How in the world have I landed here? I got my ass fired today, and yet here I am on the floor in Muhammad Ali's mother's house with Ali tickling me. He finally stops it, helps me up from the floor. We go back into the living room and sit down on the sofa. His knees are touching my knees. I'm starting to feel like family. I ask him if he has tapes of his old fights. He shakes his head no, and I say, well, look, until today, when I lost my job, I was managing a bunch of video stores
and I still get free rentals. Would you like to go rent some of your old fights? He nods yes, and I say I'll drive. He shakes his head, says I'll drive.
We go.
When we pile out and clamber up into the winter, hit the road man. He's the worst driver I've ever been in a vehicle with, other than my drunk old grandfather just before he died. Mohamma is driving down the middle of the road. You get four lanes and he's in three of them. He's all over the place, speeds up, slows down. I'm scared half to death, clutching the arm rest, hoping we don't get killed. He pulls off on an exit and cuts off these teenage kids in an old beat to hell firebird.
They get pissed.
They crank down their windows, and the two kids each shoot him the bird, and Mohammed immediately shoots.
The bird back.
We go in the video store and get an old Godzilla movie that he wants to see.
He loves old horror films.
We borrow a tape of his fights called Muhammad Ali Skill greens and guts. The kids in the store, who had been my employees until earlier that day, are dumbstruck.
Their mouths are falling open. Here I am.
Hanging out with Muhammad Ali. We get back in the Winnebago drive back to his mom's and I remember that I have a book of photos in the car that I just bought the week before in a used bookstore. It's a book of photos of Ali and his prime beautiful photos. Beautiful book. I grab it out of the car, along with a copy of a Sports Illustrated article I'd written about sparring with him when I was in college.
I've had it in the car ever since. Lynn and I moved to Louisville, hoping and dreaming that i'd eventually meet Ali. There's one photo in particular, a classic one of his face shining with sweat. I plan to ask him to sign it, but he opens the book and signs the title page to Davis Miller, the greatest fan of all times for Mohammad Ahweh, King of Boxing. Then he just keeps going. He signs that page, and then
the next one, the next one. He turns page after page after page, taking probably forty five minutes to sign individual photos, signing about one hundred of them, unbelievable. Signs them with Malcolm X, with Howard Cosel, with Elijah Muhammad signs a photo of his first wife Sanji, and besides it writes she gave me Hall. Then his second wife Belinda. He signs one that is still one of my favorites, and I have a copy of it framed on my wall. It says love is the net where hearts are caught
like fish. And then he hesitates over one of young Cassius Clay sitting in a bank vault atop one million dollars in one dollar bills. He says, money don't mean nothing, closes the book, hands it back to me and says, I'm giving you something very valuable. It stops me.
He would say, and could get in a position to do bigger thing.
That's Reverend Al Sharpton, civil rights activist and friend of Ali's, who worked with Muhammad on many projects, and who well understood Ali's true calling and what it was he considered important to do in this life.
Where As a normal person you three times living, win champion of the world, you go, retire, you live, make money, do whatever you want. Where others look for doing a commercial on endorsement, he looked for a course that he wasn't going to get anything out of.
Hey, it's me again, Davis. I know what you're thinking. No, No, really, I do you're thinking. Ain't No way, I got welcomed into Muhammad Ali's life like that, hanging out at missus Clay's house. No way, it's a logical doubt. I mean, how often does that stuff happen? Well, it just doesn't. But I assure you it is true, and it gets far more unbelievable as I enter into a dimension with
Ali I could never have dreamed of. Episode three, A magical evening back at Mama Bird's house from the video Store, Ali and I take seats from the sofa and I say, this is a story I wrote in college about how you influenced me, and it's about the time we sparred together.
He pretends to remember. There's no way.
He remembers that he's sparred with thousands of people, from three year old Tykes to their eighty year plus great grandmama's I mean, you couldn't stop him from boxing people. He asked me to read the story, which I do. He listens, He listens intently. He laughs at the funny places when I try to imitate his voice, which I do horribly, and then he signs that I'm just blown away. I want to thank him in some way, but I can't come up with the words. He gets up and
puts on the videotape. We're watching fight after fight, moment after moment of his comic life.
Like a butter fun a rubble young man rubble.
And he starts getting sleepy. I ask him, Champ, I think it's time for me to go. He says, no, stay you, my man. There's film with him training to fight Joe Frasier in their first fight.
