I was very young at the time, but I remember Clay/Ali as a very exciting boxer; not some sort of cultural hero. Waleed is trying to introduce his religious standing into the mix; this is totally irrelevant to me and my memories of Clay/Ali.
For many he was a symbol of things greater than boxing, to disregard those is a disservice.
Brilliant article by Aly. Ali was more than the sum of his sporting achievements. Marciano and Mayweather both have 49-0 records (Rocky’s record includes 43 KOs), which comfortably eclipse Ali’s 56-5 record, and you could mount a statistical argument that Ali isn’t in the top 10 boxers of all time. But due to the gravity of his performances and his political and social influence, I think the title of “The Greatest” sits comfortably with him.
He certainly wasn’t without fault. But he evolved. Like we all do.
I’d argue that '64-'68 Ali would have provided R Marciano with his first loss. His second loss too if he asked for a re-match. '71-'75 Ali would have humoured Marciano but still would have won. And for some context, S Liston, F Patterson, J Frazier, K Norton, E Terrell and G Foreman would have done the same. Z Foley, C Williams and possibly J Quarry would have been a good chance as well. Marciano’s greatest skill was his timing, and by timing I mean when he was born.
Marciano’s greatest skill was to retire from boxing when he was at his top.
SBS is Premiering a 2013 doco on Ali tonight @7.30 (have to setup the DVR …)
The Trials of Muhammad Ali is a 2013 American documentary about the heyday of boxer Muhammad Ali’s career, with special focus on his conversion to Islam and his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War.
SBS is Premiering a 2013 doco on Ali tonight @7.30 (have to setup the DVR ...)SBS or SBS2?
Not showing on my guide but I’m ready to set the DVR over the phone!
Did I say SBS2 ? 
Edit: Must be a late change.
DVR over phone? I have to get more tech savvy.
I was very young at the time, but I remember Clay/Ali as a very exciting boxer; not some sort of cultural hero. Waleed is trying to introduce his religious standing into the mix; this is totally irrelevant to me and my memories of Clay/Ali.
Ali would have walked away from the Liston fight if the fight organisers had pushed the point when they said they wouldn’t let him fight if he didn’t deny/reverse his conversion to Islam. If he hadn’t created so much interest in the fight through his own bravado and people wanting to see this lanky 22YO upstart be pulverised by Liston, who was the Mike Tyson of his day, they probably would have pushed trying to control who he was, and he would have walked away, and he would have been an impoverished nobody.
Ali’s complete rejection of people who tried to tell him who to be, and how to be, was absolutely intrinsic to who he was, and how it was that he captured the imagination of the world.
He was his own quite fallible person, but the courage he showed in being his own person, and being prepared to give up anything and everything to be that person couldn’t be anything other than an inspiration for the oppressed people the world over. In that doco the trials of Muhammad Ali it highlighted the hate and anger that people who sided with the establishment expressed to him, especially in refusing to be drafted. It was apparent that he was nothing more than a piece of shiit as far as these people were concerned, but he never bowed to them or tried to placate them even if it meant jail, or poverty, which it in reality did.
I can’t help but come across strongly with my admiration of Ali, for it is true that he represented so much to powerless people, and he never flinched, he changed the world just by being true to himself, in my mind that makes him a hero of the most fundamental kind.
He was a great boxer. …and it appears, just human.
More Ali children will come out of the woodwork like cockroaches: Boxer’s second wife warns of claims to his £55million fortune by illegitimate offspring
Muhammad Ali’s second wife believes there will be claims to his fortune
Khalilah Camacho-Ali warns that his illegitimate children will make claims
She said they the children will come out of the woodwork like ‘roaches’
By TOM LEONARD IN LOUISVILLE FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 09:58 EST, 11 June 2016 | UPDATED: 10:20 EST, 11 June 2016
Khalilah Camacho-Ali (pictured) has warned there are likely to be claims to his £55million fortune from a string of illegitimate children the boxer fathered
No doubt, patients and staff at Miami’s Mount Sinai Medical Centre took the statuesque, middle-aged waitress serving them for just an ordinary dinner lady. One glance at her name badge could have put them right.
Khalilah Camacho-Ali was the second wife of Muhammad Ali and the woman who stood by his side for almost a decade when he had few friends in his corner. At the time, he’d been stripped of his world championship title for refusing to fight for his country in Vietnam War.
Her reward for such devotion? He cheated on the mother of his four oldest children so shamelessly that she divorced him and largely retreated into obscurity.
Yesterday, though, she was back in the limelight alongside his other surviving wives and his nine children at his two-day funeral. At the ‘jenazah’ or Muslim prayer service, for Ali, Khalilah stood right next to his widow Lonnie - even putting her arm around Lonnie’s shoulder to talk to her at one point.
