LAS VEGAS – We pull into a parking lot in a nice area about 20 minutes south of the Las Vegas Strip and walk into a brunch spot.
There, Muhammad Ali’s former business manager, Gene Kilroy, is asked by a range of staff members how he is, where he’d like to sit and what he would like to eat and drink.
“Good morning, Gene,” says one.
“Would you like a booth or table, Gene,” smiles another.
Then, when it comes to our order, “Is it the usual for you, Gene, or would you like something different?”
Kilroy is plleasant to everyone, starts conversations with fellow dog owners and is happy to discuss his unique career, his life today and, especially, his passion for dogs.
Kilroy is 84 years old. He has three boxer dogs but throughout his life has owned more than 30.
“There’s nothing worse than losing a dog,” Kilroy says as we examine the menu. “They’re like family. They are family. I knew a person once, they had dogs, the person died and at the funeral the dog went and sat at the gravesite before anyone else arrived. They knew where their dad was.”
Kilroy has several stories about such relationships, ones that go beyond blood and enter the spiritual realm between canines and humans.
The subject matter of dogs unites us, but importantly it shows another side of Kilroy.
By his own admission, Kilroy can be gruff and to the point. To say he doesn’t suffer fools gladly is an understatement. He doesn’t suffer fools. Period.
As Ali’s long-time advisor, Kilroy crossed swords with his fair share of them, often as a significant protector of his client. And as an inhabitant of Ali’s world and a resident in Ali’s inner-circle, the stories tumble freely from Kilroy as we sit and eat our eggs and slurp our coffee.
Much of our time in the diner is spent with me launching celebrity names at Kilroy and him firing back answers. You can tell in the opening seconds of his reply whether he was fond of those he met or not. Occasionally, the first words he utters are, “Don’t mention that name” and he explains how someone wronged Ali.
The volume of anecdotes is unrelenting, as I put to him Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Jim Brown, Frank Sinatra, and old opponents as I rack my brain to think back to famous photos of Ali over the years because, more often than not, Kilroy would have been there, on the scene, perhaps even pressing the button on the camera.
After breakfast, Kilroy and I return to his front room in his spacious Nevada home – surrounded by his three friendly boxers, who occasionally interrupt for a little affection – and Gene answers my more direct questions about his time with Ali.
There is a feature wall in the front room, lined with framed pictures of Kilroy with any number of the stars we have already discussed. Some of them are even signed, including one of Ali standing over a shell-shocked George Foreman, with Ali having signed: “To Gene, my boy. We did it. Thanks. Muhammad Ali. Dec 20 1971.”
Kilroy and I have done interviews before, and Gene again regales me with familiar tales and discusses how he and Ali first met.
“1960 Olympics,” Kilroy remembers, 64 years on. “I was playing sports in Munich, Germany in the services and I went there to the Olympics. And I met this kid Cassius Clay. Now we had a guy on the army boxing team, Allen Hudson. He was a killer. I mean, when he fought you, it was like you’d attacked his mom and his daughter. I mean, he would kill you. And on the Olympics, Cassius Clay whipped his butt and I said, ‘I gotta see this guy.’
“When I went to Rome, Eddie Crook and Skeeter McClure were on the boxing team, Don Bragg was the gold medal winner in the Olympics, pole vault.
“One day, walking in Rome, some beggar came up and asked him [Clay], ‘Do you have any money?’ And he reached in his pocket. He had $8, he gave the guy three. I said, ‘You don’t have any money. What?’ He said, ‘He tested me. God knows what I did was right.’”
But it was not just Ali’s playful and gregarious nature that Kilroy could see, he saw an athlete with the X-Factor, one who oozed star-power.
“If they had to pick a mayor out of the Olympic Village, it would have been him,” Kilroy adds. “He was around everybody. And his mom said, ‘I always wanted my son to make the world a better place than you found it.’ And that was that’s what he lived by.”