The big question to be answered, and this man shake off three and a half years of inactivity.
When he was the most beautiful man in the world.
Fires sprung from his fingertips, and I say, do you mind if I ask something serious?
He nods.
I say, does it bother you that you're a great man? Not being allowed to be great? He says, why what you mean, not allowed to be great? I say, the things that the rest of us think of as being Muhammad awe, the things that you.
Care most about.
Is so strange that those are the very things that have been taken from you. He radars in on me, looking at me very intensely, not offended at all, not in the lead. He says, I know why this has happened. God is showing me and showing you that I'm just a man like everybody else. We're sitting there silently, quietly on the sofa. He says, I'm going to make a comeback. What I say, I think he's joking. I mean, he has to be joking. But something in his tone makes
me uncertain You're not serious. Suddenly there's power in his voice. He says, no, man, I'll get my weight down two fifteen. I'll have an exhibition at Yankee Stadium. It'll be the greatest comeback of all times. It'll be bigger than the Resurrection. And he stands up easily, not like he had before. He starts dancing around the room like the Ali on the screen, the one from March nineteen seventy one. He starts throwing punches, not like the ones he'd thrown at me.
He's playing out in the yard, but now really letting him go his true art. Six seven, eight punches a second, blistering the air.
He appears to glow in the dark.
It's an absolutely magical experience. I can't believe this is happening, he says, look at the TV. I'm just as fast now, And stupidly, I say, and you know more now too.
He says, wait till I come back. Watch this. I'm gonna destroy Mike Tyson.
I try to retire, try to be cool, but I had to come back. I'm gonna show the world that I'm the miracle man.
He looks so beautiful.
I've never done hallucinogince, I've never dropped acid, but I feel this is an incandescent alternate reality moment in my life. I understand somehow that it's seminal, though I don't know how to get He keeps dancing, he keeps moving, he keeps throwing.
Shots for three or four minutes.
Then he sits down, sweating, exhausted, and we both go entirely quiet. We're quiet for a long time. It's close to midnight. I say, Champ, I've got a wife and kids waiting. I think I should go home. He says, bring your kids over Sunday. I'll do my magic. I'm impossibly honored. Not only do I want to thank Muhammad Ali for what he's meant in my life to millions of us, and what he's given me to I want to find the way to cures Parkinson's, but there's nothing
I can do. Instead, I say, we'll see you Sunday. Champ, be cool and look out for the ladies, he says. I get back in my car. I drive to a grocery store to pick up a gallon of milk for Linn and the kids. There are quite a few customers in the store, even this late. To me, they seem to move more as floating shadows than his people. An old feeling comes across me that almost immediately recognize it's
like making love for the first time. It's that same sense of landing and a lesser reality afterwards, and of having a secret the rest of the world can't see. I reach to grab the milk jug and I see my reflection and the chrome of the dairy counter. There's a half smile on my face, and I hatn't even realized it. This otherworldly experience was the beginning of what became a life changing friendship. Years later, I'd been working
on a documentary in La. Hated the work and felt that I needed something real and pure in my life. I knew that Mohammad was in La for a book signing, so I hung out with him for a couple hours. I said, can you give me a ride to the airport. I need to go home and see my family. I haven't seen him in a month and a half. He motioned, get in the car. Howard, being Mohammad's best friend, was driving it. We're somewhere, I guess in South La, East La.
Standing beside the road was this group of street people. Mohammad is sitting in the front seat. I'm in the back seat, and he points to that group of people. Howard understood that Muhammad wanted him to pull over.
We pull off of the road.
Mohammed gets out of the car, puts his hands up beside his head in a boxer supose so that everybody knows who he is, like they would have had trouble understanding anyway, approaches a little squat black guy and says Joe Frazier, which is one of his bits that Muhammad did over and over. He starts floating little feathery punches at this guy and if the guy's looking all startled and he's playing around with everybody. And then he opens
his wallet and he'd been paid in cash for his appearance. However, many thousands of dollars that was he started handing out to this crowd of people who had gathered around him. I remember him approaching one old guy and he handed him a fifty dollars bill. Looked deep into his face when he said, no wine, just food. Mohammed gave out every nickel he had in his wallet. There's thirty people
around him, fifty people around him. He said, stay here, I'll be back, and we get back in the car, drive to an ATM and I can still see orange and green lights around that ATM reflecting into the car. Mohammedd got whatever amount of money.
