Tom Archdeacon: Muhammad Ali’s gift — he elevated us all

This is the Muhammad Ali I knew.

It was the summer of 1978 and Ali was holding court at the old Fifth Street Gym in Miami Beach. It would be weeks until he shocked the world again – outlasting Leon Spinks to win the heavyweight title for the third time – but already he was working his magic.

As he toweled off, Ali surveyed the crowd of sunburned tourists and ringside sharpies. That’s when he spotted the handicapped young boy sitting in a wheelchair just a few feet away from me.

He worked his way to the youngster, whom he scooped up and whispered to intently as they returned to the ring. Once through the ropes, Ali went into his famed Ali Shuffle.

Cradled in the heavyweight’s arms, the boy bounced and spun and giggled as his parents brushed away tears.

That’s what I remember most about Ali — the way he scooped up all of us and made that whirling, dizzying lightness our own. He was the symbol of something wonderful and liberating.

The late Bundini Brown, Ali’s motivator and muse, put it best. He once explained how, as he moved with Ali from the dressing room to the ring, he felt as if his feet were not touching the ground. That was Ali’s gift — he elevated us all.

And that’s why so many people from so many walks of life are saddened today. The wonderful ride has come to an end.

The 74-year-old Ali died Friday at a Phoenix-area hospital where he had been treated for respiratory problems exacerbated by the Parkinson Disease he had battled for 32 years.

A funeral service will be held in Louisville, Ky., his hometown.

In my 43 years as a sportswriter, I’ve never been around a more magical figure than Ali.

More than just a superb athlete – “The Greatest” as he described himself and we all soon acknowledged – he was a dancer, poet, preacher, puncher, magician and mime. He became a symbol of courage and conscience and eloquence.

And he could be pretty funny, too.

“Sonny Liston is nothing. The man can’t talk. The man can’t fight. The man needs talking lessons. The man needs boxing lessons. And since he’s gonna fight me, he needs falling lessons,” Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, spouted in 1963, a year before he did shock the world and take the heavyweight crown from the menacing champ

I covered some of Ali’s fights, went with him when he visited schools and boys clubs in Miami, spent time with him at other events in Las Vegas and Manhattan and was there that night in Georgia in 1996 when he steadied his shaking arm to light the Olympic torch at the Atlanta Games.

But where I got to know him best was at the Fifth Street Gym, when I was a boxing writer for the Miami News and he trained with my longtime pal, Angelo Dundee.

Talk about going along for a ride.

One minute I might be listening to him expound on how black Americans need to take responsibility for their lives and the next I’d hear him spouting his spur-of-the-moment rhyme:

“Last night I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick … I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.”

Ali became the most recognizable person on the planet, as evidenced by his 1974 trip to Zaire – where people giddily followed him in droves and joyously chanted “Ali bomaye” (Ali kill him) before he did dismantle the seemingly invincible George Foreman – or his 1982 visit to the Vatican, where the Pope John Paul II asked him for an autograph.

Ali replied, “Sure, but tell me, why ain’t Jesus black?”

I’m not sure if the Pope had good answer, but I know that that stewardess sure did that day earlier in Ali’s career when he was flying from Washington D.C. to New York.

As the story goes, she told him:

“Mr Ali, please buckle your seatbelt.”

“Superman don’t need no seatbelt,” he grinned.

“Mr Ali,” she responded with a smiling left-hook of a comeback, “Superman don’t need no plane.”

Ali loved that story.

That’s the man I remember today.

He’s the one who used to rub his thumb and forefinger together next to my ear and made cricket sounds, the one who always wanted pie with two scoops of vanilla ice cream and the father who once took his kids and me to the circus, only to slip off, then reappear riding on the back of an elephant.

The last time I spoke to Ali – over a dozen years ago in Las Vegas – he padded over slowly, leaned in toward my ear and in a halting whisper said, “You got old.”

“You, too,” I said.

Without missing much of a beat — and maybe remembering some of those old days from the long-gone Fifth Street Gym — he leaned in again and said in a barely audible voice:

“Still pretty though!”

And then his wife, Lonnie, led him off by the arm.

That, too, is the Ali I remember today.

“When I’m gone,” he once said, “boxing will be nothing. The fans with cigars and hats turned down will be there, but no more housewives and little men in the street and foreign presidents.

“It’s going back to the fighter who comes to town, smells a flower, visits a hospital, blows a horn and says he’s in shape. Old hat.

“I was the onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator.”

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