Shadowboxer

Two years retired, Muhammad Ali lives in a closely guarded compound called Fremont Place, hard by the Hollywood glitterati and far from reality. The big homes with their sculpted lawns and shrubbery seem to sit there amid eternal euphoria, in a world without disorder. There is not much sound here, just the swish of fronds in high trees. It's like a still life that shows how the rich and famous keep their distance.

Turn off the street, pass under an arch and you come to a little guardhouse, where a keeper frisks you with his eyes. Why not, they seem to say; didn't you hear about John Lennon?

"No, he ain't seein' nobody," says the keeper.

Yes, but we have an appointment.

He trounces on his last word again. "Nobody. That's my orders. Hundreds of people botherin' him every day."

Can the guard call him on the phone?

"Can't call up to the big house, either. He don't wanna know from nobody. Best you can do is leave a note."

Dates never did mean much to Ali, you think, and time never had dimension--unless it was measured in rounds and broken by the sound of a ring bell. Why worry about time when you believe you're going to live forever? But back at the hotel, the Fremont compound sticks in the mind; it is, perhaps, the best measure of how far Ali has come from that old clapboard house on Grand Avenue in Louisville, where he used to sit on the porch and mesmerize the other kids with tales of how far he was going. "You see this house?" he would tell them. "It gonna be a shrine one day."

Grand Avenue was Ali's only concession to a past he often seemed to loathe. For if he had no feeling for time, he did have an acute sense of place, half of it residing modestly among his people, the other half in a grandeur fit for Architectural Digest. He bought and remodeled homes as easily as he changed moods. Every house became a Xanadu, his shrine in transit; then he'd move on to the next mirage. He didn't want to go home again; he just wanted to feel like he was there.

"I see the note," he says on the phone a half hour later.

"How's everything, champ?"

"I ain't seein' nobody," he says, the voice barely audible.

"Yeah, but you told me to come out."

"I did?" he asks. "Well, I changed ma mind."

"But I'm here, for Christ's sake."

He studies the problem, it seems, then says, "You bring money?"

"For what?"

"For me. I ain't talkin' to no press, no television people, unless they pay. You sellin' me, you should be payin' me. I don't need you people anymo'."

"Come off that old line, Ali. That's not you talking."

"All you all wanna do," he says, going into mock anger, "is come out here and say, 'Oh, the champ, he misses boxin' so much, he don't talk too good.' I jist retired, and y' all buryin' me. You wanna see me hangin' round gyms, goin' to fights, and then make me look like some kind of clown. I don't need the press. I go anywhere in the world, talk to the Pope, discuss with him why Jesus always white in those pictures. Boxin' ain't nothin' to me anymo'."

"Yeah, it's true, you're still a world figure."

"You say nigga?" he laughs. He pauses, then says, "OK, come on out. But we ain't gonna talk about boxin'. I jist got my religion on my mind."

Besides the sudden return of his sense of humor, two things about the phone exchange are familiar: his peculiar and ambivalent attitude toward money and the sense that there are still Iagos working his mind. His slam at the press is a refrain straight from the mouths of those old-line Muslims who tried to manipulate his media when they couldn't improve their own; as communicators, they were like Bugs Bunny, all teeth and squawk. But there are a couple of new aspects to the retired Ali: the whispering, the slow cadence of his speech and the feeling that he is trying desperately to make one last transformation in his life--from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali to the Saint Francis of Assisi of Islam.

You want to believe he'll make it, despite the waves of rumor slapping against the hero in repose: the persistent news accounts that depict him as feebleminded; his second wife, Belinda's, saying he was a lousy husband; the mounting possibility that his current wife, the beautiful Veronica, is going to leave him; the final indignity of more and more fighters' commenting on his appearance, to the point where middleweight champ Marvin Hagler got up in the ring at the ceremonial retirement of Sugar Ray Leonard and said, as an afterthought, "We don't want to end up like Muhammad Ali."

The words were enough to make your back teeth screech. Ali as a pathetic footnote? But they don't carry away their dead in boxing; they eat them while they're still warm. Ali knew that better than Hagler and all the others who seem now to be using him to main-line on easy pathos. So, with the gossip and the disrespect, with the proscenium toppling down on him, you have to go and see how dead is dead. It is end-up time, comin'-down time, and you sense a shifting of squadrons that seems to signal some great advance--or great retreat.