The ATM would give him.
We went back to that same corner and gave out all that money as well. That's Muhammad Ali. He was accepting people into his life with uncommon generosity, even maybe a singular generosity, and he did that untold thousands of times. Craig Mortally, Hey man, will you share with us one of the times you remember?
I remember he's in the hotel room watching TV. There's a report on the local news of this Jewish home for the aged that was about to close. They ran out of funding. Mohammad gets in a car, drives up there, strokes a check and they keep their doors open. He didn't want publicity. He just did it. The next day, it's on the New York News. Here's this American Muslim helping some Jewish folks out in New York, and they gave him publicity. He did not want.
It was absolutely in his nature. He was doing that before he was Islamic. He did it throughout his life. Trophies, various awards, He gave away everything like that. At the time that Lonnie came into his life, I think that Muhammad was anything but wealthy, but he continued to give away his stuff. He didn't care about material stuff. In the late eighties, I'd see him wear the same suit
over and over in the same tie. He'd given most of his fortune away, and then Lani found a way to save what was left and eventually even make a new fortune. Sometime in nineteen ninety two, I was hanging out with Mohammed at his home Iberian Springs. He had this wall size television. It sat on some kind of cabinet and had all these flashing lights. It was always on CNN. The story comes on about the Chicago school system does not have the money to buy buses for the kids to get the kids to school.
Muhammed, the way he.
Was with kids, He's all absorbed into the story. Then when it goes off, he creaks up from his chair and motions to me to come over to his desk and help him get out his check book. He writes a check for half a million dollars to the Chicago school System to buy buses. He never told anyone about it. He didn't claim it in any manner, shape or form. He just did it. Mohammed and Money were not world class wealthy at that point. Ali just gave away a huge percentage of it so kids could get to school.
I do need populicity, but not for what I do for good.
I need publicity for my book, I need fight, I need pump listeners from a movie, but not for helping people.
It is no longer sincere.
Former President Barack Obama has called Reverend Al Sharpton a voice for the voiceless and a champion of the downtrodden. A Baptist minister of political, civil rights and social justice activist, he is the longtime president and founder of the National Action Network, as well as a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has dedicated his life to the fight for justice inequality by using the teachings of doctor Martin Luther King, Junior and applying them to
a modern civil rights agenda. Reverend Sharpton can be seen regularly on MSNBC, where he is the host of Politics Nation. Reverend, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule.
Thank you Craig for having me, particularly on what we're going to talk about.
Well, it's close to all of our hearts, so thanks again.
A Lee saw the title sort of money, saw the lifestyle as vehicles to him do humanitarian work. Our League never engaged in a lot of material things just for material things.
He saw that as a means to an end.
Lonie his wife had to take care of his business because our Lead would give all his money away from up to him.
Boxing was just a vehicle to get him the greater things.
Yeah, absolutely, Welson.
He represented there was something more to life than just getting the trinkets of being a star or having a nice home. And our Lead was the symbol of somebody that really could make a difference and use fame and fortune for a greater cause. He's my doctor King. And he would always say, shocked. You be like doctor King. Don't be out held these money grabbers. He said, Doctor King stud for something, but you be to be faithful to what you're about.
I go to fights. Is even after he stopped fighting, and.
He said, don't let dogs he canting meet you other you don't need to be doing after the parties you were preaching. He really believed that people ought to do what they're supposed to do because that's what he did.
You once a reference I've heard this about James Brown. Explain to you that it's important to say true to yourself, make people come to you, don't go to other people.
James Brown is like a father to me, he said. In my music would make me different. As I started the one three beat rather than the two four, he said, and everybody told me I was crazy. But then when the music came out and went to number one, if I hadn't listened to myself and stood for myself, it would have never happened.
Brother, our lead was like that.
Everybody told I'll leave, don't do this, don't do that, and he did it and he made it work, he said. But you got to always have a strategy. But the most important thing you have to listen to other God will bring you through, Shoppton, I'm telling you he'll bring you through.
You talked about projects that you worked with Ali on. Can you share some of those projects and how impact folk?
He was.
I said to our league that they have a crack epidemic, explained what it was, and out here getting the music industry involved. I will have a big luncheon. I'd like you to come and talk about we've got to get kids off crack. We had all the record industry guys in the Ali walks in and he stood up there and he said, we got to stand against crack.
