Hasta La Gadget!

Create a tribute of your own, or see the comple tribute to Ali at OurPaths.com

By CLAY HASWELL

In the spring of 1975, when the snow in the frozen north began to melt and turn the streets of Anchorage to slush, I found myself thinking of warmer places and scheming to get myself to one of them as soon as possible.

I was working as a sports reporter at a hopeless (and now defunct) Anchorage newspaper at the time and it occurred to me that, if nothing else, this bizarre employment, which focused mainly on covering dog sled races and Eskimo games, might indeed provide a way out of the cold and into the sunlight.

The so-called “Thrilla in Manila” heavyweight fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier had been announced, and there was a possibility, albeit a slim one, that I could leverage my lofty post at the Anchorage Times to obtain a press pass to cover the fight in the Philippines.

It worked.

Rookie reporter’s press credential, 1975

And while this is not a memorial to the life of Ali, it is certainly a remembrance of youth, when all things were possible, all past was promise, and the Greatest of All Time was at his greatest.

I was a greenhorn reporter writing for a newspaper no one had ever heard of nor probably ever will. Other reporters would read the name of my employer, the Anchorage Times, on my press credential and would look, I may as well admit, askance.

Another caveat: this isn’t a memoir of what has been called the greatest fight of all time. I think Ali and Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning author, and many sportswriters over the past 40 years have pretty much put that to bed.

But that said, I still remember almost every moment of my several days standing on the periphery of greatness.

I remember one of Ali’s press conferences because of a chance encounter with Ali’s legendary trainer, Angelo Dundee. It was a blistering hot day and I was at the back of the room dripping with sweat, struggling to hear Ali taking questions from the mob of scribblers when a stomach growled like a lion on a mission beside me.

I turned.

Dundee.

Angelo Dundee and Muhammad Ali

“Sorry,” said Dundee. “Been like this for three days.”

I reached into my shirt pocket for a vial of pills I kept at the ready. “Try these,” I said, and shook out a pair of Lomotil tablets into his hand. “Works like a cork.” Dundee, who passed in in 2012, and I will forever share that bond.

The contrast between fighters could not have been more prominent. Frazier was serious and determined. Ali was in a world of his own creation, basking in the joy of being Muhammad Ali. Nothing could illustrate this more clearly than a reception held at Malacanang Palace by President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda, she of the many mukluks.

Several hundred reporters were taking full advantage of the free booze and canapes when the President, wife at his side, along with their children Imee, Aimee, Irene and Bongbong, took to the stage to mark the entrance of the combatants. Joe Frazier entered the room first.

Marcos asked for quiet. Frazier, the former heavyweight champion of the world, made his way to the stage amid a somewhat tepid reception. Marcos welcomed the champ to the Philippines, praised his accomplishments and wished him well.

And then came Ali. He wore an expression of feigned urgency and a traditional Philippine barong shirt, sheer linen over rippling muscles.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Ali, Imelda Marcos, Frazier

The ballroom fell silent. The man could suck the air out of an airplane hangar.

President Marcos then launched into an emotional and heartfelt paean to Ali which, as I recall, included phrases like “the greatest who ever lived” and “brings great honor to our country” and so forth as Ali waited silently.

When Marcos wrapped up his florid introduction, Ali looked over at his wife, Imelda. The audience waited. Ali looked Imelda up and down, and then spoke to Marcos:

“You ain’t such a chump yourself.”

I filed daily stories from Manila and sent them by Telex to Anchorage, where they were received by an editor named Mike Granberry, now an arts writer at the Dallas Morning News. Granberry distinguished himself in many ways at the Anchorage Times but never more eloquently than when he arrived one morning in his pajamas so as not to miss a deadline.

I never reported on Lomotil or any of the myriad bizarre occurrences. But I did, with Granberry’s encouragement, report on the atmosphere at the fight itself as it appeared from the second row ringside, in a corner where Ali went into a rope-a-dope tactic that, in close proximity, was terrifying.

