Drama in the Bahamas Read online

  “By Christmas Eve 1980 I had packed all my clothes, put my wife and sons in the car, and struck out for Los Angeles where we found a nice secluded hotel,” wrote Cornelius in his memoir. “We stayed there for eleven days until we found a house to lease. My personal problems with drugs mounted, but somehow things moved along. We had looked at several houses for rent or lease, and finally set our sights on one at 616 South Arden Boulevard, only seconds from where Ali lived.”

  A man battling addiction, struggling to get by financially, opted to live in an impressive property worth $600,000. Brazen and audacious, and perhaps the first sign that all was not as it seemed to be. The rent may have been steep, but the proximity to Ali ensured Cornelius quickly became a fixture in the scene around the fighter in the first half of 1981—witness his box seat to the suicide episode on Wilshire Boulevard.

  This then would be the man to pull together the disparate threads and organize Ali’s final fight. How could that happen? Why? Well, Howard Bingham had one theory to explain the way so many charlatans managed to penetrate the inner sanctum.

  “All someone had to do was walk in the door and say ‘As-salaam-alaikum’,” said Bingham. “That was the easiest way to plug him.”

  In his own recollection of that time, Cornelius claims that one day early in 1981, as the pair of them were watching television at Ali’s mansion in Hancock Park, the fighter turned to him and said, “I want to rumble,” a statement that inspired his fellow Muslim to do everything in his power to facilitate Ali’s return to the ring. Of course, this version of events ignores the fact that Ali had been busy trying to be allowed to rumble for months by that point.

  Cornelius was striking up a relationship at a very curious time in Ali’s career. Not only did the big promoters no longer want any part of him now that he was a spent force, his name had also been tarnished by association with a shyster named Harold Smith. A sports promoter who’d met Ali through his involvement with the one-time American sprinting prospect Houston McTear, Smith had decided to try his hand at boxing, using the name of the biggest fighter of all to open doors.

  Smith paid Ali for the right to call his company Muhammad Ali Professional Sports (MAPS), and that was enough cachet to get him taken seriously in most gyms. It helped, too, that his reputation in that world was quickly enhanced by lavish spending and a penchant for always carrying a briefcase full of cash, the kind of eye-catching accoutrement that can impress fighters or their managements to put their names on contracts.

  “I saw him with all those beautiful girls, planes, boats,” said Ali when it became apparent Smith had been involved in defrauding the Beverly Hills branch of Wells Fargo Bank for $21.3 million. “I used to say, ‘You sure everything’s okay, Harold?’ He always said everything was fine. I still don’t know where he gets his money. I’m still wondering.”

  The way in which Smith offered outrageous purses made many suspect he was too good to be true. There was lurid speculation his largesse was being underwritten by the mob and/or drug dealers. The truth was much less glamorous. He was just ripping off a bank with the help of a couple of people on the inside.

  At the time that the FBI began snooping around MAPS, Smith was putting together a spectacular night of boxing at Madison Square Garden for February 23, 1981. Headlined by a Ken Norton versus Gerry Cooney bout, there was going to be $8 million in guaranteed purses and three world title fights on the card. Smith was also trying to interest networks in a television show featuring MAPS ring card girls called Ali’s Angels.

  Although Ali had no part in, or knowledge of, the fraud or Smith’s ambitions to branch into Hollywood, the presence of his name alone ensured that the scandal became big news. He was at a benefit night at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York when the MAPS story finally broke. Cheerleaders greeted him when he exited the elevator, chanting his name, even as reporters scurried around him asking questions about Smith and the disappearing money.

  “I always find a way to stay in the news, don’t I?” Ali whispered to one journalist, and to some veteran writers he appeared almost invigorated by the attention, relishing, whatever the circumstances, the presence of cameras back in his face.

  “Do you have $8 million to save the promotion?” shouted one reporter.

  “I got $8 million easy,” said Ali.

  With comments like that, there was immediate pressure on him to step in and underwrite the event at the Garden, which was then three weeks away. He very quickly and smartly rowed back from his original assertion about having enough money to save the day.