•

Goin' up is easier than comin' down. You can't doubt that if you've ever been around when a 20-game arm suddenly goes dead or when a top jockey is too scared to get up on a horse anymore. Even if he's been lucky and had a long run, when it's over, it's over. And then the hero had better know how to go off and sit alone in a quiet room. Not many have.

"Don't you ever be comin' down," Archie Moore once said to a young heavyweight named Cassius Clay, "and you'll live forever." Part metaphysician, part snake charmer, the former light-heavyweight champ was warning him to be smart with his life and his talent. Clay, an Olympic champion and already a prince in his own mind, looked at old Archie as if he were a busted-out swami; the blessed don't need advice, his eyes seemed to say to Moore. And, indeed, if you had wagered 20 years ago that one man had the pride and the ballast of character to scale down safely from the summit of fame, that man would have been Cassius Clay, soon to become Muhammad Ali.

Even now, with the taxi nearing Ali's home in L.A., you can still hear the rhapsody: "Ain't nobody been like me. I changed the face of the black man. I was a difference in my time. You can't say that about any other fighta. Look at them faces all round the world. They sayin', 'My, my, look at the champ, will ya. He don't smoke, he don't drink, he don't kill people, he gonna be forever.' When I quit, bein' down is just gonna be another way of bein' up."

Inside the Fremont compound now, a neatly tailored Moroccan who moves like a hush is guiding you up an expanse of steps and between a pair of huge white columns. He is Ali's private secretary, handling his appointments, his mail and the magic props that Ali will have him produce with a click of the fingers or a grumble that only the Moroccan can decode. Ali's inner circle has always included someone like that, who was there next to him but never seemed to be. The Moroccan doesn't live in the house, nor does the cook/housekeeper. Just Veronica and Ali and their two young daughters. His in-laws live in a guesthouse out back.

"Veronica's not home much," you remember being told by an old member of Ali's crowd before going out to L.A. "She's either in actin' class, exercise class or buyin' class. You have to go to buyin' class to learn how to give money wings, like she do." It's probably just sour grapes from a former hanger-on, though it was recently reported that Ali had gone into a deep depression over Veronica's latest $175,000 tour of Bloomingdale's. He doesn't appear too depressed when we enter his study. He is sitting behind a massive Louis XIV desk that looks like it could fly if it had wings. He doesn't notice any visitors, for his eyes are fixed on the television set across the room, something called The People's Court.

It's the kind of show he'd like, all right: bizarre day-to-day squabbles and justice doled out by a witty judge. It may remind him of his traveling entourage, for which he was judge, jury, town marshal--and banker. Sometimes, he'd pick up the food and room bills for as many as 70 people; but the hard core numbered about 25, from the man who tasted his sweat in workouts to the one who shouted "Amen!" every time Ali said something. As that raucous and spendthrift group hit the capitals of the world, his manager, Herbert Muhammad, used to shake his head and say, "Ali's a giving man. If he stressed justice, there wouldn't be anyone around him." But then again, Ali always did think of himself as a John Wayne type, with a fast gun, a tight rein on his emotions and a sympathy for weaker species.

"See any John Wayne movies lately?" you ask him. After all, maybe he hasn't seen you enter the room.

"John Wayne dead," he says, his eyes still on the set, where a woman is arguing that a neighbor poisoned her dog. "So is Elvis. Everybody dead. 'Cept me."

The candy-store jurisprudence is annoying him now, and when he waves his hand at the set, the Moroccan goes over and whispers in his ear. "Turn it off," says Ali. "She lyin', she killed that dog. Judge is gonna say she didn't, anyway. Turn it off." He keeps staring at the dead screen. "What time is it?" he asks the Moroccan, who indicates that it isn't time for whatever it's supposed to be time for.

"Why is Jesus Christ always white?" he wants to know--but don't try an explanation. He has already asked the Pope during a private chat at the Vatican, and even John Paul II came up empty, according to Ali. "We jist sittin' in a big room, full of sun and heavy curtains and things that look like gold. Oh, he a sweet man. He say that when he was a young priest, he saw me fight in the Rome Olympics, shook my hand, even got my autograph. Imagine, theee Pope. He say he knew I was gonna be big. But he can't even tell me why Christ always white, why he ain't black sometime. He jist say, 'Ali, well, you know, it's been that way for centuries.' He jist keep lookin' deep in my eyes, and I say, 'Somethin' wrong with my eyes, Father?' He laugh and say, 'I haven't been called that in many years.' And he say he lookin' in my eyes 'cause 'I've heard about Ali for years, and now you are here.' You see, I wasn't jist the champ. I was theee champ. I touch the poor and the (continued on page 236)Shadowboxer(continued from page 180) greatest. They all got a piece of Ali, somethin' to remember."