He allowed Smokin’ Joe Frazier to pound him over and over as he leaned into the ropes in front of us, absorbing punches so powerful that a blow to the chest would cause his totally relaxed muscles to ripple all the way down his legs. At one point a blow to the head sent a spray of perspiration in our direction.

I was seated next to the reporter from Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. He was 18 and another novice at covering heavyweight fights. Two years earlier, I knew from news reports, my fellow reporter had been the victim of a highly publicized kidnapping, and at one point his assailants chopped off one of his ears and sent it to his father in order to get his father’s attention.

His name was John Paul Getty III, son of the oil tycoon widely considered one of the richest men in the world at the time.

Getty, referred to by some at the time as the Earless Heir, passed in 2011, no doubt an Ali partisan to the end. Joe Frazier, who became close to Ali late in life, died the same year. The stage seems a bit bare at this point. Toni Morrison is still alive, as is Imelda Marcos and her son Bongbong. Granberry is still slinging stories about Jackson Browne and Jimmy LaFave and the Texas music scene.

Ali & Frazier in later years

But now that Ali is gone, along with most of the entourage that converged on Manila, the world seems somehow different. Youth seems even more distant.

I wanted to write a story to remember how it felt to report on the Thrilla before the memory fades, not just about the big things but the little things too; I wanted to be 26 and writing about what soon became history. I wanted to dedicate it to Ali and to things past and gone forever. Sometimes writing is just blowing on the ashes in a fireplace, trying to stoke a flame, keeping memories alive with words.

OurPaths.com is a place to remember people and things we never want to forget.

Earlier on Huff/Post50:

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Some advice The Donald is sure to ignore…

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Honeyfund CEO Sara Marguilis knows a thing or two about planning those romantic weeks after you tie the knot to your significant other. In the video above, watch Marguilis explain how traveling together can be a “main factor in keeping a couple’s relationship happy.”

This video was produced by Katrina Norvell.

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All that glitters is not gold, especially when it comes to Donald Trump.

Charlie Sheen says the presumptive GOP nominee once gave him an impromptu wedding gift of what he said were platinum and diamond cufflinks.

But there was one problem. They weren’t actually the real deal. And when the Hollywood actor had them valued, he claims they turned out to be fake.

Sheen recounted the incident on “The Graham Norton Show,” which aired in the U.K. on Friday night. 

“I’m really not a fan,” Sheen said of Trump, who spoke to him at a dinner around five years ago. “He says ‘these are platinum diamond Harry Winston’ and he pulls off his cufflinks and he gives them to me.”

Six months later, a jeweler was appraising jewelry at his home and Sheen — who later described Trump as a “charlatan” — asked her to take a look at the ‘links.

“She took the loop, spent about four seconds, and kind of recoiled from it — much like people do from Trump — and says ‘in their finest moment, this is cheap pewter and bad zirconias,'” Sheen, who revealed in November that he’d been diagnosed as HIV Positive, added.

“And they’re stamped ‘Trump.’ And I just thought, ‘what does this really say about the man, that he said, ‘here’s a great wedding gift,’ and it’s just a bag of dogshit?” Trump has so far not commented on the claims.

Watch the full clip above.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

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Nicholas N Ngomi, African Population and Health Research Center

Genomic research has proven to be a considerably valuable tool in global attempts to tackle disease.

One crucial part of this research has been identifying diseases and health problems that are more likely to be influenced by genetic factors and assessing the risk of a particular disease in an individual.

Eventually scientists will be in a position to develop new ways to treat, cure or even prevent the thousands of diseases that afflict humankind. And it will also allow them to assess the risk that exposure to toxic agents poses to individuals.

But for the world’s poorest people, the diseases that affect them have remained understudied. This is mainly due to most of these studies focusing on the genetic risk factors for disease in European populations.

For example, recent studies from Sweden’s Uppsala University show men with blood cells that don’t carry the Y chromosome – a sex chromosome normally only present in male cells – are at greater risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. They also have an increased risk of death from other causes, including many cancers.