Ali was often the star who shone brightest.
“There was something about him, the way he walked,” Kilroy continues. “He had time for people. You know, he always had time for the poor, the powerless, depressed, and that was his weakness. Everybody wants to latch on to him with another bad deal. But he was an unbelievable guy.”
When Kilroy came out of the service, he went to work with the Philadelphia Eagles before making his life in boxing, with Ali. The young fighter with the world at his feet appreciated Kilroy’s business acumen. With Ali in exile having refused the draft, Kilroy got him on the college lecturing circuit, bringing in some much-needed income.
Then, when it came to training camps for Ali’s eventual return, Kilroy educated Ali about tax write-offs, and taught him of spending wisely rather than frittering his money away. Of course, Ali didn’t always listen, but between them they had friends in high places.
“And then Teddy Kennedy, he was so helpful to us,” Kilroy goes on. “He hooked me up with everything. If you recall, in the old days, Cassius Clay’s parents never went overseas, they didn’t have passports, so I got them passports. Then they started going overseas and everything.”
There are so many big names, so many big stories, all delivered by a big personality as we sit and talk. There’s time spent in hotel rooms with Frank Sinatra, flying Wilt Chamberlain out for a roast of Dean Martin, meeting world leaders – visiting Gerald Ford at the White House – and visiting Bobby Kennedy and Ethel at their Hickory Hill home. On the flipside, Ali knew gangsters and those from the other side of the tracks. Kilroy knew them all, too.
Kilroy was a camp insider and confidante. He intimately knew Ali, and was close to his parents. Kilroy would end up being a pallbearer for both of their funerals.
“I don’t care what anybody said, no one was closer to Muhammad Ali than Gene Kilroy,” Gene says proudly.
Ali was a complex character, and Kilroy says that was down to Ali having some of his mother’s attributes and some of his father’s. Kilroy has a story for every explanation, and it makes for riveting conversation.
“He had that impatient stuff like his dad,” Kilroy explains. “But I remember when we went to get an axe – Ali wanted to chop trees. And he got a double edge axe, but I said, ‘You could cut your leg off’.”
The then-Cassius Clay wanted the more dangerous option and did not react well to Gene’s guidance, muttering his disapproval before eventually going along with his aide. Disgruntled, that was Ali’s father talking. After the wood was chopped and the job had been done, Ali thanked Kilroy and praised his decision. That was his mom.
“Now, I’ll tell you something about his mom,” Kilroy continues. “My mother was living out here with me for 10 years and she passed away. I came home and I’m sitting on the bed, and everybody goes through this when they lose a parent or dear one. I look at the phone… [I] can’t call her no more. And the phone rang. And on the phone the voice said, ‘Hi Gene, this is Mama Bird.’ Ali’s mother. I say, ‘How are you Mama Bird?’
‘I’m doing good, Gene.’
“I said, ‘Mama Bird, my mom just died’ and she said, ‘You be you, Gene, [and] I’ll be your mom.’ That’s the type of person she was. She was a good person.”
Kilroy was not just accepted by Ali’s family, but by Elijah Muhammad, founder and leader of the Nation of Islam. That astounded football legend Jim Brown, who hovered on the peripherals of Ali’s group for years.
But over the years Kilroy became frustrated with Ali’s willingness to help others, often at his own expense.
“He was a good guy,” Gene adds. “Anyone came with a bad story. There he was.”
“How frustrating was that for you?”
“Oh, God.”
“The bad deals, the guys coming around with their rented Cadillacs, their knock off briefcases. A bad deal. You know, and everybody was bringing them.”
It was down to Kilroy to “slam them” and make sure they didn’t go too far.
But for someone who was around Ali so long, there is not a single period where he was happiest to be involved with The Greatest.