What a visual jewel this is, you think: the avenging black angel who once made the Christian world choke on its rage, Islam's crazy child of the gods, theee heavyweight champion, sitting with the paragon of spiritual diplomacy, pointing to a picture of a white Christ as if he's calling the round in which he'll win. But it's hard to focus on the image, because the man in front of you now is not the Ali who could turn such a scene into lyrical rapids. Once a stream of soaring octaves, his speech now sends a chill up your back, and you have to lean in hard to hear him. The tongue is as heavy as an ingot. The lips move in slow motion. His speech limps along, struggles for air when it tries to accelerate. And there are the constant clearing of his throat and the tiny points of white saliva in the corners of his mouth.

Earlier, on the phone, you had thought that the voice was just another of his put-ons; but no such luck, and the full force of what you are hearing makes you queasy. His face is also in full view for the first time now. All right, his head is still lopsided, but we've known about that since a London hatter measured him for a derby in the early Sixties. ("You mean it's not perfect?" Ali said back then, as if he'd just found out he had scurvy. "Bloody imperfect, if you ask me," said the hatter.) There is, too, the tiny boyhood scar on the right lid. The skin is still smooth, free of zippered flesh; the nose remains agreeably flat. But the face lacks definition; it has a bloated quality that suggests a drowsy bullfrog. And those eyes where clowns used to tumble now recall a dance hall at daybreak.

You keep staring at him, and he keeps on talking about his crusade for a black Christ, but it's other voices that you hear. "He just a tired old king who don't know what to be king of anymore," one of his former running mates had said. "He'll be in a hotel room, go on the nod just like that, then wake up and say, 'Where we at, judge'--everybody was called judge in the entourage--'What we doin' here?' And then he goes back on the nod again. He's like that--what you call it?--yeah, like that Flyin' Dutchman on the sea. He don't wanna stay home, he just wanna travel out there, floatin' and noddin' in nowhere. He like a ghost ship, that's it. Then, again, he so full of life sometimes. He just tired, that's all. Sometimes I think if he had his way, all he'd like to do is back up time so he was Cassius Clay again, and he just sit there forever tellin' stories to all them kids how he was goin' to put the world in his pocket and then let them have it back, piece by piece. Young Cassius wanted to give 'em the world back. Muhammad Ali wanted to keep it forever."

Ali stops talking and looks at you looking at him. "What you see?" he asks. "Yeah, well, I been fastin' for the last 14 days. Just orange juice." But you don't counter with the obvious question: How can a man fast for two weeks and end up looking like Sydney Greenstreet? In all those years, you never went after Ali, strafing him with questions, like a hard-ass reporter. If you wanted to get a serious response, you had to become a familiar face around him, sometimes even play the beguiled fool.

"What time is it?" Ali asks again, and the Moroccan looks at his watch and says it isn't time. Ali growls something and the Moroccan leaves the study. You notice some legal pads covered with scrawl in front of Ali, and you ask him what he's writing: "You making out a will?" He smiles, then tells you to take a look.

"All day, I sit here writin'," he says, "lookin' for the truth." The barely legible words are copied from a Sufi tract. We can see the truth of this idea when we think of what we were yesterday and compare it with our condition today. Our own happiness, our riches or posterity of yesterday are like a dream to us. The message is much the same, page after page: Forget the past; find the route to your true nature.

"That's heavy, champ," you say.

"Say it again!" he says.

"That's heavy...."

"You got it! See. Even you see it, and you don't even have my knowledge." The Moroccan slips back into the room, carrying flowerpots and a box full of magic tricks, and Ali tells you to get down on the floor with him. "Kids," he says, "they love this stuff. We all kids, ain't we? Jist git ugly faces when we git older." He starts separating his apparatus. His breathing is heavy and short, and he keeps clearing his throat.