But by all accounts, it wasn’t a joyous reunion - which is not surprising considering the lingering resentment of women who vied – sometimes simultaneously – for Ali’s affections.
Khalilah, 65, told me: ‘I’ll say hello to them but I’m not going to be their friend.’ She’s talking of Ali’s last wife Lonnie and Veronica (No. 3), who was having an affair with the boxer while he was still married to Khalilah. Cuttingly, she adds: ‘Neither of them has any conscience.’
Now living alone in a local authority apartment block for retirees in the Florida town of Deerfield Beach, Khalilah says that money never made her – or Ali - happy.
As for her own part in his story, she says proudly: ‘He wouldn’t have been who he became without me.’ She is only speaking out now, she says, because she wants her side of the story to be heard.
A hearse carrying the body of the late Muhammad Ali enters Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, US, on June 10, 2016
Marriage to Ali, she says, was a ‘rollercoaster ride – it had its ups and its downs but it was fun’.
They travelled the globe together - meeting Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. She was there at the famous Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman in Zaire.
Khalilah also joined him for his next crushing victory, over Joe Frazier in 1975’s Thrilla in Manila. Having so far tolerated his philandering so as to keep the family together, she reached breaking point after she watched on TV as the Philippines president, Ferdinand Marcos, was introduced by Ali to his mistress, the model Veronica Porche.
Khalilah immediately flew to the Philippines and burst into his hotel suite - catching the couple in flagrante.
She didn’t quite float in like a butterfly but she certainly stung like a bee. Incandescent, she ripped down the curtains, smashed mirrors and scratched Ali’s face, drawing blood.
Such sexual betrayal also raises the issue of how many illegitimate children Ali had. So far, two daughters born to different lovers have already been acknowledged and a third has also made a convincing claim.
Khlilah insists there are many more. And that, inevitably, with the boxer’s £55 million fortune about to be divided up, they will quickly make their claims.
‘They’re going to come out of the woodwork like roaches,’ she says witheringly. ‘I had to protect Ali from lots of paternity suits. I went through a lot with that man – he had a real dark side. Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger (the golfer and actor were both exposed as philanderers) didn’t have nothing on Muhammad Ali.’
She says she isn’t bothered whether she is remembered in Ali’s will. Although she hopes her three daughters and son with him – Maryum, Jamillah and Rasheda, and Muhammad Jr – get something, it is more important to her that they behave properly.
‘They should be decent, civil and respectful. My children were his first family and they’ll be carrying Muhammad Ali’s legacy.’
That said, she has nothing but contempt for his widow Lonnie’s behaviour towards her son Muhammad Jr and Ali’s brother Rahman, who reportedly fell foul of Lonnie after she took over Ali’s finances and decided the pair were spongers.
‘She was selfish not only with money but also with Ali. He had a whole family he couldn’t go and see,’ says Khalilah. ‘How can she say she cares for a man when she doesn’t even let him see his brother – Ali only had the one.’
A girl touches the hearse carrying the body of the late boxing champion Muhammad Ali during his funeral procession through Louisville, Kentucky, US
Her issues with Lonnie, who married Ali in 1986 (a few years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease), go much further back, however.
She says Lonnie - a former neighbour of the boxer who was 15 years younger - was close to Ali even during his marriage to her, Khalilah. Too close, as far as she is concerned.
Unlike other Ali wives, Khalilah - still a practising Muslim - didn’t have to convert to Islam for him. Although she was born Belinda Boyd, she was brought up in the faith by strict Muslim parents, her father a lieutenant in the radical Nation Of Islam movement, which preached a controversial message to American blacks of racial separation from ‘white devils’. A karate black belt at the age of 10, she later became a bodyguard of the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.
Appalled by the racism he personally encountered and mentored by the civil rights firebrand Malcolm X, Ali was converted to the Nation’s hateful views (although he later forsook it for mainstream Islam) and dropped his ‘slave name’ of Cassius Clay. But after a disastrous first marriage to Sonji Roi, a beautiful cocktail waitress who left him after a year complaining he had forced her to adopt Islamic customs, he was searching for a good, obedient Muslim wife.
Khalilah was 15 and working in the Nation’s bakery in Chicago when she first caught Ali’s eye. He had already lost his boxing licence and his world title when he proposed marriage – asking not her but her parents. They were initially reluctant but he persuaded them he could salvage his career.
Muhammad Ali posed next to his fourth wife Lonnie Williams in 1999. During the Muslim prayer service this week, Khalilah stood right next to his widow Lonnie - even putting her arm around Lonnie’s shoulder to talk to her at one point
The couple married in August 1967 – a year after he divorced Roi – in a ceremony held in the living room of a two-bedroom house Ali had been given by the Nation of Islam. Khalilah was 17, and a virgin, and he was 25.
