KING OF ALL KINGS
By ROBERT LIPSYTE JUNE 29, 1975
The black stick fingers of Luis Sarria play over the sweat‐slick brown flesh of Muhammad Ali. The heavyweight champion is on his stomach on a rubbing table‐ in a small dressing room of the Fifth Street Gym in Miami Beach. Eight men, press, fans, friends, stand against the peeling gray walls to give Sarria elbow room. The old trainer's fingers knead the muscles of Ali's thighs, then walk up to his waist and sink in. The flesh here is still firm, but plumpish. All is 33. Sarria prods and strokes. He knows Ali's body better than his own: He has been over every inch, massaging, sponging, drying, slathering Vaseline on the face and head and shoulders before a sparring session, holding the ankles for sit‐ups afterwards, rubbing out kinks and stretching muscles for 15 years now, since 1960. And I have watched Sarria handle this body for more than 11 years now, since Feb. 18, 1964, when I stood in this very same room and wrote down everything I saw and heard in a spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen, just as I am doing now. Then, Cassius Clay called himself “the doublegreatest.” Since then, he says, he has come to realize that Allah is the greatest. Now, Ali modestly refers to himself as “the king of all kings.”
Then, lying on the rubbing table, he told the sportswriters around him that his promotion of the coming Liston fight had given us “something to write about” and had made “your papers let you come down to Miami Beach where it's warm.” The other sportswriters in the room had bristled at that, as if this kid fighter was trying to usurp and manipulate the Power of the Press, but I had laughed because I understood that was exactly what he was trying to do, and succeeding. When I laughed, he winked at me, and we have more or less understood each other ever since.
Now, on April 28, 1975, the dressing‐room door opens, and a middle‐aged man in a dark suit steps in, hesitantly. He stares at Ali's large, rounded rump, and clears his throat.
“Champ, I'm a Federal court officer and I've got some papers for you.”
Ali turns over on his back and covers his groin with a towel. “I ain't taking them.”
The court officer, startled, looks around for a friendly face, and finding none loses his poise. The room is small, oppressive, and the door bangs shut as a hard‐faced old boxer slides in behind the court officer, who chokes out a laugh. “It's only for $20‐million, champ.”
Ali smiles and reaches for the papers.
The court officer relaxes; I think I can hear the air sigh out of him. He whispers confidentially,“I didn't want to give it to you out there in public, champ.”
“That's O.K.; the press is here. The New York Times.” All passes the papers to me and raises himself up on an elbow to watch me unfold them, legal notice of the libel suit instituted by Anthony Perez Jr., the referee of the Chuck Wepner fight, whom All had called, among other things, a “dirty dog.”
I make some notes from the legal papers, then return them to Ali, who says, “See how I take care of you, Bob? When you're around me you always got something to write about.”
■
Muhammad Ali will defend his title tomorrow night against Joe Bugner in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and then he is scheduled to go on to China at the personal invitation of Chairman Mao. He has always given us something to write about, often to put on the front pages and sell papers. He beat Sonny Liston, which seemed incredible at the time. He declared himself a student of Malcolm X and a fol lower of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, an unimaginable act for a young athlete about to receive a champion's windfall of record, movie and endorsement contracts; most were withdrawn, most of the rest he refused because they conflicted with variovs tenets of his sect. He beat Floyd Patterson in cruel and humiliating fashion, alienating Liberal America, and he refused to be drafted, alienating Patriotic America. For three and a half years, from the spring of 1967 to the fall of 1970, he was not permitted a license to fight, in violation of his constitutional rights, as it turned out, and he supported himself as a college‐campus speaker. He was immensely popular. He not only made a lot of money and built a new constituency among those who identified with him because he was young or black or antiwar or anti‐Establishment, but he also absorbed an education.
In 1971 he was beaten by Joe Frazier in The Fight, and the Supreme Court dismissed the draftevasion charges against him. He was a free man, but without a title, without influence, a clown, it seemed. I left active sportswriting in the fall of 1971, and followed Ali in the papers. Once out of his magical force field, I forgot that all things were possible. When he signed to challenge for George Foreman's title in Zaire, in the fall of 1974, I not only believed he would lose, but thought he might be hurt. Clay vs. Liston again. Watching the Foreman fight on film stirred old juices in me. Ali had looked mythic in victory, as Bundini, his personal poet and confidence man, had predicted “God set it up this way. This is the closing of the book. The king gained his throne by killing a monster, and the king will regain his throne by killing a bigger monster. This is the closing of the book.”
I had my own book to close, and in the spring of 1975 I flew to Orlando, Fla., where Ali was scheduled to box a benefit for a local school. That afternoon, for $15,000, he appeared in Toronto with Howard Cosell on ABC‐TV's Foreman vs. Five Opponents grotesquerie, which I watched with Angelo Dundee, his trainer since 1960.
“You know, he's still a nice kid,” Angelo said of Ali. “The easiest fighter I ever had. Unspoiled from the beginning. He changed around the whole charisma of boxing, but he's still the nice kid I used to give a deuce to stay loose.”
“Why is that?”.
“Because he likes boxing. That's the key. He likes the sport. You know, the nicest times we have is after road work, 5:30, 6 o'clock in the morning, that serene time after he's finished running, when we can just sit around and talk boxing.”
Ali, of course, rarely gets up early to run; in fact, his training seems erratic. But Angelo has not survived changes in Ali's management and promotion and religion by leaking secrets to the press. On the way to the Orlando Sports Stadium, Angelo said: “Face it, on important things the guy stands alone. I can't fight for him, and I can't — for him.” One big brown eye winked. “Course, if I had a choice, I'd rather ‐ for him.”
■
The dressing‐room door bangs open to admit the king of all kings.
“This jet age is something else,” says he.
He barely acknowledges the men in the room. He immediately strips. We scrutinize him with unself‐conscious interest. Boxers are used to being stared at naked. Boxers are intensely absorbed their bodies, yet discuss them with a curious detach. ment, like drivers talking about their race cars. Ultimately, defeat will be blamed on a failure of the machine‐body to respond to the demands of the driver‐brain. Muhammad's body is the most superb machine any of us have ever seen, and after four years I am surprised anew how big he is, how wide‐shouldered, thick through the chest and thighs. Because his proportions are so perfect, he seems smaller and slighter on television and in still photographs.