I'm a river Shopton.
Every time I would ask him to show up for something, he show up and I say, I ain't got an honor reb I coveraged physics man. I didn't ask for no money. You doing God's work. One of the lessons I learned from him directly. During that time, he had a training camp in d Lake, Pennsylvania. He invited me down and I stayed in one of the guest cabins overnight. I got up and went to the training cabin.
As god Win the sparring.
This guy the real good at me, he Dad's He was beating up in his sparm apartment, and all of a sudden I could feel somebody behind me and I looked up and it was our Lee had come out of his cabin and he standing there watching again. I said, champion, this guy is good. He said, he look good sharping. I think this guy could get a champions He said, well, don't go too fairst.
He said, we see him throwing good punches. Let's see if he can take a punch. And a minute later his sparing partner cocked me.
And he went down and Ali said to me, the champion even what you do is not how good you can float, It is how good you could take it if you fell, you sharpon you get out there fighting, they're gonna throw punches. If you can't take it, don't get out there. And it was stuff like that that he lived by. He loved little magic tricks. But in the middle of the magic tricks, he'll come with something profound. Then he would ask me, did you ever read this poet?
I'm talking about heavy guy. Rarely do you talk sports. It was always talking about heavy maids philosophy. Plain this line to me shocking. When the guy was rounded him later in life, he would be very sparing with his words, but he'd enerject what he wanted to say. Something that was important. I remember had gotten so that he could
hardly speak. I tell you two stories as a civil rights community prepared this week for the National forty Rights March, that when I started my show on MSNBC Politics Nation, I was leaving the Dogs and thirty Rock Fellas sent a headed back over the nash Ash the work and Lonnie called me and I said, hey, how you doing.
She said, I'm all right. She said just a minute from me a whole And he came on Brillion, you got you a TV show? I mean when you were a little fat boy. Because he didn't talk that well. I said, Chap, how you doing who? And then you couldn't understand him. And then he gave the phone to Lonnie Lane. He said he watches you every night. I said really, And he grabbed the throat back. He said, don't let me down. Now.
He wouldn't sometimes have a good day and he would call him talk.
You wouldn't talk along, and it was back to Lonnie.
And when I would see him, if they would be in New York for somewhere else, he would never let you feel sorry for him.
He would look at you.
But he had that same determination, same curiosity, always thought big and global.
It's amazing his arc. He was once the most despised man in America, and then later in life he became the most beloved.
I remember before you got to sent to talk, we would talk about how he.
Was so despised.
He said that the reason his fight so loud, his three corters audience came to see.
Him get beat.
And now the sane people come around now to cheer me off. He'd be in New York and I'd be in some controversy, jobbed. Don't let the controversial bother you. Look at me, he said, people walking up getting my autograph now that wanted to kill.
Me twenty years ago. He said, if you stat up, who what's right? What you're doing is right? Is it right?
I said yeah? He said, well you believe it. He said, God will test you by giving you what is unpopular, and you.
Are arned being popular. He said, if you can't pass the test, you can't get the degree. You went to school. You went up further than I did, the higher of the degree.
The hegher the test. He'd always say that to me. The meaning why a lot of guys don't make it is they can't take the test.
You got to pass the test.
I didn't understand why I was so apartment for doing what I did, But I learned Lady of God.
Was testing me. Can you believe all over the world? All league? All lady? He started laughing, and what is our right? Dee was out of the ring. There was never a day that.
Muhammad Ali became irrelevant. Even though he couldn't even talk anymore, even though he couldn't get out of the wheel chair, he never became irrelevant. Because he presently no matter what he had to work when he made it work.
First, Lonnie, I thank you for what you did to make the second half of his life greater than the first.
In his eulogy of Muhammad, President Clinton called the second half of his life better than the first, that he transcended and had a greater impact.
The second part of his life, he was challenged physically, and yet he was able to use the legend that he'd become this man wouldn't got hostages out, he would travel around the world. The first part of his life, it was to get a title and then to regain the title. Second part of his life is he redefined what being a champion was. It's hard now to look at guys that are number one in their sport and compare to to Mohman ally, because he was so much bigger than that. He had a global impact and he
used it for humanitarian ways. And that's where I agree with President Clinton. He became much bigger than just a narrower thing of sitting in a lunch counter. Whereas a normal person you three times living with champion of the world. You go retire, you live and make money, do whatever you want. Where others look for doing a commercial on endorsement. He looked for a course that he wasn't going to get anything out of.