During the three and a half years in which he was banned from boxing, money was initially so tight that Khalilah had to cash in the money saved for her college education. She gave him his first four children in rapid succession, and became his publicist and planner. Although she says he was ‘deeply depressed’ at his situation and thought he would never box again, he kept it hidden in public as she booked him speaking engagements at colleges across the US.
He remained hated by many Americans who considered him a traitor and coward for refusing the draft. When the family moved to a bigger house in Philadelphia, a black telephone without a dial was installed, connecting him straight to the local police station in case unwelcome visitors turned up.
Khalilah insists she always stood her ground with Ali. A neighbour recalls her publicly scolding her husband for using even the mildest bad language in their house. When his boxing career recovered, he had a lazy streak and she says she often had to provoke him to train harder. She once had a T-shirt made for herself that said ‘The Greatest’ on the front. On the back, it read: ‘George Foreman’.
She was soon having to remonstrate with him for a lot worse than foul language. For all his many virtues in the ring and all the stirring words being said about him this week, Ali was an insatiable womaniser. Khalilah often walked in on it, as she did just hours before he lost to Joe Frazier in New York in 1971, his big comeback fight after his boxing licence was restored.
When his aides wouldn’t allow him into his room before the fight, she realised he had a woman with him. ‘It’s not what you think’, Ali assured her, but the woman admitted she was a ‘$40 ■■■■■’, said Khalilah years later. ‘I couldn’t believe it. Not that he would mess around but that he would mess around just before the most important fight of his life – of all our lives.’ Ali, she added, ‘didn’t grow up on principles’.
The last straw came when he flaunted his affair with Veronica Porche, who he had first seduced during the 1974 trip to Zaire. Khalilah filed for divorce in 1976, claiming desertion, adultery and mental cruelty. Ali put $1 million in trust for the children and Khalilah got a large house in a Chicago suburb as well as a reported $670,000 over five years. (She passed up on a Rolls-Royce after discovering Ali had allowed Veronica to drive it).
US boxer Mike Tyson attended Ali’s funeral on Friday
The judge wanted to force Ali to pay her alimony for life but she let him off with for just five years. ‘I was kind of stupid doing that but I thought I could make money on my own,’ says Khalilah. Considering she married ‘a man who had nothing’, her relationship with Ali was never about money, she insists.
Although she was deeply bitter about his behaviour, she told him she wanted to remain friends. His ‘unforgivable’ infidelity aside, he was a ‘wonderful, sweet and loving person’, she says. She told him she had one proviso: whenever she brought the children to see him, his ‘little girlfriends’ had to show her some respect and make themselves scarce.
To fill the void left by Ali, she tried to become famous in her own right, heading off to Hollywood and leaving their children in Chicago to be brought up by her parents. Her daughter Rasheda says it was upsetting to be separated from both parents but she hid her feelings as her mother ‘was going through some hardships, too’.
With help from Jane Fonda and Dustin Hoffman - friends from her days with Ali - she got some acting training from the famous coach Lee Strasberg and a small part in Fonda’s thriller, The China Syndrome. A few other roles followed, including playing a witness on a couple of episodes of Hawaii 5-O and appearing in a variety show starring the Jacksons. But after a couple of years, she returned to Chicago.
Her love life proved similarly unfruitful, marked by impulsive marriages and fairly rapid break-ups. She has married three more times, and nobody could accuse her of doing it for money. Khalilah wed Muhammad Mustafa Ali, a Chicago shirt salesman, in 1981. She claimed it was ‘love at first sight’ after he stopped to ask her directions, but the marriage was dissolved after three months.
In 1984, she married Antar Ali, a security guard, after a five-day ‘whirlwind romance’. The marriage was annulled the same year. 1989 produced husband number four - Rene Camacho, a Puerto Rican removals man whom she met while shopping for jewellery. They had two daughters together but divorced after four years.
Although she tells me she has made $9 million since her divorce, there is precious little evidence of it. Over the years, she has talked of setting up various businesses - selling chilli sauce, for instance - but they never materialised.
Instead, although she won’t discuss them, she was involved in civil court cases 10 times between 1986 and 2007. She was sometimes bringing the actions, but she was sued for unpaid taxes and three times by different financial lenders. In 2001 a bank unsuccessfully tried to foreclose on her large Chicago home and she says she later sold it.
Moving to south Florida in 2008 for the warm weather, she rented a drab flat in Miami and found a job in the nutrition department of a hospital. Laid off due to budget cuts, she then worked at the private Mount Sinai Hospital as a waitress.
She’s left there now, yearning for greater things than giving out trays of hospital food. She would like to get back into films but admits she needs to lose a bit of weight first. Khalilah self-published a colouring-in book teaching good manners and does occasional speaking engagements at which she extols the virtues of strong family values.
