Muhammad Ali won 56 fights and only lost five over his 21 years in the boxing ring, but it wasn't just his sportsmanship that made him one of the most unforgettable icons of the 20th Century. While his trash talk outside of the ring and his infamous phrase, "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee", is what we often associate with the man - he also did some other incredible things, like save the life of one suicidal man.
“Former heavyweight champions slip out of the news as easily as ex-presidents, but Muhammad Ali was never your garden-variety champion of all the world,” Walter Cronkite said on January 20 1981, in that day's CBS Evening News. “Yesterday in Los Angeles, he responded like a superhero when a distraught man threatened suicide.”
Police negotiators had tried for three hours to persuade the man to come down, as he threatened to jump from the window of the ninth floor, but once Ali was on the scene, he was down in 20 minutes.
The boxer's public relations manager was on the scene when he saw how negotiations were failing. He asked the police if Ali could help, but they told him no. Thinking there might be some benefit to trying, he called Ali anyway. The manager said:
“I went back to my car and called Ali anyway. I told Ali there was a guy up here on a building about a mile from his house and maybe he could get through.
"About four minutes later, Ali comes driving up the wrong side of the street in his Rolls-Royce with his lights blinking".
According to CBS News, the vet was saying, "I'm no good, I'm going to jump". Muhammad reached the floor, leaning out of another window to speak to him.
"You're my brother," Ali told the man. "I love you and I wouldn't lie to you. You got to listen. I want you to come home with me, meet some friends of mine."
The man replied, "Why do you worry about me? I'm a nobody".
Speaking to the Reading Eagle, Ali later said that he "told him he wasn't a nobody. He saw me weeping and he couldn't believe I was really doing that, that I cared that much about him".
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After he talked the man down, the gathered crowd began to chant, "USA! Digs Ali! USA! Digs Ali!". He then made sure to go with the man to the police station, before accompanying the man to a Veterans Administration Hospital. At the time, Ali told the assembled press:
"I'm going to help him go to school and find a job, buy him some clothes"
"I'm going to go home with him to meet his mother and father. They called him a nobody, so I'm going home with him. I'll walk the streets with him and they'll see he's big."
"Everyday I'm going to visit him in the hospital. I told him I'd stay close to him."
The Associated Press quotes the boxer as explaining that the man was depressed and couldn't find work, while he was also being treated unfairly by his family. "No doubt about it, Ali saved that man's life," a police spokesman told the press.
