Dick Cavett on his career in show business, and more.

Do you have things you mean to do, and ought to do, but don’t?

What is that? People you suspect are saner than yourself simply say: “Just go ahead and do it. What’s stopping you?” You agree. It’s sensible and should be done. But you don’t do it and you sit there and it starts to slip from your mind and you pick up an unread Vanity Fair or The Farmer’s Almanac and another year goes by.

That’s how it was with me and Muhammad Ali. I mean, with Muhammad Ali and me.

This will sound funny-peculiar to some, but there was a period in my life when I felt that Muhammad Ali was my best friend.

I don’t mean an imaginary, worshipped from afar friend but a worshipped from “anear” one. He was on my shows a whole lot of times, we saw each other offstage and on, and the champ appeared to have a real fondness for me. I, of course, loved that and developed a deep affection for him.

Years went by, his world and mine diverged, and about the time I realized we hadn’t horsed around together — neither offstage nor on — in quite a while, his illness struck.



The thing put off was about my desire to see him again when he became ill, along with, I hope, an understandable reluctance to see that great eminence reduced by sickness. Years went by. And more years, and he got worse. I’ll never get over the regret. What was my psychoanalysis good for if I didn’t go and see my ailing friend?

Finally, if not inevitably, circumstances brought us together again.

The Norman Mailer Center gives awards to writers, and this, some weeks back, was their annual banquet. Ali and Mailer were friends, and Ali was the gala’s guest of honor. Among the distinguished guest speakers were such folks as Oliver Stone, Joyce Carol Oates (a boxing fan), Garrison Keillor, the L.B.J. immortalizer Robert Caro and, deftly and wittily emceeing, Alec Baldwin.

Events like this are always a seemingly unavoidable combination of sleep-inducing ennui and excessive length and make me swear if I ever get home from this one and to bed, I’ll never go to another one or to anything else. Ever.

This was the exception. Ingeniously staged by the movie producer, writer, etc. Lawrence Schiller in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel’s imperial ballroom, in Manhattan, this was a model of how to do it. With one especially tough problem to crack: how to present the largely immobilized guest of honor.

Schiller’s solution: there was the usual center-of-attention stage with mike and lectern, but also a second one. In another part of the room a small theater was constructed with a well-raised stage and a handsome, closed curtain.

The champ had quietly been placed there, and when he was introduced and the curtain revealed him, the elegant crowd, at their elegant tables, went mad.

There, seated on what amounted to a throne, tuxedoed and in wraparound dark, dark glasses, sat the arguably greatest athlete of all time. The applause rolled on. He looked like an African emperor out of some romantic tale.

A few of us, including his heroic wife, Lonnie, spoke briefly and reminisced, and the curtains closed. With much help, he was brought to a nearby table.

Before dinner, for a sizable fee, for a good cause, of course, you could sit on a couch beside him and have your picture taken with the only three-time heavyweight champion of the world. A long line of well-heeled folk did before returning to, at the top of the scale, their $100,000 tables.

Ali sat looking straight ahead and didn’t speak. While waiting for the line to clear, I asked Lonnie if there was any chance he’d remember me. She said there was a good chance, “but the problem is he can’t speak to you. He can’t answer you.”

I sat beside him and began a one-sided chat. It was a bit like talking to a statue, his features drawn downward by the illness and seemingly frozen. I’m not sure I would have recognized him.



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I kept talking in hopes of some sign, and after I’d said my name a few times and recalled fun and funny incidents from our good times together, the frozen-looking countenance continued to stare straight ahead. But then it stirred a little, and I hoped desperately he might turn toward me, or at least mouth my name — my mixed-blessingly recognizable voice seemed suddenly to have gotten through. It was not to be. But I honestly think — or maybe I just need to think — that a bell rang.

Suddenly a large woman hove into view and said snippily, “We have a lot of people waiting in line.” I was being bounced. In fact, there were but three people waiting, and they were enjoying watching the two of us and were not irked.

I wasted a good and useful line from “Measure for Measure” on her.

“ ‘Dress’d in a little brief authority,’ are we?” I asked. After a bit longer, I moved away. There wasn’t much more to do or say.

Boxing.

It’s a brutish and disgusting sport and should probably be outlawed. (Sorry, Norman.)

Few doubt that Ali’s sad state was caused by head blows, akin to N.F.L. cranium-smashing. At the same time, paradoxically, it’s an entertaining sport and, at its best, requires and demonstrates great skills, complex strategies and mastery of technique.

That’s what sets it apart — way apart — from that moron’s Punch and Judy show laughingly called “professional wrestling.” That sleazy, painstakingly rehearsed game of charades that requires more thespian skill than athletic prowess. A “manly art” requiring about as much manliness as crocheting.

Paradoxically, what many describe as “men battering each other senseless” approaches, at its highest level, art. Should you need convincing on this, get ahold of the great A. J. Liebling’s masterpiece on the subject, “The Sweet Science.”

This is a silly sort of speculation, but would anyone suggest that given the magical choice of re-living his life Parkinson’s-free, Ali would gladly make the trade-off? Forsaking all those years of glory as The Most Famous Person in the World?

In that notorious survey the Ali face proved to be the only one among the world’s most famous visages past and present instantly recognized in even the remotest parts of the planet. No other face was. Not Elvis, not J.F.K., not Mickey Mouse, not Jackie, not Honest Abe, Mick or Marilyn. In the most far-flung regions, there was only one face pointed to by the Bantu tribesman and a farmer’s wife in rural Tibet. Pointed to with, “Ali, Ali.”

Had you come from way down, as young Cassius Clay did, would you trade all that? For health? I don’t suggest that the answer is an obvious one.

At this point, a self-imposed word count prevents me from detailing some of the ways the Champ and I had offstage fun together. Another time?

Meanwhile, in a merrier vein, some onstage fun: a memorable clip from a show Muhammad and I did together with Joe Frazier. Ali’s young again here, and you’ll see this witty, fractious, intelligent, vigorous man in a far-off, happier time; when he bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus.