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.
Atlanta, 1986
King's dream
"Hello, stranger," Ali murmured. He was sitting on a couch in the original Marriott, headquarters of King's Dream, a heavyweight fight between Tony "TNT" Tubbs and "Terrible" Tim Witherspoon for which the new King, Don, had paid the old King of All Kings walking-around money to drum up some press.
But Ali was not walking around. His bare feet were in a plastic pan of water that also contained electric massagers. He was trying to jolt his numbed feet back to life. It might have been a symptom of Parkinson's disease. In those days, they were calling it Parkinson's syndrome because no one wanted to deal with the possibility that he could be really ill or even mildly punch-drunk. He slurred words when he was tired.
I was feeling sad and nostalgic. I hadn't seen much of him since the late '70s, and while friends had commented on his physical deterioration, it was new to me. I was in another world -- television. I was a correspondent for CBS' "Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt." I had come to this warm city while my own was cold for a proposed 12-minute segment on Ali. With me was a talented young producer, Brett Alexander, a 6-foot-4 African-American I often worked with.
After the usual chitchat to cover the interminable setting of lights and camera angles, I conducted what turned out to be the shortest and worst interview Ali and I have ever had. I started it by referring back 10 years to when Ali was talking about being on a divine mission and ...
"I have nothing to say," said the man who never had nothing to say. His words were slurred. "Not talking about that."
"What are you talking about?"
"Nothing."
It went on like that for a few minutes. I was hurt and embarrassed. I was supposed to be the Ali-ologist, and it's expensive to send bodies and equipment out of town for a TV story. So I pressed on.
"You are a tricky man, a wise man," he ranted, "and you been sent by the power structure to make me look bad. And they sent along the biggest, darkest n----- they could find."
Now I was angry. We shouted at each other for a few minutes, but it was not even good television, at least not for an artistic, mild-mannered program. After a while, Alexander signaled the crew to pack it in and we left. I was fuming, but they were nonchalant, concerned about where we would go for lunch. Brett was sympathetic; he figured the poor guy was down on his luck, hurting and probably a little paranoid. I asked about being called "n-----," and he shrugged: Black men are allowed.
But I decided to give it one more try. The hell with the "I don't have to be what you want me to be" stuff. One thing he had to be was a decent interview for me. It had been part of our social contract for 22 years.
I was fuming. If he didn't come through, I was going to write about this, really make him look bad, rip him up and down, expose him for what he was, a version of the mindless gardener in the novel and movie, "Being There," available to be interpreted into a symbol of anything you needed, a blank slate on which to write in your own dogmas and dreams. Ultimately, Ali signified nothing.
Hell has no fury like a cool scribe scorned.
I stormed back into the hotel room. Two young women were giggling as Ali pulled them into the curtained-off area that was his bedroom. Just before he pulled the curtain, he grinned at me and said, "Just like old times, huh, Bob?"
New York, 1991
The elephant baby & the bleeder
Ali and I were in the backyard of Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official digs. It was the year my generation of copyboys solidified their takeover of the Times, and I was suddenly a sports columnist again, tracking my Big Story. The debacle in Atlanta seemed never to have happened, but I was ready for another unpleasant incident. Ali was on a book tour, and an 11-week-old boy named Assad was traveling with Ali and his wife, Lonnie. The Official Friend and Photographer, Howard Bingham, specifically had ordained the baby "off the record." I didn't accept that, especially since little Off the Record was being toted all over the city to public appearances that included TV shows in which Ali afterward bemoaned how bad he looked and sounded, which was true. What would finally be diagnosed as Parkinson's disease had begun to turn his step into a lurch, his face into a stiffening mask. His words were not always intelligible. It was heartbreaking, yet also part of a Faustian bargain. Who else had ever been as lithe, beautiful, verbal?
But still, the baby was becoming the elephant in the room for me, as big as the fox in the motor home. Forget about wise man, wise guy, cool scribe -- this was about professional pride. Were we run by our sources?
I was wondering what I would do when Chuck Wepner slipped into the proceedings. He looked uncertain. The Bayonne Bleeder had reasons; he had a tendency to mess up. He was the acknowledged inspiration for Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky" movies, but he never got paid. He was a successful liquor salesman who had recently spent two years in prison for cocaine trafficking. His greatest feat in the ring was stepping on Ali's foot to knock him down. He still lost the fight.
