Muhammad Ali’s penis looked thick. His balls seemed large. And it seemed very much like he wanted his interviewer to know.

Which is probably why The Greatest came out of his room to meet the journalist almost naked. 

"I could not believe what I was seeing," he recalls.

The journalist - now five decades older, white of hair, slightly bald and missing a few teeth - stares, briefly, into the abyss, picturing that scene from the old Ambassador Hotel - "you people now call it Mövenpick" - in Accra. 

But we are recounting the interview on Saturday, the morning of the worldwide announcement that the effervescent boxer had died at 74. 

The three-time world heavyweight champion, who had Parkinson's disease for 32 years, died from "septic shock due to unspecified natural causes", according to his family.

At the time the journalist, Joachim "Joe" Lartey, met the then 22-year old Ali, the boxer was getting into the prime of his life.

Ali came to Ghana that year in the month of May, three months after whipping Sonny Liston to claim the heavyweight title. His fame reverberated across the world after this victory, for bookies had all but written him off against his older, 32-year old opposition.

I asked Lartey, later, if at any time during the interview, he had seen the pseudo-naked great man's, uhm, privates in full? That elicited a hearty guffaw from the elderly man.

"What a question. What a question!"

He never answered.

***

"He was a man who talked big, he talked really big and he acted really big. That was Muhammad Ali," Lartey tells me in the Joy FM studios.

And that is how everyone knew Ali to be. 

Former boxer Joe Bugner fought Ali twice and described him as "unique", adding that he was not just "a great, great boxer" but also a very intelligent person. "Nobody could outwit him as far as the words were concerned."

Lartey, who was 37 at the time of that seminal interview, echoes that observation throughout our conversation. He recalls the boxer being disarming, and calmed down at the beginning of their meeting.

Ali knew what effect he could have on people, and he wanted his guest to feel at home.

“When I got into Muhammad Ali’s suite, the first thing he did was to put me at ease. And I couldn’t believe it MuhammAd Ali emerged from his room 99.5% in the nude. He had no clothes on! But he had a little bit of clothes to cover the vital triangle. But for all other matters he was in the nude. And that set me thinking: what kind of man is this?"

It's a question many, many people have grappled with throughout the Louisville Lip's extraordinary life. For years a boxing champion who terrorised and illuminated in equal measure, Ali spent another lifetime fighting another kind of battle - disease. However, from all accounts, his personality and pride could never be dimmed.

Joe Lartey describes another asset of the fighter he could not help noticing after the initial shock of his nude display.

"It was then that his handsomeness came clearly to my view.  Veeery handsome."

The whole time I interviewed Lartey, I would occasionally stop watching his mouth and monitor his eyes. His octogenatian eyes were covered with medicated spectacles, but the fire in them as he described Ali was unmistakable. 

This electric effect, this ability to revive emotions years and years (in Lartey's case, 52 whole years) after meeting the boxer, is similar to what another award-winning novelist, Tony Parsons, describes.

"To breathe the same air as Ali was to live in a heightened state of reality that you knew you would remember for the rest of your life. Just being around him made you glad to be alive," he wrote in GQ magazine. Many others described this out-of-body experience.

***

"I cannot describe what effect he had on me. But I was completely overawed," Lartey goes on.

"And then he was carrying a bowl of thick ice cream. And he was downing the ice cream minute after minute as he talked.
He was just talking and talking. And I found that my questions were not hurting, not biting enough. And from time to time he would punctuate his statements with some pieces of his poetry. He was a man who talked big, he talked really big and he acted really big. That was Muhammad Ali."

It's important to establish the context in which Lartey met the former Cassius Clay.

Ghana was a young babe still basking in the glow of independence. In the eyes of the world - except if you were the CIA or MI6 - Kwame Nkrumah and the erstwhile Gold Coast could do no wrong.

Celebrities in politics, sport, entertainment and education wanted a slice of the new African darling. And Ali, in his equally recent and fiery evangelism of Islam, to which he had recently converted, sought to learn about the wider world as much as possible. 

