One mans memory of Ali The Greatest
One man’s encounter with Ali “The Greatest”
AS THE WORLD mourns the death and celebrates the life of Muhammad Ali, Newsroom contributor Mark Scheinbaum, a former UPI reporter, was persuaded by his daughter to write some notes of his encounter with “The Greatest “nearing the end of his exile, forced on him because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam.
The notes are , preceded by a link to one of Mark’s UPI stories:
Well the autograph is faded and it was a big enlargement and crop of some photos I would take around and outside the old Fifth Street Gym…but funny what stories leap to the top of one’s mind…197?….working on a protracted feature for UPI on the new Ali, one banned from boxing and forced to become a motivational speaker at universities.
Waiting for him to arrive from Philadelphia by car, outside the Jackie Gleason Theatre home of the Angelo and Chris Dundee boxing office, Ali pulls up in a glowing gold Rolls Royce (or Bentley?) convertible. I started to snap a photo as a hippie looking kid around 20 pulled his back pack out of the back seat and said goodbye to Ali.
I think there were only two or three other people around and Ali shrugged and smiled and said the young man was hitchhiking outside of Philly so he drove him to Florida. Then he said, “forget the photo, really, it is the kind of thing which only makes people think worse of celebrities.”
So here is the Muslim Ali, loving his Rolls-Royce but not needing a huge entourage, and giving a struggling kid a lift, and still trying to regain permission to box and working out and staying in shape each morning doing road work around the Miami Beach Golf Course. Much, much thinner and in better shape, I might last one lap and then jump back into my pride and joy 1959 Mercedes and follow him around for another few laps. At some point he would stop, grab my towel and jump in for the ride back to his Algiers Hotel and a breakfast of grapefruit juice and more grapefruit juice. But on that morning I remember he said he was still proud and enjoying the remnants of celebrity.
He was flying to Los Angeles that night for a surprise birthday party for NBA star Kareem Abdul Jabbar (who ironically as Lew Alcindor at Powell Memorial HS scrimmaged against my high school’s team back in NYC).
Anyway….larger than life….not all things to all people, but except possibly for Pele and Pope Francis, the most recognized face in the world. Honored to have been a footnote in agate type in his life.
