Ali And His Entourage

"What happened to the circus?" I asked.

He was staring at the slowly swishing trees, listening to the breeze sift leaves and make a lulling sound like water running over the rocks of a distant stream. He didn't seem to hear.

And I said again, "What happened to the circus?"

THE DOCTOR

A Man of infinite variety. Medical doctor, jazz connoisseur, sports figure, confidant of the great.
—EXCERPT FROM FERDIE PACHECO'S PUBLICITY BROCHURE

"This is a painting of myself when I was 30 and living alone and messing around with a German woman who loved it when there was sweat and paint all over me...and this is a screenplay that I've just cut down from 185 pages to 135...and this one here is a 750-page epic novel, a very serious look at the immigrant experience in Tampa...and this is a painting I did of Sherman's March—that stream of blue is the Union soldiers...and that one is a screenplay I just finished about two Cubans who steal a Russian torpedo boat, and a crazy Jewish lawyer—Jerry Lewis is going to play the part and direct it—picks them up in a boat...."

In one way, Ferdie Pacheco was just like his former patient Muhammad Ali: He needed laughter and applause. He led people to each of his paintings, lithographs, cartoons and manuscripts the way Ali once led them to continents to watch him talk and fight. Both worked on canvas: Ali, when his was not near to dance on, used parlor magic tricks to make eyes go bright and wide; Pacheco, when his was not near to dab on, told long tales and jokes, dominating a dinner party, from escargots to espresso, with his worldliness and wit.

In another way, they were not alike at all. Ali lived for the moment and acted as he felt, with disregard for the cord between action and consequence. This allured the doctor, whose mind teemed with consequence before he chose his action. "In an overcomplicated society," he says, "Ali was a simple, happy man."

Twenty-five years ago Pacheco was a ghetto doctor in Miami. Today he can be found in his home, white shorts and paint-smeared white smock covering his torso, blue Civil War infantryman's cap atop his head, stereo blaring Big Band jazz, telephone ringing with calls from agents, reporters and TV executives as he barefoots back and forth, brushing blue on three different canvases and discoursing, for anyone who will listen, upon the plot twist he has just hatched for chapter 16 of his latest novel. He receives a six-figure salary from NBC for commenting on fights, has quit medicine, has become a painter whose works sell for as much as $40,000, and has completed 600 pen-and-ink drawings converted into lithographs (17,000 of which sold on the first mail-out order), six books (two of which have been published, including Fight Doctor), eight screenplays (four of which have sold), and a play that may soon be performed in London. He has also formed a Florida-based film production company and appeared across the country as a speaker. "But on my tombstone," he says, "it will say 'Muhammad Ali's doctor.' It's like being gynecologist to the queen."

In our time, will we see another comet that burns so long and streaks so fast, and whose tail has room for so many riders? "The entourage" some called the unusual collection of passengers who took the ride; the traveling circus, the hangers-on, others called it. "These people are like a little town for Ali," his manager, Herbert Muhammad, once said. "He is the sheriff, the judge, the mayor and the treasurer." Most were street people, thrown together on a lonely mountaintop in Pennsylvania where Ali built his training camp, until they burst upon the big cities for his fights. They bickered with each other over who would do what task for Ali, fist-fought with each other at his instigation—two of them once even drew guns. And they hugged and danced with each other, sat for hours talking around the long wooden dinner table, played cards and made midnight raids on the refrigerator together. "That's right," said Herbert Muhammad. "A family."