“My mad night with Muhammad Ali in an Indianapolis hotel” – Jerseyman tells his story

Monday 06 June 2016

An Islander who spent a night chatting with Muhammad Ali in a hotel room in the 1980s has spoken of the former World Champion’s grace and charisma.

Journalist/lecturer Eric Blakeley had an encounter with the great man during a grand world tour in 1987 when he and a friend went off to meet Mother Teresa, the President of Switzerland and Nobel prize-winner Linus Pauling.

He caught up with Muhammad Ali in Indianapolis for the Pan-American Games after missing the chance to meet him in Las Vegas and Michigan. After a chat in the hotel lobby he was invited up to the former champion’s hotel room for a chat for a few hours, before making his excuses and leaving to catch a few hours sleep under a tree in the hotel garden.

Tributes have been paid from around the worlds of boxing, sport, politics and show business to Ali, who died on Friday night at the age of 74 after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease.

Eric – who was 22 at the time of his meeting with the former champ as part of a tour with his friend Gary Coutanche - said: “When Ali swept in at about 11pm it was like a tornado. The quiet lobby was suddenly abuzz. He was surrounded by people. They were all trying to chat to him and get autographs. He didn’t have the physique of the Olympic gold medal athlete that he’d once been, but neither did he have the body of a man ‘crippled’ by Parkinson’s – he’d only just been diagnosed.

“He still seemed to float, and dare say could have stung like a bee. He was tall and imposing – but not threatening. He seemed to command attention by his character rather than by his stature. But, what struck me most was that he was so approachable. I got out my video camera and started to film him as he showed the gathered audience magic tricks.

“He then kept checking if I needed more footage – his generosity towards me was amazing. He was about to take the lift up to his suite of apartments when I told him my brother was also a magician and had shown me some tricks. It was true, but I wasn’t very good at them. As he left one of the women told me to wait and she’d be back down.”

Caption: A still image from the video that Eric shot of Ali in the hotel lobby.

After Ali left the lobby the crowd dispersed, but the women Eric had spoken to – who he thinks was one of Ali’s twin daughters – came back down to collect him to bring him back up to the hotel room.

“I was taken up into the private apartments,” said Eric.

“By now not only was I tired, I was awestruck – I was in the presence of the ‘greatest’. There was me, and what seemed to be a lot of young women all of them very modestly dressed. I had no idea who they were. I wondered what was going on. I later gathered they were his daughters. I didn’t take their names. Ali had a complicated personal life – he was married four times - and checking on the internet this weekend I found out that in 1987 he had four daughters. The two I’m most likely to have met were the twins Jamillah and Rasheda who were seventeen. One of them acted as my ‘interpreter’.

“Ali mumbled, but the wit was still there. My ‘interview’ had taken a bizarre turn. I didn’t get the chance to ask any of the questions I’d wanted so desperately to have answers to. Instead we just chatted - he talked to me about magic, and tricks. Every now and again he’d leave the room and I’d be left alone with the girls. Then he’d be back.

“I was like one of the family. It made me feel very awkward, but also accepted. By two in the morning I felt it was time to leave, I’d been there almost three hours. I couldn’t afford to stay in the hotel and there was no public transport. The evening was getting more and more bizarre. I slept under one of the trees in the hotel gardens where I’d left my bag.

“I never wrote up the ‘interview’. I hadn’t really got to ask him any questions. If Gary had been there perhaps we would have caught it all on camera – but perhaps we’d never have been invited to the inner sanctum. As it is I have video of Ali, but nothing of us together. No mobile phones and selfies in those days. I sometimes think it was a wasted opportunity. What a great chance for an interview, but what would I have asked him that others hadn’t? What better answers would I have got? Instead I got to meet him and his family off-guard. I left feeling knocked out.”