He dresses briskly, efficiently. How many thousands of times has he stepped into his jockstrap, one, two, slipped on white socks, laced up his high white boxing shoes, pulled on his leather‐ and‐metal protective harness, pulled on white trunks? He stands like a race horse, quietly, with nostrils flared as Angelo smears him with Vaseline, then snorts and chuffs as he warms up, shadow‐boxing and running in place. Waves of body heat ripple off him and cook the small room. A local reporter asks him if he thinks Foreman's performance this afternoon will hurt boxing.
“Boxing never die,” he says, dancing from foot to foot, bobbing, snapping his head back and forth. “Only need two people, and people always be fighting, fussing.
“Wrestling is fake. I've got boxers now acting like wrestlers, but the reality is there. George Foreman supposed to be fighting but he's looking around to talk to me. It's like the Christian spirit around the world. You could be somewhere on a Sunday where they don't practice Christianity, and all the stores are open, but you feel different because you know it's Sunday. The spirit of Muhammad All is there in boxing, if I'm not in the ring.”
Newsmen look at each other, slightly bewildered. One of them asks if he believes in Jesus.
“I can't believe a woman had a baby without a man.”
It does not seem like a promising avenue, and the tam veers. Ali's autobiography is scheduled for publication in the fall. He is going to star in a movie of his life. He stops warming up to flash coming attractions.
“This movie will tell people things they never knew.
“Why I don't have my Olympic gold medal today.
“About the shoot‐out in Arkansas during my exile.
“Nine‐teen‐fif‐tee‐nine. My first woman.
“How I rode with a motorcycle gang for six weeks. With a mask on.
“Things I stole.
“The money I turned down. Companies will be revealed.
“My first wife, how we broke up, the fight we had the night before the Liston fight.
“What happened in the desert in Arabia.
“What happened in the White House with President Ford, real strange.”
Ali looks at me for the first time. “Things you don't know nothing about, Lipsyte.” As if I had never been away.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Have to see the movie to find out. We got a orchestra, hit songs, no ‘Superfly,’ it's going to be big, like ‘Godfather.’ ‘The Magnificent Seven.’ They could make 10 films from my life.”
The dressing‐room door opens. “Ready, champ?”
“The master is ready.” He strides out quickly into the darkened indoor arena. Dozens of small boys lead him toward the lighted ring, crying, “Ahhhh‐lee, Ahhh‐lee,” and when their chant falters he picks it up and whips them into a frenzied “Al‐lee, Al‐lee, Al‐lee,” until the crowd stands and sends it echoing through the arena, “AL‐LEE, AL‐LEE, AL‐LEE.” He mounts the ring as if it were a throne.
Tonight he is fighting for the Orlando School of Black Performing Arts. Like so many of his benefits, there is an impromptu feel to the event, which has been amateurishly organized and promoted. The school director's wife, who attended high school with Ali in Louisville, recently called him to beg that he save the school from imminent ruin. That was all he needed to hear. He is a soft touch for certain kinds of appeals, especially ones in which he flies to the rescue of children.
Even for free, perhaps especially for free, Ali gives a good show. First, he boxes three rounds with Levi Forte, a long‐time sparring partner and Fontainebleau bell captain. He dances, prances, spins into the Ali Shuffle, a perennial crowd pleaser, and cowers on the ropes, a tactic invented for Foreman and honed in title defenses against Wepner and Ron Lyle, He would later call it the Rope‐a‐Dope. At the end of the third round he lets Levi hump him en the seat of his trunks.
While he boxes with John L. Johnson, Angelo flinches and winces in the corner. Ali is boxing without headgear. At least he is wearing a protective belt—Ali has been known to leave it in the dressing room because it spoiled the line of his figure.
Ali commandeers the ring mike. “It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am. You could be the world's best garbage man, the world's best model, it don't matter what you do if you're the best.
“Why, I'm so fast I could hit you before God gets the news. I'm so fast I hit the light switch in my room and jump into bed before my room goes dark. Now, I'm gong to show you how fast I am.”
He calls into the ring Solomon McTier, a local heavyweight who once trained with him. “Put up your hand.” He pumps six jabs into McTier's palm, then tells the crowd, “I can throw six punches before you count one, two. That's how fast I am. Now, let's hear you count one, two.”
He builds them skillfully. From each corner of the ring he signals, “One, two,” until the crowd is up and alive, laughing and hopping. Now he raises his hand for silence. The crowd holds its breath as he steps to the center of the ring and cocks his fist in front of McTier's palm.
“Now you better watch real careful. So fast you might miss it.” His eyes are dancing. “Ready? ... Go.”
“ONE, TWO.”
He has not moved a muscle. “Want me to do it again? You missed it. You must of blinked.”
He leaves them laughing.
■
We board a I:58 A.M. flight to Miami. Ali flops into the first seat in the first‐class cabin and motions me to sit beside him. I block the stewardesses' view and show him my economy‐class ticket.
“Don't matter,” he says impatiently. “You with the champ.”
And so I am. The ticket is never checked. Ali orders coffee, empties in six packets of sugar and gulps it down.
“You ever hear my lecture on Friendship?”
“No.”
“It's not so heavy as my lecture on The Heart of Man, but it's real good.” He opens a slim black attaché case on his lap, and lifts out a thick, dog‐eared deck of white 5‐by‐7 index cards. The lecture is written out in black script, and when I lean over to read it he pulls the deck away. “I'll say it slow so you can write it down.”
“I've got a tape recorder with me.”
“That's good. Then you can concentrate on listening.”
My mike hand is steady but my mind wanders during the next half hour, no mean feat, when Muhammad Ali is delivering, at concert‐hall force, his lecture on Friendship a foot from my ear.
“Whenever the thought of self‐interest creeps in, that means a destruction of friendship. Every little thought of profiting by it means destruction. This is what I'm doing, things I'm doing today. It can never develop into a real friendship. It can only develop into a business relationship. It will last as long as the business relationship lasts. Like me and Cosell. I lose. he goes to somebody else.”
This may not be entirely fair to Cosell, the stanchest public advocate of Ali's constitutional rights, but it's their relationship, not mine. While All speaks to my microphone, I check out the traveling troupe. Angelo and the two sparring partners. C.B. Atkins, the booking agent, who was preoccupied that week with the final arrangements for tomorrow's fight in Kuala Lumpur against Bugner. Howard Bingham, Mi's photographersidokick‐roadie, and Howard's wife. Albert P. Griffin, a Philadelphia lawyer who later told me that Ali has something in the neighborhood of $5‐million invested, mostly in commercial property. A tall, beautiful young woman in an orange dress. All except Angelo are black, none are Muslims; others have observed that All seems to be phasing out many of his Muslim companions and his white business advisers. Don King, his main promoter now, is black, and Ali's support of the campaign for a new trial for Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the former mid dleweight contender imprisoned for murder, would seem to indicate his orientation toward a higher level of economic and social involvement. King, a former numbers banker who served time for manslaughter, operates with greater Hamboyance and daring than the corporation lawyers who once cooked up deals for Ali in the free‐for‐all of boxing promotions. Of course, King has a more salable product and a wider territory and has been able to persuade Third World leaders with a country to promote that a few million dollars is cheap enough for the international prestige and headlines of an Ali extravaganza.
