Muhammad Ali Skates on the Cusp of Farce

The story of Ali's adventure in Dublin’s Croke Park.

In the summer of 1972, Muhammed Ali, fought in the unlikely venue of Croke Park in Dublin, the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association. His opponent was an ex-con called Al ‘Blue’ Lewis and the fight was co-promoted by a restless impresario and strongman, “Butty” Sugrue. This is their story…  

Welcome to the Luke Alfred Show.

I have 30 years of experience on the front lines of sports journalism, covering some of the biggest games in cricket, rugby, the FIFA World Cup, and even the Olympic games.

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I’m Luke Alfred and welcome to the show.

ON THE 19^th OF JULY 1972 Muhammad Ali fought Al “Blue” Lewis on a crisp summer night at Dublin’s Croke Park. The fight was sandwiched between bigger things, a brief stop on the way to a terminus marked “world title.” 

At Madison Square Garden the previous March Ali had been knocked down by Joe Frazier in the fifteenth round of the so-called “Fight of the Century”. Two months after the Lewis fight, in September 1972, Ali fought Floyd Patterson for the second time, again at the Garden. 

Make no mistake, Lewis was no Frazier. He was not even a Patterson, aged 37 at the time of the second Ali fight, but he was – how shall we put it? – just plausible enough as an  opponent for Ali to feel that in beating him he would lunge closer to the title. 

One of 15 children who grew up in the Detroit projects, Lewis was an ex-con whose sentence got commuted because he saved a warder’s life during a prison riot. In prison he learned to box and grew bigger. He became strong of body and mind. As we shall see, by the time of the Ali fight at Croke Park, he had also become touchingly generous, although for many years the Ali fight in Dublin left him feeling unworthy. 

When Ali fought Lewis, a former sparring partner of his in Miami, he was no longer world champion, that honour falling to Frazier. Ali was working his way back into contention like the intelligent boxer he was, circling a title shot by jabbing and dancing. And so into Dublin he and his entourage went, the Dublin of St Stephens Green and James Joyce and the opening lines of Ulysses where, “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead...”

Dublin didn’t see much heavyweight action in 1972. As a matter of fact, it saw precious little sporting action of any shape, colour or form. The Bogside Massacre happened across the border in Derry, Northern Ireland, in late January 1972, when a British paratrooper regiment opened fire on a group of peaceful demonstrators, killing 13, and no-one wanted to go to Ireland, north or south. 

Although Derry is approximately 250 kilometres from Dublin and in a different country, teams and individuals were chary of playing or fighting in the republic. Ali was an exception. Quite why he went to Ireland, no one knows, but we can hazard some educated guesses.

He fought Lewis partly because he wanted to make a point to Frazier, who was notably reluctant to defend his title against threatening challengers like, say, Jerry Quarry. He went to Dublin partly because there was an Irish connection and, therefore, there were sentimental ties. 

Ali’s mother, Odessa, had a grandfather called Abe Grady. Grady, a white man who emigrated to the southern states from County Clare in Ireland, married a local black woman. Ali was aware of his mixed ancestry and although it might have made him uncomfortable, he didn’t seek to deny it.

There were other reasons for fighting in Dublin, and fighting at Croke Park. Ali had captured the imagination of one Michael “Butty” Sugrue, the Lewis fight’s co-promoter with the American Harold Conrad, although, in the interests of depth and accuracy, I should also say that there was a small way in which Sugrue captured the imagination of the man once known as Cassius Clay. 

Like Ali, Sugrue – sometimes pronounced “Shook-roo” – talked not simply a good game but an exceptionally vivid and inspirational one. Sugrue knew that Ireland’s home fixtures in the 1972 edition of the Five Nations Championship, for example, never took place – the tournament was effectively abandoned as a result of the Bogside Massacre – and could be mightily persuasive about livening up the city’s sporting life. 

So, how about it, Muhammad? As the bout’s co-promoter, Sugrue would take the financial risk. He’d erect the ring and sell the tickets. He’d put up Ali and his entourage up at the swanky Ormond Hotel on the Dublin quays. Leave it up to him.

It might have helped the “Blue” Lewis bout that “Butty” was a man who appreciated physical culture. As a whippersnapper “Butty” not only boxed at the Killorglin Boxing Club, the town in which he grew up, he appeared in “Duffy’s Circus”, where he was dubbed Ireland’s strongest man. 

Short and squat, like a tin of condensed milk, with a massive chest and large arms, Sugrue used to challenge members of the circus audience to do better than him by lifting barbells and weights. 

Sugrue had prodigious strength. He would lift chairs (sometimes with attractive woman perched daintily upon them) clean off the floor by clamping their back rungs with his teeth. He would chain himself to motorbikes and prevent them from speeding off by muscle power alone.

Period photographs show him wrestling a billy-goat. The goat is no Joe Frazier, sure, but when goats get the goat they have the eye, although it is also true to say that it is the eye which gives goats their goat. Either way, that eye is invariably wicked. You don’t want to go eye-to-eye with a goat.

