‘I’LL TELL YOU something, Bartley. If you had been fighting me at Doncaster instead of Bob Gaskin, that would never have happened.’
So said Big Johnny Webb as we sat drinking in a crowded public house in Coventry. It was late afternoon and the light was fading. Dozens of travelling men stood in groups by the long bar or sat at tables scattered around a spacious wooden dance floor. Webb was holding court, a huge man of six foot three and twenty-one stone, with black hair, a big belly and braces. He was a well-known pugilist, said to be the best fighter in the West Country, home of some of the best bareknuckle men. There had been talk of us fighting once but it came to nothing. Now he was acting friendly enough but there was an undertone to his conversation that I didn’t like.
I had gone for a lunchtime drink with John and Elias Taylor. John was the champion of the Fens, while Elias is the best middleweight gypsy in England; that’s what he says, anyway. We ended up in this drinking den – I think it was the Port of Calls in Earlsdon. Then in came Johnny Webb with his brothers, all big men. They were staying nearby on a gig site.
The minute Webb walked in, John Taylor said, ‘I don’t like this man and I never liked him.’
‘That’s your business,’ I said. John was always saying things like that.
Webb and his brothers joined us and eventually he fetched up about Doncaster. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said.
‘I don’t want to talk about it Johnny. Everybody knows, anyway.’
Webb ignored me. He criticised Bob Gaskin and gave me credit for the punishment I withstood. ‘But I’ll tell you straight that it definitely wouldn’t have happened if you had been fighting me,’ he said. He meant I would have got fair play. He said it four or five times, to make sure everybody knew it.
‘Do you know, Johnny, I like a man like you,’ I said. ‘You are my kind of man. You would fight me fair and square would you?’
He nodded.
‘Then let’s fight now.’
‘No, I won’t fight you.’
That threw me: he had been dropping enough hints, and a notorious fighter like Webb wouldn’t normally refuse a direct challenge. Then one of his brothers jumped up. He was even taller than Johnny, lean and fit and aged about thirty, with a bushy Afro hairstyle and a thick, black, bandit moustache. They called him Mexicana.
‘I’ll fight you,’ he said. ‘Why fight the worse man?’
It was a set-up. This Mexicana was even better than his brother, though I didn’t know at the time. I stood up and we glared at each other but Johnny Webb intervened. ‘You’re not fighting for nothing. Title at stake?’
John Taylor immediately replied, ‘Yes.’
We stripped off. I judged him to be 6ft 4in and about 14½st, not an ounce of fat on him. He was the one gunning for me, not his fat brother. This is where the challenges come from, not where you expect – the long, tall, lithe, fully trained man. His stomach was like a rubbing board. The other men in the bar cleared the wide wooden floor. They were standing on tables and stools to get a good view.
‘Everything is at stake?’ shouted Johnny Webb, one more time.
‘If the man beats me he is the best man in England,’ I said.
Mexicana fought square-on with his fists cocked, swaying his body from side to side at the hips like a cat. I had never seen a style like it. I was doing my Jack Johnson thing, left foot forward, palms open to catch his punches. He rushed into me, pushed me against the wall and tried to butt me. I hit him, hard, three or four times against the side of the head and the serious fighting began. Mexicana came in close again and bear-hugged me, trapping my arms. They pulled us apart and before I could take a stance he was on me again with a hard shot to the neck. He followed it with a flurry of good punches, roughing me up. I liked it. I came down on flat feet and started punching it out with him, sending him backwards.
The landlord picked up a telephone behind the bar to call the police but someone grabbed his arm and warned him off. Webb swayed back towards me like a cobra.
‘I’ll show you about fighting,’ he said. ‘I’m the champion of the gypsies.’
‘I told you it wouldn’t be a Doncaster job,’ called his brother.
They were getting over-confident. Time to end it. I waited for Mexicana to come in again and as he did, I faked a bull-hammer right and let go a tremendous left hook. If it had landed he would have been out for a week, but he ducked and it scythed through his frizzy black hair.
I felt a jolt in my shoulder. A wave of agony stabbed through me. The force of the swing had ripped my left arm out of its socket. I stepped back, clamping my jaw against the pain, and turned southpaw, my right fist forward, my now-useless left swinging like a colt’s leg. I glanced at the eager faces in a circle around us: no one had spotted my injury.
