Drama in the Bahamas: When Ali floated like an anchor and stung like a moth

The clock had not yet ticked past five when Muhammad Ali rose from his bed in Suite 642 at the Britannia Beach Hotel and dressed for his morning run, his outfit including a rubber corset designed to encourage a 39-year-old body to shed excess sweat. In the foyer downstairs, he strolled past a gleaming white statue of himself under which was a notice bearing the message: "Britannia Beach Greets The Champion: This statue is comprised of 80lbs of lard. Compliments of Chef Rolf Epprecht."

Nobody in management seemed to get the irony of this creation.

Outside, the temperature was already nudging its way into the low 50s, chilly for the Bahamas in November but perfect conditions for an overweight boxer badly needing to pound the pavement ahead of an upcoming bout. Boxing journalists, newly arrived in Nassau, were concerned about his physical condition after more than a year out of the ring but he assured them he'd been putting in three miles a day at a good clip for nearly two months. On this particular morning, three of the more intrepid reporters, including Hugh Mcllvanney, then of London's Observer newspaper, had set their alarms to come see for themselves.

These men knew Ali in his prime. They knew him as the man who once famously declared, “The fight is won or lost far away from the witnesses, behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road; long before I dance under those lights.”

On this day, however, their reward for rising early was to witness an Ali, more jiggly than rippling, struggling like a man approaching middle age (which is, of course, what he was), his heavy footfalls sound-tracked by the crowing of roosters in the agricultural darkness beyond the main roads.

Almost as soon as his course took him up the incline of the Paradise Island Bridge, his breathing started to sound laboured. After barely a mile the slow-motion jog eventually segued into a walk, and that was punctuated now and again by him stopping altogether to shadow box, brandishing a weight in each of his hands. The punches thrown were, like the jogging that preceded them, being unfurled almost as if in slow-motion.

On the streets of Nassau’s shopping quarter, a young man came running towards the entourage and did a double-take at the sight of the most famous fighter in the world standing before him. He stopped and Ali began to playfully spar with him.

“What you doing here?” asked the delighted local. “You fighting again?”

Embarrassed

Fourteen months after being embarrassed in a ring in Las Vegas by his former sparring partner Larry Holmes, this was how far Ali had fallen. Some Bahamians weren't even aware that his latest comeback against Trevor Berbick was about to take place in their midst (promoters would end up giving tickets away on the night). Not to mention he had come to this corner of the Caribbean because nowhere else on the planet was willing to host a fighter in obviously diminished condition, a former champion with no business climbing through the ropes for the 61st time.

Minutes later, with a lot less than two miles done and the sun now starting its ascent into the sky over the Caribbean, Ali climbed into a waiting limousine and headed back to his hotel, back to his bed.

“A man who has missed the last bus after the bars close takes more out of himself on the walk home than Ali had done with what we were supposed to regard as roadwork,” wrote Mcllvanney. The legendary Scottish scribe had witnessed Ali training in his pomp and he knew this was about as far removed from that warrior as it was possible to be.

"He not only loved doing his roadwork," said Ali's trainer Angelo Dundee one time, "he knew it was the source of his stamina. So he would run until he was tired, sometimes running backward, and then he'd run some more – across causeways, up and down streets, and even over golf courses, cutting his legs on unseen sprinkler heads dotting the fairways."

That was then. Now, he was cheating on his mileage each morning and many of his training sessions in the afternoon lasted barely 20 minutes and were almost tragi-comic. The bizarre location for these work-outs was Le Cabaret, the hotel dining room that each evening hosted a pastiche of a Las Vegas revue.

Each day, the stage had to be cleared of the props, the backdrops lifted to the gods before curious locals could be charged $3 to come in to watch Ali work up a sweat in an improvised ring. Or, at least, go through the motions of doing so.

To witness Ali shadowboxing used to be one of the great privileges in sport. An up-close glimpse of an athletic marvel, a body perfectly tuned, a coil ready to spring. All that footwork. All that rhythm. Hands moving at the speed of blur. Head bobbing to avoid imaginary punches. If that was a wondrous sight worth any admission fee, this was something completely different.

Those who filed in each day deposited their cash in a shoe box on a card table. Most eschewed the chance to purchase “The Drama in the Bahamas” t-shirts being flogged near the door. Small yet significant details that reminded everybody the show wasn’t playing the Vegas Strip anymore.

“Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, Muhammad Ali is in serious training for his upcoming fight with Trevor Berbick,” said the hotel employee who would call the crowd to order. “It would be appreciated if you did not call out or do anything to break his concentration.”

The grandiloquence did not become the occasion.

Magic is missing

“After the third round, he leans against the ropes in his corner, his back to the crowd, waiting while they hook up the heavy bag. ‘I have returned, I have returned. I have returned!’” wrote Canadian journalist Jim Taylor of what he saw at Le Cabaret.

“He hasn’t turned his head or moved anything but his lips. It’s as though he’s reading cue cards on the canvas at his feet. ‘There’s gonna be a miracle! Be among those who dare to dare!’ . . . The lines are still there but the magic is missing.”

Once Ali had satisfied the minimum requirements every afternoon, he’d don a robe, pull up a chair and really give the customers their money’s worth with a question and answer session.

They’d pepper him with queries about opponents, past rather than present, and he’d turn every one into a chance to talk up his future prospects. Witness the following exchange.

“What are you going to do after you regain the title?”

“Hold it for about five years!”

