Editor's note: This account of Robert Lipsyte's experiences with Muhammad Ali was originally published in 2006.
For more of Lipsyte's first-hand account of life with Ali, click below.
Robert Lipsyte was 25, recently spat out of college, graduate school and the Army, serving as the Noon Goon (general assignment) and night rewrite reporter in the New York Times sports department when he got the assignment to cover Sonny Liston's defense of his title against Cassius Clay. It simply wasn't worth the time of a seasoned wordslinger. That decision, says Lipsyte, was the key moment of his career. By the time he turned 29, he became the youngest sports columnist in Times' history, and he went on to a distinguished career in television, as a Young Adult novelist and as a sports and city columnist at the Times where he returned in 1991. Lipsyte's personal affection for Ali is matched by his professional gratitude. Sometimes he thinks that if the real boxing writer had claimed his rightful assignment, Lipsyte would still be the Noon Goon. On the 35th anniversary of the "Fight of the Century" -- the first of Ali's three bouts with Joe Frazier -- Lipsyte reflects on 11 encounters he had with The Greatest that shaped both of their lives.
Chicago, 1967
Wyatt Earp refuses to draw
"All a man has got to show for his time here on earth is what kind of name he had. Jesus. Columbus. Daniel Boone." He left a space for me to fill in his name.
I didn't laugh, it was good copy after all, but I was also thinking about Ali as a narcissist with the emotional well of a 12-year-old, plus a touch of megalomania.
Then again, he was scheduled to be drafted in two days. It was clear that he would refuse and that he was ready to go to jail.
Meanwhile, the mood of the country over the Vietnam War was shifting. More people realized we were stuck in a terrible mistake. Also, more people were coming to believe that Ali was sincere, that he was standing up for principles.
Could you be a wise man and fool at the same time?
As we sat in a coffee shop watching Lake Michigan roil beneath an April storm, he said, "Now take Wyatt Earp."
It took me a moment to dial into the legendary Western lawman who had cleaned up Wichita and Tombstone a century earlier. He'd recently been reborn in a TV series.
"Who would have told him when he was fighting crooks and standing up for principles that there'd be a television show about him? That kids on the street would say, 'I'm Wyatt Earp. Reach!'"
San Francisco, 1968
Another contact high
I'd been up all night with a stomachache after interviewing Bozo Miller, the world's champion speed eater, and now I was foraging on Van Ness Street for toast and tea. I heard a car screech to the curb behind me, and someone shouted, "Get him. Don't let him get away."
I turned in time to see two big men jump out of a blue Oldsmobile. I started to run, but all those club sandwiches weighed me down. The car lurched forward and a third man, bigger than the others, leaped out and grabbed me.
"You fast and you pretty," Ali said, "but if you thought you could get away from me, you would apologize."
He tucked me into the back of the car, and it took off. I was writing the Sports of the Times column three times a week by then, and I had assigned myself to lend punditry to the fight between Jimmy Ellis, Ali's old sparring partner, and Jerry Quarry, with whom he would have a date with destiny in two years. It was all part of the desperate scramble to breathe life back into boxing, post-Ali.
Ali was in the Bay Area to drum up business for local mosques. He was on his way to speak at an anti-war rally at Civic Center Plaza.
With him were two unusually jolly Muslim officials and a Chicago booking agent who seemed morose over a free appearance before a crowd of more than 12,000. At the Plaza, we sat in the car for a long time, sniffing the marijuana smoke drifting in. Ali pretended to get high. The booking agent said, "I'll get you on right away, so you don't have to wait."
"No," Ali said, "I'll wait for my time."
One of the Muslims laughed harshly. "Muhammad Ali, you'll wait for your time? The Man is going to see you get time, time in jail."
Ali shrugged and watched several white balloons float up into a heartbreakingly blue sky. "You think they stay up there forever, just hanging up there in the sky till a plane hits them, or you think they got to come down again?"
"What do you mean?" I said, fishing for that profound metaphor from the holy child, pen poised like a fishing rod.
"Air pressure," one of the Muslims said. "Gets thinner on the outside, the balloon pops out."
"Oh, yeah," said Ali, satisfied. So much for metaphor. By the time Ali mounted the stage, the thousands sprawled on the warm concrete below had heard from draft-card burners, radical divas and a rock band, and cheered for a few naked strollers. They were in too good a mood to let Ali's 25-minute lecture bring them down. They just smiled at the sun in that sweetly dopey '60s way as he read from his giant index cards, mostly parables from the Koran as interpreted by the Honorable Elijah. When he told the crowd that if black is to be truly beautiful, it can't be diluted by white blood, several interracial couples stood up, booed and walked away.
It had been only a year since Ali refused to be drafted, and he was still feeling his way on the speaking circuit. Later on, he would entertainingly integrate boxing tales, Muslim dogma and racial rhetoric, but now he was simply boring. It was amazing how he improved during the three years of his exile from the ring. He lost millions of dollars in purses and millions more in endorsements, but he never lost his enthusiasm for whatever he was doing at the moment.
