The Tao of Muhammad Ali: E7 All Things Vibrate (with Justin Cornwell and Tom Jackson)d Tom)

be otherwise? We seek connection, not recognizing there's nothing we need to do, the shape of tree trunks and branches, the form of our limbs and torsos, the rhythms I feel rotating inside me, the shape of hurricanes and of galaxies, the orbits of planets and of neutrons, so very similar.

Everything is at the center rocks, pig shit, penises, bsycles, pumpkins, breast, electrons, stars, galaxy clusters, These cold fingers us everything, the gold we wear around our fingers and necks, the calcium that makes up our bones, both from the marrow of long ago exploded stars. We are, each of us, even in the strictest, most literal sense, the very stuff of the cosmos. Yet that recognition doesn't make things New Age easy, ain't nothing easy.

While I'm saying these words, star systems are getting gobbled up by black hole galaxies right now are being eaten by other galaxies and own our shimmering blue marble dictators breathe and laugh and destroy, and all the while, this remarkable man, Mohammad Ali, is slowly being eaten alive by Parkinson's disease. Yet everywhere we look, all around us and inside us, there is beauty and magic. Episode seven, All things vibrate. Ali's mom, Missus Odessa Grady Clay, Mama Bird,

dies in August nineteen ninety four. Mohammed was closer to his mom than to anybody else. Her death hits him deep and hard. In November, I watched the Michael Moore George Foreman World Heavyweight Championship out with Ali in a suite at the Old Brown Hotel in Louisville. More Foreman is the only boxing match I've seen in a year. I just can't watch them anymore. I've stopped writing about

people who punch each other in the head. This past summer, I managed to sell a couple pieces of short fiction, and I'm damned happy about that. More recently, I've chosen not to be working, hoping to rest and heal up. Lynn and I are divorcing. I understand what she finds so frustrating about me and about our lives together. She sees me on TV or hears me on the radio acting like hot shit, she says, time and again, believing the last word of that is true of me, if

not the first or the third. Yes, ma'am, I'm hot shit, or at least I'm shit, she thinks.

back into shape. I haven't seen Ali in a long time, mostly because magazine and newspaper editors no longer pay my expenses to hang out with him.

red Arabic style stitching. Now, while we're watching the fight, and I'm watching Ali intently watch the fight, Muhammed is lying on the bed. I'm sitting in a chair beside him. In the ring, Foreman is wearing the faded and shabby red and blue trunks he'd worn in his knockout lost to Ali twenty years before, trailing on every judge's scorecard in the eleventh round, forming Ko's more with a magically

timed overhand right to the jaw. At forty six years old, Reverend George has become the oldest ever world's heavyweight champion.

Netflix film Jingle Jangle, a Christmas Story. Almost impossible to have grown up in Louisville and have spent time with Muhammad Ali and not feel the impact of the great man.

back room and we hung out. We were just kind of chilling there and I see Ali and he's just smiling and he's looking at the kids, and got to take this picture with him. After that, I felt linked to Muhammad Ali. Every time I go back to Louisville, I'm looking at that mural. I'm walking in once again into the Muhammad Ali Center. It's my home, a place where my name still says some years later, I'm going

through the audition process for the show. The show is called In This Corner Cashius Clay was written by an amazing playwright named Adris Goodwin, and Idris loved Ali as much as I did. I'm looking at myself in the mirror, and I'm thinking, I can be Muhammed Ali. I could do the workout, so I could do whatever I had to do. He felt like he was already in my bones a little bit, just from having painted that mural

and hanging out with them at the Holly Center. I studied every night, poured my sweat into trying to sound like him and trying to move him and getting the words right. And I walked into the audition, into this big auditorium, and I could see the other guys who looked a little bit more like Ali than I did. Maybe they had his complexion down a little bit, but I knew that they couldn't have embodied what I would embody. It couldn't mean as much to them as it meant

to me. I wasn't nervous at all. I got the job, and when they discovered that I'm from Louisville, that I had worked at the Muhammad Ali Center, every news outlet ran with that The Louisville Son returns as Ali and I had such an amazing welcome back home. It was some of the most amazing experiences I've ever had working as an artist. I got to meet his brother, who would tell me how Ali walked when he was a kid, how Ali talked when he was a kid.

moment of my career. My first television show in La. Warner Brothers called me and said, you got to come out here to La tomorrow. I go out there, and I realized that all of the bravado that I put on.

felt a rush of energy. He was giving me the pieces of his spirit. He was infusing my spirit with the thing that made him unstoppable. It wasn't just confidence, it was also a knowledge of self to understand that you are me, I'm you. We are the same one. At this moment, you were one. You are Muhammad Ali. And then I had to go and actually be Muhammad Ali on stage. So it did feel like a one to one transference of energy directly to me. I summoned that.

