Muhammad Ali died 10 years ago. His widow wants you to know why he still matters

There’s something Yolanda Ali wants you to know about her late husband.

When someone reaches the levels of global recognition and adoration that Muhammad Ali did — and continues to, 10 years to the day since his death — people tend to think they know everything about that person.

What gets overlooked, says Yolanda, better known as Lonnie, is that the former world heavyweight champion was never about the grand gestures — “the big splash” as she calls it on a video call from the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky.

“He was for the consistent, continual, daily acts of kindness and compassion,” she says. “For meeting the person in the moment. He was always conscious of people, even as he was walking down the street. He just didn’t pass people. He recognized need. In fact, he used to tell us that if a person has to ask you for help, you’ve already failed because you should recognize it.

“Those are the kinds of examples he leaves us. To be aware. To continue to create that human bond that we seem to be losing now.”

---

On June 3, 2016, the world lost one of its greatest sporting figures when Ali died at the age of 74. Lonnie, meanwhile, lost her husband of 30 years; a man she’d first met when she was a shy six-year-old back in Louisville, scared of boys. A man she’d known she was going to marry from the age of 17.

“I always know when this day is approaching,” she says, speaking slowly and deliberately about the anniversary, “because it takes me back to when it happened and it becomes a little emotional, but I end up thinking about Muhammad; how joyful he was and how he made other people happy and so I sort of lift myself out of that.

“The loss is still here, but his energy is here, his message is here and his legacy is here. And that continues to inspire me and many other people.”

It was 1963 when Lonnie came home from school one day to find her mother standing by the front door, looking across the street. Outside the house opposite was a man – a larger-than-life kind of man – then known as Cassius Clay. All the neighbourhood boys were gathered around him, enthralled by whatever tales he was telling. When Clay spotted little Lonnie, he sent her older brother over to get her. She was painfully shy, and a little afraid, but reluctantly she went over.

There’s a black and white photograph of the very moment Lonnie joins the huddle around Clay, but even if that image did not exist, she says she would remember that day clearly. “I was the only little girl over there,” she says. “He was sitting on his mother’s front step holding court and was just larger than life. Even though he was only 21, he had this big presence about him. After a while, he was so friendly, nice and humorous that I relaxed a little.”

That house, in Louisville, was one that Ali had bought for his parents after winning gold at the 1960 Summer Olympics and turning professional. He never lived there but would visit often, and always made time for the group of children in the neighbourhood. “We were his biggest fans,” says Lonnie, smiling.

Even so, she says at that time she didn’t really understand what he did. It was only years later, after he had changed his name to Muhammad Ali and refused to be drafted into the U.S. military as part of his opposition to the war in Vietnam, that she started to become more aware of what he did, and what he stood for.

“The biggest thing after meeting him was the fear that he’d go to jail. And that scared me, not just for him, but for his mother, because I couldn’t imagine what she would do if he was in jail. After that, I tuned in more to figure out what he did.”

As she grew up, Ali became something of a mentor to Lonnie. “He was always teaching me things about the world.” He would tease her for being “square,” making the shape with his fingers as he did so.

She was often the practice audience for the lectures that he delivered to college campuses to make a living while he was in exile. Even when his jaw was wired shut and he was sipping food through a straw after the first fight with Ken Norton in 1973, Lonnie recalls Ali giving her “a full lecture on the heart.”

Lonnie had first seen Ali fight in 1971, when he took on Joe Frazier in New York — a bout dubbed the “Fight of the Century.” She was in high school at the time and went with her mom and Ali’s mother, who had become close friends.

“I had no fear,” she says of her feelings about Ali fighting then. “I’m thinking, ‘Muhammad wins everything.’ So, whatever happened, he was going to win, because he always won. And it was so shocking to me when he got knocked down and did not win that fight. I was devastated — I didn’t understand how he could not win.

