Parky: My Autobiography by Michael Parkinson

Author:Michael Parkinson [Parkinson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography
ISBN: 9780340961667
Amazon: 0340961678
Goodreads: 5035555
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2008-10-02T05:00:00+00:00

24

ALI IN AUTUMN

‘Now God is involved, now you are fighting a spiritual, holy war when you face me now.’

Muhammad Ali, Parkinson Show, December 1974

I met Muhammad Ali and his entourage at the Mayfair Theatre where we were to record a one-man show. He was accompanied by a line of bodyguards wearing dark suits and shades. Ali nodded towards them and said, ‘This is Brother . . .’ and went along the line. I moved forward with hand outstretched. They looked away.

Ali was celebrating his resurrection. He had beaten George Foreman in what was known as the Rumble in the Jungle and was now world champion. It wasn’t simply that he had beaten big old ugly George but had humiliated him. As the best of our sportswriters, Hugh McIlvanney, wrote: ‘We should have known that Muhammad Ali would not settle for any ordinary old resurrection. He had to have an additional flourish. So, having rolled away the rock, he hit George Foreman on the head with it.’

We had decided this would be the interview when we sidestepped the showboating and tried to concentrate on the nature of the man. The problem with interviewing Muhammad Ali was you could never be sure who was going to turn up. This was a man who reinvented himself every morning when he woke up.

What we needed was a quiet studio for a serious one to one; instead we were in a West End theatre crammed with worshipping admirers and an atmosphere ripe for ballyhoo. It all went more or less to plan until I produced a book written by Budd Schulberg, a friend of Ali’s. I said it was a fascinating book, pointing out one or two contradictions in his personality made all the more pertinent because Schulberg knew him well and was a friend.

Ali bridled and said Schulberg was an ‘associate’ not a friend.

I put to him a quote from the book: ‘He [Ali] is devoted to a religious movement that looks on the white race as devils, whose time of deserved destruction is at hand and yet he’s got more genuine white friends than any black fighter I have known.’ Again, Ali insisted they were not friends but ‘associates’. I pushed him further and asked him how he regarded Angelo Dundee, his trainer for many years. He said he was an ‘associate’.

He then launched into a diatribe about how whites hated blacks, which included the observation that I was too small mentally and physically to ‘trap’ him on my TV show, which, in any case, was a joke. This was the first time I had seen Ali become really angry. The eyes were bright with rage. I had witnessed the play acting when he was fooling around or selling tickets, but this was different.

The audience sensed it, too. This was a side of Ali they hadn’t seen before. In America Ali divided the nation; in Britain he was generally admired both as a prize-fighter and an amusing talk-show turn. The Ali on stage at the Mayfair Theatre was someone else, angry, racist and confrontational.

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