Carter's case has been tinged with racism from the start, and elements of it parallel Ali's own collision with American justice. Yet there are those Who feel that Ali's final victory has been morally a hollow one; he is now free to endorse the deoderants for which he was once too “controversial.” Perhaps such critics had seen him as a “pure” hero of their own fantasies.
This enlargement of Ali as a world figure, as a social activist, as a salesman, does not seem to conflict with his major role Within the Nation of Islam as its Minister at Large and wealthiest patron.
“What you think?”
With a start I realize the lecture is over. I blurt out the first word that comes to mind and seems appropriate. “Heavy.”
“No, it's not heavy at all. It's simple. People understand it right away. I'm going to give it this afternoon at the mosque.”
“You still preaching?”
“We say ministering.”
The captain announces the start of our descent toward the Miami airport and Ali looks out his window into the light‐pricked early morning darkness. “We're all like little ants. God sees all these little ants, millions of them, and he can't answer all the prayers and bless every one of them. But he sees one ant with a little influence that the other ants will follow. Then he might give that one ant some special powers.
“I'm like a little ant. Lots of other little ants know me, follow me. So God gives me some extra power.
“I pray to Allah before a fight, let me win tonight so I can keep representing my people. Let me win tonight so I can keep walking through the streets helping my people. God, let me fight for YOU.
“God, with this title I can do it.
“NO ONE CAN WHIP ME AS LONG AS I FEEL THIS WAY.”
“But you've lost fights,” I say. “How come? Was it a lack of sufficient faith?”
“It was a punishment. Things I did, playin' too much, didn't train right.”
“What things did you do?”
“Nobody's business but me and Allah,” he says firmly.
At the airport, the tall, beautiful young woman in the orange dress is dismissed by Ali with a curt “I'll call you.” Cabs roar up. Ali yells to the others, “I'm going with the reporter,” and we both climb into the rear of a cab. John L. gets into the front, turns, sees us, apologizes and starts to get out, but Ali invites him to stay. We are going to the Fontainebleau, John L., a few miles further the Beach.
“You know why I came down here to train?”
“As a matter of fact, I wondered why. You've got some setup in Pennsylvania.”
“Got $300,000 in that camp. And everybody on me up there, day and night, got to give 'em money, got to worry about their problems. Had to get away from that.—'em. Got to take care of my own family, my brother's family. I got $1.5‐million for the Wepner fight and I only cleared $240,000. I'm getting one million for Lyle, I'll clear $300,000. Just from saving money on all my helpers.—'em.
“I can use that extra money to buy schoolbuses for children. Sewing machines for women; they can save money making their own clothes. Airconditioning for the mosque in Miami. If I'm going to give my money away, I'll do it the way I want.
“Can't drive but one car at a time. I eat only one meal a day. Clothes. You see don't care about clothes. When I first came down here I saw this millionaire, I wondered how he could wear such cheap suits and drive a Chevvy. Now I understand. He knew he got it.
“Now, I know I got it. Look at these shoes, only one's I got and they need a shine. These pants, too big on me so that's why I roll the waist. This jacket I took off Howard Cosell this afternoon. No tie. I know I got it.”
He points to John L. in the front seat. John L. is staring straight ahead. “Now him. I gave him a hundreddollar bill and he's happy. Hundred‐dollar bill make him happy: That's why he's got to wear that special suit and those high‐heel shoes.”
As the cab pulls into the Fontainebleau driveway Ali turns his pockets inside out for money. He finds three single dollar bills which he gives to John L. to pay for the last leg of his ride home. He says to me, “You got five?”
“I do.” The fare is twice that, and I pay it as the king of all kings, the man who knows he's got it, waves good morning and bounces up the steps of the hotel where his wife and the youngest of his four children are waiting.
■
Another plane, taxiing for take‐off. I notice his seat belt is open and I remind him to buckle it.
“Don't need to,” he says.
“Why?”
“Nothing happen to me.”
“How come?”
“I'm under divine protection.”
“In that case, Muhammad,” I say, “would you mind if I unbuckle my belt, too, and just hold your hand till we get to Orlando?”
All laughs. He's come a long way. His religion, which he once described as fitting the American black man like a glove, seems to rest far more lightly and comfortably on him now than it did in the late sixties when he spewed forth Muslim dogma in undigested chunks. He has absorbed his religion, blended it into his own style, packaged it for easier listening. He is firm enough in his convictions to laugh patronizingly at a nonbeliever, at least a white nonbeliever. Once, he might have bridled at my lame joke. Had I dared make it.
There is much more about him now of the old Cassius Clay and the early Muhammad All before his title was stolen. He is making predictions again, spouting rhyme, taking enormous pleasure in staging little surprise parties for the world with himself as guest of honor and gift. Nothing seems to delight him more than suddenly to appear —on a downtown street, in a residential neighborhood (white or black), in a store, arena, restaurant, hotel lobby —and watch people stop . . . turn . . . double take . . . mouth, “Is that really . . .?” and then, convinced it really is, stampede toward him.
He is eminently accessible, rarely turns down a request for an autograph or handshake, even while eating, and will as gladly make a speech for one old lady or two Cub Scouts as for millions on network television. Lest a fan's lifetime dream be spoiled, All is unusually alert for capped lenses or improperly mounted flash cubes. He often seems as boyish and brimming as the old Louisville Lip, wading through crowds with open arms, touching, hugging, kissing, respectful of old people, gentle with babies, sly with pretty girls (foxes), even mellow with the ultrastylish pimps and whores whose swagger and flash once backed him into defensive postures of contempt. I sense All is still more respectful toward whites than blacks, the powerful than the poor, but the gap is not quite as wide as it once was, mainly because he is looser with nonMuslim blacks than he was in the late sixties. As one watches him gain nourishment from crowds, it is hard to remember how somber he was those years, sometimes bitter, always searching for a moral lesson from his legal, marital, social, religious problems. Allah was testing him, he said then. Now, he is champion again: “That's top of the world,” he says. Late one night he qualifies his joy:
“The training is so hard when you really don't have to train. I don't have to be up in the morning. Sign up for a million dollars in the bank. But if I lose I'll have to start getting up to a comeback and get serious. Ken Norton won. Joe Frazier won, and I sacrificed. I was real serious. Real strict. Real slim. The last two rounds I came back cookin'. When things are going my way I have a tendency to say, ‘Aw, I got it made, I don't have to train that hard. I can beat this chump in half condition.’ I enjoy it more when I'm making a comeback, but I'd rather be the way I am now. You never know if you're going to get that chance or not, that chance to come back.”
