Book extract: ‘I am just an athlete, sitting here talking to a great man like you’

At one point in his conversation with Muhammad Ali, the Taoiseach, Mr Jack Lynch, turned to his visitor and told him: “I hope to go to your fight on Wednesday next.”

“Since you’re a busy man, I guess I’ll get it over quickly,” said Ali.

“Oh, don’t do that. It would spoil it,” replied the Taoiseach.

“Well, in that case, I’ll let Lewis stay in the ring for more than one round.”

“I might get in there myself for a few rounds and keep the thing going,” countered the Taoiseach.

This wasn’t just another Wednesday in the life of the nineteenth Dáil. 

The second-last sitting before breaking for summer recess the following evening, 12 July, 1972 was an especially busy day, the variety of items down for discussion in parliament reflecting the concerns of contemporary Irish society. 

Apart from parochial interests like a request for information about the proposed site of the Kerry County Hospital or the future fate of St Francis Xavier’s Girl’s School in Dublin, there was a demand for the removal of the tax on fluoride toothpaste, myriad questions about pig husbandry and repeated references to worrying unemployment statistics.

Causing pandemonium in Leinster House

These were among the issues being debated when a convoy including Ali, his brother Rahaman, Paddy Monaghan, Angelo Dundee, Harold Conrad, and Butty Sugrue swung through the gates of Leinster House and caused pandemonium. 

Alighting from their cars, they were met by Paddy Burke, TD for Dublin County North, and the ubiquitous Timothy ‘Chub’ O’Connor, TD for Kerry South, and their arrival prompted a degree of hysteria in the normally staid confines of Government buildings. The newspaper accounts offer a flavour of the impact.

“The whole of Leinster House was in a tizzy,” reported the Irish Press. “Elderly deputies, young senators, cooks, waitresses, clerks, parliamentary correspondents, gardaí, everybody, came running to see the boxer of the decade. Politics took a back seat.”

“Muhammad took Leinster House by storm”, wrote Raymond Smith in the Irish Independent.

“Not since president Kennedy addressed both houses of the Oireachtas has the visit of one celebrity engendered such spontaneous excitement.

“Protocol was forgotten more than once during this whirlwind visit and it seemed to me that Muhammad must have shaken the hand of every member of the Cabinet as he made his way down the corridor to the Taoiseach’s office, and later the hand of every leading member of the opposition.”

The by now familiar figure of O’Connor negotiated the passage of Ali and his entourage through the crowds to the inner sanctum where he was to meet the Taoiseach, a man who was having quite a good day himself. 

In the Dáil earlier, Lynch had challenged Fine Gael, the main opposition party, to move a writ regarding an August date for a crucial by-election in the Mid-Cork constituency. 

Chiding them for “gamesmanship”, he accepted the subsequent resolution in a bid to prove his Government, its authority undermined by the lingering after-effects of the 1970 arms crisis, was not afraid to face the electorate. 

Introducing Ali to Lynch, O’Connor mentioned that his boss had been an outstanding hurler and Gaelic footballer in his day.

“I played many times, Muhammad, on the field where you will be boxing next Wednesday night,” said the then fifty-five-year-old Taoiseach, in a typically humble reference to his immense sporting pedigree. 

From the fabled Glen Rovers’ club on the northside of Cork City, Lynch had carved a unique place for himself in the annals of Irish sport. 

Wearing the blood and bandage colours of his native country, Lynch was on the Cork team which won an unprecedented four All Ireland hurling titles in a row between 1941 and 1944. 

A year later, he helped the Cork footballers triumph in the championship and when the hurlers emerged victorious again the following year, he became the only man ever to win six successive All Ireland medals. 

Selected at centre-field on hurling’s “Team of the Century”, his idealistic view of sport was perhaps best encapsulated by a speech where he described the true hurler as “a man of dignity, proud of his heritage, skilful, well-disciplined, and a sportsman”.

Using the public recognition gained on the field, and his training as a lawyer off it, Lynch entered politics in 1948 and succeeded Seán Lemass as a leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach eighteen years later. 

