome in a blue blazer and grey flannels he stood apart and aloof from his minders who were encumbered by floor-length fur coats and dripping with chunky jewellery. We shook hands (his was a gentle grip – he had nothing to prove) and opening my notebook I asked him, just to get things right, which of the many spellings of Muhammad he actually preferred. He had been born, in January 1942, Cassius Marcellus Clay, a Christian Baptist named after a (white) Kentucky politician, one of the founders of the Republican Party, who had fought for the emancipation of slaves. But ‘Cassius Clay was my slave name – I don't have to be what they want me to be; I'm free to be what I want.’ His change of name and adoption by the Nation of Islam had been well documented, but it was something he had been thinking about for years, he said.
He made a joke about the answer to my question, as he did about almost everything. “You know, last time I was asked, the guy says to me, ‘Mr Ali, how you spell you Christian name?’” His brow creased with pretend anger. Then he was off again, and beaming, educating a non-believer. Islam, he said, allowed him to have four wives, and he was going to get one who would shine his shoes, one to feed him grapes, one to massage oil into his muscles and ‘the fourth one, well, she’ll just be named Peaches...’
On a serious note, he told me – the first time he had told the story or, at least, the first time it was to be reported – that after his 1960 Olympics triumph he had been welcomed home to Louisville, Kentucky with a 30-car motorcade. There had been speeches but no dinner because the local chamber of commerce ‘just didn’t have time’. So he had gone, nevertheless much elated, into a restaurant in town, only to be told: ‘We don’t serve niggers!’ to which the former Cassius Clay told me he had replied: ‘And I don’t eat ’em, neethah!’ And he had felt so depressed about his home town and nation that he had walked to a bridge and thrown his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River.
‘You really did that?’ I asked him. ‘Honestly? But it must have been your most cherished possession!’
His eyes widened and rolled at the thought that anyone might doubt him. ‘Muhammad Ali don’t tell you no lies.’ But again it was only pretence at taking offence. ‘Listen – if Ali say a mosquito can pull a plough, just hitch it up, don’t ask him how!’
The Louisville Lip. This was the days before rap, and he was inventing it. He spoke fluently and fluidly and often poetically, always with infectious humour. He had a winning smile. It was impossible not to like him.
Emboldened, I asked him about his immortal ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ line.
‘You seen me in the ring. Well, that’s how I move.’
I’d never seen a butterfly move like that, I told him. I’d have said he floated more like Fred Astaire…
Ali touched me on lightly the shoulder. He was measuring the distance between us. He said: ‘Don’t move.’ Then he threw a punch at me.
Here I digress to tell the joke about a cowboy reputed to be the fastest gun in the west. A stranger asked to see the man’s quick draw, so the gunman’s hands hovered above his holsters for a second, then he asked: ‘Wanna see it again?’
What had just happened in the departure lounge at Terminal Three of what’s now Heathrow Airport was exactly similar. Ali’s great fist had sped to my jaw, and been withdrawn, without my actually seeing it. I was vaguely aware that he had moved. I’d felt the draught as his knuckles mercifully stopped, possibly half a centimetre from my chin, and fell back to his lap.
His face was iridescent with merriment. ‘Now…’ he asked me, ‘Wanna go for “sting like a bee”?’
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