Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [103]
A major blowup occurred in Philadelphia in March 1996 at a gala for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ali-Frazier 1. Lonnie, Khaliah says, refused her admittance. She only got to the ceremony because of Jacqui Frazier, Joe’s daughter, who insisted on her attendance. That night Khaliah was up in her father’s Ritz suite. She was wrapping his title belt around her waist. Ali gave her the belt. “Oh, no,” Khaliah said. “I was just playing. I can’t.” He said: “You keep the belt.” Lonnie and the people around her began to get nervous. Downstairs, they cornered Khaliah. Kalita Muhammad, an aide, lit into her, saying: “You can’t have the belt! It has to go to the Smithsonian. Your father doesn’t know what he’s doing! You can’t have it!” Khaliah says, “They had me convinced to give it up.” Back in the suite, she told her father her decision. “No!” he said, trying to yell. She says, “I was being called all sorts of names by Lonnie and her group.”
The argument went on for a while as Ali refused to budge. “You take the belt,” he kept saying. Khaliah remembers: “Lonnie was in a rage. I thought she’d throw me out the window. She kept saying, ‘You can’t give that to her!’ Jim Brown was there. Even he was anxious. My father cursed at Kalita and Lonnie. Then he began to cry. When did you ever hear of Muhammad Ali crying? Never. This was a big thing to him.” Howard Bingham told her quietly to keep the belt. With everyone still arguing, Jim Brown escorted her to the elevator and out of the hotel safely. He told her: “Your father gave that to you. You can’t let anyone take it away from you.”
Khaliah was seventeen then. Now, at 26, she says: “There’s so much wrong with his situation. They run him to death. For what? He’s had his fame. It’s about money. He’s a substance, an item. Items don’t make action. People like Lonnie and others act for it. They take on authority. It’s easy to do. They don’t respect me. It’s easy for them, especially when they’re dealing with my father, who’s a child himself. I want nothing but time with my father. How long is it going to be before he doesn’t know who anyone is?
“I wasn’t fond of the way Momma Bird (Odessa) was treated before her death. She lived in a roach-infested place, bills all over left unpaid. But he has to take the blame. He’s always let people take control of his life. I went out two weeks before her death. She was on a respirator. Lonnie says to my father, ‘We can’t afford this, Muhammad.’ He’s not being treated right, either. He’s not being exposed to the advances in Parkinson’s. He was drinking coffee. Can you imagine? I’m mindful of my father’s lack of integrity. Things were just the way they were. Why do you think he does missionary work? He wants people to know that he’s been a good man. That a lot of things happened that he doesn’t deserve. That he’s credited too much for a lot of things. He’s never lived in the world we did, he never did know the ordinary lives people have to live. But I let the past be the past. I live in the present with him. That’s all I have—and not much of that.”
“Last night,” Ali said, “I dreamt of black ravens.” He was outside the Hilton Head clinic after that long day in 1989, his voice a monotone, his stare trying to connect two distant points. “What’s it mean?”
“I don’t know. Just a dream.”
“Every night? Ravens?”
“Dreams are like that. There’ll be others.”
“I never liked ravens,” he said. “In my dreams, they angry, cover the sky and screech. It’s an omen. That’s what it is.”
What strikes now is the thick, dominant silence that marked his days, in contrast to the dithyrambic sound that accompanied his passage, when his every public word snared the literati into thinking he had something to say, each word weighed until they grouped and became Ciceronian insight; a one-man theater troupe, given a wardrobe to fit every desired moment. The writer Wilfred Sheed noted back then, “He will have to make twice as much noise after he’s through with boxing if he wants to stay famous.” But physical disaster—of his own making—has kept his