Remembering Angelo Dundee

Dave Kindred at Grantland:

It was an 8x10 photograph of an impossibly beautiful young man, 18 years old. There was a sunrise in his smile. He flexed his arms overhead, a strongman's pose. He sat on a fighter's stool. His name ran in script letters across his white workout shirt: "Cassius Clay." All of life awaited him. Behind Clay, Dundee leaned on the ring ropes. Behind Dundee, light came through a pair of tall windows painted with block letters: GYM. The trainer and the kid were in the 5th Street Gym, Miami Beach, 1960. Two weeks ago, he and Ali were still together. God only knows how Dundee did it. Up from nothing, scrambling for survival through the Depression, street-smart, sly, and unfailingly optimistic, he came to Ali with a psychological gyroscope that kept him even-keeled in a quarter-century of unprecedented turbulence. Dundee's partner in Ali's corner, the fight doctor Ferdie Pacheco, told me, "Angelo did it by being an innocent. He was soft-hearted, kind, gentle. He was the exact same man Ali was — but no one knew that about Ali then. They clicked in ways nobody could ever have guessed, let alone explained."
The malevolent Fruit of Islam thugs — the thick-necked muscle of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam in the 1960s — wanted the little white guy gone. Dundee stayed. He stayed through Sonny Liston, Malcolm X, Vietnam. He knew the glory of Zaire and the hell of Manila. He outlasted three of Ali's wives and walked without harm through the fight game's snakes, who were licking at Ali's feet. Pacheco's take: "Angelo kept his nose clean. He went about his business, nobody else's, and he was good at staying in the shadows. He knew Ali was the star of stars. He was just along on the ride, and he was happy to be part of the circus."

The article discusses the sad fate of Ali today.  Boxing can be so cruel, and yet so beautiful.  Dundee's personality brought some beauty to the ring.