This will be his 3rd fight since September 05. Sheika lost to Markus Beyer, (no shame in that), had a 2 year layoff, came back and fought some jobber and then has been on another year and a half layoff. I can’t support Roy trotting out BS to me like this. EVEN THOUGH I WANT TO

I’m going to set aside my Roy love and say this…

There is a really fair chance that Roy goes to sleep in this fight. I love the guy…but he is to the point where any given night he’s either going to put on a bit of a show…or get his face pounded in because he doesn’t have the reflexes to play “slick defensive guy” anymore.

the first time I met him was when I was in 4th grade. I went to school in southwest Michigan (Coloma to be exact) and Ali had a home in Berrien Springs (about a 20 minute drive from Coloma). My school built a nice new high school gym and Ali came to do the “opening ceremony.” A group of like 5 or 10 students from each grade got picked out of a raffle to meet him and I was in that group. My great grandfather told me in the week leading up all about Ali and what it meant to get to shake his hand. So I went up to him and shook his hand and asked him a question about Liston (which obviously my Grandpa told me to do) and he pretended he was going to punch me. It was a cool moment.

Then oddly enough my dad’s best friend was his plumber and spent quite a bit of time there doing odd jobs for Ali. He asked him to sign a glove for me and instead was told to bring me with to get it signed. So that was the second time. It was very brief as he was on his way out as we got there…but I have a personalized signed boxing glove from him which is probably my favorite possession in the world (and sadly is in a box somewhere in the basement after we bought our first house last year).

I met him a third time in April of ‘04. My dad was getting married in Florida and I flew down with my (soon to be at that time) step-sister. We were in the airport (South Bend Airport…very small place) and Ali came walking in to the terminal and was on the same flight as us (we had a layover in Atlanta which was his final destination). I played it cool because I’d had experience meeting many other major sports stars and had met him in the past. But it was funny to see grown men turn to complete dorks around him. So we board the plane and my step-sister and I are in row 1 seats C and D and Ali and his wife were in seats A and B. I politely (but VERY firmly) told my sister that she was going to be sitting in the window seat.

What followed is one of my most treasured few hours of my life. I generally tried to stay quiet and not bother him but every now and then he’d poke me in the side and act like he didn’t do it. So I turned and held up my fist to let him know that I’ll knock a chump out and he smiled and pointed at my book (this being 04 he was not speaking much due to the Parkinson’s) and motioned to let him see it. I handed it to him and he smiled at me and pulled the bookmark out of it and handed it back to me and held up his fist. It’s my personal moment of getting to watch Ali BE Ali. He also stood up in the aisle of the plane at one point and did some magic tricks but totally broke the magician’s code by showing how he was doing them.

Toward the end of the flight his wife began to feed him and he had trouble keeping the food in his mouth which honest to god broke my heart so much that I got up and went into the bathroom on the plane and cried.

So…yeah…that’s the story.