From PEOPLE Magazine
Click to enlarge
"Right, tell it brother," someone shouted. Palms slapped palms. "You are already," bellowed another, "you're the biggest ever, black or white." It is an assessment that Ali would not quarrel with. Indeed, since he regained the heavyweight title nine months ago, mature confidence in himself has largely replaced the adolescent braggadocio of old. His speech is more temperate, although on occasion, like a skilled actor, he can turn on a flood of bombast. "If the people want foolishness," he says, "I'll give them foolishness. But there is more to Muhammad Ali." It is true. His influence as a black leader is being felt far beyond the sports world, even as his interest in the rigorous training needed to hold the title seems to wane.
Before the George Foreman fight last October, Ali vowed it would be his last. When he won, he changed his mind, promising that he would fill 1975 with easy high-paying bouts, finish off the year with rematches against Joe Frazier and Foreman and then hang up his gloves. This week Ali was on schedule. The Joe Bugner fight in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was his third in as many months. He may change his plans for retirement again—and again. But so far, Ali has grossed $12 million, and he could add an estimated $13 million more before winter.
Wherever he travels, Ali likes to point out the excited crowds that trail him everywhere, even into his hotel room. "Whole nations beg me to visit," he says (China invited him to tour after the Bugner fight). "I've been invited to dine with kings and presidents [but never with any U.S. President]. Those who once scorned me now want to shake my hand and kiss me. Imagine me," he says, "an uneducated Negro doing all this. To this day, I can't even read very well, but I hire people who can."
Before leaving for Malaysia, the 33-year-old champion often posed a rhetorical question to audiences and newsmen:
"You may ask me why I do all this, why I keep on fighting at my age?" His reply was couched in the self-righteous eloquence that has become his trademark. "Now I could be off being the baddest Super Fly there is, screwing white women in the movies like them other Negro athletes. But I don't need to sell out to Hollywood. I can make it without doing those alcohol commercials. I've got Allah on my side, and he's put a big halo around my head."
Ali's conversion in 1961 to Islam struck many as box-office hype or, when he claimed to be an ordained Muslim minister in 1966, as an effort to beat the draft. Now he seems to have convinced most of his critics that his religious views are sincere, if over-publicized. Since the death earlier this year of Elijah Muhammad, the U.S. Muslim leader, Ali has emerged as an influential leader in the sect, although he holds no official position.
Better than 50 percent of his earnings this year have gone to the church. That is the estimate of his business manager, Gene Kilroy, who is one of two white men on Ali's staff. (The other is trainer Angelo Dundee.) "It's all I can do to keep him from giving it all away," says Kilroy, "and instead plan a little for his own future." Ali explains: "I've got all I need—a pretty house in Chicago, a bunch of log cabins in Pennsylvania [his training camp] and a white Lincoln Continental. Why do I need this money?"
Ali has become a certifiable do-gooder. In March he took on second-rate heavyweight Chuck Wepner in Cleveland. Not only did he give Wepner the biggest paycheck of his life and Cleveland the most publicity it has had since the polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire, Ali ordered that 50¢ of each ticket be donated to international food relief programs. There was one more little-known act of generosity. A Muslim group led by Ronald Bey had approached Ali with a plan to buy an abandoned department store and turn it into a church-run bazaar and mosque. "We told him there was this slight problem," says Bey, "M-O-N-E-Y. The first time he saw the store, it was late at night. He talked about what a project like this could do for our people." Ali returned to the hotel shortly before midnight and found most of his retinue asleep. "So he came around banging on our doors," said one adviser. "He told us he had just seen a store he wanted to buy and wanted to show it to us—NOW." After the Wepner fight, Ali paid $250,000 cash for the building and rented it to the church for a dollar a year. In appreciation the mosque was named after him.
Of the many honors bestowed on Ali this year, an invitation to address Harvard's senior class seemed to delight him most. He showed up in Cambridge with his wife, Belinda, and another woman, her cousin Veronica Ali, who travels everywhere with the couple now. The presence of the striking young woman, and Ali's apparent attraction to her, has raised some questions—although not certainly within his loyal group of advisers. Under Muslim law, Ali is allowed four wives. When asked about Veronica, who also goes by the last name Poarch, Ali's lawyer replied, "You could say she is a traveling companion for Belinda."
At Harvard, Ali was given a reception in the faculty club. Uninterested in academic small talk, he and his women retreated to an overstuffed sofa. There they sat as hundreds of Harvard faculty and their families filed by to stare and occasionally exchange a word. "Why," one Harvard official exclaimed, "this is the biggest reception we've ever had. He's even bigger than John Wayne."
For Ali's speech that night, scalpers were getting $15 for tickets which originally had been distributed free to the senior class. "They told me I would be speaking to future doctors, lawyers and presidents," Ali said in his touching, hour-long speech. "I said, man that's gotta be heavy. So I didn't bring no notes with me. Who could believe that a boxer with a D-minus average at high school—I didn't fail because I won the Gold Medal at the Olympic Games that year—could be speaking at this great seat of learning." Ali reminded the class, "the really great man never forgets where he came from. Just a few years ago I was making $18 a week. Now I'm going to make me a few million in one night."
Ali collects, but he also pays for his world-wide reputation. The small knot of intimate friends who once traveled with him has swelled to an expensive mob. Groupies prowl the corridors of the hotels where he stays and sometimes Ali, who admits to a weakness for pretty black women, will invite one or two for a ride in his limousine or to a private reception. He can't go anywhere without packs of autograph-seekers clawing him. "I've had it. I've got other things I want to do," he grumbles. "I've got all the money I need. These next fights are only for my Muslim brothers. I'm tired and sore. Before I get to Foreman, I'll be ready to quit for good. Just wait and see."
