When Carol Griffith of Falmouth stopped by with her family at Ali’s training camp, they got a warm welcome.
A Portland family dropped by Muhammad Ali’s Pennsylvania training camp one summer afternoon in 1978 and walked away with the memories of a lifetime.
The Griffith family has an album’s worth of photographs chronicling the visit and a story about the event, written by family patriarch Ralph Griffith, which was published in the Maine Sunday Telegram on Sept. 10, 1978.
It was a visit the Griffith family never forgot, a story to dine out on for years to come.
“He was so gracious and so kind. I can’t even tell you,” Carol Griffith, Ralph’s wife, said of the family’s encounter with Ali.
The memories came rushing back Saturday following news of Ali’s death. Griffith dug out the stack of photographs and remembered how her husband, a true Ali fan who died on Feb. 25 at age 85, got it into his head that he needed to meet the heavyweight champ in person.
It was on a drive during the summer of 1977 with Ralph’s mother, Marion, his wife and his daughters, Jennifer, then 16, and Amy, 13, back to his hometown in Minersville, Pennsylvania, not far from Ali’s camp on Deer Lake. Griffith decided to take a chance and pop in.
The family, who lived in the North Deering section of Portland, were headed toward the family farm in eastern Pennsylvania when Ali was training to regain the heavyweight boxing title from Leon Spinks.
Carol Griffith said her husband, manager of research at S.D. Warren Co., was the kind of approachable person who could talk to anyone.
“He knew about the training camp and kind of had a feeling” how to get there, said Carol Griffith, who now lives in Falmouth.
Griffith managed to point the family’s subcompact in the right direction and found the long, unmarked driveway to the camp.
Ali wasn’t home but a woman named Lana, who introduced herself as Ali’s manager “and a few other things too,” according to Griffith’s article, gave them a tour and invited them back another time when Ali would be in.
So the Griffiths tried again the next summer, on July 1. Once again the family set out in their Ford Fiesta, with Carol Griffith and her two daughters crammed in the back while her mother-in-law rode in front.
This time they were in luck.
Griffith described in his article how he walked up to a screen door at the dining hall and called out for Lana. A man answered instead and invited Griffith in.
Griffith came face-to-face with Ali, who spent the next 90 minutes entertaining the Griffiths and a few other starstruck fans who wandered down the road.
“He rose, shook my hand and invited me to sit,” Griffith wrote.
Griffith beckoned the rest of the family to enter the hall.
“We didn’t know why, so when we walked to the door and into the room, he was sitting there. We were speechless,” Carol Griffith said.
Griffith ran out of film trying to capture it all. Daughter Amy nabbed Ali’s autograph, scrawled on a scrap of paper rummaged by her parents from their car.
Marion, a practiced schmoozer and kidder, managed to banter with Ali at length, at one point challenging him to get in shape for his upcoming bout with Spinks.
Ali took the challenge. ‘The Champ’ donned some gloves, picked up an ax and proceeded to chop down three 10-inch oaks.
“This one’s for you, Mama. Timber!” he yelled out to Marion Griffith as he worked.
Summing up the impression Ali made on him that day, Ralph Griffith wrote:
“To The Greatest, everyone was deserving of special attention. And that while he probably wouldn’t admit it, he regarded everyone as even greater than he.”
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