Instead his eyes go kind he slides an arm around my shoulders we exchange hugs

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Ballet Shoes Center.com

Published: July 17, 2010

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Instead, his eyes go kind, he slides an arm around my shoulders, we exchange hugs and smiles, and it’s over. But I’ve accomplished something I’ve never, yet always, believed I’d have the opportunity to do. I have boxed with Muhammad Ali.As we leave the ring, the greatest of all pugilists speaks in a way few men have ever spoken to me: softly, gently, almost purring “You’re fast,” he says. “And you sure can hit, to be ssooo little.”He may as well have said he was adopting me.I begin to quake My insides dance. But I manage to stay composed long enough to say the one thing I hope will (and that seems to) impress him most. With the absolute confidence I’ve learnt from watching him countless times, I say simply, “I know.”SIX YEARS earlier, I’d been the smallest kid at RJ Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

I hadn’t eaten properly since my mother died unexpectedly when I was 11 years old At 17, I was 4ft 10in, weighed 4st 5lb, and still looked 11 The family doctor told Daddy that I’d never get much larger Guys in my classes nicknamed me “Foetus”. I was regularly punched, pushed into girls’ lavatories, shoved fully-clothed into showers, stuffed into lockers, picked up over guys’ heads and spun in circles.I had no interest in school. I flunked the 11th grade and would not be able to graduate until I was at least 19. Three to four times every month, I was caught skipping school. Usually, when I cut class, I didn’t have any place to go and I stayed in the building, creeping down the halls from one bathroom to the next (the best way to avoid getting caught). When I attended class, I laid my head on my desk and slept.But I had Ali.I had first become a serious Ali-watcher in 1963, a few months after my mother’s death.

I remember sitting mesmerised in front of Daddy’s small black-and-white television as the voice of Cassius Clay (as he then was) roared and crackled: “I’m young and handsome and fast and pretty and can’t possibly be beat…” The song the voice sang rolled with menace and grace. Could any warrior ever have looked so vulnerable as the young Ali with his shining and tender chin high and untucked, angular poet’s body fully erect, hands at his sides, eyes round and wide and scared-seeming even as he shocked opponents and blistered their features with punches thrown from angles and with a rapidity that they, and we, could scarcely conceive of, much less see?I bought a copy of the Ali biography by Jose Torres, Sting Like a Bee. In it I discovered that my birthday was two days before Ali’s – his was 17 January, mine the 15th – and that his wife Belinda studied karate. I began taking kyokusbinkai karate because there was no boxing in town and I longed to become as fine a fistic artist as Ali. I bought a gi (Japanese for “uniform”), attended class religiously, and worked as hard as a 63lb runt could – I kicked at the walls, punched the air countless hundreds of times, sweated and hurt for an hour and a half four nights a week. After a year and a half of study, I was awarded a brown belt, the second highest belt rank. I read everything I could about the martial arts and about boxing and, of course, about Ali.On Saturdays before Ali fights, I’d be so nervous that I could hardly eat.

I’d spend much of the afternoon pacing the rooms of the house, dancing in long elegant strides like Ali, up on the balls of my feet circling clockwise, stopping at every mirror to whirl into a flurry of pitty-pat punches, then dancing on to another room. About an hour before fight time, I’d get so nervous that my shirts would be limp and darkened with sweat. It wasn’t uncommon to shower and change clothes a couple times on the afternoon of an Ali bout.Throughout my adolescence, my bedroom walls were covered with newspaper clippings of Ali’s victories; yet when he lost to Joe Frazier in their first fight, I felt even closer to him. After all, hadn’t life regularly kicked the shit out of me? And didn’t that make me at least a little bit like Ali?IN 1973, I decided that I was going to become the greatest martial artist to walk the face of the earth I was 21. After graduating third from bottom out of 1,473 students, I’d spent several months lying around the house, moping and sleeping and wondering if there might be something I could do with my life.


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