"You got stage fright? Why are you breathing so hard?" He dismisses the questions with a wave of the hand.

"Kid come up here to the front door just the other day," he says. "I open it, look down at him. There he is, kinda bug-eyed and scared, 'cause he know it's me, and he say, 'Can you come out and play, Ali?' Now, ain't that sumpin'? He want me to do some magic tricks. You think they'd dare do that with John Wayne or somebody else real beeeg? Never. But they got a thing for me. They see sumpin' in me that's nowhere else. 'Ali, can you come out and play?' My, my, ain't the world strange?"

For the next two hours, Ali takes you through his full repertoire, while the Moroccan dozes on the couch, his head tilting to the side but popping up every time he hears a rasping command. Coins, cards, flowers, brightly colored balls--they're all disappearing in Ali's hands. So are the questions that you are trying to ease by him: Have you heard a man is pissing blood and his face is bloated because his kidneys are in bad shape, that sometimes he can hardly walk because of all the punches he took back there? Heard a man is fooling with drugs, and maybe that's why he talks funny? Nothing arouses him, and finally he concludes his act by saying, "All eeeellusion. People think they seein' one thing, but it's another. Jist like me. People think they knew me, but they weren't seein' me. Ain't magic wonderful?"

He rousts the Moroccan and asks again for the time. The secretary puts up three fingers, indicating three minutes. Ali walks briskly out of the study. Could he be going for another magic prop, maybe an elephant? No, says the aide, he is going to pray. He pulls out a chart that shows every Muslim in the world the precise moment, at least five times a day, when he should be praying, which is why Ali constantly asks what time it is. We look now into a big outside room, and there he is, his head down on a prayer mat facing east, the deepening evening shadows falling across the ornate candelabra and the statuary. Watching him there, you see a man holding on to a lifeline, to his balance in a world he is not sure of anymore.

Back in the study, his breath coming in short takes, he says, "I don't miss any ma prayer times. Used to let it slip when I was fightin', wasn't a good Moooslem sometimes, but I can't be that way now. Without Allah, the Devil's got me. Fast women and late nights and me playin' the fool. But with Allah, ain't nothin' you can say, nothin' nobody can say gonna hurt me. The Devil's out there. But he can't git me long as I true to Allah. I pray everywhere. I've prayed in Mecca. I prayed with Nasser, head of Egypt, while sailin' down the Nile, with a harp playin' in the background and the Pyramids gleamin' like mountains of gold. Nasser dead, too. Everybody dead. Ain't life strange? You never know whatcha gonna be or whatcha gonna do when your time comes."

•

Eight years gone, and the thwack of leather, those twilit eyes, are often lost to memory, only now and then running fast across the mind, like lightning in a summer sky. But suddenly, the next evening with Ali, it's there again in all its shuddering clarity: the third Ali-Frazier fight, the Thrilla in Manila. It's as if someone has thrown a torch through the window and lit up the memories--the heat waving up off dented tin roofs, the smell and feel of equatorial decay and final reckoning in the air.

What summons back Manila now is Ali's odd reaction to a suggestion that we look at the film of that fight. "No, never," he says irrevocably. "I never look at that film." He says he'll show you the ignominy of George Foreman in Zaire, Floyd Patterson in his various attitudes of martyrdom, even his own loss to Frazier in their first fight--anything but those steamy couple of hours in Manila that took him to the very center of himself as a champion and a man.

Sly persistence won't get him to change his mind. For it is clear that Manila now stands in his mind like a long-abandoned mansion in the jungle, strangled by vines and wrapped in mist. "Who wants to keep lookin' at hell?" he asks, contradicting the claim by one of his former disciples who says that every so often, when only a three-A.M. moon lights the big rooms of his home, Ali will slip down to the study and gaze vacantly as he and Frazier move out of time and make the stars quiver once again.

What does he still dread about that fight? Had it not been a masterpiece? Had it not produced a kind of primitive art, a fire storm of passion, of promises kept and value given, of dramatic passage with an honorable end? But there was no end, and that is what Ali cannot bear to see.

More than Frazier cleaving at his kidneys, like a grizzly, the film shows where Ali should have called it quits--but didn't.