And I think that's his greatness. He became all of us. He'd been the closest thing we're ever going to see, the superman. Then he became something greater. He became us. Everybody could relate to that man in the second half of his life.
I like that that is exactly right.
I think that if you read the Bible, the Tower or Koran, God uses people in ordinary sitting.
I always say, why did God send Jesus to a maiden that nobody knew?
Because you can't really be all of that if you're not with everybody and our lead last years, he was sick, he was one of us, and we found that he wasn't from Mount Olympusy.
What do you think that says about his humanity?
What I've learned is that you may get to the point where you can't depend on your oratory, so you better do enough work and.
Enough action to you speak by just being in the room because everybody knew what you stood for. I le could go in any room from the White House to a hut, and he didn't have to say anything.
Everybody knew what he stood for.
Masculinity we define, and I think in trivial terms with macho symbolic things.
Real masculinity is when you're in touch with yourself and you are able to use whatever natural gifts God gives you in a way that expresses you without having to minimize other We cheat them masculinity with macho and who we dominate.
But real masculinity speaks who you are without you having to overpower others. Luther King used to say that if you haven't found anything to die for, you're not fit to live. For me, when I was stabbed, I was leading a march against a racial incident in Brooklyn, New York.
He rushed me to the hospital and.
It ended up the guy that stabbed me didn't hit an artery or hit a bible. But while I laid there on the gurney, you don't know that you're waiting then do an X rays. You don't know they can come back and tell you you'll never speak again, or it could be fatal. I don't think you really really really know what you stand for until you don't know if you're gonna make it, and you say, if I die on this gurney, it's been worth it. I did what I was supposed to do, and I think that's
where I leave. Once several times in life before then, I was no justice, no peace, But on that gurney I had to meet with our shopton and say, you don't know what They're gonna come back and tell you hasn't been worth it.
I say yeah, and I'll do it again.
And when I got out of the hospit, you know, four days later, I wouldn't let another march. Until you meet that point, you are only guessing at what you really believe, because you.
Really don't know what would you offer to this generation who's struggling so hard with their own violence and with these really lousy excuse for role models.
I would say to them that they are better than that, and that they've got to find that in them like I leave found in himself. There are no a leads out there now, And you know what I would say to them about that. There was no lead before I lead people he admired with, they did stamp for things that he did. He found that in himself and he raised the bar to a whole other level. Before I leave we thought champions who could knock somebody else a lead made it something else. So if you don't have
a role model, you become that role model. Reaching and you said, I'm better than this, I'm better than being vioted, I'm better than being a thug or hoodler. And use our lead as an example of somebody from a circugated Jim Crow background.
That shouldn't have been able to do anything.
Not only did he do it, he reinterpreted what it was to be famous and Richie I say to young people, and when I'm talking about our league, I said, if I would ask you who the last three heavyweight champions in the world are, you wouldn't know. If I would ask you who was the most popular cultural figure in the sixties, you don't know.
If I ask you if you heard of Muhammad Ali, the whole class will.
Raised him, even if they don't know the detail, because if you stand for something, that'll last longer than if you have something. If you stand for something, people will remember you for a long time. All League, he'll live forever in history. Maybe that's what descriptions about he turns life. As long as there's man, there'll be those that will be talking about Muhammad Ali.
In the next episode of The Dalla Muhammad Ali, I get to see Muhammad for who he really is when his mother's not around.
I think he just had some stuff to get out of his system. He wasn't perfect, but he was able to move systematically and steadily to higher and hire degrees of perfection.
That's a mom Shakir, a spiritual advisor to Muhammad Ali. Also, I have to leave this magical experience with Ali. Go home, Tell my wife I'm not employed anymore. We got to find a way to pay the bills.
What am I gonna do? Stay tuned.
The Dow of Muhammad Ali is produced by Imagine Audio for iHeart Podcast and hosted by Me Davis Miller. My co host is Craig Mortally, Karl Welker, Mark Beouch, Nathan Kloke, Derek Jennings and Little Owe. Me Davis Miller are executive producers. Produced by Craig Mortally, sound design and mixing by Juan Borda, music by Djsparr and introducing a very good pal of
mine Isaac Miller. Additional music by William Ryan Fritch and also luminescence Tracknuage Visit luminescentmusic dot com to check out more from the band.