In a room normally reserved for meetings of the Irish Cabinet, his summit with Ali was witnessed by anybody with enough authority or neck to squeeze in the door and catch a glimpse of a small little piece of history. And historic it was.

In his own references to this event in The Greatest, Ali mentions that Lynch was surprised to discover he was the first Western head of government to invite him to make an official visit. 

Up to that point, the only countries whose heads of state had been as welcoming towards Ali were Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Mali, Kuwait, Somalia, Uganda, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sudan, and Morocco. 

Most photographs show the two sporting giants from different eras and worlds sitting on a couch, the redoubtable Butty Sugrue on a chair behind and between them, all three invariably laughing. 

Their conversation lasted half an hour and prolonged bouts of humorous banter were laced with occasional discussions of more serious matters, all of which were dutifully recorded by the journalists present.

“I have been to Britain, Germany, and Switzerland but they did not honour me like this,” said Ali. “This is the first time I have been invited to meet a top official like yourself.

“When I was a poor little black boy in Louisville, Kentucky, I looked upon the mayor as being a great man — now here I am today sitting beside the prime minister of this country.”

I am just an athlete, a fighter sitting here talking to a great man like you. I would love to be a leader of people someday — helping people. 

Proving skilful as ever at saying the right thing to the right audience, Ali told Lynch he wanted to compliment the Irish people “on their proud history of struggle for civil rights and justice”.

As somebody whose own people had been “underdogs for a long time”, Ali explained that he knew exactly what these fights entailed. 

However, he also admitted that even though he regularly read items in American newspapers pertaining to the conflict in Northern Ireland, he couldn’t quite figure it out.

“What,” asked Ali, “is this struggle all about?” Lynch delivered a potted history of Ireland that only begged more questions from his guest.

“Why can’t you talk about this situation with other world leaders?”

“We do, Muhammad,” answered Lynch. “But it always seems to fall upon deaf ears because a little country like ours can’t compete with the import-export economy of a nation with sixty million people. Britain has many other nations in the world depending on trade with her.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something now,’ said Ali. “If President John F. Kennedy was alive today, there would not be one British soldier on Irish soil.”

According to Ali’s friend Paddy Monaghan’s memory of the event, there was a full agreement in the room on that point, but Harold Conrad’s recall of the political discourse is a tad more cynical. 

He reckoned Ali spent fifteen minutes telling Lynch how to fix the problems in the north, and the Taoiseach’s polite response to this lecture was to suck his pipe and listen intently.

The image of Lynch smoking his pipe and taking it all in certainly rings as true as some of the other jovial exchanges from the encounter. 

Mocking the more serious government business of the day, he told Ali that Fianna Fáil had something of a fight on their hands down in Mid-Cork and enquired as to the boxer’s availability as a candidate.

“The most commonly heard crack around Leinster House yesterday was that the Taoiseach was meeting Ali to try to persuade him to stand as a Fianna Fáil candidate in the mid-Cork by-election,” reported The Cork Examiner. 

“It was learned later from a usually reliable source that Ali had shown interest at first but felt he must decline when told he would have to retire from the ring if he were elected to the Dáil. ‘What a loss!’ exclaimed one deputy.” 

When it was time to leave, Ali patiently signed a slew of autographs for the politicians and journalists present, and as he prepared to go, Lynch couldn’t resist one more paean to his visitor. 

“I’ve met some great men in my time,” he said. “But you are the greatest!” 

At this, Ali smiled, lowered his head in a gesture of exaggerated humility and replied, “Oh, I knows it!” 

With his ministers dissolving into hysterics, Lynch was laughing so hard he had to wipe away tears. Regaining his composure, he continued to spar gamely.

“I shall be cheering for you at the fight, Muhammad.” “What? Why Al ‘Blue’ Lewis told me that you said that to him also.” Even on his way out the door, Ali couldn’t resist keeping things going.

“Hey, they just found out Al “Blue” Lewis is an Irishman!” “I’ll still be cheering for you,” said Lynch.