In our sangha this morning, before meditating we spoke a little of Muhammad Ali, who died yesterday at 74.
When I returned to my apartment I found and read a fine long New Yorker profile of Ali written by David Remnick in 1998, the year he became the magazine's editor. It's a lovely portrait, whose central focus throughout is a recent occasion when he and Ali sat together in Ali's farmhouse in the small town of Berrien, Michigan, watching a video of Ali's famous bout with Sonny Liston in 1964. Here is a passage from the article:
"His greatest triumph in retirement came on the summer night in Atlanta when, to the surprise of nearly everyone watching, he suddenly appeared with a torch in his hands, ready to open the 1996 Summer Olympics. Ali stood with the heavy torch extended before him, and three billion people could see him shaking, both from the Parkinson’s and from the moment itself. But Ali carried it off. 'Muhammad wouldn’t go to bed for hours and hours that night,' [his wife] Lonnie said. 'He was floating on air. He just sat in a chair back at the hotel holding the torch in his hands. It was like he’d won the heavy-weight title back a fourth time.'
"Lonnie Ali is a handsome woman with a face full of freckles. She is fifteen years younger than her husband and grew up near the Clay family in Louisville’s West End. When Ali’s third marriage, to Veronica Porsche, was on its way out, he called her to come be with him. Eventually, Ali and Lonnie married. Lonnie is precisely what Ali needs. She is smart—a Vanderbilt graduate—she is calm and loving, and she does not treat Ali like her patient. Besides Ali’s closest friend, the photographer Howard Bingham, Lonnie is probably the one person in his life who has given more than she has taken. In Michigan, Lonnie runs the household and the farm, and when they are on the road, which is more than half the time, she keeps watch over Ali, making sure he has rested enough and taken his medicine. She knows his moods and habits, what he can do and what he can’t. She knows when he is suffering and when he is hiding behind his symptoms to zone out of another event that bores him.
"When Lonnie came into the room where we were watching a tape of the Liston fight, Ali didn’t look up from the television. He merely reached out and rested his hand on the small of her back."