Hobbling around his suite after the fight that night, his body still tingling from Frazier's punches, he ran your hand over the terrible range of bumps Frazier had raised on his forehead and he spoke starkly of the landscape of his life. He knew that behind him, in that ring, his miraculous talent had gushed out irretrievably, like blood from a point-blank wound. Before him, he could see all of this: the man, "still pretty," who had escaped in time; a significant role in the Muslim movement; a beacon for the defeated and dispossessed; the mystery who would stubbornly remain a mystery. "The ship stop here," he said, looking out over Manila Bay and fingering the bumps on his head once again. "My God, what that man done to me. No more oceans. Nothin' in boxin' for me no more."

He was right, for he knew he had no big, stomping fights left in him, the kind that could be brutal to his health and reputation. "Eagles fall from high mountains," he said, "and then all them night things come and pick at a beautiful thing that only the sun ever get near. But this is one eagle gonna stay up there on the rocks and ledges with the sun, and there ain't nobody ever gonna see him again after this evil day."

"Say it again," you say to him now in his study.

"That was an evil day," Ali says. He smiles: "Unless you dumber than you look, you know what I mean."

Who, after all, wants to dwell on the times they double-crossed themselves? Better, when you roll the time frames by, to remember Ali as some sort of mad redeemer. Better to recall him as one of the first icons of the war resistance, going off to a three-year exile shouting, "I ain't losin' nothin' but gainin' the whole world." The world didn't argue the point, and when he came back, it was waiting.

But after the final Frazier fight, the years rolled by too quickly. Ali's ability to shock had worn thin, and so had his boxing magic. He flailed his way through a traveling circus of nonfights, a Tolstoy writing a soap opera. "Nothing," Herbert Muhammad reassured his skeptical legions, "can weaken the image of Muhammad Ali. He is beyond boxing." But even then, he was slipping into that zone where legends rot, where the rabble stands at a dangerous intersection, waiting for the three-car pile-up.

"What do they want from me?" he said after taking his Saturday-night jive to Tokyo for a side-show match with a wrestler named Inoki. Besides looking greedy and foolish, Ali had been kicked in his leg by Inoki, perhaps 60 times in the same spot, sustaining serious injuries that would later require treatment back in the States. He went ahead with an official visit to Korea, though, knowing that he had damaged himself.

"This is a scary business," he said, sitting one near-dawn morning by the pool of the Seoul hotel. "And I'm scared as hell. Those little blood circuits movin' through the brain--when they pop, then so long, brain."

"So why not move on?" you asked. He kept his eyes on the half-light moving across the pool.

"You don't know what it means," he said. "Gettin' the body feelin' like a big engine. The faces everywhere you go. Hell, I ain't no poet, but I am poetry. I'm like the best movie, the best paintin' you ever did see. What else I got or can do? How can I walk away from me?" He paused for a couple of beats, then said, "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly ... everybody gotta die the way he want to."

By that point, it seemed, he had sealed a pact with the future. It had not been enough for him to reach the top; he was going to come back down in his own good time and all in one piece.

"Who's around?" he had said, surveying the heavyweight ranks like a gypsy picking through a junk yard. "I'll skip Foreman, but I don't think he want any more of me anyhow. Frazier, he through. I saw to that." But he refused to accept what he himself had lost in Manila. The holy wars with Terrell and Patterson, the return from injustice, the fights to regain what was rightfully his--those were far behind him. He was out there now, fighting the fights, but without a cross or a cause. Throughout, the visuals grew more horrid: the face, melted and bruised and bowed too long in the corner; the flaccid chest heaving for air; the legs in concrete. The affront to his dignity and his ring aesthetics was enough to make you put your hand across your eyes.

Once, when he came out of a Houston courtroom after going toe to toe with the flag, an old lady screamed, "Look what they doin' to sweet baby Jesus!" Once, soon after being freed to fight again, he stood on a corner of Times Square and, emulating James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope, raised his fists and screamed up to the sky, "Here I is, here I really is!" and the cop cars had to come and take him away before the thousands there could riot with runaway love.

"Nobody's greater than the heavyweight king," he used to say with the immense pride of a man unmarked by his trials. Oddly, it was that pride that brought him out of retirement to face Larry Holmes. Jimmy Carter had sent Ali to Africa to persuade the nations there to boycott the Moscow Olympics; it was the kind of role Ali coveted. He never stopped to think that the U.S. hadn't backed the Africans when they had boycotted the Montreal games. The trip was dismal. The black leaders laughed at Ali, avoided him, even looked at him as a lackey and a fool. He returned angry, determined to redeem himself by dominating the stage once more with a success over Holmes. It was a decision that left him in a corner, his head bowed, his mystery stupidly exposed. He had become what Cassius Clay thought impossible--a slave, shackled to his own persona.