Wepner lurked at the fringes of the party. He seemed worried that Ali would snub him because of his conviction or because he had stepped on his foot or, worst of all, simply would not recognize him. Wepner was having an attack of low self-esteem, and I wasn't much help. I told him he didn't need to lurk, that he should just walk right over and say, "Hello, Champ." But Wepner decided to leave and began walking away. Ali seemed to purposely look elsewhere as Chuck crossed his line of vision.
Wepner was almost out of the backyard when Ali, laughing madly, jumped up, ran across the lawn and mimed stamping on Chuck's foot. Everybody was very happy, especially me. It would be the perfect feel-good finish for my-week-with-Ali story, taking the edge off my mentioning the presence of the mysterious little Assad.
Louisville, 1999
My dinner with Ali
At dinner in our hotel's dining room, Ali feigned boredom with me. Or maybe it was real. He slipped off his shoes under the table and said, "If I had a lower IQ, I might enjoy your interview.'' It was a line from the old days. Then he pretended to take a nap. Or maybe he really was sleeping. I felt good. It was warm here; I had something to write about.
Every so often, he woke up happy to greet the reverent visitors who apologized for disturbing his meal but just had to tell him how much he had meant in their lives. He had had great effect, especially on those who questioned their own principles, fears and patriotism during the Vietnam War. How much better they had to feel about their decisions not to serve when the heavyweight champion of the world -- back when that was perceived as a true emblem of manhood, not a Don King/HBO/Showtime/Vegas reality program -- said he refused to "let the white man send a black man to kill a brown man."
By then, I had come to believe that Ali was best appreciated at face value. As a racial, religious, sexual or political model, he could be confusing, if not hypocritical. The word "flawed" was often used, but that connoted someone otherwise perfect. That he "betrayed expectations" was another concept that made no sense; examine your expectations, not his betrayals, I thought. Obviously, I was speaking for myself.
But I thought it was worth considering that once we were past the '60s and early '70s, when the Establishment still considered Ali a threatening force, he tended to get a bye on anything he said or did. He was associated with dozens of shady schemes, some for which people went to jail, while he was sentenced only to the label "too trusting" or "naive." He had been absolved of responsibility, a holy child. He joyfully accepted madcap diplomatic missions to free hostages or persuade African countries to shape up, but he never accomplished anything. After he became a shambling secular saint, the trembling fire-starter at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, he was excused for refusing to get tough on al-Qaida. After all, he explained, he had business interests to protect.
But it was several years before 9/11 that I went to his hometown to watch him raise money for the Muhammad Ali Center, dedicated to respect, hope and understanding. It actually opened in 2005, although six years earlier that seemed impossible, especially when he would snap awake at a fundraising meeting, as he did throughout our hotel dinner, to ask: ''What did Abraham Lincoln say when he woke up from a two-day drunk?'' While his audience blinked and his wife winced, he would answer, ''I freed who?'' and reward himself with laughter.
Miami Beach, 2003
Back in the warm
The last time I saw Ali, I was sitting next to him at ringside in the Miami Beach Convention Center, maybe in the same seat I was in 40 years earlier for the first Clay-Liston fight. Next to Ali was Will Smith, who had played Ali in a movie I hated because the character called Lipsyte was, although much better looking than the original, even dumber than same. The movie Ali was less fun than the original and more principled earlier.
A re-examination of Ali had begun by that time, led by Mark Kram, who, before he died, attacked viciously but not always without justification, and Tom Hauser, his thoughtful biographer who had been squeezed out of the inner circle when he began to question the soft-pedaling of Ali's early religious and social stands as well as the commercialization of his name.
Ali finally was cashing in. The Miami Beach Convention Center party was for a book called "G.O.A.T." (Greatest of All Time, his corporate name), a gorgeous gallery of photos that weighed 75 pounds and sold for $3,000 (the "champ" edition, with a Jeff Koons plastic sculpture attached, was $10,000). I had contributed an essay and was thus a guest of the publisher, Taschen, which had decided to launch the book during Art Basel, an international show of the hot, the hip, the hustling, about which I was clueless.
Ali was new again and so was I, thinking on that warm December night: It's cold where I came from and the popcorn man is making money and I have something to write about but don't have to file tonight. Can it get any better than this?