Ghosts of Manila (27 page)

She went to court, and a four-year legal battle ensued. He had high-priced lawyers in California. Aaisha just wanted child support. The proceedings were filled with hurt for Khaliah. A deal was set up where a bank would create a trust on behalf of Khaliah. The money would be invested and the interest would go to Khaliah for support. When she turned twenty-one, the principal would revert back to Ali; not a dime for Khaliah. He was sitting in the corridor. Khaliah went over to him.

“Daddy,” she said.

“I can’t talk to you,” Ali said. “They tell me I can’t. Sorry, baby.”

“Well, Daddy,” Khaliah said, with tears in her eyes. “No one will ever tell me I can’t talk to you. You may think I’m too young to know, but I’m not.” Ali had million-dollar trusts for the rest of his kids. Khaliah continued, “I know I don’t get any money when I turn twenty-one. But all these lawyers are getting rich. But that’s all right. I don’t want your money. I’ll make my own way. I just want you to know that no matter what, I love you, Daddy.”

Ali went back to the courtroom and said he wanted to speak. He wanted to fire the lawyers. “He just wanted Khaliah to have the money,” Aaisha says. “It was sad. No one listened to him. His speech was thick, his movement stiff. He appeared incompetent. The lawyers and his new wife, Lonnie, totally ignored him, going on as if he weren’t in the room.” But Khaliah Ali, his bright daughter, would never stop in her love for her father, and in so doing would stand her ground more than once with Lonnie.

Aaisha remembers much about Ali. She knows what he truly thought of Joe Frazier. “He thought he was a pure nigger,” she says. “He said that Frazier didn’t know how to talk, or look good, and that it was insulting if he became the heavyweight champion.” If one
moment sums up Ali for her, it was when they went to see
The Wiz
on Broadway. “Ali was always restless in theaters,” she says. “He wanted to leave. Then, the Tin Man came on, and he was hypnotized, especially when he began to sing ‘To Be Able to Feel.’ We went outside, and he said, ‘I wish I could feel something. I’ve never been able to in my life.’ He bought a player, got the tape, and ran that song over and over.”

At fifteen, Khaliah went to the American Broadcasters Dinner in New York to see her father. Lonnie, she says, would not allow her near him. She had no money, and Howard Bingham had to give her thirty dollars. At midnight, alone and angry, she made her way to the bus station. “Lonnie blocked me at every turn,” she says, “but I wouldn’t give up. I had a right to see my father.” With tenacity, she’d sneak around to see him, leaving scraps of paper with her number on it. “They’d find it in his pockets,” she says, “and throw them away. So I began writing my number on the bottom of his shoes. I’d be blocked at every turn by Lonnie and her aides. Look, I’m not the only kid of his who had trouble seeing him. They have to suck up to Lonnie. But I wouldn’t bow to her. Never. She once said to me: ‘I am Muhammad Ali now.’”

A major blowup occurred in Philadelphia in March 1996 at a gala for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ali-Frazier 1. Lonnie, Khaliah says, refused her admittance. She only got to the ceremony because of Jacqui Frazier, Joe’s daughter, who insisted on her attendance. That night Khaliah was up in her father’s Ritz suite. She was wrapping his title belt around her waist. Ali gave her the belt. “Oh, no,” Khaliah said. “I was just playing. I can’t.” He said: “You keep the belt.” Lonnie and the people around her began to get nervous. Downstairs, they cornered Khaliah. Kalita Muhammad, an aide, lit into her, saying: “You can’t have the belt! It has to go to the Smithsonian. Your father doesn’t know what he’s doing! You can’t have it!” Khaliah says, “They had me convinced to give it up.” Back in the suite, she told her father
her decision. “No!” he said, trying to yell. She says, “I was being called all sorts of names by Lonnie and her group.”

The argument went on for a while as Ali refused to budge. “You take the belt,” he kept saying. Khaliah remembers: “Lonnie was in a rage. I thought she’d throw me out the window. She kept saying, ‘You can’t give that to her!’ Jim Brown was there. Even he was anxious. My father cursed at Kalita and Lonnie. Then he began to cry. When did you ever hear of Muhammad Ali crying? Never. This was a big thing to him.” Howard Bingham told her quietly to keep the belt. With everyone still arguing, Jim Brown escorted her to the elevator and out of the hotel safely. He told her: “Your father gave that to you. You can’t let anyone take it away from you.”

