After The Fall

"If you buy five million hungry people hamburgers," Foreman said, "the next day five million people are still hungry. God wants you, not your money. Test your god, champ. He says you can kill anybody that harms his temple. My god says, 'Love your enemy, no matter what he does.' Which is best, champ?

"I almost had him!" Foreman would exclaim later, smacking a fist into a palm. "But he couldn't accept Jesus then. He needed that Holmes fight for cash; he was almost broke.

"I don't know why Ali has remained such a presence in my life. I know our fight was the turning point in my life. That night I first realized I wasn't powerful enough to control everything, that there was something bigger than me."

In 1978, in response to an invitation, Foreman took a plane to Za�re. A few yards from the place where Ali had knocked him out, he stood and preached to 60,000 people.

Muhammad Ali sat at his writing desk, doing what he has done for three or four hours nearly every day since he retired after his last fight in December 1981. He tore open a letter from another child seeking his autograph, turned it over, wrote a two-line verse—"Love is the net where hearts are caught like fish"—then signed his name and drew a happy face. He looked like he was about to fall asleep for a decade.

"George Foreman wants me to leave Allah for Jesus," he said. "I love George, but he's the biggest fool on earth. I'll convert him to Islam before he'll convert me to Christianity. If George saw all the friends I have, if he read all the mail I get, he'd envy me. They say life begins at 40—I'm just two years old.

"George thinks I'm not happy. I'm so happy—I've got my children [one son and seven daughters, whom he rarely sees except in the summer], my beautiful wife, my house, my cars, my 88-acre farm in Michigan with three big houses and four big barns and an Olympic-sized pool...and I've got my mail. Look at this." He picked up a pile of envelopes from the desk. "Come over here. Am I bored? Look at this." He opened a chestful of mail nearby. "Come to my cellar.... Look at this." He swept his hand over boxes and boxes of mail. "What man wouldn't be happy?" he asked.

In the afternoon he drove at 40 mph on Santa Monica Boulevard to the Joe Louis Memorial Gym to work out. Drew (Bundini) Brown, his sidekick in the old days and the manager of the gym, watched Ali in the ring, boxing shadows. "I just wish he had more to do," Brown said. "He should be an ambassador; the country should offer him a position. But this brain damage rumor is hurting him. [According to recent, incomplete tests at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, Ali is reportedly suffering from Parkinson's Syndrome, a condition possibly caused by repeated blows to the head.] Anybody gets hit in the head for 20, 30 years, it's gotta have an effect, but it's not as bad as they say. I could go up to that ring right now and make him talk like 20 years ago.

"But once you've seen everything and done everything, things slow down; you get a little disappointed with the world. He's alive, but he has no place to put his feelings. He needs something to love. Somewhere, somebody needs him as bad as he needs them."

As Ali did sit-ups, IBF junior welterweight champion Aaron Pryor and Mark Breland, later to become the Olympic welterweight champion, showed up to work out, and he invited them to follow him home for a magic show. He invited a man from the gym he'd never met before, he invited a reporter, and then, on the ride home, he pulled alongside three total strangers and opened his window.