COMMENTARY / Ali speaks loudly without saying a word
Muhammad Ali appears onstage at the Las Vegas gala with wife Lonnie and Sean "Diddy" Combs.
LAS VEGAS -- They gathered in the bowels of the arena where most of the great fights of the past two decades have taken place, old men now all sharing one shining moment from years gone by. They had come to honor The Greatest, though whether Muhammad Ali remembered who they were or knew what it was all about was a matter of speculation that on this night would go unanswered.
Some, like Chuck Wepner, couldn't stop talking about the night they won their personal lottery - a spot across the ring from Ali. Nothing new there, because the Bayonne Bleeder has been talking about it to anyone who will listen almost every day since then.
Others, like Leon Spinks, weren't able to talk much at all.
"Leon Spinks is here, and he needs help," Wepner said. "There are a lot of fighters who need help."
This was a night supposed to bring that help, both to fighters such as Spinks and those fighting today. Millions would be raised in Ali's name for the Cleveland Clinic's new Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in downtown Las Vegas, where researchers are busy trying to unlock the puzzles of damage to the human brain.
A seat for dinner and the show at the MGM Grand hotel started at $1,500. UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta spent $1.1 million in an auction for the gloves Ali used against Floyd Patterson in 1965 in the first heavyweight-title fight in a city that would become synonymous with boxing. President Obama wished Ali well in a video greeting, and Stevie Wonder was among those on hand to sing birthday wishes to the former heavyweight champion, who turned 70 last month.
At the center of it all was an elderly man, mute and his face seemingly frozen as he sat at a table with his wife, Lonnie, and several other family members. Whether boxing caused Ali's Parkinson's is the subject of debate, but it was clear on this night that the disease he has fought for three decades has taken a terrible toll on him.
He was once a magnificent man with a sculptured body and a mouth that wouldn't stay shut. He's still magnificent in the way that his very presence envelops and engulfs an arena as it did Saturday night, hushing high rollers and the elite of this gambling town in a way no other man could - and all without saying a word.
They used to trot out Joe Louis like this in his final years, too, a heavyweight great and an American hero reduced to drooling in his wheelchair at ringside. With Ali, though, it seems different in a way if only because you get the feeling that the man who was the ultimate people person still enjoys being around people.
Doctors say not many people survive 30 years of Parkinson's, a debilitating brain disease for which there is no cure. That Ali has lasted this long is, perhaps, a tribute to the great athleticism that served him so well in the ring. Still, the death of his trainer, Angelo Dundee, a few weeks ago and Joe Frazier a few months before that is a reminder that even The Greatest has a limited time on Earth.
This article appeared on page B - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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COMMENTARY / Ali speaks loudly without saying a word