My system was in shock with the pain. I have never given best in my life, but if a child had pulled my arm then I’d have had to quit. And I knew that if Mexicana found out, he would wrench my arm clean off. I narrowed my eyes and tried to keep my face inscrutable, though my breath was whistling through clenched teeth. It was pride that took me on: the bruised ghosts of my forebears, of Boxing Bartley and Bulldog Bartley and fearless old Ticker. I could not surrender. Never. They’d have to carry me out.
As Webb came at me I stepped in and punched with my right: bam, bam, bam. I marched forward, hitting without stop with the same hand, ignoring his blows, blanking out the agony. I was almost blinded by the pain banging in my brain, oblivious now, determined only to punch, pound, pulverise. I drove him the length of the bar, glasses and bottles tumbling off it, his legs sagging, his eyeballs rolling in their sockets and his head bouncing back like a speedball.
‘Enough!’
I don’t know if it was Mexicana or his brother Johnny that cried out, but I almost collapsed with relief. I put my good arm around him. ‘I tell you something, you’re a good fighter,’ I gasped. ‘I have got to give you credit. You can always say you fought for the title.’
I just wanted to get out of there but I had to finish the show. ‘Drinks all round,’ I shouted. I dropped some money on the bar, shook hands with Webb and his brothers, and left. John Taylor tried to insist that we go on the car park and fight again. I think he wanted to try out Johnny Webb. He still didn’t know about my arm.
Through gritted teeth, I hissed, ‘The man has just given in. Leave it.’
We got in John’s Volvo. I nearly fainted.
‘Get me to the hospital, quick as you can.’
‘What is it, what’s the matter?’
I told them about my shoulder as we drove. Elias Taylor whistled. ‘When I saw your big left hanging at your side, Bartley. I thought, what a style that is!’
I got through the hospital door crouched over with the pain. A foreign doctor came and examined me.
‘How did you do this?’
‘I was in a bit of a scuffle.’
‘Hmm. It must have been some scuffle. Your arms are as big as my thighs.’
They put an oxygen mask on me and tried to force the dislocated shoulder back in its socket, but couldn’t. The pain was unbearable. After a while they said they’d have to give me an anaesthetic. I had to sign a pink consent form and then they put me under. In the meantime, John Taylor had set off to my mother’s to tell her I was in hospital, only to be stopped on the way by police for drunk-driving – typical.
When I awoke, my arm was back in. I asked the doctor how he had done it and he said they had used a wooden mallet to knock it in. It was in a sling for weeks, but it has never come out since. They said Sonny Liston never really hurt his shoulder when he quit in his first fight against Ali; well I believe he did, because I suffered the same in that fight, and I can vouch that the pain was too much. As for the Webbs, I never saw them again, though I heard Mexicana later fought a good man called Cooper to a draw in the New Forest.
*
MY ARM WAS barely out of the sling when I was back in action, and this time the Braddocks were the cause. I was drinking in the Raddle with the usual crowd: Bob and Will and Reg Martin, and Bob was moaning.
‘There’s a man from Ripley and he won’t give me back my horse skin.’
They used the skins for floor or wall coverings. This man from Derbyshire had taken one from Bob but wouldn’t pay him. It was the sort of petty dispute that dealing men are always getting embroiled in.
‘We’ll get it,’ said Will. ‘Let’s take boyo.’ Meaning me.
What the hell. I knew it would end in a drink and a singsong and that was all I wanted. So the four of us set off, me not knowing or caring who the man was. I wasn’t to know he was the best fighter in Ripley. We arrived on a housing estate and I waited in Will’s Vauxhall Zodiac while Reg and Bob went to get the skin. They came back without it. The man had three or four friends with him and had told them to clear off. One of them had pushed Reg.
I went to the house with him and did the talking. ‘This man wants his horse skin. Will you give it him, mate?’
‘If you don’t go now, I am going to give it you like you’ve never had it before,’ was his reply. And he looked good.
‘Give him his rug.’
‘I’ve told you what I’ll do to you.’
‘Come on then.’
We went onto a green opposite his house, both in our shirtsleeves, and without more ado we started fighting. I’ll give him his due: he didn’t know who I was and he didn’t care either. There is no respect in this game. A farmyard cock will fight a champion fighting cock to the death and it’s the same with streetfighters. But I cut him to pieces. He fell to his knees and I went down on my knees with him so I could still punch him. Bob and Will had to pull me off.