He often used that stage to mock those who derided his efforts, hammering, especially, unnamed people who spread rumours his brain and liver were severely damaged. The back and forth often lasted longer than the training itself, and was far more entertaining.

“You are all my people!” Ali told the crowd. “Black, white, Chinese! They are all my people.”

His daily routine culminated in a return to an empty dressing-room behind the stage. There, he’d eat grapes and lie on a cot, surrounded by sequined dresses, pirate costumes, wigs, swords, and jars and all the other paraphernalia deployed by those who performed at Le Cabaret’s dinner show. The bizarre and slightly grotesque circumstances didn’t lessen his braggadocio any.

“They say I’m old, I got bad kidneys. I can’t get on TV,” said Ali when a group of reporters sat with him after training one day.

“They say I couldn’t get the license. Why is everyone worried that a black man is going to get hurt? White people take risks all the time. Climb them mountains with those little picks. All I did for American boxing and they wouldn’t give me a license. Fighters making $200 million now. I started that. I changed the whole picture and they ran me out. But I forgive them. They know not what they do.”

His attempt at biblical magnanimity towards those who’d hindered his attempt to fight again was matched only by the quality of his name-dropping, which also served to remind everybody he was so much bigger than this sport and this so far off-Broadway locale.

“Three weeks after this fight, I’ve got to go to Peking. Deng Xiaoping wants me to introduce boxing to the Chinese people. Then I’ve got to go to Russia. [Leonid] Breshnev’s having something at Red Square. I’ve got to stand alongside him. If a journalist followed me, it would be incredible. Can you imagine me and Breshnev having dinner, watching the tanks in Red Square?”

No matter the toll the years had taken on his physical attributes, Ali could still talk a great game. Indeed, when Angelo Dundee arrived into Nassau on December 8th, three days before the fight, he found him holding court in his room, lounging on his bed in a robe, surrounded by the inevitable bevy of reporters. Of course.

He was opining on everything from Holy War to holes in his opponent’s defences. Same tableau as it ever was. The two men hugged like the old friends they were. But many of those present knew one of them was actually a lot more enthusiastic about Friday night’s forthcoming festivities than the other.

“Angelo thinks I shouldn’t be fightin’,” admitted Ali, earlier in the week. “He’s coming in to work the corner but he thinks I’m shot, my legs have gone. But Angelo’s not me. He don’t know what I’ve got.”

Dundee did his best to dispel any idea he might have sat this one out, telling those witnessing the reunion, “If he’s determined to fight, I’ll be in his corner.”

At which point, Ali started to boast anew about how well his sparring had been going during his celebrated trainer’s absence, citing, in particular, an uplifting encounter with the next biggest name on the fight card.

“I had a four-round brawl with Hearns, and it was right on,” said Ali.

“With Tommy?” Dundee asked.

“Stickin’ and jabbin’. Over his jab. Trading punches. Getting him in the corners. One on one.”

“I love you going with little guys,” said Dundee. “I love it.”

Ali had indeed sparred with Hearns, and afterwards, the Detroit fighter reckoned there could be only one winner of the main event.

“Ali can still do anything with the left hand that he wants,” said Hearns. “I think he’s a much better man than Berbick. I had the pleasure of seeing Berbick fight before and he don’t have the style of Ali. He’s not of the calibre of Ali. I feel that with Ali’s ability that he can go on and be victorious.”

Hearns was standing by his man but others who witnessed their spar remember it differently, recalling an embarrassing affair in which the gulf between the elderly (at least in boxing terms) Ali and a young fighter at the peak of his powers was all too apparent. Hearns was fast and occasionally furious, dictating the pace and the style of the exercise; Ali was ponderous, one-paced and restricted mostly to heavy-handed pawing.

Floated like an anchor

“He floated like an anchor and stung like a moth,” quipped Tony Segreto of NBC in Miami.

The snippet of surviving video footage shows 39-year-old Ali being bullied around the ring by a thin, rangy man in a yellow singlet in a way that didn’t bode well for his chances against a larger opponent bent on really hurting him.

Tellingly though, within 24 hours of arriving, Dundee had, at least for public consumption, started singing from Ali’s hymn sheet. “I was very pleased with what I saw with the way he is working. To be quite honest I didn’t think he could go through it again. He’s ready to beat Berbick.”

If his trainer, Hearns and others were willing to ignore the increasing body of evidence that Ali was neither fit nor able for one more contest, some of those closest to him weren’t as wilfully myopic.

“I’m worried that my daddy might get hurt,” said 10-year-old Jamillah Ali.

His mother, too, was growing concerned.

Odessa Clay had made an appearance during one of his sessions at Le Cabaret, bringing a lady backstage to meet her son so he could wish her a happy birthday. The usual cameo of Ali lighting up the room, giving somebody a lifelong memory. Yet, when a journalist asked Mrs Clay her opinion of the forthcoming contest, she spoke from the heart. Like only a mother can.

“I don’t think my son should be fighting any more,” she said, “And he knows it. I worry about my son. I worry about him getting seriously hurt. I worry about the punches he takes. His whole family worries about him. My son’s almost 40 years old now and that’s too old for him to be fighting.”

She was asked who, if anybody, had the power to stop her son boxing.

“Himself,” she said. “I just wish my son would realise there comes an age when you should begin taking it easy, even if you’re Muhammad Ali.”

Drama in the Bahamas: Muhammad Ali’s Last Fight by Dave Hannigan is published by Sports Publishing (New York) and is available wherever books are sold.