Back in the car, Ali played back his speech on a tape recorder, pausing it to make changes on the index cards. He was bringing the same methodical discipline and craft to speechmaking that he had to boxing.
"You have to modify the speech for a radical audience," the booking agent said.
"I was too strong for them," Ali said. "They couldn't take it."
Later, back at his hotel, I had what was my first and last real conversation with him. Almost all of our 40-odd years of interaction have consisted of Q-and-A or monologues (his) or permitted eavesdropping (mine). But these were just two guys whose wives were in the eighth month of pregnancy with their first child. We talked about living with swollen, expectant women, with wondering about what the kid would be like, with the wonder of it all.
Ali had a complaint. "Takes so long," he said.
Daytona, 1975
King of all kings
My road trip began in Miami Beach, where a federal officer marched into the Fifth Street Gym while Ali was getting a rubdown and handed him a subpoena in a libel suit he eventually won. Without looking at the subpoena, Ali handed it to me and said, "See how I take care of you, Bob? When you're with me, you always got something to write about."
The road trip ended a week later on a high school football field near Daytona Beach. He had just finished a joke-a-poke exhibition match for charity and now he was back in the motor home he used as a dressing room, changing clothes while his bodyguard shooed everybody out, Jake LaMotta, Angelo Dundee, me, everybody except three foxes he had picked out of the crowd. Then two of the foxes left, and Ali grinned at us as he closed the door behind them.
I watched for a while, until the motor home began to jiggle on its springs. The champ was floating and stinging. "Don't write about this," said Angelo, and one of the press agents added, "Not if you ever want to interview him again."
At that moment, I didn't much care. Soon after Joe Frazier defeated Ali in The Fight in 1971, I quit the Sports of the Times column to write novels and movies. While I missed out on going to The Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila, there wasn't much else I missed about the grind of daily journalism. I could keep up with Ali with occasional freelance pieces, like this one for the Times Sunday Magazine. During the week, there had been a number of mysterious women in hotel rooms and foxes pulled out of crowds that I was supposed to forget about. If I had been a boxing beat writer for a paper or magazine that really cared, I probably would have forgotten about them. But it's easier to remember when you don't have to go back every day, and when losing access just meant you'd have to find something else.
So I could stand there, thinking freely about how I would write it. I thought about the scene in "Madame Bovary" when Emma and Leon did it in a carriage that jiggled on its springs. Could I steal from Flaubert? Ultimately, I didn't, but I wrote enough so I would never be able to interview him again. Too bad. Whenever I was with him, I had something to write about, usually in a warm city.
The Times titled the piece, "King of All Kings."
Miami, 1976
Hannibal the heterosexual
The first thing Ali said when he saw me again was, "King of all Kings, right!" Then he invited me to come listen some more.
"Nat Turner and Wyatt Earp," he said dreamily, "they was dead a hundred years before their pictures was made. And, of course, they didn't get to play themselves."
He was lounging on a couch in the stern of another motor home, dressed for a morning run in a black sweat suit and black Army boots. But he was also wearing makeup for his title role in his auto-flick, "The Greatest." I was writing about this for the Times' Arts & Leisure section.
"After this picture, I'm going to play Hannibal, hundreds of elephants," he said. "I got to have roles equivalent to my life. This face" -- he sat up and touched it reverentially -- "is worth billions. My roles have always got to be No. 1. I can't be the boy in the kitchen. Some big football star plays the waiter in the movie, while some homosexual gets the lead role."
I probably should have known better, but it was such a great line and so often true. Ali always made homosexual jokes ... wasn't this a way of portraying his character? And I really didn't care about protecting him. Now I was really tired of Ali, his easy quotes, his instant mythologies, his on-again, off-again religiosity. This quasi-accurate movie was based on his quasi-accurate autobiography. The Oscar-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. told me, "What made the script difficult to write was the facts. We decided not to be inhibited by the facts, to change them if necessary, to adhere to the truth."
Spare me, o revered blacklisted truth-teller. I wanted to tell him how the Commies couldn't get over Ali's not chasing blonde Swedish tail, but I was in this warm city while it was cold where I lived to make some money and get my name back in the public prints, not to lecture guys who had sacrificed for their principles and were now able to make a bundle on other guys who had sacrificed for their principles. Later, alone in my hotel room, I decided that I was a fool, envious and petty, not a wise man.
If I really were such a hotshot, I would have found a way to write Lardner's explanation of Ali's prodigious sexual appetites. He said that Ali had told him he refrained from climaxing so he wouldn't disappoint all those who showed up for an audience. I decided that since Ali never boasted about his women, and seemed not to discriminate in favor of youth or beauty, he wasn't scoring so much as he was being generous. Think of it as very special autograph sessions. So, maybe I am a wise man, too. Or just a wise guy?
What I did get into the paper got me into hot water, that quote about homosexuals in leading roles. Not only did the National Gay Task Force write to the Times and demand an apology, which it got, but it removed my name from its list of nominees for its board. Because of my liberal politics and my help in the past, I was to be the token straight board member. The official explanation of my removal was that the group had decided it should be all gay.
You sacrifice when you stand up for your principles.