by Cal Fussman MUHAMMAD ALI came through the double doors into the living room of his hotel suite on slow, tender steps. I held out my hand. He opened his arms. Ali lowered himself into a wide, soft chair, and I sat on an adjacent sofa. "I've come," I said, "to ask about the wisdom you've taken from all you've been through." Ali seemed preoccupied with his right hand, which was trembling over his right thigh, and he did not speak. "George Foreman told me that you were the most important man in the world. When I asked him why, he said that when you walked into a room, it didn't matter who was there--presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, movie stars--everybody turned toward you. The most famous person in that room was wondering, Should I go to meet him? Or stay here? He said you were the most important man in the world because you made everybody else's heart beat faster."
The shaking in Ali's right hand seemed to creep above his elbow. Both of his arms were quivering now, and his breaths were short and quick.
I leaned in awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do. Half a minute passed in silence. I wondered if I should call for his wife.
Ali stooped over, and now his whole body was trembling and his breaths were almost gasps.
"Champ! You okay? You okay?"
Ali's head lifted and slowly turned to me with the smile of an eight-year-old.
"Scared ya, huh?" he said.
Ali was in Dublin for the opening ceremonies of the Special Olympics. A van pulled up outside the hotel, and it was with much effort that he slowly lifted himself into the front seat. And yet as soon as the driver pulled out onto the road, the left-hand side of the road, Ali was waving his arms in a childish portent of doom and gasping, "Head-on collision! Head-on collision!"
There were four of us in the back: Ali's wife, Lonnie, who is fourteen years younger than Ali and who grew up across the street from his childhood home in Louisville; his best friend, Howard Bingham, a photographer he met in 1962 and who's snapped more pictures of Ali than anyone has ever taken of anybody; and a businessman named Harlan Werner, who's organized public appearances for Ali during the last sixteen years.
Jet lag had come to dinner with all of us as we took our table near a flower-filled courtyard at Ernie's Restaurant. Ali asked for a felt-tipped pen, and while the rest of us talked he pushed his plate and silverware out of the way, spread out his cloth napkin, and began to draw on it. First he sketched a boxing ring, then two stick figures, one of which he labeled "Ali" in a cartoon bubble and the other "Frazier." Then he began to set in the crowd around the ring in the form of dots. Tens of dots, then hundreds of dots, then thousands, his right hand driving the pen down again and again as if to say: And he saw it! And he saw it! And she saw it! And he saw it!
Occasionally, Ali would stop, examine his canvas for empty space, and then go on, jackhammering in more dots. It must have taken him more than twenty minutes to squeeze all of humanity onto the napkin. Then he signed his name inside a huge heart and handed it to me.
"Thank you," I said.
"That'll be ten dollars, please," he whispered.
And that was the way it was with Ali. You just couldn't help laughing, even when you knew he'd play that same line off the next hundred people. No matter how many times he told a fresh face, "You ain't as dumb as you look," it worked.
But watching him eat was awkward. His right hand picked up a piece of lamb and trembled as he tried to bring it to his lips. He did not eat very much. His sciatic nerve was paining him, he was tired, and it was best to go back to the hotel.
On the way to the door, the diners at the other tables--every one of them--stood and applauded. Ali moved gingerly, almost painfully, and then, all of a sudden, he bit his bottom lip, took a mock swing at one of the applauding men, and the restaurant roared with laughter.
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