“Every day of my life,” Kilroy nods, thinking back. “I was with him when he was fighting, when he wasn’t fighting. If I had some time off, I would go with him to the college, lecturing. And I remember one time we were in Birmingham, Alabama. We went down, we rented a car and we headed to university. And all of a sudden two stones hit the window and we pull over. They were bullet holes.”
Ali wanted to tell the media, but Gene insisted they kept it quiet.
“I said, ‘No, no, no, no. We’ll tell the cops everywhere you go. Nobody bothers you. If you tell them someone took a shot at you and missed, you’re gonna get some crazy guy and he’s gonna say ‘I won’t miss. I’ll get him.’
“Ali listened and he respected me. Respect, respect, respect.”
Were Ali’s feelings hurt when a large portion of America turned their backs on him after he refused the Vietnam draft?
“No, here’s what he said, ‘They [the people] believed in their heart what was right, like I believed in my heart.’
“But then [Robert] McNamara, Secretary of Defence, said [later] that the war was unjust and an unholy war, just like he [Ali] believed. Ali said, ‘But I’m not going to go over to fight against people who never call me the N-word.’”
Did Ali feel vindicated in the end?
“Yeah, he said he believed. How many guys would have a belief and not do that?”
The depth and breadth of Kilroy’s time with Ali reveals itself in his answers. He wasn’t just a bystander, he was in the car with Ali, in the hotel rooms with Ali, by his side, throughout.
He was in Zaire, and Kilroy could write a book about his time in Africa with Ali, in 1974 for the Rumble in the Jungle. He was in Ali’s hotel after the fight as they heard the monsoon crashing away outside following one of the great nights of sport.
Talking about that causes us to segue into tales of Cus D’Amato, the legendary trainer whose counsel Ali sought ahead of the George Foreman fight.
D’Amato told Ali to go out and get the big man’s respect early, and Ali flew out of the blocks and socked Foreman with an overhand right.
Ali had great reverence for D’Amato.
“Cus D’Amato told Ali how to fight him [Foreman]. Fear’s like fire, it can cook your food or could burn your house, you gotta control it,” Kilroy continues. “Cus told him, ‘Your first punch has to be with devastating tenacity.’ And if you watch the fight, you’ll see George Foreman coming up, and then Ali hit him. Boom. Then Ali called him names and everything. ‘Uncle Tom… you ain’t shit…’ No one talked to George like that and then Ali said to me, ‘If we lose this fight, that aeroplane ride is going to be long way home.’”
Kilroy also denied that D’Amato had been in the frame to work with Ali (“Ali really adored him. And he had so much respect for Cus. ‘Get Cus on the phone… get Cus on the phone’”) although fondly recalled Ali auditioning with future opponent Archie Moore and his trainer Dick Sadler. Moore told Ali to go and clean the camp toilets.
Ali told them he was there to learn how to fight and he wouldn’t clean no toilets.
“And Archie Moore said, ‘Get ready, tonight. Rest up. I’m going to teach you humility tomorrow morning. We’re going to spar.’
“And Cassius Clay got in the ring and whupped him. Moved all over. So then he [Ali] went back to Louisville, Kentucky and then he met Angelo Dundee, with Alonzo Johnson and Willie Pastrano when they fought in Louisville. But Angelo said, ‘I’m not going there. You gotta come down to Miami.’ Ali went down there and that’s how Angelo came aboard.”
Of course, the story being told here is of Kilroy and Ali, and not only Kilroy’s take of the Ali story.
“In my heart, I wasn’t a star. Ali was a star. I was on his coattails,” Kilroy smiles.
“You know, he paid the price. He paid the cost to be the boss. People don’t realise how he worked. How he would get up in the morning. I’d wake him to do the road work. We’ll do three miles. Then he come back with [trainer] Luis Sarria. Me and him and Sarria. Then he’d take a shower, do his exercises, take another shower. Then he’d go have breakfast. And then we’d go watch the movies of the guys who were fighting. I had all the movies for him. I remember one time I’m watching Foreman fight Frazier, and George knocks Frazier down, and he knocks him down again. And then Foreman goes into neutral corner.