Slowly, the man regained his feet. He staggered into his house, came out with the rug and gave it to Bob. We went down into town for a drink and at about 10pm they insisted on going to the roughest pub in Ripley. Sure enough, there was the man I had fought, with a large group of friends. I thought this was going to end in trouble – a lock-up job for certain – but the man walked straight to me and shook my hand.
‘You’re the only man that has ever beaten me and the best I have ever fought,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’
‘No, I’ll buy you one.’ I was that relieved that it wasn’t going to be another Doncaster job.
I think the fight was just a test by Bob to see if my arm was okay, because a few days later he presented me with a far more serious proposition. This time we were in the Horseshoe at Longnor, near Buxton. He fixed me with his dark stare, his face criss-crossed with scars: a butcher’s block, was Bob.
‘You’re a correr mush, an’t ya?’ he said. A fighting man.
‘Yeah, a bit of one.’
‘Well, I’ve got a man fer you, boyo.’
He had been down to the Rhondda Valley in South Wales buying pit ponies and had come across some fighting men. Bob had put up money for me to fight their best man: £1,000 against forty ponies at £25 per pony. Bob said I could have ten ponies if I won the fight. I had two young children and knew they’d love a pony each. I’d sell the others. ‘It’s arranged, boyo,’ said Bob. ‘You’re to fight him down in South Wales where the ponies are.’
That was all right with me. My grandfather had been the scourge of South Wales.
‘Oh,’ said Bob, almost as an afterthought, ‘and you’ll be fighting him underground. Down a mineshaft.’
‘Hang on, hang on. I’m not fighting down any pit.’ Gypsies don’t like going underground and I’m no exception.
‘That’s where he wants to fight you. If you are the man they say you are.’
This was several years after Doncaster but I was still wary about where I went. No way was I going down some dark hole in the ground in some lost Welsh valley. But Bob and Will loved the idea: after my title fight with Fletcher they’d been hauled in by the police and had vowed they would never put on a fight in such an open place again. Having it underground would be a good way of avoiding the law – and would also be a good craic.
I still refused but Will wouldn’t give up. He knew a man that worked at Longrake mine, near Youlgreave in Derbyshire, and came to some arrangement with him. A week later, he said to me, ‘If you won’t fight down in Wales, will you fight this man up here in a mine?’
‘This man must badly want to fight me, then.’
In the end they talked me round: they said the mine would be just a bit of a tunnel that you walked down. And it would be unusual: the first gypsy champion to fight down a pit shaft. But I wanted twenty ponies and I wanted my pick.
‘No,’ said Bob, ‘there is other men in this as well as you and they’re putting up the money.’ They wanted to cut it four ways: Bob, Will, Reg Martin and me.
‘I’m going to take the punishment and only get a quarter? No way.’
In the end they agreed to let me have a dozen ponies. They called the men in Wales and the fight was arranged for the following weekend. I knew nothing about my opponent except that his name was Jack Grant and he was supposed to be the best man among all the miners of South Wales. So I knew he’d be tough.
Ten of us made the trip: me, Bob and Will, Reg Martin, Old Roly Mare, a horse drover who always wore a smock, Caggy Barrett, Alan ‘Twilly’ Wilson, Freddie Wuthard, Ezzy Taylor and Nelson Boswell. Caggy and Twilly were my cheerleaders, like Bundini Brown for Muhammad Ali. It was a winter’s day and the surrounding hills were white with snow. The mine was closed but Frank, the foreman, let us in on the sly. He must have been bunged a few quid. As we hung around, I was thinking about my ponies. I wanted to see them.
‘You hadna won the fight yet,’ cautioned Bob.
We waited a good while, getting colder and colder. Frank made us tea in a wooden hut. Then three or four cars drove into the compound and a large number of men got out. One of them, in a suit, looked very tough and I figured he would be my opponent.
‘Don’t tell him I’m Bartley Gorman,’ I said to the others. ‘Say I’m called Nathan Appleyard.’ I didn’t want the police onto me again.
