A few days before Muhammad Ali’s fight against champion Al “Blue” Lewis at Croke Park on July 19th, 1972, every last journalist and photographer was at Dublin airport, waiting.
They were there to greet Ali, and at the same time they couldn’t believe it was really going to happen.
Last time Dublin had seen a heavyweight champion was in 1922 when Mike McTigue knocked out Battling Siki inside 60 seconds at the Capitol Cinema. Black-marketeers sold tickets after the fight was over and the Civil War raged outside the GPO next door.
This was 50 years on, and less than a month since owner Butty Sugrue told Dublin press he was having trouble getting promoters to lay down the needed $25,000, because they didn’t believe it was really going to happen either.
But it did. Opperman’s Country Club had opened for visitors in Wicklow, and at the airport a huge black Mercedes awaited Ali, his mother Odessa Clay, his brother, and his assistant Roc Brynner.
Someone – tactlessly – had learned that Mrs Clay's maiden name was Grady and she had Irish ancestry. Nobody seemed sensitive to the socio-historical significance of a slave owner named Grady who exercised droit de seigneur over his slaves over a hundred years earlier.
Charm
Muhammad Ali stepped off the plane and danced over this gaffe charmingly.
“Yeah, well, you see, there was a lot of sneaking around in those days.”
He was respectful about the Troubles in the North, about which he said he knew nothing. He was his old, beautiful, cheeky, witty, 1963 Cassius Clay self as he mugged it up for the photographers.
Since then, of course, he had become a black Muslim, changed his name, studied Islam, been fined and sentenced for refusing to fight in Vietnam – an all-white Texas jury found him guilty in 21 minutes.
Now he was 30 years old and back in the ring, and of all places he was in Dublin.
Next day, Ali was spending his first day visiting the Dáil and talking to Jack Lynch, the taoiseach, and signing senators’ autograph books for over three hours. RTÉ had a field day too.
His aide Roc Brynner was amused. He’d been described as Ali’s “bodyguard” on a front page.
“Telephone bodyguard, maybe. My job is to foil all those telephone calls all day long.”
Roc was wearing a gold earring, a pink hat, and bore no resemblance whatsoever to his father, actor Yul Brynner.
“Ali calls himself the People’s Representative,” he continued. “And that’s what he really is. It’s beautiful. Wherever he goes, one thing you always notice – everyone’s smiling. They didn’t smile for Sugar Ray, oh no.” He told us one of Ali’s practical jokes, the “I can burn your hand with my eyes” one.
Pretty corny, I said. “Yeah, but man, that boy is corny. He’s so corny it’s ridiculous. Why, he’s the corniest thing alive he’s so corny.”
“Corny?”
“Well, his sense of humour.” A little child’s.
Dublin
“Why Dublin?” I asked promoter Hal Conrad.
“A lot of people think you get shot on the streets down here [in the South]. Seeing Ali walking around Dublin in perfect safety will show them that’s not the way it is.”
And were the profits really going to charity? “Well, the fees are $215,000 and promotion alone is costing $300,000. So if there’s any left over . . . we’ll see.”
Autographs
After his 6am run Ali went back to bed. “That boy surely does love his sack,” someone said. When he finally got up people radiated in front of him in the hotel lobby. The gardaí lined up for autographs. Endlessly civil, he signed them all, and with a great sweep. He was photographed spoof-punching a garda, thrusting gardaí back, then arms round their shoulders.
“Jeez,” whispered an awed photographer, “He’s great. If you asked him to stand on his head, he would.”
What he was really interested in doing was spoof-punching a nine-year-old boy who wandered in. The boy was unselfconscious and unintimidated. “What’s my name? What’s my name?” asked Ali. The boy told him.
“I’ve seen him play with children for a whole days,” said Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee. “Never gets tired of it. Never.”
Ali slept late again next morning after running at 6am. Wearing his old grey tracksuit with the rip in it, he comes in, muttering “Bored . . . boring . . . boring.”
He’s muzzy, he said. Jet lag?
“I have no power . . . what power have I got? I’ve a heavy cold I can’t seem to get rid of. Who made the sun that warmed me so’s I ran this morning? Who made the milk I drank last night, the steak I ate, the grass to grow . . . Not me, I couldn’t make that. I ain’t got no power.
“When I’m the biggest man in the world I could be struck down by a germ or I could be crippled by disease. I know that I’m nothing, same as everyone else.
“I don’t mess with limousines and all of that. My place is on the sidewalks and in the ghetto and sitting back on the garbage cans with the drunks. That’s where I am. Because I want to be bigger than anyone but I want to stay big and strong with my own. I want to be on top of the great big mountain but not sell out.”
A riff about saving his brothers and sisters from evil followed.
I asked if he never got tired of writing autographs. “Way I look at it, I give someone an autograph, they run out shouting, they’re happy. But it’s nothing to me. Don’t take more than a few seconds.”
Herbert Muhammad arrived, son of the black Muslim leader Jabir Herbert Muhammad, and the little boy ran past.
“You gonna give me a kiss? Come here, what’s my name, what’s my name?” The little boy told him he was Muhammad Ali, and then Ali went out to be photographed by a lady from Foxrock.