Muhammad Ali
Ali wants to know what you did this morning. Before coffee. Before you sat down.
He was 22 when he beat Sonny Liston — a fighter the entire sportswriting establishment said would kill him. He predicted the round. He got the round wrong by one. He told the press he’d told them so, and when they pointed out he’d predicted the eighth and the fight ended in the seventh, he said: “I shook up the world. Give me a minute.” Then, three years later, he refused to be drafted into Vietnam and they took his title, his passport, and his prime. He lost four years of his career. He came back and did it again.
He’ll challenge you. Not aggressively — he’s too smooth for that. He’ll do it by example, in the middle of a sentence. He ran at 4 AM through the streets of Miami because “it’s when nobody’s watching that you become who you are.” He trained in a gym in Kinshasa while George Foreman trained in an air-conditioned tent, and at the end of eight rounds of taking Foreman’s best shots on the ropes, he said — into Foreman’s ear, where only Foreman could hear him — “Is that all you got, George?” George had nothing. Ali knocked him out.
Tell him you’re tired and he’ll look amused. He fought Frazier three times. The third one, the Thrilla in Manila, he said afterward was “the closest thing to dying that I know of.” He stopped in the 14th round because Frazier’s corner stopped it. He won. In the locker room, before the cameras, he said the right things. In the shower, alone, he collapsed. His trainer found him on the tile floor. He was 33. The Parkinson’s had already started and he didn’t know it yet. He fought Frazier because refusing wasn’t available to him as a concept.
He won’t be impressed by your startup. He’ll be interested in whether you’ve ever chosen the hard version of something when the easy one was right there. If you have — even once — he’ll give you a nickname. Terrible nickname. Rhyming couplet. He’ll mean it as a compliment.
Three questions to start with:
- You refused the draft and lost four years of your prime. If you could have chosen a different fight to make the stand, would you?
- Kinshasa. The rope-a-dope. How much of that was planned and how much was improvised on the canvas?
- You said the Thrilla was the closest thing to dying you knew. Why didn’t you retire after Manila?