“But Muhammad put it all in perspective. Afterwards, he said that of course he was disappointed, because this was a huge fight and to lose like that, I’m sure he had to do some self-evaluation. But he said, ‘You know what? All I did was lose a fight. Other people lose their lives. They lose family members, they lose their job, they lose their homes. I just lost a fight.’”

Three years later, she remembers being “scared to death” watching Ali fight George Foreman while she was a freshman in college.

By that time, she’d had a strong realisation — an “epiphany” — that Ali was the man she would marry. She describes it as a “knowing — an awareness that I would marry him at some point. Not then, because I had a lot of things I wanted to do, but I would marry him, and I don’t know where that came from. It just went through my mind.”

It didn’t come to fruition until November 1986 when Lonnie, then 29, married 44-year-old Ali. He had retired from boxing five years earlier. Around the same time, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, the disease that ultimately contributed to his death from a respiratory illness.

“I knew that I needed to step in because the last thing I wanted was for him to be in a situation where he couldn’t take care of himself or he wasn’t being taken care of,” says Lonnie. “He deserved better than that. And I knew that, for whatever reason, I was put here to support him in that manner.”

---

Her focus for the last decade has been on continuing Ali’s work and legacy, which, she says, is more relevant now than ever.

“In a time of polarization, cultural division and toxic rhetoric – algorithms that sometimes keep us divided – it’s important that we continue to connect to each other and see the humanity in each one of us,” she says. “It’s something that has to grow.”

Together with the Muhammad Ali Center, she is launching an annual “Day of Compassion”, with the inaugural one taking place today. Anchored in one of Ali’s enduring beliefs — “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth” — it’s a global day of service and community action that will bring together nonprofits, schools, faith communities, corporate partners, and community leaders to complete coordinated acts of service throughout the day.

The Ali Center serves as a museum and cultural institution, but also as a place of education that aims to inspire young people to find their own greatness. It’s just one reason why Lonnie stays in touch with boxing and why she felt compelled to testify in support of the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act last December, a bill that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in March.

It was the first proposed change in U.S. federal law on boxing since 2000 and the introduction of the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, which aimed to protect boxers by restricting the power of promoters and regulating corrupt sanctioning bodies. Lonnie and Ali worked on it together with Senator John McCain.

Lonnie says the new bill will create an “alternate model” for the sport and create a schedule and cadence for it that can help rejuvenate boxing in the U.S. and help reverse a trend which, she says, has seen the sport “almost disappear from the landscape in America.”

She also believes it will give boxers better protections and opportunities.

“So many young people use boxing as a rite of passage. It’s one of those sports that you don’t have to have a lot of money to partake in, and I thought it was important, especially in the inner city, to give kids that pathway because it teaches them discipline and setting goals and understanding that you have to continue to to show up every day and put the work in if you want to achieve that goal.”

The act has caused controversy. Ali’s grandson Nico Ali Walsh, and his former wife Belinda Boyd. testified in opposition to it at the recent senate hearing.

Does Lonnie simply want the sport’s existing model to disappear?

“I say it’s competition and hopefully the competition will make the current model better — that they, too, will offer the same kinds of opportunities to boxers,” she says. “It’s not something that’s mandatory. A boxer can decide to stay with the traditional (model), but it gives them an opportunity to have a cadence of fights and to be paid for every round they box.”

Ali remained fascinated by the sport that he recognized had given him a global platform long after his retirement. He would go to fights when he was healthy enough to do so and Lonnie remembers him being staggered by the amounts of money on offer to fighters.

“When the Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather first bout occurred,” Lonnie recalls. “Muhammad could not fathom that they were being paid as much as they were (Mayweather was reported to have made in excess of $220million).

“He didn’t believe me when I told him that. I had to call up his daughter and say, ‘Ask Rasheda, she’ll tell you.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, daddy, that’s what he got paid.’ It was mind-boggling for him.”

Ali’s interest remained as an observer, not as a promoter or trainer. Lonnie insists he had a bigger purpose.

“Muhammad recognized that God had given him a special gift, given him a global platform, where he could not just lift himself up, but he could lift others up as well,” she says. “And he was very conscious of that.”