There were other parallels between Ali and Sugrue. Both had well-developed instincts for self-promotion. Amidst much malarkey, Sugrue once wrestled a single abysmal round with Jack Doyle, the former boxer, B-grade actor and tenor known as the “Gorgeous Gael”, an Irish institution. He even tried to bring an Irish goat from Kerry to one of his pubs in Kilburn, north-west London, for a local version of a Puck Fair. History tells that bringing the goat to London was not successful.

Ali, meanwhile, found his Irish adventure liberating. Despite having a cold prior to the Lewis fight – wags in the press chirped about the “Ali snuffle” – Ali felt liberated in Dublin. He went on Irish television, admitting he could say things he would get into trouble for saying back home where he was obliged to play the pantomime villain. When asked what chance Lewis had against him, Ali unfurled a deft verbal combination. “Two chances,” he said, “slim and none.”

For several days after Ali and his entourage stepped off the Aer Lingus 747 at Dublin airport, everything went according to plan. Ali skipped rope in the gym. He pressed flesh on walking tours through the Dublin streets. On the morning of the fight he ran a few energy-preserving laps on a local golf course. 

Even Lewis, so neglected by the media and fans that he may as well have been the invisible man, was well-treated by Sugrue and his fellow-promoter. He said as much. “Everybody looked at me very strange in Dublin,” he told the Irish Times’ Dave Hannigan in his antiquated English many years later. “But they treated me very well. Very well. Whatever I asked for it was given to me. I was real important that week.”

But as fight night approached, things began to go wrong. Sugrue realised there were no gloves for the fight. Somehow not considering that boxing gloves could be bought in Dublin, they frantically sent a communique to London to get gloves on board the next Dublin-bound flight. The video of the fight shows the Croke Park entrances marked “A” and “B”, hand-drawn with black marker on white cardboard. Stewards were in noticeably short supply.

Many of the Croke Park seats were on the grass, without overhead cover, so it was just as well it didn’t rain on the night of the fight. Punters milled in, some in bright clobber, an all-male affair.

The Garda, the Irish police, in their distinctive black caps and black ties, were present but unobtrusive, often standing in the back row, some with arms folded. Clouds of cigarette smoke wafted over the crowd. 

A recorded version of Stars ‘n Stripes was played and a folk band, all four of them in different colour shirts, played the “Soldier’s Song”, the Republic’s anthem in the ring itself. Off in the far distance, at the very top of the frame, on the terraces fans heaved themselves over fences. Once in the stadium, some of them ran.

It emerged after the fight that ticket sales by Sugrue and his boys must have been haphazard. Tickets sold never remotely squared with the size of the crowd, which was far bigger than the takings suggested it should be. Most likely the Ali versus Lewis fight was paid for by the previous night’s takings in Sugrue’s several London pubs, the Puck Fair, the Lord Nelson and the Wellington. 

The dictionary of Irish biography puts matters in perspective: “While Ali’s visit to Ireland captured the public imagination, the fight did not, and the official attendance of 18 725 included at least 7000 who got in free. The fact that there was no profit from the fight meant that the nominated charity, loosely defined as ‘the mentally handicapped children of Ireland’, received nothing.”

The bell at the end of the first two rounds was so quiet that only those in the ring seemed to hear it. The prescribed one-minute break between rounds also seemed a trifle long, certainly in the early rounds. By the end of the second round the stream of punters climbing the fence at the top of the frame had slowed to a trickle. 

At the beginning of the third round Ali’s feet started to move. He was noticeably breezier, more confident. Quick hands, quick mind, quick feet. Ali’s grace paradoxically served to highlight the ponderous Lewis. When Ali skimmed across the ring in his white boots, dancing like an angel, Lewis moved like an Old Testament long beard, shuffling through the desert with his raised tablets of stone.

Ali rocked Lewis in the fourth round and knocked him to his back at the end of the fifth. In the sixth round Lewis took terrible punishment. Ali snaked out jabs and rocked Lewis with combinations, looking for the big right hand that would seal Lewis’ fate. At one point the fight commentator talked of Lewis’ knees buckling and, briefly, they seemed to collapse like those of a new-born foal. 

Although the action slowed down appreciably in round seven, it seemed inconceivable as the rounds progressed that Lewis’ legs were holding him up. How did they do it? There seemed so little strength left in them. Watch the soles and balls of his feet – they barely seemed to leave the floor – sliding across it rather than lifting up off it.

Again, Ali turned it on in nine and, in ten, Lewis’ poor legs now jelly-like, the television commentator came up with this. “You feel as though there’s a gate in those ropes,” he says. “And Lewis might open them and get out.”

Poor Lewis and his legs were finally saved by the referee, Lew Eskin, who came before Lewis and his opponent, waving Ali away early in the eleventh. Seconds, well-wishers and those simply wanting to grab a slice of the action poured into the ring. Soon it was full.