‘Things are going to get much better but as long as I’m comfortable, have a roof over my head and have my children going fine, I have a happy life,’ she says. ‘I may not be the richest person but I’m a happy person, sweetheart.’
After all, she says, she saw what riches did to her first husband: ‘Money ruined Muhammad Ali’s life and character. He would have been better off poor.’
Was he so thoroughly despised? Sure there were many who did, but there were also many who thoroughly loved him. There were others who has no choice but to respect him, boxers like Ernie Tyrell. I listened to their fight. Tyrell held one of the 3 versions of the world title belt and was the first to go the whole distance with Ali. He had called him Clay in the lead up to the fight. Ali taunted him throughout, saying “What’s my name?”
Ali was the “greatest”, no doubt but greatest fighter?
I’d argue that '64-'68 Ali would have provided R Marciano with his first loss. His second loss too if he asked for a re-match. '71-'75 Ali would have humoured Marciano but still would have won. And for some context, S Liston, F Patterson, J Frazier, K Norton, E Terrell and G Foreman would have done the same. Z Foley, C Williams and possibly J Quarry would have been a good chance as well. Marciano’s greatest skill was his timing, and by timing I mean when he was born.
I’ll avoid the social and political dimension, which does place Ali securely at the pinnacle, and challenge the greatest fighter tag. Or at least my late dad, who boxed when he was younger, did…all the ■■■■■■ time. I loved Ali, partly because he annoyed the ■■■■ out of the old man who told me over and over again that Ali was a sucker for a left hook and offered this moment as evidence.
I havent seen the Joe Louis video before, thanks for posting it.
Lot of flat-footed, unbalanced, old, white guys in that clip.
Ali was the "greatest", no doubt but greatest fighter?I'd argue that '64-'68 Ali would have provided R Marciano with his first loss. His second loss too if he asked for a re-match. '71-'75 Ali would have humoured Marciano but still would have won. And for some context, S Liston, F Patterson, J Frazier, K Norton, E Terrell and G Foreman would have done the same. Z Foley, C Williams and possibly J Quarry would have been a good chance as well. Marciano's greatest skill was his timing, and by timing I mean when he was born.I’ll avoid the social and political dimension, which does place Ali securely at the pinnacle, and challenge the greatest fighter tag. Or at least my late dad, who boxed when he was younger, did…all the ■■■■■■ time. I loved Ali, partly because he annoyed the ■■■■ out of the old man who told me over and over again that Ali was a sucker for a left hook and offered this moment as evidence.
And if Henry Cooper could tag him with the left, the old man would lecture me(after also insisting that Ali’s trainer Dundee had cheated Cooper of a win by taking precious and illegal extra time at the break), imagine what the Brown Bomber’s left hook hammer would have done to him. We’ll never know of course but Joe Louis is one fighter who really would have tested Ali’s impressive chin and he wouldn’t have gone in flailing like
Foreman. Anyway according to Dad it was Louis and daylight for greatest fighter.
Marciano did beat Louis, but it was an aging washed up Louis in his final fight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-4DMPM2lns
Its like pondering how Bradman would have gone against the WI attack. Meaningless and unknowable.
Ali was a great in a great era. Whether the best fighter ever doesnt really matter. Possibly his best years were lost to him. Arguably, his early losses made his boxing legacy even greater. His later losses were a disgrace on the sport. I think as his reflexes went, his “technique” opened him up to extreme punishment. But i’m too young to recall him live. I can only go off footage.
Was he so thoroughly despised?The start of the SBS show was brutal. It was a clip from from The Eamon Andrews Show and the first “question” to Ali from the panelist (David Susskind) is “Well, I don’t know where to begin. I find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man. He’s a disgrace to his country, his race, and what he laughingly describes as his profession. He is a convicted felon in the United States. He has been found guilty; he is out on bail. He will inevitably go to prison, as well he should. He’s a simplistic fool, and a ■■■■.”
As was pointed out in one of the zillion speeches at his funeral (worth watching it all), little of the establishment loved him when he was “down in the mud”.
That’s what you get for trolling them a la Gorgeous George, being uppity, and just simply being a bit ahead of his time. Fifty years is a long time, in much the same way that it seems absurd now that a line like "In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted” could be part of our Constitution.
Watched (again) the Thrilla in Manila doco on ABC2 last night. Sunni Khalid really hates Muhammad Ali.
Watched (again) the Thrilla in Manila doco on ABC2 last night. Sunni Khalid really hates Muhammad Ali.
If anyone missed it, it’s being repeated tonight @ 11.25 on ABC 2.
(Yes Deej, ABS Two) 
