EW's assistant managing editor Peter Bonventre was a sportswriter for Newsweek when he covered 1974's ''Rumble in the Jungle'' in Kinshasa, Zaire.
The last time I saw Ali, he blew me a kiss goodbye.
The occasion was a dinner party six years ago in Manhattan. I didn't stay long. It was more unsettling than I had imagined to spend an evening reliving Ali's glory days with the man himself. Ali was the greatest, and now he was taking medication to alleviate the cruel symptoms of Parkinson's syndrome: vacant eyes, unsteady hands, shambling gait, slurred speech. When I was ready to leave, Ali walked me to the door. And just as I was about to step into the elevator, he slowly raised his right hand to his lips and waved in my direction. I wanted to cry.
That image of the champ was depressingly hard to shake -- until I saw When We Were Kings. Watching Ali in battle, his 32-year-old body tuned to perfection, his keen mind determined to regain his title from the fearsome George Foreman, worked its magic on me all over again.
The excitement is so thick around a heavyweight championship fight, notes Norman Mailer in Kings, that waiting for the first round to begin is ''almost physically unendurable.'' So much so that once Ali and Foreman finally collided in the center of the ring, my hand twitched so furiously I could barely take notes. One day I will tell my 5-year-old son that I sat not 10 feet from Ali's corner and that as the bell for the eighth round sounded, Ali's trainer, Angelo Dundee, shouted at me, ''How're you scoring it?!?'' I raised a thumb in the air, and then Dundee started screaming ''Take him home, Muhammad, knock him out!'' Ali's last punch of the fight -- a chopping, etherizing right to the side of Foreman's head -- is etched on the inside of my eyelids.
A few hours after the fight, Time photographer Ken Regan and I drove to Ali's compound outside Kinshasa. We found the champ sitting on a stoop with a bunch of kids and ended up having breakfast with him before the rest of the press arrived. Of all the words that tumbled out of Ali that morning, I remember these most vividly: ''The man who has no imagination stands on the earth. He has no wings; he cannot fly.''
No athlete's imagination ever soared so high as Ali's, and I thank him from the bottom of my heart for taking me along on the ride.
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