Drama in the Bahamas Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Dave Hannigan

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sports Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Tom Lau

  Cover photo credit: Associated Press

  ISBN: 987-1-61321-898-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61321-899-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  What Happens in Vegas

  Two

  The Sweet Science of Fraud

  Three

  The Boy Who Learned to Fight at Gitmo

  Four

  The Talk of Tinseltown

  Five

  Searching for the Fountain of Youth

  Six

  Doctors Differ, Patient Continues to Fight

  Seven

  If You Build It…

  Eight

  Trouble in Paradise Island

  Nine

  The Financial Make Weight

  Ten

  For Whom the Cowbell Tolls

  Eleven

  Separating the Dancer from the Dance

  Twelve

  Farewell to the King

  Thirteen

  Of Gods and Monsters

  Epilogue

  Sources

  Photo Insert

  To the memory of my mother, Theresa

  Prologue

  AS DEACON OF THE CHURCH of God in Norwich, Jamaica, eighty-four-year-old Canute Lambert hosted an early morning prayer meeting in the chapel every Saturday. Just after six a.m. on October 28, 2006, Lambert arrived at his place of worship to prepare for the arrival of his most devoted parishioners. Immediately, he noticed some sort of large object at the top of the steps to the entrance. At first, from a distance, he figured it was a garbage bag discarded there by somebody the previous night.

  Beginning his ascent, however, Lambert recognized a trail of crimson tracking beneath his feet. Looking up, he was close enough to see what lay at the top of the church steps was not refuse but a body. “It looked like a human being,” he said later. When he bent over the corpse, even with four gaping wounds in its head, he knew immediately who it was. Lambert had known Trevor Berbick from the day he was born. He had watched him grow up, leave the island, become world famous and return, only to die in a pool of blood, a $100 bill lying beside him, yards from his home.

  Within hours, news of Berbick’s death was flashing up on websites and newspapers across the world. Almost every headline described the former heavyweight champion as “the last man to fight Muhammad Ali.” His calling card in history.

  CHAPTER ONE

  What Happens in Vegas

  I can’t represent the Muslims again until I quit sports. I spoke with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and he told me, “If boxing’s in your blood, get it out.” I’ve got a few more things to do before I can get it out of my blood, about four more fights. First is the one with James Ellis down in Houston, and the last one will be with Frazier. Then I will be free to represent the Muslims again.

  Muhammad Ali, June 22, 1971

  BORN ON WESTMON ISLAND IN Iceland in 1944, Sig Rogich was five when his parents moved to America, eventually settling in Henderson, Nevada. For a financially struggling family it was a fortuitous time to arrive, as nearby Las Vegas was undergoing its first prolonged boom. Rogich worked his way through high school and college busing tables at the casinos and doing stints as a hotel bell-boy along the strip. Before turning thirty, he founded what became the state’s largest advertising agency, made his first million, and was such an influential player around town he once helped Frank Sinatra obtain a gambling license.

  Walking through the doors of the state building in Las Vegas on the morning of December 29, 1980, Rogich cut a debonair figure, wearing his usual tailored Italian suit and expensive loafers, and carrying the title of chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission. For six years he’d served on the five-member body charged with sanctioning boxing matches and licensing fighters. Since Vegas had essentially become the world capital of the sport in that time, this made the committee arguably the most powerful quintet in the game.

  The reach of their impact and significance of their decision-making was hammered home to Rogich when he saw that more than fifty journalists had arrived for the meeting. He knew why they had come. He understood why editors had sent them from all over America. He realized this was no ordinary meeting. On this day he was tasked with presiding over a hearing to decide whether Muhammad Ali would ever climb through the ropes of a boxing ring again.

  In the nearly three months that had passed since the thirty-eight-year-old former champion had been resoundingly defeated by Larry Holmes in an improvised arena in the car park of Caesars Palace, his fistic future had hung in the balance. It had been put there very firmly by Rogich’s own comments to the press in the aftermath of that bout.

  “I believe we should retire a great champion for his safety and the integrity of the sport,” said the chairman of the commission back in October. “He demonstrated after the fight he should not be fighting again.”

  The troubling manner of Ali’s loss that night of October 2, 1980, the sheer lifelessness of his performance, and the disturbing sight of him absorbing so much savage punishment was, many would say belatedly, forcing the commission’s hand. The jig, finally, appeared up.

  “Ain’t this something?” said Ali, as he was corralled by reporters on the way into the hearing. “One bad day on the job and they want to fire me.”

  If his quip made for characteristically good copy, the case against him was overwhelming. Aside from the damning evidence provided by the ten torturous rounds of the Holmes beatdown, a horror show only ended by trainer Angelo Dundee refusing to let him answer the bell for the eleventh, there were other serious issues to consider. Ali had used thyroid medication before the contest (to excess, he himself would admit), and taken painkillers immediately after it, crucially before the mandatory post-fight urinalysis had even been conducted.

