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Ali stopped for an autograph
Why He Stopped
The man traveling with him protested that they would miss the flight and asked why he had stopped. Ali answered that it was the only time that person would ever get to interact with him, and he wanted it to be a beautiful moment.
An Open Door
Ali had a quality of making people feel they were with him, even people he never met. When he lived in New Jersey, people could knock on his door, and he would come out and do magic tricks for them.
A Week Together
Writer Cal Fussman spent a week with him at a time when Parkinson's disease had made speaking very difficult for him. The way Ali treated him made him look up to his childhood hero even more than he had watching him on a big screen as a kid.
Why does Parkinson's make speaking difficult?
Parkinson's disease destroys dopamine-producing cells in a brain region called the substantia nigra. Dopamine helps coordinate movement, including the small muscle movements of breathing, voice, and articulation. As a result, speech often becomes quiet, flat, and slurred. Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson's syndrome in 1984, three years after his last fight.
How did Ali become known worldwide?
Ali, then named Cassius Clay, won the light heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics. In 1964 he beat Sonny Liston to take the heavyweight title, and he soon took the name Muhammad Ali. In 1996, with his hands trembling from Parkinson's, he lit the cauldron at the Atlanta Olympics before a global television audience.