Word: alie
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Flying Lessons. Muhammad Ali, of course, is a success story too. But Ali does not dwell on his background (the son of a Louisville sign painter, he had a more stable childhood than Foreman and finished high school). Ali lives in the present and future. For relaxation, he does anything but escape behind a locked gate. During the summer he interrupted workouts to take helicopter flying lessons. For long trips, he bought a full-size Scenicruiser bus and refitted the inside as a plush mobile home. Truckers who heard a strange voice jabbering away over the Citizen's Band...
...Ali has mellowed in recent years. In the early mornings, when he is being rubbed down after roadwork, he can actually become contemplative. "People ask me why I'm constantly talking and performing. It's because I've been blessed with showmanship. People come to see me expecting verbal contact and I give it to 'em because I like to talk. I'm not some illiterate pug. Boxing will survive without me though. The presidency has survived without Nixon. Boxing will get by without the king...
Boxing will indeed survive, but championship prize money will not be the same. Ali's charisma has helped a number of heavyweight opponents into the upper-income brackets. During his own career, Ali has earned more than $10 million in purses alone, not including next week's fortune. Were George Foreman fighting anyone else, the take would not be half as large...
Outmaneuvering Arum. For this fight, Ali did more than simply agree to appear. He helped arrange the deal. Last February Ali met Zaïre's President, Mobutu Sese Seko, while both were visiting Kuwait. Mobutu proposed the idea of bringing the greatest black American fighters to their ancestral homeland for a championship match. He and Ali parted in agreement that Zaïre should make a bid to have what was then only a potential Foreman-Ali fight...
...prospect of that match in any location was enough to make promoters clamor. Only one seemed to have the inside track: Robert Arum, Ali's lawyer and the president of Top Rank, Inc., a closed-circuit TV company that has always telecast Ali's fights. To Arum's astonishment, he was quietly outmaneuvered by Don King. Since being paroled from prison in 1971, King had put together a small stable of fighters. He had also had a run-in with Arum over TV rights in Ohio for the second Ali-Frazier fight...