“Ali says, ‘Run that back. No, no, right after the knockdown’ and Foreman leaned on the ropes to get back at the neutral corner. ‘Foreman has got no stamina. I gotta wait ‘til he hears round seven, round eight…’
“And then, when he [Ali] knocked Foreman out [in Africa], Foreman started spinning going down. I said, ‘Ali, you could have hit him [again].’ He said, ‘He’d had enough.’”
Of course, Zaire would have been a glorious swansong but there were many more years and fights afterward. Some of the team stayed, some of the team left. Kilroy saw it all.
“I begged Ali to retire right after Zaire, Africa. Retire,” Gene snaps. “Then came Joe Bugner. $3 million. He [Ali] said, ‘I might not even hire Joe Bugner as a sparring partner. $3 million.’
“I told all the fighters that they beat everything but the heavy bag and Father Time. By the time they realize what boxing is all about, it’s time to get out of it. I begged them in Zaire, Africa, right after that, ‘Don’t fight anymore.’
“Elijah Muhammad didn’t want him to fight anymore. They had a big falling out over that.”
They felt Ali had nothing left to prove. Asked who was right or wrong, those who left the camp or those who stayed, Kilroy simply replies: “I can’t speak for them. I spoke for Gene Kilroy.”
Kilroy also considers how much the damage Ali sustained in the final portion of his career contributed to his ill-health in retirement. Along the way, Kilroy had heard of the struggles through the final fights, with camp members reporting Ali could not even complete his roadwork.
“Well look, I asked myself that many times,” Kilroy says. “There’s people who had Parkinson’s Syndrome that never put on a glove or wore a jock. The pope had it. Michael J. Fox has it. They never wore a jock, they don’t know what causes it.”
Of course, plenty called for Ali to retire a year later, after he travelled to Manilla to defeat Joe Frazier in their epic third fight. The bitter rivals battled in extreme heat until, at the brink of exhaustion, and with Frazier wilting, the Philadelphian was withdrawn by trainer Eddie Futch before the start of the 15th and final round.
“They were friends. In the end. They were good friends,” Kilroy says of the relationship Ali and Frazier shared over the years, which ended up with Kilroy once telling Frazier that Ali had gone too far with the pre-fight histrionics ahead of their bouts. “I took Ali to Frazier’s funeral. We went together.
“They did make amends. I sat down with Joe once and he said, ‘Wait a minute. How would you like to go to your kids go to school, and they’re calling your daddy a gorilla?’ I said, ‘He [Ali] took it too far.’ And then Ali apologised to Joe. ‘Joe. I was just selling tickets.’”
And Joe accepted that?
“Yeah.”
Gene and I have been talking for more than an hour. His boxer dogs have regularly visited us and while the conversation has been varied, Kilroy admits he struggled when Ali died in June 2016.
“I lost part of my body,” Kilroy sadly admits. “I went to the funeral in Louisville and in the airport on the way back a sports writer was talking to me and I said, ‘I feel sad. This is the first time I left Louisville, Kentucky without Ali.’ But we had a lot of beautiful memories and good times.
“I did a documentary one time and I said, ‘The only fear I have is I’m afraid my mom’s gonna wake me up and say, ‘Come on, Gene. It’s time to go to school.’
“My life has been a dream.”
Now Ali and Frazier are both gone. So, too, almost all of the celebrities and fighters we have conversed over.
“Oh, listen,” Gene sighs wistfully. “Life goes on. You know, Ali never wanted to die. And he would always be dreaming.
“He would always say, ‘When I go before God, if there are more pluses then minuses, I’m gonna be okay.’
“Well, hopefully.
“But he truly was a man of greatness and he had a beautiful heart. Let me tell you, there’s an old Chinese proverb saying, ‘We’re never dead as long as we’re remembered.’”
Read the full article here
