He tells the story now, even 40 years later, with a profound sense of awe. Joel Sacher was attending the inauguration gala for President Jimmy Carter, which would have represented a life milestone for the longtime Springfield resident regardless of the circumstances.



But he was there as a personal guest of Muhammad Ali, maybe the most recognizable man on the planet at the time. And we use the word maybe here for a reason.



Because Ali and Sacher were meeting with one of the few men who could challenge for that distinction. They were talking to John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, and while the conversation included plenty of nostalgia about a famous meeting between a band and a boxer long ago, it was more than just reliving the good old days.



Ali was armed with a proposal, one that was the brainchild of Sacher and a business associate that had the potential to stun the world. They wanted to reunite the most famous quartet in rock 'n' roll history, and do so for the benefit of impoverished people around the globe.



They weren't the first to try to bring the Fab Four back together, of course, against daunting odds. The lads from Liverpool had not parted as the closest of friends when the had broken up seven years earlier.

Still: Sacher remembers an overwhelming feeling of hope that night in January 1977, and for good reason. He had a very convincing ally, after all.



"If there was anybody in the world who could have pulled this off and reunited the Beatles," he told NJ Advance Media this week, "it was Muhammad Ali."

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There are hundreds of ways to remember Ali, who will be memorialized in public services in his hometown of Louisville, Kent., on Thursday and Friday.

He was a great boxer, of course -- The Greatest, as he himself proclaimed -- who won the heavyweight championship three times and lost just five times in 61 fights. He was a showman who, more than any athlete before or since, understood how to turn a sporting event into a spectacle.

He was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and as polarizing an icon to ever emerge from the sports world, and a man who courageously lived with Parkinson's Disease and campaigned for research to fight it even as it left him unable to speak.

He was all that and more, someone who lived such a big live that something as fascinating as this -- his relationship with the world's most famous rock band -- is but a footnote. And his attempts to reunite that band near the end of his boxing career? Almost completely lost to history.

Sacher was a witness to it. It started with a chance meeting between Alan Amron, his partner in the effort, in a Miami restaurant early one morning in 1976. Amron was many things -- an inventor, a businessman and a promoter -- but he certainly wasn't shy.

"Excuse me, sir," he began, according to a recent interview with the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, "but I'm trying to re-form the Beatles. Would you like to help?"

"The Beatles?" Ali replied. "I love the Beatles!"

Ali gave Amron his business card. Soon, according to Sacher, he and his partner were flying to meet the champ in Houston, where he was filming scenes for his movie "The Greatest."

Sacher had grown up idolizing Ali, and now there he was, standing next to him on a movie set. He said he could only stand silently and stare until Ali turned to him and broke the ice.

"What's the matter with you?" he said. "Never seen a black man before?"

That introduction was the beginning of a 40-year friendship. Sacher isn't exactly sure why Ali took such a liking to him, but he has a collection of old photographs and funny stories as proof.

Like the time Ali asked Sacher's kids to make a paper mache acorn, one that his entourage carried around the ring before his fight against Earnie Shavers -- who Ali had nicknamed "The Acorn" because of his bald head -- in September 1977. Or the time Ali carried his young daughter into a hospital when she was suffering from a urinary tract infection, much to the stunned amazement of the doctors and nurses inside.

"After we met in Texas, Ali had my number and called my house," Sacher said. "My wife answered the phone. He said, 'May I speak to Joel?' She said, 'Who's calling?' He said, 'Muhammad Ali.' And she said, 'Yeah, okay, Joel.' When we met in Philadelphia, Ali said, 'Man, your wife did not believe it was me.' I told him, 'Muhammad, sometimes I don't believe it either.'"

That meeting in Philadelphia, like many others during the late '70s, had a singular focus: Reuniting the Beatles.

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They had intersected in history before, of course. This was 1964, soon after the Beatles made their famous appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. They wanted to meet Sonny Liston, but the heavyweight champ refused, so the band's management set something up with his underdog opponent -- still known as Cassius Clay then -- in the much-anticipated upcoming title bout.

It was Feb. 18, 1964, when the band arrived at Miami Beach's 5th Street Gym. Both sides were skeptical, according to observers at the time, but the musicians soon found a match to their comedic instincts in the boxer. They took a series of iconic photographs, including one in which Ali picked up drummer Ringo Starr.

"And then he's carrying me. I don't know why, he just picked me up!" Starr told Rolling Stone in an interview this week. "It wasn't like, 'OK, pick him up now!' He just suddenly did."