Flying, we look through the current Ebony magazine. Ali is featured in three separate articles: one about the country's highest‐paid athletes (he is No. 1), another about its most important black leaders (in alphabetical order), and one about the death of Elijah. We talk of that.
“We're in a new phase now, a resurrection,” says Ali. “Elijah taught us to be independent, to clean ourselves up, to be proud and healthy. He stressed the bad things the white man did to us so we could get free and strong. Now we're in this new phase, and his son Wallace is showing us there are good and bad regardless of color, that devil is in the mind and heart, not the skin.”
■
Ali is receiving well‐wishers and petitioners in the stern of a motor home parked outside the Leeds catalogue store. He has just finished a jive‐and‐autograph session inside, a leftover obligation from Saturday night's Orlando benefit, and now he is briefly enervated; at least he is not twitching, jabbing, rolling his head to drain off excess energy. He sits quietly on the long bench under the rear window, polite and impassive, as local blacks pay their respects or press a cause. Local whites, like the Daytona Beach banker who has organized this motorhome trip, and blacks with national reputations, can somehow always get through to Ali on the telephone.
As the motor home inches through the crowd, All points out a black family, the father in a dark suit, the mother in a white dress, the children scrubbed and turned‐out as if for church. They wave decorously, with a proprietary pride, as if this were the royal carriage. “See there,” says Ali. “Muslims. So clean and peaceful, You can tell they're Muslims. Eyes so bright, healthy‐looking, neat hair, respectful children.”
On the highway to Daytona Beach, All moves up front to be interviewed by two local newsmen. He reminds them how he has always been ahead of his time. Didn't he change his name before Kareem Abdul‐Jabbar made it fashionable? Didn't he put down the Vietnam war before the people woke up to what was happening? In the back of the motor home, C. B. Atkins and Howard Bingham doze, and up front the banker and the driver, a Daytona Beach doctor who owns the vehicle, confer about arrangements once they hit town. The newsmen are talking notes furiously as All recites poems, sayings, snatches from such famous lectures of his as “The Heart of Man” and “The Intoxication of Fame” and, of course, “Friendship.”
“One of my sayings says, ‘The man who has no imagination stands on the earth. He has no wings; he cannot fly.’ Understand that? Writers are men of wisdom, that's why I talk to you. See, the average man I can't talk to. Some of the most wisest men in the world are the loneliest men. Nobody else is on their level. I can only talk to professors of colleges, great poets, newspaper writers, somebody who understands knowledge. ‘The man who has no imagination stands on the earth. He has no wings; he cannot fly.’
“You need an imagination to be a writer. You'll write about the man as we went along the highway, right? As he talked to you, as he drank his juice. You're gonna have enough for 10 stories, big hit stories.
“Columbus had imagination. The Wright Brothers had imagination. I have an imagination. Boxers don't have imagination. The way I was talking about ‘Lay on the ropes!’ Imagination!
“The way I say, ‘I am the greatest, he'll fall in eight, go to your TV's.’ That's imagination.
“You getting all this down?”
■
It is evening, a balmy, sweet spring evening in Daytona Beach. The motor home is parked at the edge of a highschool football field. All sticks his head out a side window. “Where the foxes?”
The crowd laughs. Hundreds of men, women, children and foxes are pressing against a wire fence that prevents them from engulfing the motor home.
“Bring me some foxes,” Ali roars.
It is incredibly crowded inside the motor home: Ali, C. B., Howard, Angelo. Angelo's war buddy, the banker, the doctor, the doctor's son, the doctor's daughter, the doctor's daughter's boyfriend, the son of Jake LaMotta, the boss of the son of Jake LaMotta, a writer from New York, the wife of the writer from New York, Solomon McTier, Lipsyte . . .
The door clicks open and three pretty young black women wearing Ali T‐shirts‐‐undeniably foxes—climb into the motor home and are woven through bodies toward All in the stern. I squeeze into a momentary vacuum and pop outside. The air is delicious. I make my way to the ring set up in the middle of the football field and wait for Ali to pick his fox, dress for the exhibition bout, and come out to rescue the Halifax Boys' Club from ruin.
All boxes Levi and he boxes John L. Another good benefit show. When it's over, he grabs the mike. “Very unusual. never before in history rias a heavyweight champion. two weeks before a fight, come out with no headgear before a crowd so small and tickets so cheap.” The crowd, perhaps 3,000, applauds its claim to fame. “I admire your stadium, I like your style, but the equipment's so cheap. I won't be back for a while.” The crowd cheers wildly.
And then the police are rushing Ali out of the ring. The darkness beyond the stands suddenly blazes with headlights, cars explode and screech into the night. I hear someone calling, “Lipsyte . . Lipsyte .” It is Angelo, the scoutmaster, packing the troop into a caravan of volunteered station wagons, compacts and a Volkswagen for the ride to the airport and a midnight flight to Miami. But I stick with C. B., a seasoned traveler who finds us places in the back of a Cadillac. I check out the cars before we pull out—everyone is accounted for except the doctor‐driver, the champion and one of the foxes. The motor home swings out and the caravan follows.
I am the only member of the troop staying in Daytona Beach—I will fly back to New York from here in the morning—but I decline C. B.'s suggestion that I be taken to my motel. I have to see Ali to the airport, out of my reportorial jurisdiction before I can sleep. Most of the cars peel off en route: There is plenty of time for a late supper before the flight. But the Caddy follows the motor home, which turns off the main airport road and stops in a dark and quiet spot on far side of the terminal.
The doctor comes out shaking his head.
I ask, “What's going on in there?”
“I didn't look.”
