ALI : Away From Crowds, He’s Still Not at a Loss for Words

At first the pronouncements seem odd coming from Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight champ whose slurred, stumbling speech of recent years has led millions of his former fans to believe that all those blows to his head had turned him into a punch-drunk palooka.

Now he’s talking like a machine gun, floating and stinging, jabbing and stabbing, like the Ali of old and about everything that pops into his head from Jesse Jackson to Mikhail Gorbachev to his own Parkinson’s syndrome. The thoughts, the words tumble out faster than a reporter can note them down.

Ali on Jackson: “I like Jesse, but I think his timing’s off.”

On Gorbachev: “If it’s all a show, he’s a better actor than Ronald Reagan.”

On himself: “God gave me this physical impairment to remind me that I am not the greatest. He is.”

During a rare telephone interview, the champ was in his old form, and he was clearly pleased with himself.

“I bet you’re surprised I’m talking this good,” Ali quipped. “See, I’m not stupid. I’m not brain-damaged. The mind is good. I just sometimes have trouble articulating.”

Hours before, Ali had struggled through a brief statement at a Capitol Hill news conference to announce the appointment of his friend Stephen Saltzburg to a Justice Department post. Now he apologized for his public appearance, explaining that it’s crowds that cause him the most trouble.

“When it’s crowded, I feel pressure and I just can’t project,” Ali said, alluding to the astonishing contrast in his speech control between the cramped news conference and his hourlong telephone interview.

“The difference now,” he said, “is that I don’t feel so crowded.”

What he does feel is frustrated, that he can’t show the traffic-stopping throngs who appear whenever he’s in public that his mental acuity is just fine. And he feels hurt when people talk about him and call him brain-damaged to his face and apparently don’t realize that he knows exactly what they are saying.

“They don’t walk down the street and talk about a man who has cancer,” Ali said.

“It’s unfortunate that people have an image of me as a legendary figure . . . and if they see anything less than Superman, they can’t accept it.”

“It’s an infirmity that I acknowledge freely and accept peacefully,” he said of Parkinson’s syndrome, “and my goal is to work well in spite of it.” Then he said, “Sometimes it’s frustrating, but it’s not contagious.

“And I’m certainly not ready to meet my maker.”

Ali’s attorney, Richard Herschfeld, had volunteered an interview with Ali earlier this year in conversations he had with a Washington Post reporter covering a trial in which he was involved.

During the interview, the only noticeable speech problem was a few instances when he stuttered briefly when starting a word. Several times he grappled to find the right word to express his views, but pointedly noted that those instances were not a manifestation of brain damage.

Ali has been receiving additional treatment in recent months and every three hours he takes medication that he says “makes a real difference” in how he feels. He declined to discuss the medical treatment in detail, but if he varies even a little from his medication schedule, his speech shows it.

Ali has Parkinson’s syndrome, which was caused by blows he took in his boxing career and is related to Parkinson’s disease. It is a progressive neurological degeneration that causes muscles to be unresponsive, at once hard to move and trembling, and slurred speech. In its early stages, Parkinson’s can be treated with certain drugs.

Last summer, a physician who had examined Ali, Dr. Stanley Fahn of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, said of his case, “There is no evidence that it is going to progress and lead to invalidism.” Another Ali physician, Dr. Dennis Cope of the UCLA Medical Center, said, “We have no evidence of . . . damage to the brain” other than what causes the Parkinson’s symptoms, adding that Ali’s mental abilities are normal.

“God gave me the physical advantage to be a boxer, which made me the most famous man in the world,” Ali said. “But boxing was just a vehicle, and now I’ll spend the rest of my days trying to repay the goodness with which God blessed me.”

Mostly these days, Ali said, he spends his time reading and riding horses with his “best friend” and lawyer, Richard Hirschfeld, at the farm they own near Charlottesville, Va. Ali’s voting address is Charlottesville, and he and his wife of 18 months, Lonnie Ali, also spend time at houses in Pennsylvania and Michigan. His biggest project is mounting a national campaign against child abuse and dabbling in politics.

