SubscribeAs 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.While you're trying to find a way to login and read it *cough*bugmenot*cough*, I'll leave you with this Ali quote from an Esquire "What I've Learned" article:
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.
I came back to Louisville after the Olympics with my shiny gold medal. Went into a luncheonette where black folks couldn't eat. Thought I'd put them on the spot. I sat down and asked for a meal. The Olympic champion wearing his gold medal. They said, "We don't serve niggers here." I said, "That's okay, I don't eat 'em." But they put me out in the street. So I went down to the river, the Ohio River, and threw my gold medal in it.
Oscar Wilde once suggested that you kill the thing you love. In Ali's case, it was the reverse: what he loved, in a sense, killed him. The man who was the most loquacious of athletes ("I am the onliest of boxing's poet laureates") now says almost nothing: he moves slowly through the crowds and signs autographs. He has probably signed more autographs than any other athlete ever, living or dead. It is his principal activity at home, working at his desk. He was once denied an autograph by his idol, Sugar Ray Robinson ("Hello, kid, how ya doin'? I ain't got time"), and vowed he would never turn anyone down. The volume of mail is enormous.-- George Plimpton
The ceremonial leave-taking of great athletes can impart indelible memories, even if one remembers them from the scratchy newsreels of time β Babe Ruth with the doffed cap at home plate, Lou Gehrig's voice echoing in the vast hollows of Yankee Stadium. Muhammad Ali's was not exactly a leave-taking, but it may have seemed so to the estimated 3 billion or so television viewers who saw him open the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Outfitted in a white gym suit that eerily made him seem to glisten against a dark night sky, he approached the unlit saucer with his flaming torch, his free arm trembling visibly from the effects of Parkinson's.
It was a kind of epiphany that those who watched realized how much they missed him and how much he had contributed to the world of sport. Students of boxing will pore over the trio of Ali-Frazier fights, which rank among the greatest in fistic history, as one might read three acts of a great drama. They would remember the shenanigans, the Ali Shuffle, the Rope-a-Dope, the fact that Ali had brought beauty and grace to the most uncompromising of sports. And they would marvel that through the wonderful excesses of skill and character, he had become the most famous athlete, indeed, the best-known personage in the world.
The Close Reader column on July 14 [2002], about the relation between daily life and intellectual life in Israel at present, referred erroneously to protests against the award of the Israel Prize to an Israeli Arab, Emile Habibi. The award, and the protests, occurred in 1992, not 'recently'; the Israel Prize is given for a life of achievement, not any particular accomplishment. The novel 'Arabesques' was misattributed; it was written not by Habibi but by Anton Shammas, also an Israeli Arab, in Hebrew, not Arabic.
The column misstated the title of a book that discusses political minorities in modern Hebrew literature, and misstated its timing in the author's career. It is 'Producing the Modern Hebrew Canon,' not 'Constructing the Hebrew Canon,' published after the writer joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, not before. And his preferred transliteration of his name from the Hebrew is Hannan Hever, not Chanan Chever.
The column also attributed an honor erroneously to the novelist A. B. Yehoshua. He has never received the Sapir Prize (often referred to as the Israeli equivalent of Britain's Booker Prize).
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I just wish he would have quit boxing a little earlier--it was painful just to watch his last few fights.
posted by leftcoastbob at 8:07 AM on October 30, 2005