  There was then a surfeit of available reasons why the commission seemed bound to ensure the sixtieth fight of Ali’s pro career was also going to be his last. Indeed, recognizing the weakness of his position, and knowing the lay of the land from Rogich’s public statements, Ali’s attorneys had tried to preempt the hearing. In a letter dated December 19, they offered to surrender his license in Nevada, a gesture that would make the adjudication moot and, more importantly for the boxer’s future prospects, not force other states to take their lead from the most influential commission in the sport and effectively retire him.

  Rogich and his colleagues didn’t buy this gambit. They were determined to wield their power to call a halt to perhaps the greatest career the sport had ever seen. They countered to his lawyers that Ali’s offer to surrender the license meant nothing if they refused to accept it. And, after a vote, that’s exactly what they decided t
o do.

  So then the hearing began in earnest. A fight film was produced of the Holmes bout, and Ali’s attorneys—Michael Phenner, Michael Conway, and Niels Pearson—began arguing the case on behalf of their client.

  Befitting a commission that usually didn’t draw a big crowd, the meeting was held in a small room. However, so many people had shoehorned into it for this case that it soon began to get hot and clammy. As the proceedings dragged on, Ali grew visibly bored by the lawyerly back and forth. He could be seen doodling away on pieces of paper—that is, until he spotted a pair of kids in the public gallery.

  Che and Kwasi Cunningham had been brought along by their mother. In this pair, Ali had found himself the perfect distraction from the labyrinthine business at hand. Beckoning them forward to his seat, he began entertaining his newfound audience with magic tricks.

  “I’m sitting there watching this and thinking, ‘My God!’” said Patricia Cunningham. “Here’s Muhammad Ali entertaining my kids while the commission is deciding whether or not he can fight. There were all these media and cameras there, and Ali didn’t even look at them. He was just having such a good time with the boys. I’ll never forget it.”

  Ali asked the Cunningham lads if they were hungry. They were. So he dispatched a member of his entourage to a nearby McDonalds to bring the boys back some food. Soon, the thick smell of French fries wafted through the overheated room, adding a unique flavor to an already sticky atmosphere.

  Although it might have looked as if he wasn’t paying attention, Ali clearly knew what was going on. The morning session had not gone his way, and he used the interval to inform the press he was already considering going down other legal avenues.

  “I’ve set aside two million dollars if this goes to court. I don’t feel humiliated, but this is silly,” said Ali. “I’ll take this to the highest court if I have to. They can’t retire me without giving me a chance to prove myself again. Look at all the fighters who were knocked out cold—Earnie Shavers, Ken Norton, John Tate, George Foreman, Joe Frazier—they never tried to retire them. I’m not just some ordinary Negro off the street. I’m the most controversial fighter in history. They can’t railroad me. We’re going to make this a world case. This is going to be a good rumble…bigger than the fight.”

  The commission definitely wanted to stop Ali fighting again in Nevada. But, it also definitely needed to avoid the type of costly and embarrassing litigation during which the spotlight would inevitably fall on how and why Rogich and his cohorts had considered Ali fit to fight Holmes in the first place, especially after a two-year hiatus from the ring. That scandalous decision hung like a dark cloud over the entire proceeding.

  By the same token, any move to a federal court by Ali’s camp would also necessitate a rigorous independent investigation of the fighter’s health that would surely end his hopes of lacing up gloves anywhere ever again. For the sake of both parties then, a face-saving compromise was badly needed.

  A solution was found when Rogich met Gene Kilroy, Ali’s business manager/facilitator, in the men’s room during a break in the afternoon session; the two struck an informal deal. The commission would, after all, accept Ali’s surrender of his license, and the fighter would, in return, promise never to apply to fight in the state again.

  “I think everyone had a chance to make their point,” said Rogich, after announcing the decision, demonstrating a talent for spin that he would later put to good use in the presidential election campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. “We all must give and take a little. For health and safety reasons, the state acted properly. The decision was best for all parties concerned. This hearing wasn’t held to embarrass Ali.”

  Obviously pleased with the deal, Ali shook hands with Rogich and then delivered his own verdict to the cameras.

  “They think I can’t fight anymore,” he said. “According to my last performance, I don’t blame them. I don’t have too many fights left. But I didn’t want to go out being retired. I want to be free to make my own decision. If I stop, it’s because I want to stop. Nobody’s going to make me stop.”

  And that was the bigger issue at stake. Now that the Nevada State Athletic Commission, for all its presumed power and influence, had effectively washed its hands of Ali, who then possessed the power to make him stop? Who had the wherewithal to save him from himself, especially when there were always going to be others intent on helping him to keep going, no matter the increasingly obvious personal and physical toll it was exacting on him?

  The very next morning’s New York Times carried an item about him possibly fighting in Madison Square Garden as soon as February. Within days, there was speculation about him applying for a license to compete in Hawaii. In both cases, the name of the English heavyweight prospect and European champion John L. Gardner was mentioned as the most likely candidate for his sixty-first outing. Talk of that bout had preceded the Vegas hearing.

  Indeed, eleven days before the showdown in Vegas, Ali had touched down in London to promote Freedom Road, NBC’s historical mini-series in which he played Gideon Jackson, a former soldier and Civil War veteran who becomes a United States senator. Immaculately turned out in a suit and tie, rain mac draped over one arm, small suitcase in the other, he shadowboxed for some young fans at Heathrow Airport and signed umpteen autographs. Yet, some of the photographers capturing his arrival felt he was a more subdued version of his normally effervescent self.

  Prior to the premiere on British television, Ali took a suite at the Dorchester Hotel where he seemed to spend more time talking about his desire to continue boxing, rather than extolling the virtues of acting alongside luminaries like Kris Kristofferson.

  “If I am not allowed to fight John L. Gardner, I will call all my people and all my fans to march from Harlem to Manhattan, and from the Washington ghettoes to the Capitol,” said Ali. “We are going to march all over America. I am going to shake up the whole country.”

  That threat was delivered with a glint in his eye, and mock-seriousness in his voice. And, at one point, he sounded refreshingly stoic about his future. “I don’t need boxing. What you thought you needed yesterday, you are sometimes shown you don’t need tomorrow.”

  Yet, for all that, he couldn’t help but return again and again during his time in England to the lust to continue fighting.

  “If you judged all fighters on one performance, you would have to stop a whole lot of them from fighting. Let me fight Gardner and I say that if I lose or look bad beating him, I will get out of boxing. I want to go on because I am the only man in the history of the sport with the chance of winning the heavyweight title for a fourth time. I shall be old in a year or two.”

  During his brief stay in London, Ali was typically busy. He visited the House of Commons at the invitation of Martin Stevens, Conservative MP for Fulham, and there was the inevitable parade of visitors to his hotel room. A then up-and-coming Irish actor named Liam Neeson was among those granted an audience.

  “We were up in his suite and I remember children being there,” said Neeson. “Ali, he’s famous for it, went straight for the kids and we were all ignored for a few minutes. Eventually, we formed a semi-circle and he was coming around, shaking hands with everybody. My knees were genuinely shaking. You’re going to meet your hero, and I thought, ‘I have to say something to him because I’ll never get the chance in my life again.’ And, as he came up to me, I just went, ‘Man, I love you!’”

  Ali also resumed his professional relationship with the legendary English broadcaster, Michael Parkinson. In a lively appearance on Parkinson’s chat show, Ali was forced to defend his desire to continue fighting.

  Parkinson: You’ve seen the shambling wrecks that go around, you see them at every boxing occasion. And what people are frightened of is they don’t want that to happen to you.

  Ali: What, to be a shambling wreck?

  Parkinson: That’s right.

  Ali: I’m a long ways from a shambling wreck.

  Parkinson: Oh,
I’m not suggesting you are now. I’m saying that’s what they’re frightened might happen.

  Ali: Let me tell you why they’re frightened. Some people can see farther than others. Some people are pressed with limitations….

  If Ali appeared in good fettle while jousting with Parkinson, problems arose during two other interviews he recorded for BBC radio. In the first he recited a poem about how he would win any rematch with Larry Holmes, the usual Ali shtick except listeners struggled to make out what he was saying. In the second, his speech was even more slurred and, as a result, the BBC decided not to broadcast it.

  “It was very sad that so much of what history’s greatest fighter said was unintelligible,” said the BBC’s official statement on the matter.

  In the face of that rather compelling and objective evidence that all was almost certainly not right, one English reporter asked Ali whether he was punch drunk. “I have heard about people being punch drunk but I do not feel drunk. When you get as great as me, people always look for some sort of downfall.”

  He need not have worried unduly. There were plenty of others out there wanting to afford him the chance to continue boxing, wherever and whenever that might happen.

  Despite the embarrassment with the BBC and the licensing setback in Las Vegas, Ali began 1981 determined to get back in the ring against Gardner, with the Neal Blaisdell Center in Honolulu in April the most likely time and place.

  “If I stop it’s because I want to stop,” said Ali. “Nobody can make me stop.”

  That was true. That also became his mantra as opposition to his intentions mounted.

  On January 7, he was in Honolulu taking the physical examination necessary for him to be licensed to fight there. At a meeting of the Hawaiian Boxing Commission five days later, Dr. Richard You testified that, in his opinion, Ali was fit to fight if he addressed some health issues before climbing into the ring. He was deemed overweight (twenty-three pounds heavier than when he fought Holmes), had less than normal blood sugar, and minor problems with his kidneys. Otherwise, the fighter was in “good physical condition.”