Frank fetched us yellow pit helmets with lights on. The Welshmen had brought their own, far superior to ours. We were led to what was basically a large iron bucket, big enough to hold three men. It hung from a thick steel cable that went up to a wheel on a large crane operated by a man sitting in a cabin. This was to take us down into the bowels of the earth. Bob stepped into the bucket first and went down with a couple of the others. Then it fetched up again. I waited to go down with Frank, the top man: I figured he’d know what to do if anything went wrong. We had to step over a gap and the man said it was 200 feet down and then another 100 feet of water. Slowly we were lowered down the shaft. What little light there was soon receded, to be replaced by the glow from our helmet lamps. The dank rock walls were just a few feet from our faces. The crane rumbled and cranked and water ran down the green rock. As we sank, it got darker and darker and quieter and quieter.
I don’t know how far we descended but it seemed like miles. At the bottom it was pitch black and silent. We walked along the shaft for a few yards. The roof was very low and underfoot were rail tracks for the coal trucks. There were no lights down there at all. Bob was talking to the Welshmen. It wasn’t the man in the suit I was going to fight but another fellow who looked in his late thirties, though it was hard to tell. He was stripped off and looked the part, about five foot ten and thickset with bony elbows. His head was bald, his nose was flat and his two top front teeth were missing. He had cords of muscle and a big tattoo. I thought, what am I doing here? I was there because of my friendship with these people and because they would think it was good and exciting, but I was fighting a miner in his own environment. A gypsy man should have been fighting in a green lane.
I was wearing Doc Marten boots and fought in a vest for the first time since I had been an amateur boxer. It was so cold I didn’t want to take it off. Bob walked with me and put his hand on my shoulder and in the half-lights I could see my opponent had no front teeth and eyes like glass. His bald dome gleamed under the lamps and I could see shadows on his face. I know they breed them tough in South Wales but it never crossed my mind that I might lose.
‘The pub’ll be open soon,’ said Bob, ‘so let’s get it over with.’
The others stepped back but there still wasn’t much room, which was another mistake for me, because I’m a mover. I was trying to get them to pull girders and timber out of the way while Bob started introducing the fight.
‘Never mind about all that crap,’ said Grant.
We started and I knew straight away he could fight. I had no space to manoeuvre and within seconds he’d grabbed me by the belt with his left hand and put his head into my chest and hit me a dozen times in the side with his right. It hurt. I got my hand around his head but most of my punches hit him on the forehead. The man was a powerhouse but so was I; it was like putting two gorillas in a phone box. We went up against the rock and some iron girders. The shouts soon went from, ‘Come on, Nathan Appleyard,’ to ‘Come on, Bartley.’ I hit him as hard as I could behind the neck with rabbit punches. He lashed back at me with knuckles, forearms and elbows. I couldn’t see properly with the torches in my face. It was a nightmare.
We got tangled in a clinch. They pulled us apart and sluiced the blood off us: they had two plastic buckets of water and sponges. Then we started again. I cut my knuckles on his teeth and it became very brutal, a feel-your-way fight. Grant hit my head and it banged against the rock. All the lights on the helmets seemed to go into a chain. I hit back, throwing wild because I couldn’t see. I put my arm behind his neck again, pulled his head towards me and butted him flush on his flattened nose. I’m sure I broke it. Then I held him tight in a headlock. Some of the Welshmen intervened again and dragged us apart. One of them pushed me very hard under the chin to get me off Grant, so I started rowing with him. I said there wasn’t enough room to have a clean fight.
‘Look, what do you want, mate?’ he replied. ‘The man has come into your backyard.’
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’m in his backyard, an alien environment.’ Caggy Barrett started a shoving match with one of them and Will and Bob had to stop it.
It was do or die now. We were smothered in gore but we still went at each other like pitbulls. He was trying to keep as close to me as possible, to rough me up on the inside and not give me room to punch. So I pushed him back and, as he came flying back in, caught him with the hardest left hook I ever threw. For a second he seemed frozen, then he pitched face-forward onto the tracks. He was sparked out completely. We all thought he was gone, his white body pale as death in the lamplight. His men slapped his face and put water on him but he didn’t come round. Everyone was getting very anxious. What would we do if he was dead?
There was a phone down there and it rang. It was the man at the top who operated the crane. He was frit that it was going on too long and said he’d have to call the police. We had fought for twenty minutes.
‘I’m going up,’ said Frank.
We put Grant in the bucket and took him back up, carried him to the hut and tried again to revive him. By now I was very, very worried. I never intended to hurt someone that much. I told Bob Braddock he could keep his ponies; nothing was worth this. Finally, after more than half an hour, the man came round. He was groggy at first and didn’t know where he was. Then he recognised me. ‘You can fight, you ginger-haired bugger,’ he said.