  “Harold Smith was stealing money,” said Ali. “We can’t pay those prices. No promoter can. The fighters and the managers have to agree to other terms. The card as originally presented was unreasonable from the start. Now when we read the papers we know where he got those unrealistic figures from.”

  Yet, he couldn’t help talking up his ability to maybe segue into promotion.

  “I made Don King,” said Ali. “I made Bob Arum. I am the greatest name in boxing and I will be the greatest promoter. Everyone will come to me. I will use my name to run things. People shouldn’t condemn boxing. Because Nixon was no good doesn’t mean the government was bad.”

  When he returned to Los Angeles from New York, Ali was confronted by a phalanx of reporters staking out his home in case Smith, who’d become a fugitive at that point, might turn up there. Again, his responses to questions had him speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

  One minute sensible….

  “I decided to take my name off the organization a few days before it happened because it just didn’t look right. Whoever knew it was going to break told my lawyer.”

  The next almost bragging about his unwitting role in the fraud…

  “I am always wrapped in controversy. Controversy is my middle name. Ain’t many names that can steal this much.”

  Asked how he might react if Smith visited him, he said, “I’m going to tell him go right to the FBI before he talks to me. I’m not going to jail. I’m going to tell Harold, ‘Turn yourself in, don’t talk to me.’”

  Did he know where Harold was?

  “Where’s Harold? It would be illegal for me to know where Harold is and not tell anybody.”

  Amid all the controversy, it emerged that Smith (whose real name it turns out was Ross Eugene Fields) had been trying to add Ali-Gardner to the promotion at Madison Square Garden, telling the people in New York he wanted to do so as a favor to Ali. As the questions kept coming, it also sounded as though Ali might finally be seeing sense about the possibility of one more bout.

  “Another fight was just something I had in myself…to come back,” he said during one bout of MAPS-related questioning by journalists. “All I’m going to do now is promote and lecture. I ain’t fighting. I don’t need fighting. I’m going to stay out of the ring but I haven’t retired.”

  In the spring of 1981, Ali was somewhere he’d never been before. Still smarting from the beatdown he’d received at the hands of his former sparring partner in Vegas, he’d become a bit-part player in a case of fraud that was, to that point, the biggest bank scandal in American history. Much as he tried to brazen out the MAPS stuff, even turning up to support Smith in court during closing arguments before he was sentenced to ten years in prison, the constant drip of negative headlines must have hurt.

  For the ego, this was probably difficult to take, and certainly wasn’t what he envisaged for his post-career life. Against that background, it seems obvious he would inevitably return to the prospect of one more fight, and would be amenable to anybody promising to make that happen. The ring offered salvation, the chance to rid himself of the sour taste of the Holmes defeat, the toxic fall-out from the MAPS debacle, and provide the opportunity to turn the clock back with one more win that would generate the positive coverage he thrived on.

  All of this explains why James Cornelius could, at that time, have Ali’s ear and style himself as the man to pave the way for his return to the ring and the spotlight he so desperately coveted. Just how somebody with no money, no track record in promotion, and no contacts in the sport beyond a friendship with one fighter, could pull off such a feat is a remarkable tale, an amalgam of derring-do, brinksmanship, and barefaced lying.

  It was Harold Smith who’d first proposed the Bahamas as a possible location for Ali’s sixty-first fight, and once Cornelius decided to focus his efforts on securing the bout he set his sights on the Caribbean island. Not yet a decade free of colonial rule from London, the newly-independent nation seemed a perfect fit, a country that would relish the opportunity of the international publicity that traditionally came with hosting an Ali fight, even with him now in the post-twilight of his career.

  Undoubtedly, that’s how Cornelius sold it to the Bahamian officials and politicians he met on two trips to Nassau in the spring and summer of 1981. Deal-making skills honed in the secondhand car business in Atlanta stood him in good stead as he navigated the island’s labyrinthine corridors of power. An initial contact with Cyril Ijeoma at the accounting firm of Laventhol and Horwarth gained him an introduction to Kendal W. Nottage, the Minister of Youth, Sports and Cultural Affairs.