Khaliah was seventeen then. Now, at 26, she says: “There’s so much wrong with his situation. They run him to death. For what? He’s had his fame. It’s about money. He’s a substance, an item. Items don’t make action. People like Lonnie and others act for it. They take on authority. It’s easy to do. They don’t respect me. It’s easy for them, especially when they’re dealing with my father, who’s a child himself. I want nothing but time with my father. How long is it going to be before he doesn’t know who anyone is?

“I wasn’t fond of the way Momma Bird (Odessa) was treated before her death. She lived in a roach-infested place, bills all over left unpaid. But he has to take the blame. He’s always let people take control of his life. I went out two weeks before her death. She was on a respirator. Lonnie says to my father, ‘We can’t afford this, Muhammad.’ He’s not being treated right, either. He’s not being exposed to the advances in Parkinson’s. He was drinking coffee. Can you imagine? I’m mindful of my father’s lack of integrity. Things were just the way they were. Why do you think he does missionary work? He wants people to know that he’s been a good man. That a lot of things happened that he doesn’t deserve. That he’s credited too much for a lot
of things. He’s never lived in the world we did, he never did know the ordinary lives people have to live. But I let the past be the past. I live in the present with him. That’s all I have—and not much of that.”

“L
ast night,” Ali said, “I dreamt of black ravens.” He was outside the Hilton Head clinic after that long day in 1989, his voice a monotone, his stare trying to connect two distant points. “What’s it mean?”

“I don’t know. Just a dream.”

“Every night? Ravens?”

“Dreams are like that. There’ll be others.”

“I never liked ravens,” he said. “In my dreams, they angry, cover the sky and screech. It’s an omen. That’s what it is.”

What strikes now is the thick, dominant silence that marked his days, in contrast to the dithyrambic sound that accompanied his passage, when his every public word snared the literati into thinking he had something to say, each word weighed until they grouped and became Ciceronian insight; a one-man theater troupe, given a wardrobe to fit every desired moment. The writer Wilfred Sheed noted back then, “He will have to make twice as much noise after he’s through with boxing if he wants to stay famous.” But physical disaster—of his own making—has kept his fame intact. He would have become the bore dodged at the party, as he often threatened to become when he was in apostolic and/or sociological thrall; best then to think of lunch or replay an old poker hand, thereby reducing him to the white sound of an air conditioner. The future promised that there would be no more clothes with which to dress him up.

What he was and was not is only of celebrity moment, unworthy next to his talent even in an age now of desperate and flimsy construction of heroes, the pallid figure made towering, assigned value in
a valueless time. As a fighter, a champion—and there is no other measurement for those who ignore the buzz—he was the surface of a shield, unmalleable, made for mace and chain, flaring with light. He was the uncommon standard, the true measure that says the Parthenon should not be able to be scaled by those with just a shoeshine and a smile. Brilliance, greatness, of such impoverished meaning now, do not do the job when it comes to what he did with a pair of Everlast gloves. Funny, though, while watching film of most of his fights, trying to reassess the breadth and detail of his work, the mind strays from him, as though knowing that film cannot reclaim the once real. Attention goes to eerie, gray figures trying to survive and solve him, and it is like looking, from a high, high view, at the diorama of a lost world.

They were gone now, most of those who peopled the parabola of his ring life, and memory calls them up, just flickers of thought with no ordering of place or value. Sugar Ray Robinson: who imposed himself on a room like a rare artifact of pre-Columbian art, making his last stop in a dinky arena in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in a rattling station wagon alone with a suitcase showing the stickers from French liners he used to take. Sonny Liston: blasted even by the NAACP, setting off for the hills of Denver with a backpack of bricks and a jar of water, when he suddenly braked, snorting, the mucus streaming from his nostrils, at a shrine of Mother Cabrini. He soaked a rag and wiped her feet. “They look dirty to me,” he said. Floyd Patterson, whose favorite words were the self-portraying “vicissitude” and “enigma,” now hardly able to remember that he was once a fighter. Old and unordinary Cash, Ali’s father: dying at the most prosaic of stops of a heart attack—in a hardware store. One can still hear him jabbing at his son. “I eat pork. Nothin’ wrong with pork. Get these Muslim loafers outta here, I’ll cook you up a nice pork roast.”