I stroll over. Is the motor home jiggling ever so slightly, jouncing almost imperceptibly? Imagination. You need it to be a writer. Goodnight, king of all kings, lonely man of wisdom, champion of the world, And thanks again. It's true. You always take care of me. When I'm around you. I always got something to write about. Big hit stories. ■
By ROBERT LIPSYTE JUNE 29, 1975
The black stick fingers of Luis Sarria play over the sweat‐slick brown flesh of Muhammad Ali. The heavyweight champion is on his stomach on a rubbing table‐ in a small dressing room of the Fifth Street Gym in Miami Beach. Eight men, press, fans, friends, stand against the peeling gray walls to give Sarria elbow room. The old trainer's fingers knead the muscles of Ali's thighs, then walk up to his waist and sink in. The flesh here is still firm, but plumpish. All is 33. Sarria prods and strokes. He knows Ali's body better than his own: He has been over every inch, massaging, sponging, drying, slathering Vaseline on the face and head and shoulders before a sparring session, holding the ankles for sit‐ups afterwards, rubbing out kinks and stretching muscles for 15 years now, since 1960. And I have watched Sarria handle this body for more than 11 years now, since Feb. 18, 1964, when I stood in this very same room and wrote down everything I saw and heard in a spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen, just as I am doing now. Then, Cassius Clay called himself “the doublegreatest.” Since then, he says, he has come to realize that Allah is the greatest. Now, Ali modestly refers to himself as “the king of all kings.”
Then, lying on the rubbing table, he told the sportswriters around him that his promotion of the coming Liston fight had given us “something to write about” and had made “your papers let you come down to Miami Beach where it's warm.” The other sportswriters in the room had bristled at that, as if this kid fighter was trying to usurp and manipulate the Power of the Press, but I had laughed because I understood that was exactly what he was trying to do, and succeeding. When I laughed, he winked at me, and we have more or less understood each other ever since.
Now, on April 28, 1975, the dressing‐room door opens, and a middle‐aged man in a dark suit steps in, hesitantly. He stares at Ali's large, rounded rump, and clears his throat.
“Champ, I'm a Federal court officer and I've got some papers for you.”
Ali turns over on his back and covers his groin with a towel. “I ain't taking them.”
The court officer, startled, looks around for a friendly face, and finding none loses his poise. The room is small, oppressive, and the door bangs shut as a hard‐faced old boxer slides in behind the court officer, who chokes out a laugh. “It's only for $20‐million, champ.”
Ali smiles and reaches for the papers.
The court officer relaxes; I think I can hear the air sigh out of him. He whispers confidentially,“I didn't want to give it to you out there in public, champ.”
“That's O.K.; the press is here. The New York Times.” All passes the papers to me and raises himself up on an elbow to watch me unfold them, legal notice of the libel suit instituted by Anthony Perez Jr., the referee of the Chuck Wepner fight, whom All had called, among other things, a “dirty dog.”
I make some notes from the legal papers, then return them to Ali, who says, “See how I take care of you, Bob? When you're around me you always got something to write about.”
■
Muhammad Ali will defend his title tomorrow night against Joe Bugner in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and then he is scheduled to go on to China at the personal invitation of Chairman Mao. He has always given us something to write about, often to put on the front pages and sell papers. He beat Sonny Liston, which seemed incredible at the time. He declared himself a student of Malcolm X and a fol lower of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, an unimaginable act for a young athlete about to receive a champion's windfall of record, movie and endorsement contracts; most were withdrawn, most of the rest he refused because they conflicted with variovs tenets of his sect. He beat Floyd Patterson in cruel and humiliating fashion, alienating Liberal America, and he refused to be drafted, alienating Patriotic America. For three and a half years, from the spring of 1967 to the fall of 1970, he was not permitted a license to fight, in violation of his constitutional rights, as it turned out, and he supported himself as a college‐campus speaker. He was immensely popular. He not only made a lot of money and built a new constituency among those who identified with him because he was young or black or antiwar or anti‐Establishment, but he also absorbed an education.
In 1971 he was beaten by Joe Frazier in The Fight, and the Supreme Court dismissed the draftevasion charges against him. He was a free man, but without a title, without influence, a clown, it seemed. I left active sportswriting in the fall of 1971, and followed Ali in the papers. Once out of his magical force field, I forgot that all things were possible. When he signed to challenge for George Foreman's title in Zaire, in the fall of 1974, I not only believed he would lose, but thought he might be hurt. Clay vs. Liston again. Watching the Foreman fight on film stirred old juices in me. Ali had looked mythic in victory, as Bundini, his personal poet and confidence man, had predicted “God set it up this way. This is the closing of the book. The king gained his throne by killing a monster, and the king will regain his throne by killing a bigger monster. This is the closing of the book.”
I had my own book to close, and in the spring of 1975 I flew to Orlando, Fla., where Ali was scheduled to box a benefit for a local school. That afternoon, for $15,000, he appeared in Toronto with Howard Cosell on ABC‐TV's Foreman vs. Five Opponents grotesquerie, which I watched with Angelo Dundee, his trainer since 1960.
“You know, he's still a nice kid,” Angelo said of Ali. “The easiest fighter I ever had. Unspoiled from the beginning. He changed around the whole charisma of boxing, but he's still the nice kid I used to give a deuce to stay loose.”
“Why is that?”.
“Because he likes boxing. That's the key. He likes the sport. You know, the nicest times we have is after road work, 5:30, 6 o'clock in the morning, that serene time after he's finished running, when we can just sit around and talk boxing.”
Ali, of course, rarely gets up early to run; in fact, his training seems erratic. But Angelo has not survived changes in Ali's management and promotion and religion by leaking secrets to the press. On the way to the Orlando Sports Stadium, Angelo said: “Face it, on important things the guy stands alone. I can't fight for him, and I can't — for him.” One big brown eye winked. “Course, if I had a choice, I'd rather ‐ for him.”
■
The dressing‐room door bangs open to admit the king of all kings.
“This jet age is something else,” says he.
He barely acknowledges the men in the room. He immediately strips. We scrutinize him with unself‐conscious interest. Boxers are used to being stared at naked. Boxers are intensely absorbed their bodies, yet discuss them with a curious detach. ment, like drivers talking about their race cars. Ultimately, defeat will be blamed on a failure of the machine‐body to respond to the demands of the driver‐brain. Muhammad's body is the most superb machine any of us have ever seen, and after four years I am surprised anew how big he is, how wide‐shouldered, thick through the chest and thighs. Because his proportions are so perfect, he seems smaller and slighter on television and in still photographs.
