sport news IAN HERBERT: Ali came to Birmingham with a dream, so how has it been allowed to ... trends now
His cognitive decline was terribly evident but Muhammad Ali’s irresistible spirit was still intact when he arrived at the Handsworth district of Birmingham in August 1983.
They were difficult days for the place. Racial tension stalked the streets. Unemployment and social dislocation had provoked riots two years earlier and two years later there would be more. But for one indelible week that summer, the district bathed in Ali’s light, his humour and his magic tricks, which he needed little persuasion to perform.
He received no money for visiting. He was picked up from Heathrow in a Birmingham businessman’s Rolls Royce and serenaded by the TV-AM chef Rustie Lee, a television celebrity at that time, in her Handsworth restaurant. But he was there simply to make good on a promise to attend the opening ceremony for a community centre they had named after him.
The Muhammad Ali Centre was a place for the young people to direct their energies. There were karate classes, pool tables and music nights. Ali’s powers of speech were not the best when he stood on the stage to inaugurate the place. ‘I’m not just boasting by saying I’m the greatest,’ he told them. ‘We’re the greatest.’ He brought the house down.
Given sport’s pursuit of ways to capture its history and heritage you would imagine that the centre would now be a beacon on the landscape of a city which has just spent £218million of its own taxpayers’ money on a Commonwealth Games, which cost £778m to stage. It is anything but. The Muhammad Ali Centre is in a state of shocking dereliction: pool tables upended, the bar area smashed up, the stage Ali once stood on just about discernible amid the bird excrement. The twisted aluminium of what once served as roofing is lying amid this debris.
Muhammed Ali was mobbed by supporters in the streets of Birmingham in a visit back in 1983
The boxing legend had visited to attend an opening ceremony for a community centre named after him to help young people - which was located in the Birmingham district of Handsworth
The centre is in disrepair with Birmingham's link to one of the greatest sportsman left to rot
Two homeless young men had just spent the night under the partial cover the place offers when I visited last week. ‘People keep setting fire to the place,’ one of them said, gesturing to scorched chair legs which revealed others’ rudimentary attempts to keep warm here, regardless of the nauseating stench. The toilets were smashed up. Outside, rubbish overflowed from the plastic bags dumped by fly-tippers.
The district is clearly aware of Ali’s support in some of its most difficult years. A mural of him, in trunks and gloves, adorns a gable end redbrick wall in the neighbouring Lozells district - part of an interactive arts trail ‘to inspire locals.’ But the centre is drifting inexorably out of the collective memory.
It’s always been a struggle. In 2002, a fire brought its closure. For the past seven years, it has been in the ownership of a local organisation, Kajans Women’s Enterprise, which three years ago proposed demolition. That didn’t happen.
For community groups the dereliction of this place, which has stood on the site since the 1960s, is a source of distress. ‘It’s part of our legacy,’ says one. ‘Part and parcel of our community.’
Others sharing the sentiment include Gary Newbon, who as a sports reporter for the broadcaster ATV interviewed Ali when he made the 1983 trip. Newbon ventured into places where others journalists hadn’t gone, during that Birmingham studio interview, putting it to Ali that all those punches seemed to be taking a toll. ‘People are worrying about your health,’ Newbon told him.
There’s an unspeakable sadness about
