Ali And His Entourage

"How can you afford to feed them all?"

"We can't. I spend five dollars a day to buy chicken backs, turkey parts, rice. I mix it with their dog food. We spoil them. But dogs are better than people. Sarria loves to caress them."

Sarria rose gradually and hobbled to the house holding the black dog. "He is sad," she said, watching him go. "Because he cannot work, he is losing force." She glanced at the fence. "If Ali would come to that gate and say, 'Let's go to Manila,' Sarria would be young again."

I remembered how reporters used to gather in Ali's dressing room after a workout, recording every word from the champion's lips, moving then to the corner man, Angelo Dundee, or perhaps to the street poet, Bundini Brown, or to Dr. Pacheco. Never did anyone exchange a word with Ali's real trainer, as some insiders called Sarria. It was almost as if no one even saw him. "Even in Spanish," said Dundee, "Sarria was quiet."

He had flown to America in 1960 to train Cuban welterweight Luis Rodriguez and never returned to his homeland, yet he never learned English. He felt safer that way, his lips opening only wide enough to accommodate his pipe, and Ali seemed to like it, too. Surrounded so many days by con men, jive men, press men and yes men, Ali cherished the morning hour and the afternoon hour on the table with the man who felt no need to speak. For 16 years, the man physically closest to the most quoted talker of the '70s barely understood a word.

Sometimes Ali would babble at Sarria senselessly, pretending he spoke perfect Spanish, and then in mid-mumbo jumbo blurt out "maricón!" and Sarria's eyes would bug with mock horror. Everyone loved the silent old one. They swore his fingers knew the secret—how to break up fat on the champion's body and make it disappear. "And the exercises he put Ali through each morning! Sarria was the reason Muhammad got like this," Dundee said, forming a V with his hands. "He added years to Ali's boxing life."

The extra years brought extra beatings. And, likely, the Parkinson's syndrome. "I used to ask God to help me introduce power into him through my hands," Sarria said in Spanish, sitting once more on the front step. He rubbed his face. "Never did I think this could happen to him. I feel like crying when I see him, but that would not be good for him to see. To tell a boxer to stop fighting is an insult. I did not have the strength to tell him, but I wish to God I had."

"Oh, Sarria," said his wife. "You have never talked."

"If I had spoken more, I might have said things I should not have. Perhaps they would have said. This Cuban talks too much,' and I would have been sent away...." Or perhaps today he would be standing in Sarria's Health Spa on Fifth Avenue, massaging corporate lumbars for $75 an hour.

He ran his fingers across a paw print on his pants and spoke softly again of Ali. "Ambitious people...people who talk a lot...perhaps this is what happens to them."