Ali played career counselor during 2002 visit
Published 3:28 am Thursday, January 25, 2007
By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Muhammad Ali, career counselor.
Central Middle School's career awareness day with U.S. Rep. Fred Upton and other speakers was actually the following day, but when you can get a speaker who made $58 million boxing, you accommodate him.
"It's important to do good deeds because the angels are recording your good deeds and your bad deeds," Ali told students.
"On Judgment Day, whether you go to heaven or hell depends on what good deeds you did today, so he's working real hard to do good deeds because he's had a torrid past," added his personal assistant, Kim Vidt, with a laugh.
For two hours March 27, 2002 Ali, 60, of Berrien Springs, treated four groups of seventh and eighth graders to the most captivating of his many appearances in Dowagiac, including the opening of the Boxing Club in 1999.
He spoke at length, including his vintage "I'm the Greatest," but these days Ali uses his stature as a global personality to champion education.
Not only did they hear the voice he displays sparingly in public, but he pounded out some boogie on the piano by the stage and when told he sings like Nat King Cole, he lit up and crooned a few bars to prove it.
He might just as well have been in Afghanistan, but that journey as a United Nations goodwill ambassador and American Muslim has been postponed.
He lit the Olympic flame in Atlanta in 1996 and he's been to Ground Zero, but he did not attend the Oscars because he just got home from three weeks on the road.
He's home less than 90 days a year, dispelling the image of a "retired guy, sitting around doing nothing," said Vidt, daughter of former Dowagiac superintendent of schools Lionel Stacey.
His friend Larry Seurynck, now on the Dowagiac school board, said, "He's got 90 days a year to be home and rest and he chose to come to see you folks. That's how much he values education."
Ali saved his only scowl for Football Coach Bernard Thomas, who suggested at one time he believed he could get in the ring and "whup" him.
Ali rose from the easy chair provided by Imperial Furniture, ready to spar. He delighted in asking students if they were easily-fooled "dummies" as he performed a magic trick with a Chieftain-orange handkerchief.