It rekindled personal memories when I read Lisa Mitchell’s Northern Berks Patriot Item article on a select few gathering outdoors to watch the first part of Ken Burns’ new PBS four-part documentary “Muhammad Ali” on a big screen at the late heavyweight champion’s Deer Lake training camp near Orwigsburg on Sunday, Sept. 19.
As a young sportswriter for the then Reading Times, the first time I interviewed Ali was at Bernie Pollack’s mink store on Fifth Street in Reading. Ali, who had trained for years at the Fifth Street Gym in Miami, was looking for a rustic training camp to escape the big-town tumult.
Ali’s business manager Gene Kilroy, who was from Schuylkill County, introduced Pollack to Ali. Muhammad would train at Pollack’s Mink Farm in Deer Lake until he built his training camp on Sculps Hill in 1971.
It was years before GPS and the first time I visited Ali’s Deer Lake camp it was like looking for the Holy Grail. Later Sculps Hill Road would be paved and sport a street sign, but at the time it was just a dirt road up a hill off Route 61.
The reason the road was eventually paved and got its own sign was because the multitudes flocked to Muhammad’s Mountain as if it were Mecca itself. Ali was that magnetic.
Granted, the place didn’t have the hustle and bustle of Miami. But it hardly was a lonely existence for Ali as his fans and a phalanx of celebrities frequented the place to bask in his ambience.
The lone celebrity I ran across at Deer Lake was Tom Jones, the Welsh singer who then was in his heartthrob prime. Fortunately for my new wife, she accompanied me to camp that day. Of course, she forgot I was there once she got a glimpse of Jones.
On his mountain, Ali was both king and jester. He often paused his gym work to play to the crowd, which seemed to energize him. Mostly he was irrepressibly playful, occasionally interrupted by riffs of malice — part promotional, part personal — against his next opponent. But then he simply would take the rage off his face like an overcoat.
The mountain had a strange hold on him. He would train there throughout the 1970s, including for his second and third Joe Frazier fights, the Ken Norton fights and the Rumble in the Jungle with George Foreman.
Ali’s public persona was loquacious and bombastic. But I found Ali to be quietly reflective and soft-spoken in his private moments.
He often would chat with me in his Deer Lake dressing room or kitchen, giving me a singular audience as if I were the star columnist for the New York Times. To Ali, a reporter’s note-taking pen was pure magic, no matter how big his market.
I had followed Ali’s career since I was a young boy and realized while I watched him train and fight in the 1970s that he no longer in the ring was Mozart with melodies and Rembrandt with canvas.
Prior to his enforced three-and-a-half-year exile from boxing, Ali of 1960s vintage was as much of an artist as a fighter, a man blessed with extraordinary hand and foot speed, hand-eye coordination and reflexes — not to mention having the flexibility of a limbo dancer.
He carried his left hand illogically low, which was considered to be an invitation to be murdered by a crushing right hand. Ali often punched while moving backward, a tactic generally deemed to be pure suicide. But that was for ordinary men. Not an immortal like him, who could machine-gun a fusillade of 10-punch combinations in a blur.
But it was a testament to his tactical genius in the ring and iron will that even a somewhat diminished Ali was so compelling effective in his epic fights with Frazier, Foreman and Norton.
The young Ali rarely got hit. The older Ali, especially when he discovered the rope-a-dope strategy out of pure desperation against Foreman, often leaned on the ropes and absorbed punishment before firing off retaliatory strikes.
Boxing is a primeval sport played without balls or bats or other draperies, like a chess match played with naked brain waves. Ali’s naked brain waves over time were battered by way too many shots.
Watching Ali interact with his adoring fans at Deer Lake, it was hard to recall when he was held in such furious contempt by so many.
Once reviled as a notorious draft dodger for refusing induction during the Vietnam War, in the twisted shadow of that malformed war and with so many cultural crosscurrents at play, he morphed from the militant separatism of the Black Muslim to a beloved global Muslim ambassador of peace.
Ali remarkably had toggled between the yin and yang of extreme emotion — hatred and love. Once a pariah for his polarizing act of draft defiance and a lightning rod for social change, he became revered for sacrificing the heart of his boxing career.
I choose to remember Ali as the lithe poet in the ring, the incandescent athlete — a mass of energy, charm and fame on the loose — who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee.
I’ve been fortunate to meet a couple Presidents of the United States as well as a raft of NFL, MLB and NBA stars, but the highlight of my journalistic career was chronicling Ali’s Deer Lake training camp.
The champ, with that omnipresent twinkle in his eye, had the type of galvanic personality that sparked a writer’s muse. Indeed, he could inspire even an armadillo to write great literature.
Mike Zielinski, a resident of Berks County, is a columnist, novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
Source: Berkshire mont
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