It was a relief when he finally had nothing more to give and traveled back to the silence of his Deer Lake camp in the hills of Pennsylvania. Deer Lake was where he had trained for so many fights, where he used to sit around after a day's work and admire the huge boulders that he'd had put there and the "real wood" of his rustic cabins. "The big trees, the big rocks," he would say, "are indestroyable, like me."

•

There is a hole in Ali's sock, and he knows you're looking at it. With his shoeless feet sprawled before him on the floor, he studies it absently and says, "I never did care much for dressin' up. I only got 'bout three suits now. Never had much more before."

It is Friday, a day for the Muslims like Sunday is for the Christians. This mosque is in the poor area of L.A., light-years from Mecca and from Ali's embroidery of the temples he would one day build with his money. (Who knows what happened to those?) The air is thick with the smell of jasmine, and often there is a shout from the crowd: "Go on! Say it! Don't stop now!" Wallace Muhammad, the leader of the American Muslims and today's speaker, doesn't need much encouragement. Hypnotically, with a serpentine style, he's going to say what he's come to say. For hours, he will rattle the sabers just a bit, boost materialism, harangue against superstitions, numbers players and Saturday-night princes.

"Ain't he a great speaker, so powerful?" Ali leans over and whispers in your ear. "Look round you: Lot of these people been whores, pimps, robbers, spendin' their pay on Friday nights. Now look at 'em; they so clean, their faces fulla Allah." He goes back to Wallace's words, then resumes his own private sermon: "We ain't the old Chicago Muslims anymore. We belong to the whole Islamic world. We don't talk about white devils. Even you can join our religion. Even I could marry a white woman now, even go into the Army."

Wallace is trying to work the mainstream of labor, dignity, thrift and revolt against religious persecution; his father, old Elijah, must be spinning like a top.

To the few Americans who knew about them when Ali came along, Elijah Muhammad's Black Muslims were little more than a wacky storefront religion in Chicago, an enclave for mysticism and a corruption of Marcus Garvey's Back to Africa movement. Elijah scorned boxing as a slave trade run by fat men with cigars, and the name Cassius Clay was remote to the sect. It was Malcolm X who had the vision to hook Clay for the Muslims before he took Sonny Liston's title.

Overnight, with Malcolm's direction, he became Muhammad Ali and brought the media eye down on the black outriders. In no time, it seemed, the old prophet Elijah was talking about Muslim spaceships that circled the earth with ray guns leveled at the white devils. Muslim membership grew and, after the press explained the sect, so did white paranoia. While Malcolm defected and was later assassinated, old Elijah had Ali securely on his knee. Ali truly loved the old man, even if he didn't understand him half the time. He also loved having a cause other than himself.

Today, he is no less a shepherd for the diplomatic Wallace. Yet, for a symbol who projected the Muslims into national prominence, who is still its most identifiable figure, who is said to have pumped a fortune into the religion, Ali seems to be just another parishioner here. He seems to have been given no official status equal to his eminence, especially now that he needs it the most. With our heads bowed to the floor once more, he whispers, "I jist wanna be an advance man for Wallace. Go 'head and git the crowds ready for his comin'. Or like that saint--what's his name?--love the animals, give up all his riches just to save the people."

Saint Francis of Assisi?

"Yeah, that's him." He says this with touching humility, and it makes you wonder if Wallace and his new Muslims are going to be around if Muhammad Ali ever really needs to be saved in one way or another.

Heads back down to the floor again, and Ali rasps, "Heard a man pissin' blood 'cause of bein' hit in the kidney, have ya? What a man pee, nobody knows. Heard a man's on drugs, have ya? Ever see that man on drugs? Then no man ever landed on the moon, and Elvis ain't dead. Ya deeeg?"

Finally, Wallace ends the ceremony, and Ali makes his way out of the mosque, doing magic tricks for the kids. There are no pleasantries exchanged between Wallace and Ali; there's been no sign of recognition by Wallace for the man who earlier in the afternoon had spread out his elaborate plans for a costly Muslim school for boys in L.A.

