The Muhammad Ali That I Knew

By George Das KUALA LUMPUR, June 20 (Bernama) -- You wouldn't know the real Muhammad Ali until you were in the presence of the greatest heavyweight boxing champion who died on June 3 at age 74. Until that meeting on June 16, 1975 here, I had a certain dislike for him. I grew up watching him and I found him to be brash and a braggart. However, all that flew out of the window. In the wee hours of that day, I had just finished running 16 furlongs with Ali on the Selangor Turf Club track in Jalan Ampang, where the world's tallest twin towers now stand. After that gruelling run, I decided to hitch a ride in Ali's limousine, a Lincoln Continental, back to the Kuala Lumpur Hilton in Jalan Sultan Ismail. I sat in the back seat with Ali but suddenly a security personnel came over and motioned me to get out. Ali quickly told the security guy: "He's my brother and he's coming with me". That was it and it was a kind gesture. It was this gesture that changed my attitude towards him. In fact I became an "Ali convert" from that day. Yes folks, you didn't know Ali until you were in his presence. He was an exceptionally extraordinary person who exudes a brilliant personality. I couldn't believe he could be so different from all the negative aspects that I had read about him over the years. If I had not planned to do this run with him I would never have found what a wonderful person he really was. I was then a sportswriter with The Star (a Malaysian English-language, tabloid-format newspaper) and I wanted to do something that none of the other sportswriters gathered here in Kuala Lumpur for the Ali -- Joe Bugner fight, would have thought of doing. Later, his manager Angelo Dundee, who helped arrange this meeting with Ali had told me that this was a first as no other journalist had volunteered to do such a story. Running with Ali was the easy part. It was being at the venue at the right time that was the difficult part. Ali had no fixed schedule for his "run". Sometimes it was at 2 am, sometimes it could be 3pm. So The Star photographer Tham Choon Fatt and I got to the track at 3am on June 15th and we missed Ali by nearly an hour. The next day, we decided to be at the Selangor Turf Club at 2am and Ali arrived two hours later. I got my story. I certainly was the luckiest local sportswriter to not only have had the opportunity of getting an exclusive story running with Ali but also to speak to him without the other media around. Just before we reached the hotel, he invited me to come up later to the presidential suite on the 25th floor of the KL Hilton. I accepted it without batting an eyelid for here was Ali, a mega superstar and I was not going to bypass this once in a lifetime "scoop". This meeting in his suite I thought was supposed to be just a one-off thing but it turned out otherwise. I went on to interact with him for the next three days. Unlike other athletes, where you had to make appointments to do interviews, this was not so with Ali. I found him so easy going. He wasn't domineering or over-bearing at all. In fact I found Ali exceptionally decent, very well-mannered and deeply religious, graceful, charming, very humble and he had charisma. At times when he spoke, you had to strain your ears to hear what he was saying. Now when I look back, if only there were smart phones at the time, I could have had so many things to record and photograph. However after the first day’s encounter, in the following days, I brought along my National cassette recorder. I didn't want to lose out on what Ali was saying. Today, I still have the cassette tape with some of the poems that Ali recited to me in our meetings. I have numerous photographs, some of them autographed by Ali and a pair of training gloves. The cassette tape with the recordings of Ali and the poems would be a rare piece of an "Ali memorabilia" that I have in my possession. Without a doubt he was not only the greatest sports and most charismatic personality of our time, he was an exceptional human being. --BERNAMA