The Parkinson’s had been a part of his life for 20 years, progressing with the specific patients of a disease that takes incrementally but takes persistently and had reduced the physical vocabulary of the most extraordinary athletic body of the 20th century to something that the medical literature could describe. But that description did not fully capture.
He moved slowly. The tremor was present in his hands and sometimes in his voice. The specific grace that had made him the most beautiful heavyweight who ever lived was not visible in the way it had been visible. What was visible was something else. Ali was on the gym floor alone. No trainer, no entourage.
The man who had brought him, a longtime friend named Gerald Mason, who had been part of Ali’s circle for 30 years, was sitting on a bench near the wall watching. Ali was working. Not in the way that a 60-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease is supposed to work, which is to say carefully, conservatively, with the specific limitation of ambition that the medical reality of his condition required.
He was working in the way Muhammad Ali worked, with the intent and the focus of someone who has decided that what is happening in this gym this morning matters and is going to give it what it requires. He was shadowboxing slowly by the standard of what he had been. Nothing would ever be that again, but with the specific quality of movement that had always distinguished Ali’s work from everyone else’s.
The economy, the way each movement connected to the next without waste. The intelligence of a body that had spent 50 years learning exactly what was necessary and had shed everything that wasn’t. Even now with the Parkinson’s, with 60 years of weight, with everything the decades had taken, the intelligence was there, visible to anyone who knew what they were looking at.
Tyson knew what he was looking at. He stopped at the edge of the gym floor. He did not announce himself. He did not speak to Gerald Mason or to Ali. He stood at the edge of the floor and he watched. He watched for 22 minutes. In 22 minutes, Tyson had watched Ali move through a complete shadow session. The combinations, the footwork, the head movement.
All of it slowed and quieted by the years and the disease, but all of it present. Organized around the same principles it had always been organized around, expressing the same understanding of space and time, and the geometry of two bodies in relation to each other that had produced the rumble in the jungle and the thriller in Manila.
and every extraordinary thing that had happened in a boxing ring when Ali was in it. Tyson did not move for 22 minutes. He stood at the edge of the floor with the stillness of a man who has understood that the thing in front of him requires stillness as a form of respect. When Ali finished, when he stopped, stood quietly for a moment, and then turned to walk back to where Gerald Mason was sitting, Tyson saw him.
The two men looked at each other across the gym floor. Ali raised one hand, a slow raise, the tremor visible, the gesture of a man who has recognized someone and is acknowledging the recognition. Not a wave, a raise, measured, complete. Tyson raised his hand back. Neither of them spoke.
Ali walked to the bench where Mason was sitting. Tyson stood at the edge of the floor for another 30 seconds. Then he stepped outside the gym. He took out his phone. He called a man named Eddie Gant, his corner man for 15 years, the person who had been in his corner for more professional fights than anyone else, who knew Tyson’s voice in every register that voice produced, and who could distinguish between those registers with the accuracy of someone who has spent 15 years listening carefully to one person. Gant answered.
Eddie, Tyson said. He paused for a moment. Gant later described the pause. Three seconds in his account, not long, but longer than Tyson’s pauses usually were. “He’s still Ali,” Tyson said. He hung up. “Edddy Gant sat with the four words for a long moment. He had been expecting something. Not the specific content, but something.
a description of what Tyson had seen, a story, at minimum more than four words. He received four words and a dial tone. He called Tyson back. Tyson didn’t answer. He texted, “What do you mean?” Tyson texted back two words, “Go look.” Gant gave an account of the phone call in a 2009 boxing interview when a journalist was profiling Tyson’s post championship years and asking the people closest to Tyson about the moments that had stayed with him.
I’ve been in Mike Tyson’s corner for 15 years. Gance said, “I’ve heard his voice after wins and after losses, after the Holyfield fight, after the Lewis fight. I’ve heard him when he was afraid and when he was angry and when he was the most confident man alive. He paused. I’ve never heard his voice sound the way it sounded when he said those four words. He’s still Ali.
There was something in it that I can’t describe exactly. The closest I can get is reverence from Mike Tyson, which is not something I had heard before. The journalist asked what Gant had done after the call. I tried to figure out what he meant. I knew Ali was sick. I knew what the Parkinson’s had done. I assumed Tyson meant something about the spirit.
That despite everything, Ali was still Ali in some essential way. That’s what I thought he meant for about 2 days. He paused. Then I talked to Gerald Mason, who had been there. And Mason told me what he had actually seen that morning, what Ali had been doing when Tyson arrived. the 22 minutes. He shook his head and I understood what Tyson meant.
He didn’t mean Ali’s spirit was still there. He meant Ali’s Ali was still there. The actual thing in the gym at 60 moving. He looked at the journalist. I wished I had been there, Gant said. I’ve been wishing it since 2002. Tyson mentioned the morning once briefly in a 2011 retrospective on his career. The interviewer asked about the fighters who had most influenced him not as opponents, not as rivals, but as examples of what the sport could be at its highest level.
Tyson mentioned several names. Then he mentioned a September morning in Detroit. I went to the Kron for a session. Ali was already there. I watched him work for 22 minutes. He was quiet for a moment. That’s the most I’ve ever understood about what boxing actually is. 22 minutes watching a 60-year-old man with Parkinson’s who was still completely and undeniably the best who ever did it.
He paused. I called Eddie after I told him he’s still Ali. I didn’t have anything else. He looked at the interviewer. What else was there? Tyson said. That’s the whole thing. Whatever it is that makes Ali Ali, it’s not in the speed or the reflexes or the physical gifts. Those are gone. Whatever it is, it’s in something that the Parkinson’s can’t touch. He paused.
I don’t know what to call it. I know what it looks like. I stood at the edge of a gym floor in Detroit and watched it for 22 minutes. Muhammad Ali trained at the Kron that morning and left before Tyson’s sparring session began. Gerald Mason drove him home. Ali did not mention Tyson in any account of the morning. He had been in the gym to work and he had worked and he had acknowledged Tyson with a raised hand and gone home.