And the others…so many of them: Oscar Bonavena: shot to death outside a Nevada whorehouse for trying to woo the owner’s wife and
take the joint over. Jerry Quarry: the best white heavy since Marciano, constantly trumped by his betters in the division, not knowing how to find the bathroom in his brother’s small house, his food having to be cut in small pieces, then dying of erosive brain trauma. Cleveland Williams: having to run down his manager for his money on the street, then being handed a swindling $37.50 as his end, with his manager Hugh Benbow berating him. “I’m ashamed of you.” The Big Cat died in an accident coming home from a dialysis treatment. George Chuvalo: a good man with a bad roll, two sons lost to drugs and suicide and finally the suicide of his wife. Archie Moore: the mentally bejeweled fakir, above all, who knew the most and was listened to the least; he lived, like one of his oaks, to a graceful, long age. Bundini Brown, saying: “Next to the champ, I loved the sea best. It makes the world small. I was, you see, a pillar-to-post baby. You know, born on a doorstep with a note on my chest that says ‘Do the best you can for him.’”

I thought of my first conscious sighting of Ali. In
Requiem for a Heavyweight,
by Rod Serling, when the young Clay was the opponent of Mountain Rivera, and would send him into the arms of social workers and make him in the final pulling shot of the camera a wrestler in Indian headdress; Mountain’s fall from pride and dignity certainly so very far from any wild irony that could descend on the new royalty of Clay. “Great fight, kid,” he says to the old and battered Mountain. “You were great.” The last striking sense of him that persists and stings comes from his daughter Khaliah. She was at Momma Bird’s funeral, and that night sat with her father. She was both sad and happy. For the first time, she had him alone. She thought of all they would talk about. But he just sat there for hours in the dark living room, saying nothing. She sat with him, wondering—what is he thinking? She said nothing. Over and over, he listened to the same song lyrics until dawn broke: “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, only darkness every day….”

A
large part of this book comes from my own observations, analysis, and long relationship with the principals of this story—Ali, Frazier, and the people who surrounded them. Writing about the ring then, unlike the marketing-driven coverage now, could be done on a highly personal basis. Writers could sit with fighters and their managers for long hours without interruption, leading to the kind of storytelling sessions that invariably added at least some view of the fighter’s inner world.

Very little in the way of preparatory reading has been done for this book; most of what is out there is first-and secondhand hero worship. However, a few books were especially rewarding.
Black is Best
, by old colleague Jack Olsen, catches the early Cassius Clay with a sharp reportorial eye and is certainly the finest book to have been done on Ali. Wilfred Sheed produced a keenly observed work back in 1975,
Muhammad Ali
, that also ranks as a piece of boxing literature. The autobiography written by Joe Frazier with Phil Berger was helpful
in that it provided a sincere overview of Joe. But the same cannot be said for
The Greatest
, the autobiography of Ali done with the Muslim propagandist Richard Durham. It is a screed of misdirection and fantasy that, along with the film of the same title, is in part responsible for the Ali myth. Conversations with the late Tex Maule, Dick Russell, former
S.I.
colleague, were always enlightening, as were long talks over the years with Sugar Ray Robinson and Archie Moore. Sugar’s fine book with Dave Anderson was also quite helpful.

Acknowledgments are due a number of people, particularly my editor, David Hirshey, for his enthusiasm and close attention; my agent, Chris Calhoun of Sterling Lord Literistic; and Sunni Khalid, a student of the Nation of Islam. And, most heartfelt, to Anne Janette Johnson, for the generosity of her time in the preparation of the manuscript; and to my son, Mark, for his strong editorial hand and unlodgeable belief.