We took the Welshmen for a drink to a pub called the Jug and Glass. I was singing and they joined in with Welsh songs. They asked me where I was from and I said, ‘Ireland. I’m a gypsy man.’ I don’t like to talk to opponents afterwards too much, otherwise you end up fighting again, but Grant kept coming to me and saying, ‘You are a professional boxer, aren’t you?’ I could see all the blue on his face where he had been down the mines and that he was scarred as badly as Bob Braddock. Grant said he’d had a lot of fights. His real name, it turned out, was James Preece: he had been fighting under an alias as well. He bought me a pint and I bought him one.
‘You ought to fight for the championship of the world,’ he said.
‘You’re a tough man yourself,’ I said.
‘They breed them tough where I come from,’ he said.
He didn’t have to tell me that.
*
ANOTHER WELSHMAN THAT the Braddocks tried to fix me up to fight was David Pearce, the British heavyweight champion from Newport. He was fifteen years younger than me but had failed an eye test and was being forced to retire from pro boxing. Will Braddock got on the phone to his managers and offered him £20,000 to fight me with gloves for the unlicensed British title. I even spoke to Pearce myself on the phone. At first he accepted but then he declined. I would have gone for the heavyweight championship of the world if I had won that. I would have moved into the gorgi circles.
Instead I fought a man bareknuckle in a stone barn used for cockfighting in the Peak District. It had straw on the floor and a corrugated iron roof. This man was a powerful fellow with curly blond hair, the spitting image of Joe Bugner, and many of the people there were convinced he was Bugner. We did nothing to dissuade them and it later became something of a legend around that part of the country. In fact I believe the man was a Polish farm worker. There were very few people there, it was so hush-hush, but he had a circle of backers and there was a lot of gambling money riding on it. The atmosphere was tense and I thought something might go off because of the money.
He caught me with a good shot in the first few seconds but after that he had shot his bolt: he must have been gambling on catching me cold. I toyed with him for ten minutes until he was exhausted, then finished him with two or three good punches. He went down but needn’t have; he just didn’t want to go on.
Though there was a lot gambled on fights like these, I never earned any money from fighting. Anything I did make came from dealing. In 1980 I sold my little house in Tean and bought a one-and-a-half-acre plot at Wood Lane, near Uttoxeter racecourse, for £5,550. Its previous owner had lived there in a caravan but had hanged himself. It was in a prime site, surrounded by green belt and across the road from the town golf course. I was immediately offered twice what I had paid for it, but refused. I had prayed for a place like it for my kids. I moved onto it in a trailer with Gwendoline and the children and named the site Fort Woodfield.
I bought it lock, stock and barrel. There were saw benches and vices and log splitters and machines up there. I opened the previous owner’s old trailer and had started clearing out cups, saucers and blankets when I found some papers. One said, ‘£700 in sweet jar under slab.’ I pulled up some two-by-two slabs outside and sure enough I found several jars full of money: half crowns, florins, white fivers and old John Bradbury pound notes. It came to £5,000. It also said there was a jar full of sovereigns, but that I never found.
What I didn’t know was that the permission for a caravan on the land was only for the lifetime of the previous owner. I put down a drive and a parking area and had my trailer connected to water and electricity but, within a year, East Staffordshire District Council refused to renew the caravan licence and issued an enforcement notice ordering me to move.
I started a long-running fight with the council. I fought an appeal against the decision and then it went to a public inquiry. I told them I had had enough of travelling and just wanted to live peacefully in my trailer. Shaun and Maria, then eleven and ten, were both at local schools and I wanted to give them a stable upbringing. It wasn’t as if we were knocking on our neighbours’ doors asking them to buy clothes pegs or lucky heather. But the neighbours didn’t want me, though they dressed it up by saying they were ‘concerned about future residential development’ on the site.
My appeal was quashed by a Department of Environment inspector. My barrister said that, as a gypsy, I should be treated exceptionally in accordance with current government policy and anyway the caravan was unobtrusive but the female inspector said the very fact that I wanted to settle there meant I was ‘not a travelling gypsy’. I was in a Catch-22 situation. She also said that ‘the caravan undoubtedly detracts from the rural character of the area’, which was rubbish, as you could barely see it. I was supported by the National Gypsy Council and still had the right of appeal to the High Court.
