Muhammed Ali was ‘The Greatest’
Hillary Clinton is a free woman.
Republicans were hoping otherwise.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee had even declared she’d be in prison pinstripes before the Democratic National Convention.
That won’t happen.
Instead, Republicans in Congress are thinking up new ways to disqualify Clinton.
I’m yawning while I write this.
I have better things to think about.
Muhammad Ali.
While Clinton and Donald Trump were jockeying for daily headlines last month, Mr. Ali’s death meant the battle for the presidency got relegated to afterthoughts.
He died on June 3. The following morning, I wrote on my Facebook page, “To me, the REAL Superman died last night.”
I really meant that.
He’d brashly catapulted himself onto the American landscape when I was in my early teens.
My father, though, didn’t like Cassius Clay, and he liked Muhammad Ali even less.
He’d refer to him as the “Louisville Lip,” with a sneer in his voice.
Joe Louis had been my father’s “Superman.”
Like most black athletes of my father’s generation, Louis had been stoic, humble and, sadly, humorless.
This loud-mouthed kid from Louisville was none of those things.
He always had something to say, sometimes controversial – and often funny.
A black man with strong opinions? For personal reasons, I kinda like that.
Besides, he always managed to back up his bravado with decisive knockouts.
I later discovered that my father had, like many Americans, grown to appreciate Mr. Ali.
It was on the night of March 24, 1975.
That night, Ali defended his Heavyweight Championship against Chuck Wepner.
I found my father huddled in his breakfast room, with the fight blaring on his radio.
He was cheering wildly for the former “Louisville Lip.”
“I thought you didn’t like him?” I asked my father.
“I do now,” he replied. Then he added, “He’s the GREATEST, you know.”
Oh, I certainly understand that many people will never consider him to have truly been the “The Greatest.”
My father did. That’s all that matters.
Of course, I’d always thought Mr. Ali was “The Greatest.” I didn’t need to be convinced of that.
Especially on the night of March 7, 1987. That night I had a brief encounter with Mr. Ali.
I’d been sent by “Entertainment Tonight” to cover the post-fight after party of the Mike Tyson vs. James “Bonecrusher” Smith Heavyweight Championship fight in Las Vegas.
There were sure to be lots of celebrities to interview at that event.
I was surprised to discover one of the first celebrities to enter the room was Muhammad Ali.
We approached him, to get his thoughts about the dull fight that had preceded that party.
He refused.
The ravages of Parkinson disease had robbed him of his ability to speak clearly. He knew that an interview would’ve been troublesome for him, and difficult to understand for everybody else.
But I hardly had time to become disappointed, before he pulled out a magic trick, and performed it for our camera.
There I was, standing two feet away from “The Greatest,” and he communicated to me, the very best way he could.
I was as speechless as he had been forced to be.
That brings me to last week.
On July 4, my wife and I were in her hometown in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.
She’d told me that when she was too young to fully know much about Muhammad Ali, that he’d trained in the area.
So, we decided to find his training compound, which is only a few miles from where she grew up.
There it was.
The cabins, the Mosque, the large cabin that was used for his complete training regimen and large boulders with the names of previous heavyweight champions painted on them – are still standing, as if they’re some kind of shrine.
While there, we encountered two women from Lancaster, Pa.
They told us that as children, they had pictures taken of them sitting on Ali’s lap at that camp.
They returned to rekindle those memories, because they, too, had always thought of him as being “The Greatest.”
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net