Outside, Ali signs a few autographs and then picks up an earlier thread of thought: "Elvis, he dead 'cause he never found anything bigger than himself. If he did, then the pressure'd never've eaten him up. One out of three people in the world are Moooslem. I'm a part of that. That's my strength now. Boxin' don't mean a thing to me no more."

Ali drops behind the wheel of his Rolls-Royce, and we are off on a slow drive. You ask him why he settled in L.A., and he says that "one place jist like another." Others believe he did so because he likes the glamor nearby but mainly because it was perfect for Veronica's chase after stardom. "I had 'nough glamor for a thousand men," he says, and he won't say anything about Veronica except that she's "got style and taste."

You wouldn't have heard those words from Ali in the days when the Muslims made him divorce his first wife, Sonji, because her dress and behavior were too flamboyant to fit the Muslim mold. His second wife, the young Belinda, was the epitome of his view of Muslim femininity, diffident and long-suffering. They were happy for a long time, until Veronica came along, cool and ambitious. The second marriage ended when Belinda, tired of all the rumors, got on a plane, went to Manila and marched right up to the suite where Veronica and Ali were nestled. She stayed only a few hours, nearly wrecked the suite and Ali, then got back on the next plane out of Manila. Even Muslim women apparently have their limits.

After a while, Ali stops the car. He is looking sadly at the ruins of a Bel Air home. It had belonged to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and it had burned to a shell a day or so before, while the Laker star was on the road. It is drizzling now, and smoke still waves spookily up from what was once a multimillion-dollar estate. Ali just sits there, shaking his head. "See what it all means?" he says. "Money and stuff? Means nothin'. Money's a devil. Jist like that and you lose it."

He glances again at the smoldering ruins. "Let's go," he says. "I don't like lookin' at bad luck."

•

Back at the compound, the mansion is dark and still. He flicks on the light in his study, and right away, half a dozen parrots begin a frenetic screech: Aleeee! Aleeee! Aleeee! "Shut up!" he yells, but they are still at it as he leads you off for a tour of the rooms.

The decor looks as if it has been lifted from Versailles. Everywhere, rugs of extraordinary tapestry, priceless antiques and re-creations, all accumulated by Veronica. "They gonna photograph the place," Ali says, "at one of the magazines. Veronica got taste, don't she?" He says it has cost $750,000 to furnish the house.

Upstairs, Veronica's room is pure antebellum Southern belle, except that the baby dolls scattered on her bed and along the windows are black. Ali's own bedroom is neat and bare, a stoic's quarters.

"You see," he says, "I don't care 'bout much. Jist a bed and blanket do me fine. Wouldn't care at all if I give it up and jist take a simple apartment somewhere. Jist stay on the road, helpin' Wallace in the Moooslem world. Like that Saint Francis, a, a, what's his name?" Of Assisi, you say. "Yeah, like him. People say I'm broke, but that's jist another lie. Like me takin' drugs. I support eight families, bought homes for 'em all. I don't even know how many kids."

Still upstairs, we move into a vast recreation room filled with fight posters and other memorabilia. A hand-carved tiger, six feet long, stands in a dark corner, its yellow eyes peering out. "Teng Hsiaoping gave it to me," he says. "I liked it, and he say, 'Take it.' Teng's a nice little man. Teng not dead. You know who he is? Leader of China. We standin' on the Great Wall of China one afternoon, jist me, him and his man who speaks English. He ask me how fast do I hit a man, somethin' like that. Faster than a snake's tongue, I say. And I'm showin' him how to jab with his short arms. He only about four and a half feet high. I say my jab used to go out at four thousandths of a second, and he don't know what to say to that, but he laughin' and havin' a good time. Then he ask me when I'm goin' to retire. I say I don't know. Then he say the strangest thing, somethin' about ... mountains can't grow any higher, and no matter how much we keep diggin', they don't git any lower. Somethin' like that. Still don't make any sense to me."

