Touched by the Greatest
John Julius Reel
Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali’s corner man, was a fan of my dad’s column in the New York Daily News, so in the summer of 1978 my dad, brother and I were invited to spend the day at The Greatest’s training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania.
A month earlier, I had been left off the Little League all-star team, despite having made it the two previous years. I hoped that meeting one of my heroes might snap me out of my slump.
We woke up early, and Mom dressed Joe and me up in plaid pants, fat-soled, Buster Brown shoes and wide-collared, short sleeved pull-overs, the kind that made my armpits itch and stink.
“Geez,” I said. “It’s not like we’re going to church.”
Mom would not be swayed.
“You’re meeting important men today.”
Dundee said he’d pick us up at the News Building. The last time Joe and I had been there, we’d run into Jimmy Breslin in the hall. His huge head, bushy hair and eyebrows protruding off a top-heavy frame had reminded me of a bison. He’d just grunted at us, with a cigar clenched between his teeth, then made some wisecrack that none of us understood. Dad nodded and smiled, until Breslin went away. The nicest guy had been the cartoonist, Bill Gallo, who invited Joe and me into his office and drew us our very own Big Bertha, who asked us in a bubble of dialogue to play ball.
The biggest highlight of that previous trip into Dad’s office hadn’t been his co-workers, but the building lobby, with its wall of clocks, each one set at a different time, for a different city around the world, and the centerpiece, an enormous globe with a railing around it, spinning on the same axis as the actual earth.
Today, as usual, we took the bus then the Staten Island Ferry into the city, then another bus outside Whitehall Station, getting off on Madison Avenue, a block away from what Dad called, “the quintessential spot to make sissy in the city,” the Yale Club. After leading us in to do our business – the urinals went straight down to the floor, like something you could prop up mummies in –, Dad gave the doorman a big hello on our way back out the revolving door.
“Little does that guy know,” Dad said, once we were walking home free down Vanderbilt Avenue, “that your old man was once arrested for pelting a New Haven cop in a campus snowball fight. I falsely pleaded ignorance.”
Once at the News Building, on 42nd Street, we waited for Dundee’s limo beneath the mural above the entrance. The motto, “He made so many of them,” was sculpted into the stone. So many men, I guessed, since that’s what the mural showed, and that’s what the streets teemed with. Well, we were off to see the greatest of them, although he’d recently lost his title to Leon Spinks.
The rematch would be held in a month, on September 15th, the day after I turned 11.
***
John Stearns was Bad Dude, Dave Kingman was Kong, and Pete Rose was Charlie Hustle. A few months after Reggie Jackson hit three homers in a single game in the previous year’s World Series, off the first three pitches he swung at, the Reggie Bar had come out. Joe and I agreed that the “Mr. October Bar” would have sounded better, although the second-rate name was small beans next to its wrapper – orange and blue, the colors of the Mets. Reggie Jackson was a Yankee! How could such a colossal error have been overlooked?
There was also Doctor J in basketball. The shots he was known for, the dunk and the finger roll, “didn’t even exist,” according to Dad, back when he’d played. We’d even heard of Broadway Joe, although more for Namath’s commercials with Farah Fawcett than for his football heroics. “A man about town,” my dad called him.
Of course none of these nicknames compared with The Greatest.
“Someone or something that’s impossible to forget” was how Dad defined greatness.
He’d often use the word when practicing with Joe and me. “Great play!” he’d say, or “Great catch!” Or even after we struck out: “Great swing!”
Sometimes, happy to be home after a long day’s work, or just lolling around the house on the weekend, waiting for Mom to call us into dinner, he’d pat one of us on the back, and say with an emphasis undiminished by his signature irony, “One of the all-time greats!”
We never doubted that’s what we were to him, and our plays and our swings as well. We were his sons, after all.
Perhaps Dad was great. He called his columns his “stuff,” the same word he used for a pitcher’s ability to get guys out. For instance, the Mets’ Jerry Koosman had “lost his stuff,” having gone from a 20-game winner in ’76 to a 20-game loser in ’77. This season he was doing even worse. Meanwhile, Tom Seaver, who’d been traded to the Reds the previous year, hadn’t lost an ounce of his. A few months ago, he’d thrown his first ever no-hitter. The Mets had tanked since he’d left. With the Mets, first he’d been Tom Terrific and then The Franchise, living up to both nicknames.
Although the News trucks had finished their work by the time I was out and about before school, and then, when the Night Owl edition was being delivered, Joe and I would already be in our pajamas, I knew Dad’s face had been plastered across the sides of every single one. So perhaps, in what he called “the newspaper business,” Bill Reel was as much a franchise player as Seaver, Jackson, Garvey or Schmidt.
How many trucks were needed to deliver all the copies of the News sold on Sunday? In any given moment of the morning, how many faces of Dad were spread across the Tri-State Area?
“Enough to fill Shea?” I had asked Joe one day.
Joe, whose paper route gave him an insider’s view, applied his mathematical mind to the question.
“Maybe enough to fill the box seats,” he’d mused.
Still, Dad’s definition of greatness wasn’t foolproof. Failure too was impossible to forget.