But will African men be affected in the same way? African populations have evolved significantly over time. Their genetic composition is more diverse than that of European and other populations so this may not be the case. Very little is known about the nature and extent of this diversity.

With the high burden of disease in sub-Saharan Africa, medical research needs a significant boost on the continent to identify genetic risk factors for diseases and to tackle the spread of drug resistance and emerging infections.

Genomic research has gained considerable momentum on the continent in the past decade. But challenges, such as a lack of high-quality clinical and epidemiological data across all countries, still hamper efforts.

A different genetic makeup

Genetic research taking place in Africa has focused on the genomic and environmental risk factors for cardiometabolic disease in Africans. Cardiometabolic diseases are those associated with the heart and include strokes, heart attacks and diabetes.

According to the statistics, non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease and chronic respiratory illness have all skyrocketed in sub-Saharan Africa in the past ten years.

Globally, more than 16 million people die from non-communicable diseases. Of these, 80% are in low- and middle-income countries.

Research teams are trying to understand the interplay between genetic factors, the changes in the way the gene expresses itself, or epigenetics, and environmental risk factors for obesity and related heart diseases. They are using existing longitudinal cohorts from four countries: Kenya, South Africa, Ghana and Burkina Faso. And they have six study sites across these countries, which have undergone different population changes as a result of their individual burdens of disease.

The goal of this initiative, the first of its kind in Africa, is to develop the capacity to carry out these kinds of studies in populations around the continent. This would help scientists better understand the genetic and genomic markers for disease.

One of the diseases that the study is attempting to understand is alcoholism.

Global studies have shown that the amount of alcohol one drinks and whether this progresses to alcoholism has a genetic influence. Separate findings show that processes that are related to factors in the gene, but that do not change the sequence of the DNA, also play a role. These are known as epigenetic processes.

And in European, North American and Asian populations, research has drawn a correlation between genetic variations for drugs and dependence.

Alcohol consumption and problems related to alcohol vary widely around the world but the burden of disease and death remains significant in most countries. It is the world’s third largest risk factor for disease and disability.

It is also one of the four risk factors that lead to people developing non-communicable diseases such as heart attacks and strokes. In middle-income countries, it is the greatest risk factor.

But very little is known about the risk of alcohol consumption in sub-Saharan African populations. This is despite statistics from the World Health Organisation listing 17 countries on the continent as heavy drinking countries. Nigeria takes the lead.

The high toll of alcohol and drug over-consumption among African populations means that this must become a priority. Understanding the genetic and genomic markers of diseases such as alcoholism would lead to research interrogating whether drug use and abuse are genetically linked.

And this could lead to an evidence-based approach to control drug use and abuse that fits the African context. It would help the continent improve its efforts to eliminate one of the four main risk factors for non-communicable disease.

Challenges and solutions

The amount of available genomic information has grown rapidly in the past decade, mainly due to the falling cost and increasing efficiency of DNA sequencing technologies.

But DNA sequencing is still relatively expensive for large-scale studies. Africa lags behind other continents with such studies. This is mainly due to:

• a shortage of African scientists with genomic research expertise;

• lack of biomedical research infrastructure;

• limited computational expertise and resources;

• lack of adequate support for biomedical research by African governments; and

• the participation of many African scientists in collaborative research at no more than the level of sample collection.

Although scientists on the continent are unable to match the scale of research produced on other continents, they are continuously attempting large-scale genome-sequencing studies focused on specific diseases.

The H3Africa project, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust, supports several studies involving collaborative centres on the continent.

In addition, ongoing genomic projects in Africa are both establishing infrastructure for genomic research and training local researchers, as well as generating genomic datasets.

Many of these projects have made capacity building one of their core missions. This will in the long run build a critical mass of highly skilled individuals in the field shaping the future of genomic studies in Africa.

Nicholas N Ngomi, Research officer, African Population and Health Research Center

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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