News did not travel as fast as it does today - "We did not have the...what do you call it? The internet. We got magazines from outside the country a while after they went on sale, sometimes months" - so both Lartey and Ali saw every chance of meeting new people as grounds to establish if stereotypes were founded.

"We got a lot of our accurate news through the BBC, those of us who loved sports used to listen to the Sports Round Up. And there was also the Ghana News Agency who would take some time to bring the news as well..."

It may explain why despite being such a huge celebrity, Ali was so interested in the life of the ordinary middle-aged journalist from a sub-Saharan state broadcaster seated across from him.

Here's Joe again, "In those days we were using celluloid for recordings. And I was carrying 15 minute duration of tapes - I had about four. I think at the end of it, I needed more tapes and he was still willing to talk! He was so friendly and I culdn ot believe I was talking to Muhammad Ali the greatest. He asked me about my job, job security, why I chose journalism...it was interesting."

Lartey found himself entranced and spellbound, at the same time his tongue seemed loosened, as if by ouija board.

*** 

The above photo was taken on Saturday.

Now 89 years (today, Monday June 6, is his birthday), Lartey identifies this interview as an important point in his career.

The journalist entered the profession quite late, having been a teacher and a navy man for many years. In fact, Joe Lartey had only started work at GBC on January 1, 1961 as a senior programmes assistant on a six-month probation.

It's not difficult to see why he was so giddy at getting such a high-profile interview just three years into his third profession.

"I had just recently started journalism, so this interview was one which really made me feel that I had a future in it. While we spoke, Ali encouraged me; and because I was an older man, I found myself also giving him a piece of advise or two!"

Along with a fearsome reputation as a fighter, Ali spoke out against racism, war and religious intolerance, while projecting an unshakeable confidence that became a model for African-Americans at the height of the civil rights era and beyond.

But in this interview with the Ghanaian journalist, Ali "[had] told me he'd rather stay off politics. I think he was advised not to, and I think that was a smart thing to do", Lartey notes.

Still, a nagging question had to be settled: why did the boxer stayed for the entire duration of the interview almost stark naked?

"I think it had something to do with the heat, you know? It was May, and probably the heat was not what he was used to. I say this because of how he was still downing the ice cream, bowl by bowl, throughout the interview – sometimes he went to the right sometimes he walked to the left. And then he sat for awhile, talked again, described some of his fights." 

But all in all, Lartey's impressions of the Greatest tally with what several accounts from those have met him recount: charismatic, physically imposing, handsome and almost beautiful, and intelligent. 

All these are qualities that would surely have endured Ali to the ladies. Of course, they did.

Joe Lartey fondly remembers how, finally, Muhammad dropped some nuggets that revealed that he was, after all, human.

"Ali was so handsome that he could not have been anything else [than a ladies man]. And you see, he was a celebrity. Celebrities, one of the occupational hazards they go through, is with the women, you know... And I don't think I was able to escape that much!" he laughs.

"It is part of the game. It is part of the game, I confess," the ex-commentator says with a glint in the eye.

There was one other thing - the boxer's ability to make the biggest of celebrities feel star-struck. Lartey felt same, too. "At the end of the interview, he made me feel small. Ali's personality made me feel inconsequential. He was...something else".

Lartey's reaction to the news of the great man's death?

"I could not believe it. I had always, thought, naively, that Muhammad Ali should  not have died. He should not die. But man is mortal. And i now admit that Muhammad Ali was die-able. He is one of the characters in life who is a phenomenon. He is the kind of person who comes into incarnation once in a while."

"But the words that I uttered somewhere, I would like to repeat here: there goes Ali, when comes another? With apologies to Shakespeare", the veteran says with a knowing smile. 

Indeed, Ali was something else.

But, just as Ali was something else to Lartey, I also finished the interview with the veteran, took him home to the west of Accra, picked up my phone, and said to my girlfriend: "Joe Lartey is something else".

And he is.

Over to you.

 

**

Gary Al-Smith is assisting Joy Sports editor. His initial piece on Ali's two-week, 1964 visit to Ghana can be seen in full, here.

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