In August of ’75, a year before I had entered Little League with a golden bat and glove, proclaimed an eight-year-old prodigy in the national game, Mike Vail had debuted for the Mets. He went 4 for 4 against the Padres a few days later, beginning a hitting streak that had Dad, Joe and me going directly to the box scores in the News on mornings after games, more concerned with Vail’s performance at the plate than the final score. The streak ended at 23 games, the longest ever by a Major League rookie, and a tie for the longest by a Met. By the end of the season, he was being touted as the new miracle of the Miracle Mets. A .302 average, the second best on the team, behind only Ed Kranepool. Mighty Mike! Yet the following season, he hit just .217. And this year, during spring training, the Mets had finally let him go.
He was the Met I remembered most, for being a flash in the pan – exactly what Ali hoped to turn Spinks into, exactly what I hoped to never become.
***
The back of the limo was like a tiny living room, upholstered in tawny beige with gilt lining framing the pull-out ashtrays, door handles and overlaying the window lips. Dundee sat on the couch-like seat across from us, wearing dark gray pants and an open-collared shirt with shimmering pin stripes. A thin chain traversed the triangle of exposed flesh below his neck. A fatter chain circled his wrist. The frames of his eye-glasses, and even the top of his head – tan, shiny and balding – added to the sheen of gold. He also wore cologne. Because he’d shaken my hand, I wore it now, too.
“You boys ever had to defend yourselves?” he asked.
I considered telling him about the time I’d bashed Roy Jordan’s nose back in 3rd grade. Instead of hitting back, he’d said, “Nice punch!”
“They’re ballplayers,” Dad replied.
Mr. Dundee nodded approvingly.
“I thought I saw fire in their eyes,” he said. “That’s what makes a champion.”
The radio was tuned to WNEW New York, exactly what we listened to at home. William B. Williams and Jonathan Schwartz, the station’s star DJs, played from what they called The Great American Songbook. To them, there was Sinatra, a.k.a. The Chairman of the Board, and then all the rest: Benny Goodman, Lena Horne, Nelson Riddle… The dudes and dames of something called “The Make Believe Ballroom.”
“Hello world!” Willy B would say, as Dad drove us back from St. Andrew’s on Sundays. We had a VW squareback, Dodger blue with cream interior, and a whistle in its engine tone. Dad would tap his fingers on the ball at the end of the stick shift, keeping time with the music.
Now, in the limo, I watched him ply his trade on Dundee. The give and take of their talk, its pace, made me wonder if they were angry at each other.
“It’s all about surprising the opponent,” said Dundee. “The greatest fighters even surprise themselves.”
“But he’s 36,” said Dad.
“Ali’s still got some surprises left in him.”
“He’s not the fighter he once was though.”
“He’s different. But his personality and character are the same,” said Dundee. “That’s what makes him the greatest fighter who ever lived.”
***
By the time we got to Deer Lake, the scent of Dundee’s cologne, mixed with the smoke from the cigarettes that he and Dad sucked down to the filters and filled the gilded ash trays with, had gone to my head. Also we’d skipped lunch. At one point, during complete silence, a fart had trumpeted out of me. Not even Joe had acknowledged it with a raised eyebrow or an elbow to the ribs. Now that we’d finally reached our destination, I just wanted to be back home, flipping through and talking baseball cards with Joe, eating one of Mom’s grilled cheeses with a glass of milk, ripping farts to my heart’s content.
Dundee must have sensed that we were faltering, because, as soon as we got inside the compound’s ring and training facilities, he went off to get us “Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee” t-shirts, blue for me, red for Joe, and two brass, Muhammad Ali belt buckles, with his likeness cast in a boxer’s defensive pose, the metal the exact color and shine as the skin of the man I was now seeing in person, alone in the ring, shadowboxing, sweat sliding down him, his face transfixed, like Dad’s when he would pound out his column at the dining room table.
He gave a final flurry of punches, then shook out his legs and arms and bent to slip through the ropes, as an assistant wrapped him in a white robe. When they disappeared through a door, I thought that was it. But Dundee came over and asked Joe and me if we’d like to join Ali in a few minutes to watch the Spinks fight tape in one of the bunk house living rooms.
We immediately stood with all our stuff.
Dundee went off to find something for us to put it in. He returned with a shoebox that said EVERLAST, and Size 13. It was the biggest shoe box I’d ever seen.
***
A couple of The Greatest’s sparring partners flanked him on the sofa. The three of them wore loose, gray t-shirts and shorts and hunched down like sitting bears ready to roll forward into swift motion. The furniture seemed like what you’d find at a garage sale, or left out for the garbage men to pick up. The upholstery gave off the odor of sweet feet and something muskier that I couldn’t pinpoint. The carpet was dirty brown, and you could see where food and drink spills had been carelessly cleaned up. I stared at the soda cans in the fighters’ hands, looking as tiny as dice-rollers from my Parcheesi game.
Once, way past our bed-time, at a dinner party with some of Dad’s friends in the city, I’d overheard him tell of the time he’d seen Yogi Berra in the Yankee locker room.