I walked around the lot of Warner Brothers. I've never been to Los Angeles in my life. I've been working to be an actor my entire life, and this was the town that was going to make or break my career.

I was able to find confidence, and I wouldn't have found it without trying to walk in Ali's footsteps, not only the footsteps of his mentality, but his humanity as well. I'm still walking in his footsteps today. I ended up working with in the organization called Kids in the Spotlight.

What we do is we help kids from the foster care system who would have never had the kind of opportunities that I had with great teachers, to get them into a position where they can learn how to act and direct and all these skills, and work with professionals like myself, the whole gamut of amazing people. I feel a responsibility to transfer my energy. You get to be great, but you don't get to be great. Tell someone else that they're great, and reach out your hand.

for his longtime exceptional coverage of professional football. In two thousand and nine, Tom won an Emmy Award as the Outstanding Studio Analyst, and in nineteen ninety six he won the Cable Ace Award in the same category. Prior to his successes in sports television, Tom was a three time Pro Bowl linebacker for the Denver Broncos. During fourteen NFL seasons, he led the Broncos to the Super Bowl twice in

nineteen eighty six. A member of the Bronx Goes Ring of Fame, Tom was the franchise leader in seasons played and games played at the time of his retirement. He was named by his teammates Denver's defensive MVP three times in the team's Most Inspirational Players six years in a row, and if it sounds as if I'm biased on the topic. That's because I am guilty ist charged TJ. Welcome to the podcast.

him verifies that for you. When we did finally meet for lunch, by the time he left the restaurant, there were hundreds of people who had gathered outside the restaurant because they knew that he was there. Howard Bingham who was there at the lunch as well, and as we got through with the lunch, he was like, Tom, you probably want to you know, because we had some assignments

and stuff to do. He said, you probably should go on and go because all of those hundreds of people who are outside this restaurant, Ali is going to sign all of their autographs, He's going to meet them, he's going to shake hands with them. He's going to take pictures with them because he will not leave anyone out there wanting to meet him or have something signed. He's not going to let him walk away disappointed. So it's going to take some time. And I just again, I

just thought, Wow, he's a different human being. I asked the question, how do people know where he is? And the answer is, somebody knows where he is all the time. I think he liked it. He enjoyed people. His life was so public, but that privacy that I felt talking to him and having a chance to have a conversation with him was extraordinary. I always remember the very first thing he ever said to me. We sat down and he looked at me and he went, Joe Frasier.

going to accept it. She's a different generation than Ali. Yes, she's heard about him from me. In my head, I'm like, is she going to understand who this man is? Is she really going to get it? And before we actually met him, we had arrived at the stadium. We had some people taking us through some different areas and she turned to me and she said, am I going to get a chance to meet Ali. I said, I don't know.

I said, what I'll tell you is this. I said, They're going to set up us going out to the field in some way, shape or form, and it's gonna be whatever he wants. I said. If he wants to stay, then he'll stay, and if he wants to leave, they will make arrangements for him to leave. They're going to do whatever it is that he wants to do. He's just unique. What he was doing seems so outside the realm of the norm. That he was alone. That's one of the things I respect most about him me. He

didn't take his cues from anybody. They took us finally down to the locker room that led out to the field, and when we walked into that locker room, I'll leave us sitting there. From that moment on, Taylor literally was mesmerized by what she felt, what she saw, the interaction with him. It came time for us to go out on for the toss of the coin, and Lonnie asked me, when he gets out there, he had time sometime maintaining

his balance, would you mind holding him? The feeling even right now is one of I don't even know where to put it. I was so honored that she would ask me, and I told her that that it would be an honor for me. I've never forgotten it. It's one of the great moments in my life, hanging on to him and holding him by the arm. I don't even remember the toss of the coin. I don't remember who woned, who got the ball first. The only thing I was thinking is, you're holding on to Muhammad Ali.