He dresses briskly, efficiently. How many thousands of times has he stepped into his jockstrap, one, two, slipped on white socks, laced up his high white boxing shoes, pulled on his leather‐ and‐metal protective harness, pulled on white trunks? He stands like a race horse, quietly, with nostrils flared as Angelo smears him with Vaseline, then snorts and chuffs as he warms up, shadow‐boxing and running in place. Waves of body heat ripple off him and cook the small room. A local reporter asks him if he thinks Foreman's performance this afternoon will hurt boxing.
“Boxing never die,” he says, dancing from foot to foot, bobbing, snapping his head back and forth. “Only need two people, and people always be fighting, fussing.
“Wrestling is fake. I've got boxers now acting like wrestlers, but the reality is there. George Foreman supposed to be fighting but he's looking around to talk to me. It's like the Christian spirit around the world. You could be somewhere on a Sunday where they don't practice Christianity, and all the stores are open, but you feel different because you know it's Sunday. The spirit of Muhammad All is there in boxing, if I'm not in the ring.”
Newsmen look at each other, slightly bewildered. One of them asks if he believes in Jesus.
“I can't believe a woman had a baby without a man.”
It does not seem like a promising avenue, and the tam veers. Ali's autobiography is scheduled for publication in the fall. He is going to star in a movie of his life. He stops warming up to flash coming attractions.
“This movie will tell people things they never knew.
“Why I don't have my Olympic gold medal today.
“About the shoot‐out in Arkansas during my exile.
“Nine‐teen‐fif‐tee‐nine. My first woman.
“How I rode with a motorcycle gang for six weeks. With a mask on.
“Things I stole.
“The money I turned down. Companies will be revealed.
“My first wife, how we broke up, the fight we had the night before the Liston fight.
“What happened in the desert in Arabia.
“What happened in the White House with President Ford, real strange.”
Ali looks at me for the first time. “Things you don't know nothing about, Lipsyte.” As if I had never been away.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Have to see the movie to find out. We got a orchestra, hit songs, no ‘Superfly,’ it's going to be big, like ‘Godfather.’ ‘The Magnificent Seven.’ They could make 10 films from my life.”
The dressing‐room door opens. “Ready, champ?”
“The master is ready.” He strides out quickly into the darkened indoor arena. Dozens of small boys lead him toward the lighted ring, crying, “Ahhhh‐lee, Ahhh‐lee,” and when their chant falters he picks it up and whips them into a frenzied “Al‐lee, Al‐lee, Al‐lee,” until the crowd stands and sends it echoing through the arena, “AL‐LEE, AL‐LEE, AL‐LEE.” He mounts the ring as if it were a throne.
Tonight he is fighting for the Orlando School of Black Performing Arts. Like so many of his benefits, there is an impromptu feel to the event, which has been amateurishly organized and promoted. The school director's wife, who attended high school with Ali in Louisville, recently called him to beg that he save the school from imminent ruin. That was all he needed to hear. He is a soft touch for certain kinds of appeals, especially ones in which he flies to the rescue of children.
Even for free, perhaps especially for free, Ali gives a good show. First, he boxes three rounds with Levi Forte, a long‐time sparring partner and Fontainebleau bell captain. He dances, prances, spins into the Ali Shuffle, a perennial crowd pleaser, and cowers on the ropes, a tactic invented for Foreman and honed in title defenses against Wepner and Ron Lyle, He would later call it the Rope‐a‐Dope. At the end of the third round he lets Levi hump him en the seat of his trunks.
While he boxes with John L. Johnson, Angelo flinches and winces in the corner. Ali is boxing without headgear. At least he is wearing a protective belt—Ali has been known to leave it in the dressing room because it spoiled the line of his figure.
Ali commandeers the ring mike. “It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am. You could be the world's best garbage man, the world's best model, it don't matter what you do if you're the best.
“Why, I'm so fast I could hit you before God gets the news. I'm so fast I hit the light switch in my room and jump into bed before my room goes dark. Now, I'm gong to show you how fast I am.”
He calls into the ring Solomon McTier, a local heavyweight who once trained with him. “Put up your hand.” He pumps six jabs into McTier's palm, then tells the crowd, “I can throw six punches before you count one, two. That's how fast I am. Now, let's hear you count one, two.”
He builds them skillfully. From each corner of the ring he signals, “One, two,” until the crowd is up and alive, laughing and hopping. Now he raises his hand for silence. The crowd holds its breath as he steps to the center of the ring and cocks his fist in front of McTier's palm.
“Now you better watch real careful. So fast you might miss it.” His eyes are dancing. “Ready? ... Go.”
“ONE, TWO.”
He has not moved a muscle. “Want me to do it again? You missed it. You must of blinked.”
He leaves them laughing.
■
We board a I:58 A.M. flight to Miami. Ali flops into the first seat in the first‐class cabin and motions me to sit beside him. I block the stewardesses' view and show him my economy‐class ticket.
“Don't matter,” he says impatiently. “You with the champ.”
And so I am. The ticket is never checked. Ali orders coffee, empties in six packets of sugar and gulps it down.
“You ever hear my lecture on Friendship?”
“No.”
“It's not so heavy as my lecture on The Heart of Man, but it's real good.” He opens a slim black attaché case on his lap, and lifts out a thick, dog‐eared deck of white 5‐by‐7 index cards. The lecture is written out in black script, and when I lean over to read it he pulls the deck away. “I'll say it slow so you can write it down.”
“I've got a tape recorder with me.”
“That's good. Then you can concentrate on listening.”
My mike hand is steady but my mind wanders during the next half hour, no mean feat, when Muhammad Ali is delivering, at concert‐hall force, his lecture on Friendship a foot from my ear.
“Whenever the thought of self‐interest creeps in, that means a destruction of friendship. Every little thought of profiting by it means destruction. This is what I'm doing, things I'm doing today. It can never develop into a real friendship. It can only develop into a business relationship. It will last as long as the business relationship lasts. Like me and Cosell. I lose. he goes to somebody else.”
This may not be entirely fair to Cosell, the stanchest public advocate of Ali's constitutional rights, but it's their relationship, not mine. While All speaks to my microphone, I check out the traveling troupe. Angelo and the two sparring partners. C.B. Atkins, the booking agent, who was preoccupied that week with the final arrangements for tomorrow's fight in Kuala Lumpur against Bugner. Howard Bingham, Mi's photographersidokick‐roadie, and Howard's wife. Albert P. Griffin, a Philadelphia lawyer who later told me that Ali has something in the neighborhood of $5‐million invested, mostly in commercial property. A tall, beautiful young woman in an orange dress. All except Angelo are black, none are Muslims; others have observed that All seems to be phasing out many of his Muslim companions and his white business advisers. Don King, his main promoter now, is black, and Ali's support of the campaign for a new trial for Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, the former mid dleweight contender imprisoned for murder, would seem to indicate his orientation toward a higher level of economic and social involvement. King, a former numbers banker who served time for manslaughter, operates with greater Hamboyance and daring than the corporation lawyers who once cooked up deals for Ali in the free‐for‐all of boxing promotions. Of course, King has a more salable product and a wider territory and has been able to persuade Third World leaders with a country to promote that a few million dollars is cheap enough for the international prestige and headlines of an Ali extravaganza.