“Yogi had just stepped out of the shower. Body hair covered him like a wet shag carpet.” Dad rose from his chair and propped his foot up on the seat to show how Yogi stood. “He had a slice of pizza up over his head, drooping down, dripping oil, about to send it in. And down below his paunch. . .” Dad dropped a hand to beneath his legs, as if holding a great weight there.
“Billy!” Mom said. “The children!”
“Some indelible memories you’d prefer to forget,” Dad said.
The room had burst into hilarity. It was a side of Dad I’d never seen before, nothing sacred, the life of the party, having forgotten his family was present.
***
In the bout against Spinks, there had been some controversy about a moment between the late rounds, after which Spinks came out with a second wind, key to his winning the fight by decision. Ali fast-forwarded directly to this part, with the cameras on Spinks in his corner, then pressed play. We all watched as one of Spinks’ corner men squirted a water bottle into the fighter’s mouth. Instead of spitting it into a stool-side bucket, Spinks swallowed it.
“Didja see? Didja see?” said Ali, jumping up from the sofa and beginning to bob and weave.
After a flurry of jabs, he turned to me. “Ain’t nobody gonna cheat the king! Ain’t no one gonna cheat the worl’! The greatest of ALL time! Learnin’ new tricks at 36. Ain’t over the hill, Spinks gonna get his fill. Don’t stand no chance ‘gainst an Ali who can dance.”
His sparring partners chimed in, “Das right, champ!” . . . “Uh huh!” . . . “Gonna whup him like you whupped the rest.”
Ali followed with a fiercer and more intricate display of shuffling and shadow boxing, as I sat on a foot stool below him.
“When that bell ring, gonna be so fast, he gonna think he’s surrounded. Be floatin’ an’ dancin’. Old enough to be his daddy, they sayin’. We’ll, I’m gonna beat him like I’m his daddy. Ain’t nobody gonna stop me. I’ll whup ‘em all. Gonna go outa boxin’ just like I came in…,” he squatted down in front of me, his face as big and golden as a gong. “Shockin’ the worl’!”
He bit his lower lip and popped his eyes out, as though it was all he could do not to let fly with the fist he held under his chin. I tried to smile, but a pathetic squeak betrayed me.
I felt his hand on my head, radiating heat.
“I would never hit you, little man,” he said. “Be afraid you’d hit back.” He stood and turned toward his sparing partners on the couch. “Someone get the champ here a Mountain Dew!”
He looked back at me, noticing the shoebox for the first time, then eyed me as though he’d caught on to my tricks.
“You tryin’ to put yourself in my shoes?”
He began to back away, still glowering in his jocular way.
“Spinks is a clean fighter,” he said, suddenly serious, “and a good fighter. People have to give him credit.”
Before he could take a seat, his sparring partner returned with my soda. Ali took it from him, popped the tab and stepped forward again.
The can changed from small to big, as he handed it to me.
“You know how smart Spinks gotta be to beat me?” he said.
***
On the return trip to the city, I stared out the window, like I would on school trips, so that it was just me and the outside world, my head pressed to the cool glass, my breath fogging it. I didn’t want to think about anything at all.
Little by little, as we approached New York, more and more homes, closer and closer together, began to line the highway. The greenery shrank, and became less exuberant, with more cars parked along the streets. Then the green merged with every other color into a general grayish brown. Factories spewed filth that warped the air. Warehouses surrounded by parking lots were crammed full with rows and rows of repair trucks, school busses or delivery vans, motors cooling, routes run, cargos unloaded.
An unending stream of cars, expanded now to three lanes, whooshed past in the opposite direction, or rushed alongside of us in the pell-mell return to the center of it all, bumper to bumper in front and behind. The driver put the radio on, louder this time. Sound surged up all around us. Jonathan Schwartz spoke low, his tone confidential, as though addressing only me. He said something about Satchmo, The First Lady of Song and summertime. A pause followed, interspersed with one or two pops of a needle on vinyl, then a muffled horn, a swell of strings and a sad, slow bell.
What did I need to do to be remembered forever, to have a nickname that everyone knew, or a candy bar named after me?
“One of these mornin’s you gonna rise up singin’,” sang a voice impossible to forget.
Satchmo was still at it when I saw the News truck pass in the opposite direction, with Dad’s face blown up to billboard size, plastered across the side of it. The east and west bound lanes had veered slightly apart at that point, so my eyes could linger long enough to read, “Get the Reel Story” – the same number of words and syllables as “I am the greatest.”
A short while later, when Dundee got dropped off at Grand Central, he said to the driver, “These young men are ballplayers. Get them home for dinner.”
There was still daylight left when the limo pulled in front of our house. Dad suggested that we play pepper in the street, while Mom got supper ready. I didn’t feel like it, but said yes, because that’s what ballplayers did to be the greatest.
John Julius Reel, born and raised in Staten Island, New York, has lived for 14 years in Seville, Spain. He is the author of a memoir in Spanish, ¿Qué pinto yo aquí?, and has collaborated as both writer and editor in El derbi final, an award-winning book about the Seville soccer derby. Among his English publications, the essay “My Darlings” stands out for having been recognized as “notable” in Best American Essays 2015. His two essays in the most recent issue of Sport Literate are part of a memoir in progress.