My Run-In with Muhammad Ali

Since everyone else is recounting personal stories about Muhammad Ali, I guess I should tell about my somewhat abbreviated encounter, but don't expect deep insight into his character.

It was the mid-seventies and I was working for Bantam Books.  Of course, I was completely unqualified for the job I had, but I had landed it by the simple expedient of applying for every job listed in the local want ads that paid what I needed—regardless of the qualifications required.  My wife, The Doc, was still in medical school and we were slowly starving to death.  Eventually, Bantam experienced a clerical error and hired me by mistake. 

The job required a lot of travel, but The Doc and I were childless at the time and she was working so many nights at the hospital that she rarely even noticed I was gone.  It helped, of course, that I was still young and stupid enough to think being away from home four nights a week was fun.  Looking back, it probably was fun—for a while, anyway.  Bantam sent me to New York and to  San Francisco, and had me drive thousands of miles across Texas, to explain new books to the owners of small town bookstores who fervently wished we would clone Louis L’Amour a few dozen times.

Equally important, I had to explain "Texas" to a bunch of editors who worked on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.  (The actual address was, "666 Fifth Avenue".  The ‘666’ part of the address regularly upset a few of the more conservative booksellers, despite my reassurances that we were not a beast.)  I was frequently called on the carpet for not spending enough money on my expense account.  While my counterparts on the east coast were spending $75-$125 a night for lodging, I was spending only a fraction of that amount.  No matter how much I tried, no one in Manhattan would believe me when I said that in the winter, I could get the honeymoon suite in Freeport for $24.95 (and that included breakfast).

Nor did they think that I was entertaining nearly enough.  I once took every employee and every customer in the only bookstore in Beeville, Texas to lunch, AND I bought lunch for everyone in the diner while we were there—and I still got change back from a fifty-dollar bill.  In those days, you could get a chicken-fried steak and a glass of iced tea for less than $3 (less than the cost of a single martini in Manhattan).

I vividly remember the call I got from an editor who was demanding to know why I had only sold six copies of “A Shiksa’s Guide to Married Life” in the entire state of Texas.  Even after I explained that this was 150% of market penetration, he still wasn’t very happy.

In 1978, the convention for the ABA (American Bookseller’s Association—not the American Bar Association) was held in Miami, and I was excited to go.  I’d never been to Florida, but I figured that since I'd read all of John D. MacDonald's "Travis McGee" novels, I was an expert.  I was to be sorely disappointed:  Bantam had me working 16 hours a day, and I don’t think I ever set foot outside of the hotel.  I worked that damn convention floor until I was exhausted.

On the up side, I did get to meet a lot of interesting authors.  I have previously written about meeting Donald Sobol, the author of the "Encyclopedia Brown" stories for children.  I also met Leon Uris, Dr. Cooper, Jim Fixx, Mickey Spillane, and a rather famous New York prostitute who had just written her tell-all memoirs.  (I will be kind and just say that her clients must have over-sampled those expensive New York martinis—which must have been considerably more potent than their southern cousins—which perhaps explains why they cost so much more in New York.)

After a solid week away, I was anxious to fly home.  Bantam had arranged my reservations and had expressed me my tickets.  Shortly after boarding, I noticed a curious bit of customer service.  The flight attendants were hanging leis on all the passengers, most of whom were wearing Hawaiian shirts.  It turned out that the flight was nonstop to Honolulu. 

This presented a difficult moral dilemma:  I had never been to Hawaii (and still haven’t) and all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I would have been on my way.  On the other hand, Bantam would probably only have let me stay there overnight, and I had been away from my wife for a week…  We were still newlyweds, so I fessed up to a flight attendant and was shoved off the plane at the last possible moment.

After a frantic call to the home office, I was booked onto a connecting flight to New Orleans whose imminent departure only allowed minutes for me to change planes halfway across the airport and make a flight home to San Antonio.  I could forget about my luggage for at least a week—it was irrevocably Honolulu-bound.

So, that is how I ended up running like a madman across the New Orleans airport trying to make a connecting flight I was doomed to miss anyway.  As I scrambled like a stabbed rat around a blind corner, I ran into Muhammad Ali.  Literally.

I am face blind, meaning I rarely recognize people or photographs.  But this was a face that even I could recognize—perhaps because his face was only about six inches away (and another four inches up).  Just a few months before, Ali had regained the heavyweight championship for an unprecedented third time.  Now, he looked slightly surprised, and I’m fairly sure that I looked fairly idiotic—standing there with my mouth open and my eyes crossed trying to get a good look at the famous boxer.

Even as his two bodyguards (or so I assume them to be) gently and politely held me against a wall while the boxer walked away, I remember thinking:

1.   “There is not a mark on his face—hasn’t anybody EVER hit him?”

2.   “So that’s what a thousand dollar suit looks like.”

And then, just like that, he was gone.  I missed my flight, Bantam wouldn’t spring for a hotel room, so I spent most of the night in the airport, not getting back to San Antonio until the middle of the next day.  By the time I got there, The Doc was back at the hospital pulling an all-nighter.  I should have gone to Hawaii.

That’s it:  I ran into Muhammad Ali.  If you were expecting this story to have a great redeeming moral at the end, I’m sorry.  As Freud said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”  (Of course Freud never actually said that—Carl Jung claimed Freud said it, but Jung was an unconscious liar!)