Carter's case has been tinged with racism from the start, and elements of it parallel Ali's own collision with American justice. Yet there are those Who feel that Ali's final victory has been morally a hollow one; he is now free to endorse the deoderants for which he was once too “controversial.” Perhaps such critics had seen him as a “pure” hero of their own fantasies.
This enlargement of Ali as a world figure, as a social activist, as a salesman, does not seem to conflict with his major role Within the Nation of Islam as its Minister at Large and wealthiest patron.
“What you think?”
With a start I realize the lecture is over. I blurt out the first word that comes to mind and seems appropriate. “Heavy.”
“No, it's not heavy at all. It's simple. People understand it right away. I'm going to give it this afternoon at the mosque.”
“You still preaching?”
“We say ministering.”
The captain announces the start of our descent toward the Miami airport and Ali looks out his window into the light‐pricked early morning darkness. “We're all like little ants. God sees all these little ants, millions of them, and he can't answer all the prayers and bless every one of them. But he sees one ant with a little influence that the other ants will follow. Then he might give that one ant some special powers.
“I'm like a little ant. Lots of other little ants know me, follow me. So God gives me some extra power.
“I pray to Allah before a fight, let me win tonight so I can keep representing my people. Let me win tonight so I can keep walking through the streets helping my people. God, let me fight for YOU.
“God, with this title I can do it.
“NO ONE CAN WHIP ME AS LONG AS I FEEL THIS WAY.”
“But you've lost fights,” I say. “How come? Was it a lack of sufficient faith?”
“It was a punishment. Things I did, playin' too much, didn't train right.”
“What things did you do?”
“Nobody's business but me and Allah,” he says firmly.
At the airport, the tall, beautiful young woman in the orange dress is dismissed by Ali with a curt “I'll call you.” Cabs roar up. Ali yells to the others, “I'm going with the reporter,” and we both climb into the rear of a cab. John L. gets into the front, turns, sees us, apologizes and starts to get out, but Ali invites him to stay. We are going to the Fontainebleau, John L., a few miles further the Beach.
“You know why I came down here to train?”
“As a matter of fact, I wondered why. You've got some setup in Pennsylvania.”
“Got $300,000 in that camp. And everybody on me up there, day and night, got to give 'em money, got to worry about their problems. Had to get away from that.—'em. Got to take care of my own family, my brother's family. I got $1.5‐million for the Wepner fight and I only cleared $240,000. I'm getting one million for Lyle, I'll clear $300,000. Just from saving money on all my helpers.—'em.
“I can use that extra money to buy schoolbuses for children. Sewing machines for women; they can save money making their own clothes. Airconditioning for the mosque in Miami. If I'm going to give my money away, I'll do it the way I want.
“Can't drive but one car at a time. I eat only one meal a day. Clothes. You see don't care about clothes. When I first came down here I saw this millionaire, I wondered how he could wear such cheap suits and drive a Chevvy. Now I understand. He knew he got it.
“Now, I know I got it. Look at these shoes, only one's I got and they need a shine. These pants, too big on me so that's why I roll the waist. This jacket I took off Howard Cosell this afternoon. No tie. I know I got it.”
He points to John L. in the front seat. John L. is staring straight ahead. “Now him. I gave him a hundreddollar bill and he's happy. Hundred‐dollar bill make him happy: That's why he's got to wear that special suit and those high‐heel shoes.”
As the cab pulls into the Fontainebleau driveway Ali turns his pockets inside out for money. He finds three single dollar bills which he gives to John L. to pay for the last leg of his ride home. He says to me, “You got five?”
“I do.” The fare is twice that, and I pay it as the king of all kings, the man who knows he's got it, waves good morning and bounces up the steps of the hotel where his wife and the youngest of his four children are waiting.
■
Another plane, taxiing for take‐off. I notice his seat belt is open and I remind him to buckle it.
“Don't need to,” he says.
“Why?”
“Nothing happen to me.”
“How come?”
“I'm under divine protection.”
“In that case, Muhammad,” I say, “would you mind if I unbuckle my belt, too, and just hold your hand till we get to Orlando?”
All laughs. He's come a long way. His religion, which he once described as fitting the American black man like a glove, seems to rest far more lightly and comfortably on him now than it did in the late sixties when he spewed forth Muslim dogma in undigested chunks. He has absorbed his religion, blended it into his own style, packaged it for easier listening. He is firm enough in his convictions to laugh patronizingly at a nonbeliever, at least a white nonbeliever. Once, he might have bridled at my lame joke. Had I dared make it.
There is much more about him now of the old Cassius Clay and the early Muhammad All before his title was stolen. He is making predictions again, spouting rhyme, taking enormous pleasure in staging little surprise parties for the world with himself as guest of honor and gift. Nothing seems to delight him more than suddenly to appear —on a downtown street, in a residential neighborhood (white or black), in a store, arena, restaurant, hotel lobby —and watch people stop . . . turn . . . double take . . . mouth, “Is that really . . .?” and then, convinced it really is, stampede toward him.
He is eminently accessible, rarely turns down a request for an autograph or handshake, even while eating, and will as gladly make a speech for one old lady or two Cub Scouts as for millions on network television. Lest a fan's lifetime dream be spoiled, All is unusually alert for capped lenses or improperly mounted flash cubes. He often seems as boyish and brimming as the old Louisville Lip, wading through crowds with open arms, touching, hugging, kissing, respectful of old people, gentle with babies, sly with pretty girls (foxes), even mellow with the ultrastylish pimps and whores whose swagger and flash once backed him into defensive postures of contempt. I sense All is still more respectful toward whites than blacks, the powerful than the poor, but the gap is not quite as wide as it once was, mainly because he is looser with nonMuslim blacks than he was in the late sixties. As one watches him gain nourishment from crowds, it is hard to remember how somber he was those years, sometimes bitter, always searching for a moral lesson from his legal, marital, social, religious problems. Allah was testing him, he said then. Now, he is champion again: “That's top of the world,” he says. Late one night he qualifies his joy:
“The training is so hard when you really don't have to train. I don't have to be up in the morning. Sign up for a million dollars in the bank. But if I lose I'll have to start getting up to a comeback and get serious. Ken Norton won. Joe Frazier won, and I sacrificed. I was real serious. Real strict. Real slim. The last two rounds I came back cookin'. When things are going my way I have a tendency to say, ‘Aw, I got it made, I don't have to train that hard. I can beat this chump in half condition.’ I enjoy it more when I'm making a comeback, but I'd rather be the way I am now. You never know if you're going to get that chance or not, that chance to come back.”