You're helping him, and you're never going to forget it. You're never gonna forget it as long as you live. I felt such a sense of pride. I had to steal myself against tears in that moment. Oh my goodness, would I and just making sure that he's okay. Yeah, that's the moment. He ended up staying for the game. Taylor had a chance to sit right next to him, which I will tell you it might have been the

line of the night. She's having a great time, Mohammed's having a great time, and Lonnie comes over to me, and she turns to me and she goes. You know, he still likes to interact with a pretty girl every now. And we stepped back into the hotel room, and Taylor turns to me and she said, Dad, it's like being with royalty. She goes being with him was like being with royalty, and I told her, I said, he is royalty. He is royal in every way and treated as such.

And there's nobody who doesn't feel it when you're around him. If he doesn't say anything, if he doesn't say if he doesn't say a thing, it makes no difference. It's just that you realize you're in the midst of greatness. My wife Jennifer had a chance to meet him at a seventieth birthday party out in Arizona, and I told her before he and Lannie arrived. Because we were there for four days. It was a celebration of Ali's birthday, so there were a number of people who spoke and

I was asked. They said, would you speak last, And I said sure, but it's the kind of thing that you want to get right. And I had thought about it quite a bit. I got out there and I told him, I said, I want to tell you about the first time that I heard your voice. That's the way I started it. February twenty fifth, sixty four, and I said, I told him, I'm laying in bed with

my dad. I don't know actually anything about you, I said, I'm just laying in bed with my dad and knowing that Sonny Liston is supposed to beat somebody else up and move on to the next opponent, I said, And we're listening to the fight on a radio, wasn't on TV. Life metaphorm like clown. I said, you win the fight, and I heard your voice. Then you were screaming me I'm handsome, I'm fat, I'm pretty and can't possibly be

beaten at the top of your lungs. That how pretty you were, how you were the greatest fighter of all time, how you shook up the world, How nobody should ever doubt you again, no matter what. And I told him, I said, something inside me was touched, like millions of other kids just like me, the young African American black kid. I had never heard a black man talk like that. And then there was my dad, completely other generation. My dad turned to me and he goes, he's crazy, and

that's what I wanted him to know. That was the beginning of the relationship. For many, many kids, many many young people. We all experienced the same thing. You came out and you were like, I am this, I am different. I am going to be boastful about who I am. I am going to give confidence to people who don't have it. I'm gonna make people feel good. And that's what he did for me. And I told my wife Jennifer, I said, you should prepare yourself before he gets here.

I said, because you cannot imagine the emotion. There's about three hundred people. I said, you're going to see some emotion that you have not seen before that's going to be exhibited toward him as soon as he gets here. And sure enough he comes in. They wheeled him in. He's in a wheelchair, and people broke down in tears, and not tears of sadness. I'm talking about just an overflow of emotion. People who had young kids who were there at this thing, who brought them over so that

Ali could touch them. There was a couple of babies in the area. People brought those babies over to touch him, as if he was an apostle. Jen had tears coming out of her eyes, and I told her, I said, I knew what it was going to be because I have felt it myself. You can't help but feel it. And he lives with it all the time. That night, I don't know that he said one word the entire night. He was just sitting there, and yet there was all of this emotion around him. That's what I felt. That's

what I felt. Here's what I would say. There's something spiritual about him. I can't explain it. I don't know what it is. There's something spiritual if that word has the meaning that it's supposed to have, god like, not God, but god like, emulating something spiritual in many ways, that's what I felt about him.

studio for the next ten years. And you know, I'm doing all right and feels good to do what I want to do. I don't have to be what anybody wants me to be. I can just be who I want to be. There's ever a message that he gave us. It couldn't have been stated more simply. Sometimes the most complicated issues are solved in very simple statements. That's what that felt like to me. He said such simplistic things. But if you take it and you break it down,

there's just no mistaking the straightforwardness of it. So hopefully that's how it passes on.

track Nuage. Visit Luminescent music dot com to check out more from the band.