Dear Mike...

I was thinking of you the other day. I was thinking of the morning a little more than a year ago when we walked the boardwalk in Atlantic City, winter blowing in off the ocean and cutting into us like teeth. Remember? You had your hands plunged into the pockets of a knee-length tweed coat, and a cap tugged low over your head, and you stopped and stared through a store window at some Italian clothes you knew you didn't need. But the clothes, they must not have been what you were looking for, because your eyes moved to my reflection on the glass and your voice turned soft. "What's it like to be married?" you asked. "To have kids?"

"I like it," I said. "But I'm not you."

You thought about that for a few seconds, then your face hardened and the breath you blew out fogged over some thousand-dollar suit. "I'll never get married," you said. "I only need myself. There's no one else I need."

Ever since that day, it seems, you've gone out to prove that. You didn't need the woman you married seven weeks after our conversation, or the mother-in-law who came with her. You didn't need your old manager or trainer. I'd started wondering if you might make it through a whole life with no one to need.

And then I ran into someone the other day, an old man with gray hair and bifocals and a book of Persian poetry in his gnarled, knobby, boxer's hands. It was him, Mike. Unmistakably. The one man you need.

It's funny. He's right in front of you, and you don't see him. You're in Las Vegas getting ready for another fistfight, against Frank Bruno on Saturday night. God knows how many times you've ridden right by his house. Sure, I understand, it's difficult. You're hurtling toward the edge of a cliff, and there are a hundred hands waving at you; how are you supposed to notice some little old man who doesn't even lift a finger?

It's not just you, Mike. Seems like the whole world has been looking at this old man for ages but not quite seeing him. Saw him and didn't see him in the other corner the first two fights Muhammad Ali lost. Saw him and didn't see him bent over Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Larry Holmes, Alexis Arguello, Michael Spinks. Heard him and didn't hear him utter quiet instructions to 15 champions of the world. Just before a big fight, he would be the last one in his boxer's entourage to step through the ropes; after the fight, even his own family couldn't spot him when the camera swept the ring. Maybe truth is like that, Mike; it doesn't wave or jump or shout.

You don't need more noise, Mike. You need someone to make the world stop whirling, the hands stop waving, the cliff's edge lose its allure. You need someone who doesn't want your money, your rocket ride, your fame. Someone who climbs down from the ring, walks past the back-thumpers and handshakers and returns to his room to read poetry. Him, Mike. Mr. Futch.

I want to be a legendary figure," you told me. Remember? You were pacing in that dank dressing room in your training quarters above the police station in Catskill, talking and gesturing as if in a fever. "I want to be mentioned in the same breath with Marciano and Louis and Ali, that's what I want."

You want Mr. Futch, Mike. History keeps washing up like driftwood at this man's feet. He played ball against the first edition of the Harlem Globetrotters; sparred and shared a dressing room with Joe Louis; trained Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown records; yes, trained the first man killed in Detroit's '43 riots, too; stopped one of the greatest fights in history to save Joe Frazier's brain tissue; outfoxed the fox, Muhammad Ali.