What happened next was almost as good as the fight itself. Lewis walked across the ring, using every ounce of his remaining strength to do so, and embraced Ali. A disembodied hand – not Ali’s, mind you, because his hands were still in their gloves – ghosted out of the throng surrounding Ali and touched Lewis’ cheek briefly with its palm, an act of purest delicacy. 

It was there for only a fraction of a second, quickly being obscured by figures who walked in front of the camera. Lewis lifted Ali up, not quite onto his shoulders, with a kind of clumsy camaraderie. Ali looked exhausted. At no point did he reciprocate Lewis’ warmth and humanity.

Lewis will say later that he was embarrassed by his performance at what locals called “Croker.” Others say he shouldn’t be but what they say doesn’t reach him. 

“People would say to me, ‘you did well’. But to me, I didn’t.”

Attention to detail was clearly not part of Sugrue’s broader attention to detail. The fight takings, which never squared with the gate anyway, were, well, taken, the robbers – widely reputed to be the Irish Republican Army (IRA) – making off with thousands of pounds. All said, it was a strange episode, part media spectacle, part a boxing match between two noble giants, part rip-roaring farce that might just have starred David Niven.

The Ali versus Lewis escapade at Croke Park was all in a day’s work for Butty. He simply loved the limelight, loved the stunts, loved the crackle and pop of publicity. It made him feel alive. 

In 1968 he persuaded an Irish labourer called Mick – or Mike – Meaney to attempt to break a world record in a relatively uncontested field – that of being buried alive. 

As it happened, the 1960s were good times on the being buried alive front, as many chased the world record, which was lengthening. Not quite a craze, enough people around the world were interested in doing it to suggest that “buried alivers” were keeping a watchful eye on what their competition was getting into. Mainly they were getting into coffins. And getting into the ground. Sometimes they were even getting into trouble, but that, as they say, is another story, and one beyond the ambit of this week’s podcast.

Once Mick, labourer and former boxer was snared, Butty insisted that he needed to practise, so Butty put weights on the lid of Mick’s coffin, making it impossible for him to get out. Training in this case didn’t involve breaking sweat or skipping rope or even raising the heart-rate. Just the opposite. Training involved not really training in any accepted use of the term. 

Training involved lying down in the coffin and closing one’s eyes, waiting patiently for Butty to get bored and the desperate to lose interest. If he was lucky, Mick could grab a quick 40 winks in the peace and quiet of semi-oblivion, giving new meaning to the phrase “falling asleep on the job”.

Eventually it was decided that Mick’s training regime had paid dividends. He was ready to be lowered into the ground, to – as it were – feed the bottom. Amidst much fun fare and smiling for the cameras at the Admiral Lord Nelson, one of Butty’s pubs, Meaney tucked into was predictably described as “the last supper.” 

Dressed in a pair of blue pyjamas, Meaney was lifted into the coffin by Butty. The coffin lid was screwed shut and passed through a chain of hands out of one of the pub’s first floor windows and onto a truck belonging to Mick Keane, who owned a truck depot down the road. To a patch of vacant land the truck belonging to Keane drove. 

With due ceremony Meaney’s coffin was lowered into the ground and covered with earth. A lean-to was erected over it above ground and two four inch pipes protruded out of the coffin up into fresh air. One of them was used to lower down food and drink. Meaney had been buried alive.

Meaney was not alone. Over in Texas, a country singer named Bill White was also attempting to break the record for being buried alive for the longest time. Early on the two spoke to each other through the intermediary of a BBC radio journalist but the exchange became heated. Insults were traded. It was a race to the bottom. 

The last laugh was White’s. Hearing that White had thrown in the towel, Meaney was released from his underground slumbers. No sooner had this happened than it transpired that Meaney and Sugrue had been tricked – White was still underground. 

Not to be deterred, everyone retired to the pub. Meaney was thirsty. Butty was thirsty for publicity. The punters were thirsty, too, keen to touch a man who had been buried alive for 61 days. Thoughtfully, Butty hired the actress Diana Dors to give Meaney a welcome kiss and hug. Although Butty paid her £1000, she refused. He smelled like death.

After the Croke Park fight Lewis returned to Detroit with seven bottles of Guinness in his luggage, and $35 000 in cash stitched into a secret pouch in his shirt. It was his biggest payday, unmatched by any of his five later fights. With the money he bought his mother a house and furniture to put in it. His feelings of unworthiness would soften with time. 

“Now I look at it and can relate to it better. I lost but I didn’t look like no punk in losing. I can now understand where I came from and how I got to be in a ring with Ali. I appreciate that journey,” he told Hannigan, the Irish Times journalist who wrote a book about the fight.

Ali continued to pursue a re-match with Frazier. This finally took place at the beginning of 1974 in the Garden. This time round Ali won a unanimous decision on points. As he had been when he beat Sonny Liston in Miami in 1964, he was champion of the world once again. The 1970s would be good to him – and he would be good to the 1970s, becoming, without doubt, the greatest boxer the world has ever seen.