Flying, we look through the current Ebony magazine. Ali is featured in three separate articles: one about the country's highest‐paid athletes (he is No. 1), another about its most important black leaders (in alphabetical order), and one about the death of Elijah. We talk of that.
“We're in a new phase now, a resurrection,” says Ali. “Elijah taught us to be independent, to clean ourselves up, to be proud and healthy. He stressed the bad things the white man did to us so we could get free and strong. Now we're in this new phase, and his son Wallace is showing us there are good and bad regardless of color, that devil is in the mind and heart, not the skin.”
■
Ali is receiving well‐wishers and petitioners in the stern of a motor home parked outside the Leeds catalogue store. He has just finished a jive‐and‐autograph session inside, a leftover obligation from Saturday night's Orlando benefit, and now he is briefly enervated; at least he is not twitching, jabbing, rolling his head to drain off excess energy. He sits quietly on the long bench under the rear window, polite and impassive, as local blacks pay their respects or press a cause. Local whites, like the Daytona Beach banker who has organized this motorhome trip, and blacks with national reputations, can somehow always get through to Ali on the telephone.
As the motor home inches through the crowd, All points out a black family, the father in a dark suit, the mother in a white dress, the children scrubbed and turned‐out as if for church. They wave decorously, with a proprietary pride, as if this were the royal carriage. “See there,” says Ali. “Muslims. So clean and peaceful, You can tell they're Muslims. Eyes so bright, healthy‐looking, neat hair, respectful children.”
On the highway to Daytona Beach, All moves up front to be interviewed by two local newsmen. He reminds them how he has always been ahead of his time. Didn't he change his name before Kareem Abdul‐Jabbar made it fashionable? Didn't he put down the Vietnam war before the people woke up to what was happening? In the back of the motor home, C. B. Atkins and Howard Bingham doze, and up front the banker and the driver, a Daytona Beach doctor who owns the vehicle, confer about arrangements once they hit town. The newsmen are talking notes furiously as All recites poems, sayings, snatches from such famous lectures of his as “The Heart of Man” and “The Intoxication of Fame” and, of course, “Friendship.”
“One of my sayings says, ‘The man who has no imagination stands on the earth. He has no wings; he cannot fly.’ Understand that? Writers are men of wisdom, that's why I talk to you. See, the average man I can't talk to. Some of the most wisest men in the world are the loneliest men. Nobody else is on their level. I can only talk to professors of colleges, great poets, newspaper writers, somebody who understands knowledge. ‘The man who has no imagination stands on the earth. He has no wings; he cannot fly.’
“You need an imagination to be a writer. You'll write about the man as we went along the highway, right? As he talked to you, as he drank his juice. You're gonna have enough for 10 stories, big hit stories.
“Columbus had imagination. The Wright Brothers had imagination. I have an imagination. Boxers don't have imagination. The way I was talking about ‘Lay on the ropes!’ Imagination!
“The way I say, ‘I am the greatest, he'll fall in eight, go to your TV's.’ That's imagination.
“You getting all this down?”
■
It is evening, a balmy, sweet spring evening in Daytona Beach. The motor home is parked at the edge of a highschool football field. All sticks his head out a side window. “Where the foxes?”
The crowd laughs. Hundreds of men, women, children and foxes are pressing against a wire fence that prevents them from engulfing the motor home.
“Bring me some foxes,” Ali roars.
It is incredibly crowded inside the motor home: Ali, C. B., Howard, Angelo. Angelo's war buddy, the banker, the doctor, the doctor's son, the doctor's daughter, the doctor's daughter's boyfriend, the son of Jake LaMotta, the boss of the son of Jake LaMotta, a writer from New York, the wife of the writer from New York, Solomon McTier, Lipsyte . . .
The door clicks open and three pretty young black women wearing Ali T‐shirts‐‐undeniably foxes—climb into the motor home and are woven through bodies toward All in the stern. I squeeze into a momentary vacuum and pop outside. The air is delicious. I make my way to the ring set up in the middle of the football field and wait for Ali to pick his fox, dress for the exhibition bout, and come out to rescue the Halifax Boys' Club from ruin.
All boxes Levi and he boxes John L. Another good benefit show. When it's over, he grabs the mike. “Very unusual. never before in history rias a heavyweight champion. two weeks before a fight, come out with no headgear before a crowd so small and tickets so cheap.” The crowd, perhaps 3,000, applauds its claim to fame. “I admire your stadium, I like your style, but the equipment's so cheap. I won't be back for a while.” The crowd cheers wildly.
And then the police are rushing Ali out of the ring. The darkness beyond the stands suddenly blazes with headlights, cars explode and screech into the night. I hear someone calling, “Lipsyte . . Lipsyte .” It is Angelo, the scoutmaster, packing the troop into a caravan of volunteered station wagons, compacts and a Volkswagen for the ride to the airport and a midnight flight to Miami. But I stick with C. B., a seasoned traveler who finds us places in the back of a Cadillac. I check out the cars before we pull out—everyone is accounted for except the doctor‐driver, the champion and one of the foxes. The motor home swings out and the caravan follows.
I am the only member of the troop staying in Daytona Beach—I will fly back to New York from here in the morning—but I decline C. B.'s suggestion that I be taken to my motel. I have to see Ali to the airport, out of my reportorial jurisdiction before I can sleep. Most of the cars peel off en route: There is plenty of time for a late supper before the flight. But the Caddy follows the motor home, which turns off the main airport road and stops in a dark and quiet spot on far side of the terminal.
The doctor comes out shaking his head.
I ask, “What's going on in there?”
“I didn't look.”
I stroll over. Is the motor home jiggling ever so slightly, jouncing almost imperceptibly? Imagination. You need it to be a writer. Goodnight, king of all kings, lonely man of wisdom, champion of the world, And thanks again. It's true. You always take care of me. When I'm around you. I always got something to write about. Big hit stories. ■
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