4

Magic Man

“Dad, who was that man?” (Courtesy of Jim Lampley)

When I was turning 14 and started watching network news, Mom liked Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC. Brinkley was from Wilmington, North Carolina, and had a matter-of-fact style with a flat, almost monotone delivery. Huntley seemed more sophisticated and, as Mom put it, “more New York.” I scouted around a bit and settled on my own preference for Walter Cronkite on CBS, having watched several of the Mercury project space launches in school, and it just seemed that Cronkite and the people around him knew more and cared more about whether the United States would beat the Russians in explorations of outer space. CBS was to me more spirited on the coverage of civil rights, too, and there was something about the cadence with which Cronkite would say the name “Martin Luther King.” There was reverence in it.

Early on the afternoon of Friday, November 22, 1963, I had finished my Phys Ed class, quickly showered, and arrived at the outset of geometry on the second floor of Southwest Miami Senior High School. The teacher was a very young, very cool, very popular guy named John Tracy. He had the occasional capacity to make the subject interesting and was utterly unafraid to reach across the invisible barrier to touch the minds of adolescents who were closing in, however awkwardly and unconsciously, on chronological adulthood.

As we sat down, about 25 of us, he instructed everyone to close our math books and sit still. Something had happened in Dallas, and we would listen to the radio news. The rest is a blur leading to our early dismissal with a stipulation, probably mostly ignored, that we should go straight home. I walked there, a quiet 45 minutes, and turned on the television to find Walter Cronkite at the news desk in shirtsleeves. The events weren’t real to my 14-year-old mind until I saw him validate the details of what happened, summarizing with critical detail that the president was dead, and then taking off his glasses.

I sat there in a daze until Mom walked in, and the next three days became a graphic, unforgettable enactment of her critical role as my ad hoc civics teacher, history tutor, moral conscience, and cultural guide. There seemed to be nothing about this that she didn’t know, no nuance about which she did not have strong feelings, very few moments when she couldn’t predict what Cronkite or his reporters would say next.

Having sat through most of World War II on air force bases waiting for news that was all too elusive, now the details of JFK’s assassination were immediate and tangible, and she passionately captioned them all for me: the bloodstains on Jackie Kennedy’s pink skirt, the sudden and inexplicable shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department basement, the riderless horse and two beautiful children standing at the edge of Pennsylvania Avenue, the coffin lying in state in the Capitol rotunda. Mom had seen the moment when Cronkite paused, removed his glasses, wiped his eyes. She described the piercing humanity of it, and I understood why she was so moved.

By Saturday or Sunday, I was asking her what might be most affected in our lives by this, and she made clear her most salient concern was the civil rights movement. The president and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy—his brother—had been aggressive and fearless in pushing for school integration in the South, and the issue was central to Mom’s concept of what would constitute a morally responsible society. Lyndon Johnson was a Southerner from Texas who had the opposite record for much of his time in Congress, though he helped pass a civil rights bill when he was Senate majority leader in the 1950s. She suspected the assassination had something to do with the civil rights movement, and she would lose sleep over that. She was thinking of her life insurance clients in the ghetto neighborhoods of Miami, not far from where she had moved us to have it better than the rural North Carolina she had outgrown.

Fifteen months after the first fight in Miami Beach, Sonny Liston got his rematch title shot against the heavyweight champion variously identified in American newspapers as Muhammad Ali, Cassius X, and Cassius Clay. There was still no shortage of detractors who either didn’t want to believe or didn’t want to honor that this controversial would-be “draft dodger” had legitimately won the biggest prize in competitive sports.

The fight was originally set for Boston. A few months before the first scheduled date, Ali’s fellow Nation of Islam follower Malcolm X was assassinated by gunshot, a stark sign of violent tumult in the Black Muslim world. A decision was made to take the event out of Boston, and it landed in an obscure arena in the rural mill town of Lewiston, Maine.

Mom paid for me to get into a movie theater showing the live fight in South Miami. Midway into the first round, Muhammad Ali landed a short right-hand countering over Liston’s jab in the center of the ring. It didn’t fit my concept of a classic knockout shot, but it was clear to me the punch did land on Liston’s cheek. He went down and stayed down and that was it.

The debate was feverish: Was it a real power punch? Did the aging Liston take a dive? Was it a fix? Was Liston so spooked by the fear that bullets of revenge for Malcolm X were going to fly that night that he took the safe way out? There was a lot to discuss, but indisputably Liston was done, and the king of the boxing world was the Louisville Lip.

At my household in Miami that discussion rapidly gave way to more and more anxiety about the escalating War in Vietnam. My older brother, Fred, owned an automatic exemption from the draft because his father had died in active duty coming back home from Saipan. But I was theoretically eligible for the draft and now less than two years from age 18.

And my instinct was to trust my mom’s judgment, and also the judgment of Muhammad Ali. And in June 1966 I would be graduating from high school and heading off to college. There was only one place I really wanted to go next, and that was to Chapel Hill.