“I certainly don’t fancy myself a politician,” Ali said. “I don’t care if they are Democrats or Republicans--I care about people.”

To the question of whether he would like to be an ambassador himself, Ali said: “No. I’m aware my role is limited” during public appearances with politicians. “I generate crowds. I don’t have any crazy illusions about being something I’m not.”

Then quickly and wittily, he turned the interview into a game as a brief demonstration of his mental acuity and political expertise, suggesting, “ask me anything you don’t think I’m prepared for.”

And he was off and punching, taking on such diverse subjects as Virginia politics from Democratic Lt. Gov. L. Douglas Wilder to Charles S. Robb, Democratic candidate for the Senate; the metamorphosis of former Dixiecrat presidential nominee Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., and the current troubles of Attorney General Edwin Meese.

But it was for his friend Jesse Jackson that he had the most pointed advice.

“I think timing’s everything. And I don’t think the time is right for Jesse to be the leader of the free world.

“He needs to prove that he is not just a cheerleader. He should run for office and get himself elected governor or senator. I think it’s too big a responsibility for him to be the leader of the free world right out of the starting gate,” Ali said, comparing Jackson’s entry into the political world to a horse running the Kentucky Derby as its first race.

“I think Jesse ought to prove he can lead. He should be a Cabinet member in the Department of Education or the Department of Housing and, you know, HUD. He cares a lot about the less fortunate. He needs to leave an imprint, an impression, like when a boxer gets hit on the head.”

Ali laughed, then continued without a break.

“Even though it’s not an elective office, he could prove he could manage . . . He cannot rely on his experience in Operation PUSH. That should not be indicative of his managerial style. He speaks for the oppressed people and when he speaks, people listen.”

But Ali had even sharper words for the Jackson supporters at last weekend’s Virginia Democratic convention who booed former governor Robb, who was selected as his party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate.

“Nobody deserves to be treated like that,” Ali said, adding that he intends to campaign for Robb. “I think he will make a great senator and has the potential to be a great vice president and president.”

Ali applauded politicians on the left and right, calling Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, “a very trustworthy person” and referring to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., as carrying on the family tradition: “He seems real concerned about abuses in the judicial system and the way grand juries operate.”

Still, Ali said, he hasn’t decided who he’ll support in the presidential race. “I like (Massachusetts Gov. Michael S.) Dukakis. He seems like an honest man. And I like his wife. But it seems like George Bush has more experience.”

At the same time, Ali said he has made inquiries to Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., to see if he might be running on the ticket with Dukakis.

“I’m not so vain to think that my endorsement means so much,” Ali said. “But if it helps people to turn out, I’ll be there.”

And he’s already planning to be “be there” for Wilder, who is expected to be the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the state’s 1989 election.

“I think the timing is right for Doug Wilder in Virginia,” Ali said.

Then he segued into a discussion of Thurmond, with whom he had appeared at the Saltzburg news conference. (Saltzburg lives near Ali in Virginia, and the two became friends when Saltzburg invited Ali to a lecture he was giving on the 1971 Supreme Court decision that reversed Ali’s draft-dodging conviction.) Noting that some people must have been surprised that he and Thurmond had anything in common, Ali said, “He’s not the same man who ran as the presidential candidate on the States’ Rights ticket in 1948. He’s learned through exposure.

“He believes in equity. He believes in justice, that you rule by right and not by might.”

Ali also had compassionate words for Meese, who had attended the news conference with Thurmond, comparing Meese’s current legal problems to his own battle to be declared a conscientious objector.

“He might have made some errors in judgment,” Ali said of Meese. “But that doesn’t make him a crook . . . . If he’s right, I’m in his corner. If he’s wrong, he’ll have to pay the piper.”