Even in the Lowcountry, Muhammad Ali could make his presence known

The evening began as a legal walkthrough, the kind of briefing all witnesses get the day before giving testimony. Routine stuff.

There’s little routine, though, when your witness is Muhammad Ali. And he’s in the living room of his rented Hilton Head Island condo, offering a private demonstration of the famed “Ali Shuffle” in the middle of the floor.

“To me, it looked pretty good,” said Beaufort attorney Buster Davis, recalling the encounter 21 years ago, after the boxing icon began to show signs of the Parkinson’s disease that ravaged his last two decades. “For some reason, that night he wanted me to see that. And he was pretty agile.”

Ali, who died Friday at age 74, was a frequent visitor to Hilton Head Island after his boxing days as he sought treatment for muscle and speech deterioration that eventually would be diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease.

Even though the visits were typically low-key, Ali had a knack for making his presence known. Beachgoers might catch him running in the mornings, or enjoying such eateries as Gaslight Restaurant or Charlies L’Etoile — even Shoney’s, if he had a craving for simpler foods.

In 1990, he caused a summer traffic jam on William Hilton Parkway, spotted shadowboxing on the side of the road and causing folks to stop for autographs.

“There are certain people that you meet in life that have that aura around them, a little bit bigger than life,” Davis said. “It was easy to see that when you were around him.”

By then, Ali had transformed from the bombastic boxer with a penchant for quick-fire poetry — some scholars have suggested he was the first athlete/rapper — to the statesman who tried to get the world to better understand one another.

“He was the greatest — not because of his boxing skills, but because of his humanity,” said Hilton Head Island’s Jack Shaheen. “It’s his humanity that made him so great.”

Shaheen, a professor and author whose career has centered on the portrayal of Muslims and Arabs in popular culture, never encountered Ali on Hilton Head Island. But he was the moderator of a televised roundtable about Islam in the United States that helped provide seed money for the Muhammad Ali Center that was built in Ali’s hometown of Louisville, Ky.

The program featured Islamic scholars from around the world, many of whom had been touring the country accompanied by State Department officials. Ali wasn’t part of the discussion, but sat in on the taping.

“He walked in the room,” Shaheen recalled, “and all these scholars from Asia and the Middle East — they surrounded him. He was embracing all of them. It was a beautiful thing to see.”

As the evening wound down, Ali offered Shaheen a chance to have their photo taken.

“He said, ‘Why don’t you knock me out, throw a punch?’” recalled Shaheen, now a distinguished visiting scholar at New York University. “I said no, you throw the punch. We just started laughing.”

In the end, the photo shows Shaheen throwing the punch — perfectly angled as though the professor had connected with Ali’s nose.

“He touched everyone, I think, that was blessed to know him,” Shaheen said.

Ali’s playfulness was on display for many, both public and private. Part of his treatment for Parkinson’s was to take an injection in the buttocks, which then required a certain amount of beating on the area to get the medicine to spread.

Once as a nurse was trying to spread the medicine, Ali looked back with a big smile. “Now you can say you’re the only one who’s ever beat Muhammad Ali’s ass,” he quipped.

In 1995, Ali came to the Lowcountry to serve as a character witness in a case involving Dr. Rajko Medenica, an immunologist whose controversial blood cleansing procedure was embraced by Ali and such world leaders as Leonid Brezhnev and Josep Tito.

“He’s got gigantic hands,” Davis recalled. “To shake his hand is like putting your hand in a catcher’s mitt. But the most remarkable thing about him was his sense of humor. ... He’d just kind of stare at you, and for a moment you couldn’t tell if he liked you or didn’t like you. Then he’d just start smiling.”

After the legal formalities, the two and Ali’s wife Lonnie sat another hour or so and talked about old fights. “He was very complimentary of the people he fought against,” Davis said. “He was really proud of the one they call the ‘Thrilla in Manila.’”

No Lowcountry retrospective, of course, would be complete without mention of Beaufort native Joe Frazier. It was their early 1970s trilogy — capped by the Thrilla in Manila — that defined a golden era of heavyweights, though the encounters took their toll both physically and emotionally.

Frazier, serious and straightforward, was the polar opposite of Ali — which made him the perfect foil for Ali’s bombast. Some of it, though, crossed the line when Ali called Frazier an “Uncle Tom” for their first fight in 1971, or a “gorilla” for the 1975 finale.

Frazier, who died in 2011, harbored bitterness for nearly a quarter-century, until a 2001 New York Times interview in which Ali took back his taunts.

“I said a lot of things in the heat of the moment that I shouldn’t have,” Ali said. “Called him names I shouldn’t have called him. I apologize for that.”

The words allowed Frazier to finally drop his guard. “I’ll accept it ... and hug him when I see him,” he said. “This has gone on too long.”

This story was originally published June 6, 2016 at 8:42 PM with the headline "Even in the Lowcountry, Muhammad Ali could make his presence known."