Awards ceremony for the 1983 3Kings Mile…Steps of the Customs House of the Christiansted National Historic Site…Christiansted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands USA…Wallace Williams (with Ali cap) …When I was made aware that Muhammad Ali was hospitalized today, I got a bad feeling… June 3, 2016 In Kentucky where I was born, our heroes include those at home who are often our own age. Cassius Clay is one of my heroes. I was first aware of Cassius Clay when I watched “Tomorrow’s Champions” boxing matches on a Louisville TV station. Eventually he was featured as the dude who started boxing because somebody stole his bike. Around that time I was an eight year-old Altar Boy at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Campbellsville, Kentucky, he was twelve and learning to box in places like Louisville’s Colombia Gym. We grew older, toward the crossing of our paths. I moved to Louisville in 1964 and lived in Fort Hill on the South side of the city. I honed my basketball skills on the playgrounds of the city. One of them was Victory Park near the west side. Some great basketball players came through that park. Victory Park was one of my playgrounds when I would visit the city growing up and years before I moved there, it was in Clay’s neighborhood. I do remember seeing this dude running around the park in the summer time in heavy clothes and combat boots. “That’s the dude who boxes…man him and his brother, crazy, running around in em combat boots”. His aunt’s chili was the best though! Cassius Clay got respect from all the guys when he started his serious boxing career winning AAU and the Golden Gloves competition and then the Gold Medal In the 1960 Rome Olympic Games. Basketball was king and still is in the state of Kentucky. Numerous other famous people have come out of there, but if you didn’t make it as a ball player, it was hard to truly be recognized. Not so for Clay. I graduated from high school in 1964, I was 18. Cassius won his first heavyweight championship in 1964. He beat Sonny Liston, he became Muhammad Ali. He put us on the map, he was the man. I had not met him personally at this point but the both of us had at least one thing in common. At the age of 18 we both became eligible for the military draft, had the same draft board, the same military induction center located on Broadway in Louisville (he refused his step forward in Houston). The fact is the two of those federal buildings probably still had water fountains/bathrooms labeled “Colored” “White” when it was time for us to be classified 1-A for the draft. In short, we could be drafted into war in foreign lands but we had to use a colored water fountain. After a year off before college and a year as a student/athlete at Louisville’s Bellarmine College I chose to join the U.S. Air Force (September 1966), it was that or get drafted. Cassius who changed his name to Muhammad Ali defied the draft and refused to enter the Army (March 1966). In 1967 I was an Aircraft Crew Chief/Jet Mechanic at Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, Texas. Ali was a conscientious objector and sentenced to five years in prison and fined thousands of dollars. They took his World Champion title. It took years of college education in the Liberal Arts and Political Science for me to truly understand and appreciate what he did when he refused to go to the Army. He embraced the Nation of Islam, at his age this was a heavy move. None of us wanted to be drafted for the Vietnam war. He did not allow it! I was a Vietnam Era Veteran with no desire to be in the war…Ali was a conscious objector who made incredible sacrifice to be out of the war…taking a strong position against the war, against injustice toward black people. Those 60’s were incredibly turbulent times for all of us…we experienced the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, of Malcom X, of Robert Kennedy, of Medgar Evers, and numbers in the summer civil rights riots in U.S. cities. In the anti-war protests including the Kent State killings of college students by the National Guard. The fact is, one of our home boys, Michael Smith, a student at Kent State is in the cover photo showing a student killed of Life Magazine which covers the tragedy. In 1970 I finished my military obligation and received an honorable discharge from the U.S. Air Force. Ali served like three years of suspension and became a notable anti-war and pro civil rights lecturer at American colleges and universities. The Supreme Court of the United States overturned the decision related to his conviction, he served no prison time. The dude with a basic high school education lectured at Harvard and was well received. Now he was supported by the U.S. Supreme Court. That summer our paths would cross again. I was now looking forward to finishing college again as a student/athlete. I lived in the Chicago suburb Maywood, Illinois and had a part-time job as a courtesy car driver for the Embassy Hotel near Ohare International Airport. One day I walked in the terminal where the drivers hung out by the baggage claim area…someone yelled out…”hey, the champ is upstairs!”…I hustled up the escalator, walked down the corridor and there he was, sitting with a young lady and no one else around. I walked up to him, told him I was from home, that I played ball at Victory Park and ate chili at his aunt’s place. He put up his fist and mocked a punch and said “you were one of the dudes who teased me when I ran in my combat boots”…I go “nah man I thought you were kool”. We chat for like 15-20 minutes. I was curious as to if and when he would box again. He did say one day he would fight Jimmy Ellis, another hometown dude who, I believe, actually beat Cassius in their amateur days when he and his brother Rudy (changed his name to Rahman Ali) were learning the trade. In our conversation I told him that I knew a guy named Fred Stonner who was my basketball coach in a 1964 summer league in the Smoketown gym in Louisville, that his main motivational talk to the team was about how he was the trainer for Cassius Clay and how hard Clay worked to become the best. I asked him if he knew Fred…he said he did, that…”Fred was in his corner for his first professional fight against Sonny Liston”…he said he was working on his book and was going to remember all those who helped him to greatness. It was a great day…I talked to the Champ about old times. A couple of days after we met at Ohare (August 1970), it was announced that Ali would box again and against Jerry Quarrie. Ali set up his training camp at Navy Pier on the Chicago lake front (in 1971 to train for his fight against home boy Jimmy Ellis). I biked down there one day to see him train. Navy Pier was undeveloped then, there were a number of connected quonset huts, one in which he trained. After the day’s session I went to a nearby basketball court and shot some baskets as he and his entourage was leaving the buildings. Ali saw me and yelled “there he is, one of the dudes from Victory Park who laughed at me”. He called for the ball and I hit him with a pass. “I could have been a great basketball player” he said…then he threw the ball like three-quarters of the length of the court to the opposite basket…nothing but net”…I couldn’t believe it. Redd Fox, the comedian, was beside himself as he also witnessed it (I recall reading this in one of his biographies, but it was attributed to another time and place…could it be that he did it twice?). Life brought me to the Virgin Islands in the mid-seventies as I continued my career as a librarian and an athlete and transitioning from basketball to marathon running. It was here where our paths would again cross. Aside from, when I was a youngster, taking day trip tunnel ride under the river from Detroit to Canada, the Virgin Islands was my first, so-to-speak, international travel. My hero, by now, was known around the world. He had won the Olympic Gold Medal in Rome, he fought in Canada, Europe, Africa, the Pacific and also the Caribbean (San Juan in February of 1976), he was a world renowned Muslim, an advocate for peace. I had a visitor in my office at the Florence Williams Public Library one day in the mid-eighties. He represented a group who was planning bring my hero, the “Champ”, Muhammad Ali for a visit to St. Croix. He was aware that Ali and I grew up in Kentucky. He pursued a general conversation. I never really knew what his actual goal was that day and frankly didn’t give the meeting much thought. A while later the Champ came to St.