From a pile of pictures, you pick out one of Ali with Idi Amin, and Ali opens his eyes wide. "Wasn't he sumpin'?" he says. "We're havin' a big dinner at his palace one night. I'm a guest of honor, and there's everything to eat at this table longer than a block, all kinds of people there. We havin' a good time, and he's got a dwarf sittin' next to him, who he's feedin' soup to with a spoon. Then he suddenly hollers down at the end of the table to me. 'I want to fight the great Muhammad Ali!' he yell. I git to kiddin', say he must've had a nightmare. Then he goes under his table and comes up with a satchel. Dumps the money right out on the table. 'That's two million dollars,' he say. 'You a champion or a coward?' He wants to fight me six rounds. The guests are oohin' and aaahin' at all that money just layin' on top of the food on the table. I say no, thanks. He gonna kill me if I whup him. I go back to eatin', and then, when I look up, there he is, pointin' a big gun at me. The whole table's quiet. People startin' to git up. The dwarf scoots away. 'Now, what you say, Muhammad Ali?' he say. You know, I don't curse much, but I say, 'Go fuck yourself.' I'm mad and scared at the same time. Nobody at the table now. He holdin' that gun right on me. I can hear my heart, and then, suddenly, he drop the cannon right in the soup in front of him, and the soup splashes all over his uniform and face, and he let out a laugh that would chase the ghosts away. He sure was a crazy man."

On the way back down to the study, he pauses at the top of the stairs and looks oddly at a $2000 robe, a gift from Elvis Presley that is now spread neatly on the wall. Beaming and proud, Elvis took it off his back and gave it to Ali backstage one night in Las Vegas; a few nights later, Ali wore it into the ring when he fought Joe Bugner.

"Poor fella," he says of Elvis. "Everybody dead, it seems. Gettin' kind of creepy, ya know what I mean?"

He's still looking at the robe when you ask him the question that you have been trying to avoid from the start. He doesn't even look at you, but answers, "Maybe. Could be. Yeah, I believe I got brain damage. I believe so." Just like that, as if he's announcing he's got a cold or an upset stomach. You ask if he is being serious or making some sort of cryptic joke. He gives no reply but just shrugs; he seems to shrug a lot these days, as if he has caught himself moving uncertainly out of one dream and into another.

He turns and walks down the long staircase toward a big LeRoy Neiman painting of Cassius Clay with his hands raised toward the sky. So there it is, short and hard: the betrayed meeting the betrayer 20 years later. There is nothing left here of the young Clay who was so obsessed with eluding the sorry cutout of the ring wraith, the broken-down old fighter. "They used him badly," he once said of Joe Louis, "and he wasn't too smart and he stayed on too long and now his head's messed up. Fightin's just slavery, and I'm no slave for nobody. You won't see me hangin' on too long, shufflin' around like I don't know where I am." And here is the man--his brain circuits frayed now and likely to get worse--who kept chipping away at his legend and his youthful ideal until there wasn't much left of them.

•

Down in the dim study, Ali goes through his mail while the racket from the parrots outside fills the room. "I don't know what to do 'bout them," he says of the parrots. "Sometime, they make me think of faraway places; other times, they just noise." He looks at a couple of pieces of mail and tosses them to you. "You can't believe the mail I git," he says. "See that chest over there? I got twenty-seven chests like that filled with mail. People always writin' me." He asks you to read the two letters. One man says he has discovered a chemical for treating burn victims; he wants $1,000,000. The other man says he's going to walk around the world and wants Ali to contribute whatever he can to Ali's favorite charity. Ali takes the letters back and scrawls on the envelopes, Man wants a Million. Man wants to walk round the World. "People in need, sometime I help," he says, picking up the ringing phone.

"Hello, Momma," he says, smiling. "How's my beautiful girl? How's your baby, Momma?" he says. "Momma, I'm forty-two years old."

They talk awhile, and he ends by saying, "Yeah, Momma, I'm all right. I still alive, ain't I?"

Hanging up the phone, he says, "She the dearest thing in the world. Always wanted to marry a woman like my momma." He blows into his cupped hands and says, with his eyes suddenly drooping, "I git so tired sometime. I git so cold. Let's go over, sit by the fire."

He is quiet for a while, sitting close to the fire, rubbing his hands together. It is comin'-down time, and you just hope that tomorrow some kid can find the way to his door and ask him to come out and play.

"Why did you go on fighting, Ali?" you ask after a long moment of silence.

He just sits there staring into the flames, the light and shadow playing across his face.

"Everybody do it," he finally says.

"What?"

"Git lost," he says. "I just git lost, that's all."

"Once a stream of soaring octaves, his speech now sends a chill up your back."