Muhammad Ali

People come up to me in the streets quite often and tell me how wonderful my dad is. They all have such amazing stories. That was the reason I wrote my book More Than A Hero. I thought, “So many authors are only writing about his history in boxing. A lot of people don’t know about him as a human being and how wonderful he is.” To be honest, it was going to be a Fathers’ Day gift, but my mother thought that it would be a good idea to get it published. It’s been out for almost a year now, and I get a lot of fan mail – of course, the fans are my father’s! – telling me how wonderful and poetic they thought the book was and how it shows another side of him they didn’t know existed or they hadn’t seen. I take it for granted. I keep forgetting that people who think they know my father don’t really know how wonderful he is. He has a big heart and is such a humanitarian.

My interest in poetry came from the fact that, when I was really young, my father would speak in rhyme a lot, so I would imitate him and write little love notes. Then, one day, I was watching a documentary on my dad and was inspired to write a poem, my first poem, entitled ‘Ali’ – it was just a short poem about my father and how I viewed him.

See, my dad is like a big kid. He was always real fun around the house, always joking, doing magic tricks, making little rhymes and whatnot. And we always had people in the house, ’cause he liked company – he was very open and he had a very open environment. People would come up to him and want to meet him, and he’d say, “Come on home with me,” and he’d just sit them out and do magic. I was about nine when my parents divorced, so we were around a lot, running around, and he was just real open. It didn’t matter what he was doing; he just let us run around and have fun.

The world knows my father as Muhammad Ali, but I know him as Daddy, and he’s always been a great dad, surprisingly, ’cause he was always very busy, travelling, but he made it very evident that he loved us and he gave us a lot of attention. Nothing was too important. There was never a time the door was closed or even in an important business conference call. He focused on his kids and he made time for his family life as well as the business world.