  A curious character with a résumé that included banning reggae music from the nation’s radios, and a stint working as Howard Hughes’s lawyer, Nottage had the ear of Lynden O. Pindling, the Prime Minister, and he had the ability to make things happen. Whatever his motivation, he bought into what Cornelius was selling, endorsing the fight and guaranteeing that Ali would be licensed to box.

  If that was something for the would-be promoter to work with, pulling off any sort of bout in Nassau still appeared an awfully big ask. Having a location and the tacit approval of the star attraction represented progress, but there was a long way to go.
A penniless man living under an assumed name is always going to struggle to raise the high finance necessary to underwrite an Ali promotion.

  That much was hammered home during Cornelius’s second trip to Nassau. He arrived at LAX with ten dollars in his pocket, bought a plane ticket with a check that was destined to bounce while he was in the air, and then went cap in hand to the Bahamians who’d been so helpful during his first visit. Whatever he lacked in organizational skills, Cornelius was an audacious character and something of a master at flying by the seat of his pants.

  For much of the time when he was trying to pull together the proposed fight in Nassau, his office was the payphone of a Shoney’s Restaurant. It was noisy and far from ideal, but his home phone had been disconnected, so he needed some place from where to call prospective investors. Given that kind of chaos, Ali and Herbert Muhammad appeared to question the validity of his enterprise at different stages. Indeed, at a certain point Cornelius shamelessly played the religion card, reminding Ali of all the work he’d done for the Nation in Atlanta in the seventies. And there was no doubt in his own mind that a higher power was guiding his promotion.

  “Muhammad Ali said to me, ‘I want to fight again,’” said Cornelius. “I knew that the help he needed from me would be difficult, but by Allah’s permission, the designer and planner of all things, it happened.”

  That Ali himself was in two minds about his future was clear from a trip to Portland, Oregon, in the middle of June 1981. Following a visit to The Oregon Freeze Dry Foods plant in Albany, where he discussed an initiative to use the company’s products to help feed the hungry in Third World countries, he caused a huge stir at the local airport upon his departure. When questioned about his professional intentions, he was, at first, unequivocal.

  “I don’t have nothing to do with boxing. I’ve been blessed to be bigger than boxing. Boxing was just a medium to get me in the position I’m in now. My work is only beginning.”

  About half an hour later, by which time he had been besieged by well-wishers and adoring fans, he changed his tune.

  “Just one more fight—maybe?”

  For all Ali’s public ambivalence, as the summer wore on Cornelius appeared to have the outline of an arrangement for a December bout in Nassau. Until, all of a sudden, he didn’t.

  On Wednesday, August 19, Ali flew to Columbia, South Carolina, and, in the now familiar fashion, announced before he’d left the airport that he was there to show that a man nearing forty could still fight. Ahead of a tentative bout against an unnamed opponent set for November 1, he was in town to take a complete physical in order to gain a license to box.

  “It’s risky,” he said. “But life is risky. It’s attitude that causes success or failure.”

  Conveniently ignoring the Bahamas, he listed Libya, Egypt, and Morocco as countries that desperately wanted to stage the bout. And, ever the name-dropper, pointed out that Leonid Brezhnev and Deng Xiaoping (“I know him personally”) had assured him that he could always fight in the USSR or China. There may even have been some truth to those boasts, but the philanthropist in him was offering a city in the south a chance to gain worldwide recognition.

  “The whole world’s gonna come to Columbia, South Carolina. Columbia, South Carolina will be known in Morocco. This shall be the greatest event of all time. Of all time! My man! My comeback!”

  And, of course, amid the bluster he claimed that his mission had a higher purpose than just boxing.

  “I’m actually teaching the world, teaching the deprived people, teaching the minority people, people who give up. I’m back and I want to be an inspiration to everybody not to quit. All of you have a Larry Holmes in your life.”