In 1983 I reapplied for temporary permission and the council said I could have it for three years if I agreed to sign certain conditions. Again I refused. I even wrote a letter to the Queen. A second public inquiry was held in March 1984. I told them, ‘I want my children to get a proper education and not keep moving from school to school.’ I eventually won my appeal and got permission to live there for another three years. For the first time in my life I had somewhere of my own that was worth having.
*
IT HAD BEEN more than twenty years since I had watched a newsreel of the young Cassius Clay on top of the Empire State Building, proclaiming that he was going to be champion of the world. I had honestly felt then that one day we would fight. He was only two years older than me and I was as confident as he that I would be a champion boxer. But of course, it had never happened.
Our lives followed very different paths yet there were always parallels. He had chased Sonny Liston, the brooding champion they said was unbeatable; I had pursued Uriah Burton, feared among all travellers. Clay – or Ali, as he became – had to contend with racism and opposition to his religious faith; I, with being a gypsy. We had both become champions. We had both been more flamboyant, more outrageous, than anyone before us, pushing back the boundaries. And we had both paid a price – a terrible price. We had overstepped the mark. I bore the scars, physical and mental, of the knuckle world. And by 1983, Ali was also showing signs of the damage he had suffered from too many brutal encounters in the ring. There were reports that his fingers shook, his speech was slurred, his face was puffy and his movements slow. But he was still The Greatest.
In August of that year, he came on a visit to England to open a mosque in the Midlands. He stayed at the Albany Hotel in Birmingham, and an acquaintance of mine who had got to know Ali well over the years invited me to go and meet him. Apparently Ali was quite keen to meet the King of the Gypsies, so I went along with my brother Sam. As we walked to the hotel, we saw a yellow Rolls-Royce with ‘Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee’ on it. That could only belong to one person. We were taken up to his room on the eighth floor. The door was opened by one of several huge bodyguards festooned in gold rings and bracelets and so tall they made even Ali look small. My first impression was what a handsome man he was. He was talking to some Muslim lawyers and doctors and looked bored. Then I was introduced to him as the champion of the gypsies, and a light appeared in his eyes.
‘You gypsies are real good at making money,’ he said.
‘Not as good as you,’ I said. ‘Half a million in a minute.’
I told Ali about watching him as a brash young man and how it had inspired me. He took me away from the other people and over to the window, with its view over the city.
‘You see out there is the wide world?’ he said. ‘And I was the champion of the whole world three times. Three times.’ ‘Yes, and down there are lanes,’ I said. ‘And in those lanes live gypsies. And I’m the champion of all of them.’
He looked at me, widening his eyes in mock surprise. ‘You must be reeeal good.’
Someone asked us to pose together for photographs. We squared off in the room but he wouldn’t put his hands up in a fighting pose, so neither would I. I threw a couple of jabs into his palm for the photographer and pretended to clip him on the jaw. He was a gentleman and our sparring was never more than a bit of play-acting but, I have to be honest, I thought I could take him.
Every couple of minutes the phone would ring. Calls were coming in from all over the world. Ali, ever the joker, picked up the phone and pretended to be a woman, talking in a high-pitched voice. I sat down on the pile carpet but Ali got up and gave me his chair. He fetched another for himself and pulled it over right in front of me, blocking me in. Suddenly he was serious, talking about his religion and beliefs. He could change mood in an instant.
There was a knock on the door. It was the police. Earlier that day, somebody had apparently made a threat on Ali’s life and they had come to check he was okay.
‘What’s going on?’ he said.
‘Somebody wants to kill you,’ I said. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll look after you.’
Ali pointed at me and did his eyes-wide-open routine. ‘You! You look after me! Tell them to come here.’
The cops came over. They were uniformed men and women with walkie-talkies. I don’t think the threat was genuine: I think they had really come because they wanted to meet The Greatest.
‘I don’t need no protection,’ said Ali. ‘I come from the toughest country in the world. I’m not scared of death. I believe in Allah the Almighty. I don’t care if I die of cancer of the throat. I’m ready to meet my maker.’
He goofed around with the police for a while. Then we talked some more. Eventually Sam and I got up to leave. After a lot of handshakes and goodbyes, Ali followed us to the door and watched us walk down the hotel corridor. I looked back and he was standing to his full height in the doorway, pulling a proper fighting pose. I looked him over and the real Ali did stand up. That was when I admired him most.