BOXER REBELLION

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Laila Ali asks in a smooth, low voice. Very much, thank you. She contemplates her visitor and then replies, “Well, I’m not getting it for you.” Of course she isn’t. She’s the subject of the interview-- the star. And stars don’t fetch coffee. She grabs the visitor’s arm and quips, “I’m playing with you, man. Now go get your coffee and get comfortable. We’re cool.”

Professional boxer Laila Ali is 22 years old, 5’10” and fights at about 166 pounds. She is wearing canvas shoes, slacks and a Cynthia Rawley blouse. A diamond tennis bracelet adorns one wrist and her ring finger is outfitted with a very robust diamond given to her by her husband, Yahya McClain, for their wedding in August.

She also has several tattoos--one on each wrist and ankle--that she’s in the process of having removed. “I don’t like the two on my legs, and since I’m getting them removed, I thought I’d do the ones on my wrists as well.”

Paring down, perhaps? In person, Ali’s style seems a work in progress, morphing from young L.A. hipster into classic Westside affluence--Ungaro and Armani separates, expensive jewelry, minimal makeup, hair pulled back from her face, nails a natural pearl.

Nails on a boxer? From the wedding, she explains. “They really need to be half this length--in a fight they could tear. But I’m still a woman,” she remarks tartly.

Undefeated, with eight victories, seven of them knockouts, she is the second-youngest of Muhammad Ali’s nine children. Though her mother, model Veronica Porsche Anderson, has been supportive from the beginning, Ali’s legendary father initially tried to discourage her from her current career path.

But Ali doesn’t appear to be someone who is easily discouraged. At 18, while a full- time student at Santa Monica College, she opened a nail salon in Marina del Rey that she has since sold. “My counselors thought I was nuts,” she admits. “They said, ‘You can’t do this,’ and I was saying, ‘But I have a plan, this is all part of a strategy.’ ”

And, indeed, Ali is all about strategy. At Hamilton High School in Los Angeles, she had a reputation for fighting. “I was never mean, but I was always the first one to defend someone else who was smaller and being picked on. I was the good bully. I stood out, being Muhammad Ali’s daughter.” She laughs. “I had to bust off the shoes and the earrings and get down in the dirt with them. When I found out about women’s boxing, I thought, ‘Oh! I could make a lot of money.’ I don’t do anything if there’s nothing in it for me. I started training to see if I could be good at it.”

Though she admittedtly wasn’t an athlete in high school, she concedes, “I always had an athletic build. My husband says I was fat when he met me a year ago.” She grins and dismisses the comment with a wave of her hand, as her husband, who is sitting in on the interview, chuckles. “Shut up, Yahya,” she commands with a smile.

She has a reputation for being aloof and cold to the press, unlike her father, but from all appearances this morning, it’s the way she relates to the press that has perhaps contributed to that misunderstanding.

With Ali, the media have to play her game. “I go on talk shows and they ask me to play- box. It happens all the time. And I say, ‘You don’t ask Evander Holyfield to play-box.’ I don’t think it makes me look good and I don’t think it makes boxing look good, and then, once we’re live, they start in at me, and I just sit there.”

But don’t mistake this for attitude. Rather, she knows what she has to offer a body-hungry media, and she has a very clear idea of what she wants to portray.

Women’s magazines get just as hard a ride with the boxer. “I go on these shoots and there’s nothing but skimpy clothing. Just because I’m pretty and I have a nice physique doesn’t mean I’m gonna run around in skimpy clothes. You can be confident, you can be pretty, you can be a fighter. You can be whatever you want to be. But because there are so many girls walking around half-naked, many women feel they have to do that to get attention from men. It’s a self-esteem thing.”

Ask her where she sees herself in 10 years and she is emphatic about one thing. “I will not be boxing as long as my dad. It’s not the healthiest career.” She adds, “There are other things I want to do, such as having kids. Right now, we have a hot commodity, which is me. I’m into community building, but first I need to build some capital through boxing so I can really make a difference in creating businesses that create jobs.”

Here, the ends justify the means. “I have to take my time. Follow my plan. As a fighter, I want to take on the toughest girl in the ring tomorrow. But as a business person, I have to tell myself, ‘No, you’re not at that level--yet.’ Regardless of what everyone else says, if they had the opportunity I have, they’d be doing things the same way.”

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Styled by Delphine Tandonnet/Celestine L.A.; hair: Lijuana Gil-reath/Salon Eberechi; makeup: Phaedra L. Williams/Action Agency