George Kimball America At LargeFor a generation of theatergoers he was Broadway's leading leading man. A booming baritone classically trained at Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music, he recorded 60 albums, won a Tony and a Grammy, starred in more than a dozen musicals and appeared in scores of films and television programs, but in his native New England his unfortunate legacy derived from one brief, unshining moment that occurred more than four decades ago.

For the rest of his life, the mention of Robert Goulet's name to a sports fan would inevitably elicit the response: "Oh, you mean the guy who made a balls of the national anthem at the Ali-Liston fight?" Although he was Canadian by upbringing and ancestry, Goulet had been born in Massachusetts, and in May of 1965, when he learned that Ali would be making the first defence of his heavyweight championship in the city of his mother's birth, the singer asked his manager to find him a ticket to the Ali-Liston rematch in the French-Canadian enclave of Lewiston, Maine.

The manager did better than that. The deal he swung for Goulet promised a pair of tickets and two rooms at the Poland Springs Hotel on the night of the fight. All he had to do was get up in the ring and sing The Star-Spangled Banner just before the main event.

Although Goulet had never performed the American anthem, he had by then spent enough time in this country that he knew it by heart - or so he thought. On the night of the Ali-Liston fight, he was invited to have dinner with Maine Governor John Reed. On three separate occasions he excused himself from the table and went out on the porch to rehearse the song.

How many glasses of wine he consumed in between those trips to the balcony remains unlearned, but when his moment in the ring arrived, Goulet not only mangled the words but, some claimed, the tune. In newspaper accounts of the disaster, several eyewitnesses concluded that beyond the cultural gulf involved in performing the unfamiliar anthem, Robert Goulet was plainly drunk.

Of course, it didn't help much that his tortured rendition of the anthem had lasted longer than the fight did. Ali dispatched Sonny with a first-round "phantom" punch many onlookers never saw, and the once-menacing Liston was counted out while flat on his back, one glove raised to shield his eyes from the glare of the overhead lights.

"It was as if they blamed me for what happened in the fight," Goulet recalled years later. "I'd walked into Lewiston a hero, and I walked out a bum."

The embarrassing episode should hardly have been the defining moment of Goulet's life, but boxing fans can be an unforgiving lot. A lifelong devotee of the sweet science, the singer was a fixture at Las Vegas ringsides for most of his adult life, and when he was introduced at ringside, some wag in the audience would inevitably hoot out "Hey, Goulet, why don't you sing a few bars of The Star-Spangled Banner?" It should probably be noted that over the next 40 years Goulet flawlessly performed the American anthem before baseball and football games on dozens of occasions.

He and his big, booming voice had literally burst into the American national consciousness in 1960, when he was cast as Lancelot in Lerner and Loewe's Camelot. His show-stopping, glass-rattling rendition of If Ever I Would Leave You not only represented the high point of the musical, but became his own signature song.

We ran into him on several occasions at Las Vegas fights over the past 25 years, during which he appeared to have carved a second career out of good-humoured self-parody, from his performance as a broken-down lounge crooner in Louis Malle's Atlantic City to playing himself on an episode of The Simpsons through his final Broadway appearance two years ago, in which Goulet, a committed heterosexual, played one-half of a gay couple in a revival of La Cage aux Folles. Goulet had been hospitalised for the past month with a rare form of pulmonary fibrosis, and was awaiting a lung transplant when he died two days ago, aged 73, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

If Goulet's lapse in Lewiston remains his legacy in the boxing world, it should probably be noted that, garbled words and all, he probably still had a better night in Lewiston than did Jersey Joe Walcott, the referee who presided that evening.

And Ali himself, if he was ever aware of the botched anthem, clearly forgave him.

Several years later they found themselves on the same airplane, and after take-off Goulet made his way to Ali's seat, where they spent the better part of an hour in conversation. In a 2000 interview with North Carolina comedy writer Barry Lindeman, Goulet recalled the encounter: "I had a tendency back in those days when I was talking with somebody to playfully hit them in the chest with the back of my hand, as if to say to them, 'yeah, that's it.' So I did that to Ali once and he just looked at me and I said 'sorry about that,'" recalled Goulet.

A few minutes later the singer gave Ali what he described as "another good shot in the chest" as he emphasised his point. The baleful look as Ali looked down at his chest told him it hadn't been a good idea. "I'm sorry, champ, it's just a bad habit of mine," Goulet apologised.

"I eventually went back to my seat and when we landed, Ali was right behind me as we were getting off the plane," Goulet recounted. "I told him how delightful it was to talk with him and as I did, I gave him a gentle shove on the chest. With that, Ali turned around to Bundini Brown and said: 'If he hits me one more time, I'm gonna whoop him!'"