That they would all go onto fame that would transcend boxing and music made that moment -- and those photos -- something of a cultural touchstone. Ali never forgot it, even if the boxer and the band would only cross paths a few times after that meeting.

Flash forward to 1977. Sacher and Amron knew that it would take more than money to bring the Beatles back together. It would take a cause. It would take a movement. They hatched a plan for an event that could raise $200 million to create a permanent agency that focused on "feeding and clothing the poor people of the world."

Ali's representatives reached out to the lawyers for the four Beatles, with limited success. Then, on Jan. 15, 1977, Ali took the story public with an interview with New York tabloid the Daily News.

The headline on the front page that day: "Ali to Beatles: Come Together." The story made it clear that no one involved wanted to profit on the venture except for the good of humanity.

"I don't need the money and neither do the Beatles." Ali told the newspaper. "The idea is to create this fund, and to help people to develop a quality of the heart."

Sacher is mentioned briefly near the bottom of the story as, along with Armon, "the catalysts" for the effort and for forming the "International Committee to Reunite the Beatles." But make no mistake: This was all about Ali.

"It would be a personal joy to see them together again," Ali said. "The man who helps unite the Beatles makes a better contribution to human happiness than an astronomer who discovers a new star."

The story, not surprisingly, took off. Sacher found himself taking phone calls from reporters from all over the world. But only one thing mattered: How would the Beatles respond?

Just five days later, at the inaugural gala for Jimmy Carter, he thought he had his answer.

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The gala was, in every way, a spectacle. Linda Ronstadt sang "Crazy." John Wayne delivered a speech, telling the new president, "Starting tomorrow at high noon, all of our hopes and dreams go into that great house with you." Lauren Bacall was there. Paul Newman was there.

And so was Joel Sacher, feeling like he had stepped in as an extra in some unbelievable movie. He was with Ali when the boxer approached Lennon, wearing a tuxedo with a star lapel pin, and struck up a conversation.

"Yoko and John were so enamored with Ali," Sacher said. "They were more excited about seeing him than the President. It brought back such memories for them, they couldn't stop talking about having met him in '64 and all that had transpired in the world since then. It was a moment in time you could never recreate."

Ali wasn't going to secure a commitment from Lennon that night. But he did earn an invitation. Come meet with us, Lennon told Ali, at their famed apartment at The Dakota and we'll talk some more.

A meeting? It was a start.

"Ali and I left like two little boys," Sacher said. "We were so obviously thrilled I can't tell you. We just kept looking at each other. This would have been a victory bigger than any of his fights. Here he was champion of the world in the ring, and now he would have been champion in the world of promotions!"

Alas, it didn't happen that way. Geraldo Rivera had gotten involved, Sacher said, and in an interview with the TV newsman Paul McCartney -- who was atop the charts with his new band "Wings" in early 1977 -- made it pretty clear. He wouldn't say no, but not even the champ was likely to make this reunion happen.

Sacher said there were many behind-the-scenes meetings with representatives from the musician and the boxer over the coming months, but they never did have that sit down at The Dakota. It was outside that building, on Dec. 8, 1980, when an assassin's bullet ended their dreams for good.

Lennon was dead, and with the rest of the world, Ali was grieving.

"Ali was devastated, and not the fact that we couldn't get the Beatles back together, but that another person could take someone life's as such a talented individual," Sacher said. "It had a profound effect on Ali for a while. It had that effect on all of us. Why? Why end a life like that?"

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Now the world is grieving again. Sacher will be among the thousands who travel to Louisville this week to pay his respects to Ali. He never lost touch with the boxer, last seeing him in September 2014 when he posed for a photograph with Sacher's entire family.

Ali even playful sparred with his young grandson.

The many tributes to Ali from around the world included words from the two surviving Beatles. Starr tweeted simply: "God bless Muhammad Ali peace and love to all his family."

McCartney, meanwhile, wrote "I loved that man."

"He was great from the first day we met him in Miami, and on the numerous occasions when I ran into him over the years," he wrote on his website. "Besides being the greatest boxer, he was a beautiful, gentle man with a great sense of humour who would often pull a pack of cards out of his pocket, no matter how posh the occasion, and do a card trick for you."

Sacher still believes, had Lennon lived, that Ali would have pulled off the greatest reunion in rock 'n' roll history. Maybe that was wishful thinking, but there is one lesson that Ali spent a lifetime teaching the world.

Never doubt The Greatest.

Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevePoliti. Find NJ.com on Facebook.