  On the Wednesday night, Ali turned up at the Memorial Youth Center in Columbia. A reporter covering his visit reckoned he looked tired as he moved through the crowd, stopping to kiss babies and to sign autographs, his progress that of a politician courting voters. Yet, when he was challenged to climb into the ring by a couple of local contenders he was a man transformed. Newly invigorated, unbuttoning a black shirt that covered a midriff that was paunchier than he’d have liked, he started mouthing off at a succession of would-be contenders.

  “I got speed, I got endurance, if you gonna fight me, you’re gonna need more insurance!”

  Sylvester “KO” Conners, a Golden Gloves champion, was first up, gleefully taking the bait and starting to jaw back. Never a good move. Ali accused him of talking too much and then during a brief spar he began evading and swatting away the youngster’s attempted punches. “Man, you’re so ugly when you start crying the tears go halfway down your face and then turn around and come back.”

  Roger Kirkpatrick was next to try his luck, and he came with something of a pedigree. Last time Ali had swept through town, he’d got to spar with him then, too. That was ten years earlier.

  On this particular night, Kirkpatrick assured Ali, “I’m going to get you in shape for Larry Holmes!” Ali slipped most of Kirkpatrick’s punches and only threw a few brief flurries himself. When he landed with one, however, he mock-chanted “Larry Holmes, Larry Holmes!” to the delight of those necklacing the ring. As Kirkpatrick climbed through the ropes, he pointed to the spot on his face where one of Ali’s jabs had connected, and said, “I’m not gonna wash my face for a week.”

  The following morning, there was a news conference at the Carolina Coliseum that featured a coup de theatre for the gathered reporters. Ali opened his wallet, took out a crisp five dollar bill and handed it to Chris Hitopoulos, Richland County’s boxing commissioner. Hitopoulos then presented him with a license to fight.

  “This is the place where they let me make my comeback,” said Ali. “I couldn’t get a license to box from the good white folks in the liberal North. That shows how hypocritical all those Northern cities are.”

  As if to hammer home the legitimacy of the enterprise, a team of four doctors were present, the same physicians who it was reported had put him through four hours of rigorous testing the day before. They pronounced Ali in “good shape.”

  “All of us agree he’s in perfect health excepting the stress cardiogram which would be perfect when he gets back to full training,” said Dr. Christopher Biser. “He was at about eighty-eight percent. That’s excellent considering he’s not in full training. We expected his weight to be a little more than his fighting weight, but it’s not as bad as in the past.”

  Biser recommended that Ali plane twenty pounds off his bulging frame of 244 by the day of the fight. At one point, somebody mentioned that Joe Frazier was also planning a comeback. Ali was dismissive. “He’s too old!” Of course, Frazier was two years younger than Ali, but he never did let the facts get in the way of a good quip. In any case he was supremely confident there’d be no shortage of fighters willing to take him on.

  “We’ll get offers,” said Ali. “They’ll knock the doors down. Whoever fights me will be honored. We will choose one of them if they are lucky, that’s my attitude. I’m still pretty. Look at me. A little heavy. I’ll lose some weight, get in shape, make my comeback. I will train one month here in Columbia so people can see me in living color.”

  Ali was so sanguine about the whole thing that he began mapping out his schedule for the next year, plotting to fight the number eight contender and then the number four contender before demanding a world title shot. And, in his opinion, by that point Gerry Cooney, the Long Islander, should have dethroned Larry Holmes, setting up a clash between the latest great white hope and “the greatest.” That would be box office gold for all involved.

  “Me and Cooney? For $20 million a piece, a $40 million gate. The Ku Klux Klan will be selling tickets and all the bigots will rant and rave, ‘Stop the nigger! Stop the nigger!’ Whoever can put the behinds on seats has the power. I can still put behinds in the seats.”

  The trip to South Carolina seemed like a success—except nothing was to come of it. For all the headlines and the glad-handing and the very public handover of the license, Columbia was very quickly put in the rearview mirror. Just ten days after the southern swing, James Cornelius called a press conference for September 1 at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to announce Ali’s comeback fight. Even if he had been charging telegrams to somebody else’s account in order to finalize the details, Cornelius had at least enough in place to make an announcement.