Suffering through Ali’s three-year exile from the ring was excruciating. Anticipating his return was rejuvenating. Devoid of money to access the closed-circuit showing, I received the news of Joe Frazier’s victory with grief on March 8, 1971. I was hoping that when I watched a delayed telecast that weekend, it would show me the judges had it wrong in their unanimous decision. But that wasn’t what I saw.

From there forward were more disappointments, like the surprise split-decision loss to Ken Norton in San Diego, and moments of extreme exultation, like the rope-a-dope knockout of George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. But virtually no boxing careers end happily, and Ali’s was in every way the prime example of the experience.

On an October night in 1980, Ali met his former sparring partner and mentee Larry Holmes for the title that now belonged to the former understudy, the two of them acting out a rite of passage as old and familiar as the sport itself. No serious student of the sport would have deluded himself into believing the aging global icon still had any chance to win the fight. Even I didn’t really indulge in that fantasy.

By now I was an established figure at ABC Sports, and by invitation I watched in a private suite at 1330 Sixth Avenue, where Roone Arledge hosted a gathering of New York glitterati for the closed-circuit feed. By about round 9 or 10, as Holmes’s systematic beatdown of the older, tired fighter was getting unbearable to watch, I was suddenly treated to the single greatest line of boxing commentary I have ever heard, even despite all the years I spent calling fights with Larry Merchant and George Foreman and Max Kellerman and others of their ilk. It came from a seemingly unlikely source.

Standing near a monitor, eyes glued to the screen in anticipation of the poignant stoppage, I felt a friendly poke just below my rib cage on the right side of my body. I looked over at Mick Jagger, whose acquaintance I had made four years earlier at the Montreal Olympics. He leaned toward me.

“Lamps, do you know what we are watching?”

“No, Mick. What are we watching?”

“It’s the end of our youth.”

To this day, it gives me chills. And it cannot be topped. It just can’t.

When you grow up from childhood into adulthood with an idol like Ali, the last thing you expect is that you will someday meet that man, talk to that man about his game and his life, truly befriend him, and learn from him as though he is your intended universal instructor. That happened to me. I can only describe it in those most simple and direct terms. There is no other experience quite like it.

In the spring of 1991, I was master of ceremonies at the annual dinner of the Boxing Writers Association of America at a midtown New York hotel. The dinner was taking place simultaneously with the publication of the most intimate and thorough of all Ali biographies, Thomas Hauser’s simply titled Muhammad Ali. As a plausible promotion for the dinner and the book, the boxing writers prevailed upon Muhammad to autograph copies in the hotel lobby. He sat down and began doing it in the afternoon, then was brought into the greenroom to relax and refresh before signing more books and delivering a keynote speech that night.

I was in that greenroom with my 10-year-old daughter, Brooke, whom I had promised to bring to the dinner. But now I needed to go out into Manhattan traffic to run a series of errands, and it would be more challenging if I took her along. I asked her if she might be comfortable staying and waiting for me in the greenroom. She was already used to that kind of thing, so I began looking around for a likely choice to chaperone her, and predictably Ali spoke up.

“I’ll watch over her. Take all the time you need, just leave her with me.”

As I went out the door, I glanced back to see him taking a deck of cards out of a briefcase. Magic tricks. I had heard about that for years.

That night Ali signed hundreds of books. He was right next to me on the dais, and Brooke was out in the audience seated at the HBO Sports table with a group of people she barely knew. There was a lengthy list of award presentations, each with a recipient speech. Ali was scheduled to close the show. As soon as dinner was complete and the waiters were clearing tables and the dais, I looked over and saw that Muhammad was verging toward sleep. And out in front of me at the HBO table, I could see my daughter was bored, cranky, and spent. I could conjure only one solution.

Calling on my de facto authority as master of this ceremony, I motioned Brooke to climb the stairs up to the dais and sit in my seat. Instantly Muhammad revived, and a whole new set of magic tricks began, these all involving silverware and napkins and dinner programs.

Brooke was beyond enthralled, and at the end of a long night, Ali stood up and successfully negotiated the speech. It was like a movie scene.

In the taxi, taking Brooke back uptown to her mother’s Madison Avenue apartment, she turned to me in the darkness of the back seat and portrayed real curiosity.

“Dad, who was that man?”

“Well, that is a big answer and someday you will surely know it all. But I’ll just start with this: he’s probably the most famous man in the world.”

I sat with my arm around her and quietly fought back tears. Tears of pride, tears of unaccountable fortune for me and my daughter, tears for the imminent loss prefigured by the 49-year-old Ali’s advancing Parkinson’s syndrome. Tears I couldn’t let her see on that precious night.

Ten years later Brooke graduated number one among 66 in the class of 1998 at the American School of London. For the graduation program, each student was asked to choose a couplet of poetry to define himself or herself, something many of them would surely keep as a reminder of that beachhead of accomplishment. Not surprisingly, selections from Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Frost were popular. I had flown from Los Angeles to London to be there for the ceremony, and there in the program was my prized daughter’s selection.

Brooke Lampley, valedictorian

“Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee.”

By Muhammad Ali.