Meeting Ali

         The year was, I figure, 1973.

         I had bought my first suit that Fall, a stunningly checkered, wool conglomeration of rust and light brown colors  that stood out from the crowd in the way 7-foot Kareem Abdul-Jabbar towered over piles of cigarette smelling journalists.

         Big events in our lives, like Elvis up and dying in 1977, Hurricane Katrina scattering everything in 2005 or my Mama catching life’s last harmonic chorus in 2007 are recorded in the journals and notebooks of those much more famous and/or talented than I.

         That year of work was punctuated by three interviews/stories.

         The first interview was the Amazing Kreskin, an entertainer, psychic, fun-kind-of-guy if you could get past the ol’ psychic, no-fun-kind-of-guy image. That might not shake your toupee, but when I was in my early 20s, man, that was a big deal to me.


         Turns out that not everyone was a Kreskin fan. When at the news budget meeting someone mentioned having an opportunity for a one-on-one interview with The Amazing (which legally became his first name later -- and I'm not making that up), no one knew who he was. 

         Except (TA,DA) me. Seriously. I said I would go do it if I had to, stretching the if I had to far too long, like I really, really, really didn’t want to but would if asked. I said this with my tongue lying on the table where it had landed when the question was posed about doing a one-on-one with ol’ or Frank or whatever Amazing was going by that day. They said yes. I did my happy dance.

         The second interview was Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. No, really. Rabin. Across the table from Yitzhak. Really. Four feet from Israel’s boss. Me. From Lizelia, Miss., me. Me who had only voted once at that time. Me who read the sports section first, last and sometimes only.

         But if I was going to be judged (not by the story certainly), it would be from the third interview/story.

         Read ‘em and weep puddles of joyous tears, folks. I once spent an evening as far as this keyboard is from a computer monitor from Muhammad Ali.

         Really. A good three feet from the greatest athlete not named Jim Thorpe or Jessie Owens, in human history.

         Ali was scheduled to speak at Mississippi State University for some reason that escapes me. Imagine that. Muhammad Ali as part of the speakers’ series at MSU. He had come back from a layoff in his boxing career to reclaim the heavyweight championship the same year as our conversation took place.

         He was casually dressed, cutting jokes and generally in a great mood. I had earlier decided that I, too, would be casually dressed leaving that big ol’ suit in the closet.

         What I remember the most about Ali was just how big he was. You didn’t get that impression on TV during his fights, which is all I had to measure him by. A full six feet, three inches and a solid 225 pounds, Ali stood in front of the media assembled in a room in the Mississippi State Union Building. He was between fights in 1974, having beaten Joe Frazier in January of that year and being in the process of scheduling a championship bout for October of that year. That fight, against George Foreman, was one of the greatest in boxing history.

         But that night in Starkville, in a plain, off-white painted room, the media circled the once and future champ like he was chum and we were sharks waiting to devour.

         Ali was in the process of signing autographs, scribbling his name on sheets of the newspaper, even to the media, when he grabbed my reporter’s notebook, whipped a pen across a page and handed my notebook back.

         I had my first and only autograph. MUHAMMAD ALI it read. I had an autograph. An autograph. Never asked for one before or since.

         But I had an autograph. Of Ali. Of (and I admit it only now that he has died) the GOAT, Greatest Of All Time, a man with thick arms and flattened abs, whose speed in the boxing ring seemed to deny how big he was. I had an autograph of a man who laughed with clownish glee like there was nothing better to do on a Tuesday night in a poor town in a poor state than answer questions from poor journalists about those times when the boxer floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, dancing away from opponents stuck in the quagmire that the rest of us saw as exciting life.

         I ripped the page from the notebook, stuck it in the pocket of my jeans, and went about the business of doing what I did back then. Ali was charming, funny, serious, and all those things wrapped into one package, that one night, one unlikely and unique package we never had before him and never after.

         The great ones, the very few and truly great ones, come to the edge of oblivion and knock, knock, knock, waiting for the door to be opened.

         As the night drew to a close, and I went back to the newspaper office to write, I knew suddenly and surely this kind of moment wouldn’t come again in my career. It didn’t. But it was more than that.

         Oh, there were plenty more interviews, plenty more stories, plenty more great ones along the way in what would be a 34-year journalism career and even more as I moved into ministry a while back. I interviewed Paul Newman, Michael Jordan, Bear Bryant, Drew Brees, Archie Manning, and on and on. But none of them were Ali. None.

         So, I kept the autograph. Right up till the moment where it got pitched when we are doing a semi-annual house-cleaning moment.

         Gone, but surely not forgotten.