Ali Walked Off A Plane In Belfast 1972 — And Spent The Night In A Family’s Kitchen JJ

In November 1972, Belfast was not a city that welcomed strangers easily. The Troubles had been running for 3 years. Bombs went off in the city center with enough regularity that people had developed a specific vocabulary for the different sounds. Muhammad Ali landed in the middle of it with no schedule, no security plan, and no one telling him what to do next.

The flight had originated in New York and was bound for London, where Ali was scheduled for a series of appearances connected to his upcoming fight with Bob Foster. The re-route happened over the Irish Sea, a weather system over Heathrow that made landing inadvisable, a decision by the flight crew to divert to Aldergrove Airport outside Belfast, and a ripple of logistical consequences that moved through Ali’s travel arrangements like a stone dropped in water.

By the time the plane touched down, it was past 10:00 in the evening. The London appearances were postponed, the hotel reservation was useless, and Ali’s manager, Herbert Muhammad, was on a payphone in the terminal trying to locate accommodation in a city that had not been on anyone’s itinerary 40 minutes ago.

Ali was 30 years old. He had beaten Joe Frazier in their first fight the previous year, the fight of the century, 15 rounds that both men barely survived, and lost to Ken Norton in March, and was rebuilding toward what would become the Rumble in the Jungle 2 years later. He was in the middle of his career in the way that middle is only visible in retrospect, when you can see both ends of the thing and understand where the center was.

At the time, he was simply a man in an airport in a city he had not planned to visit, watching Herbert work the payphone, and feeling the particular restlessness that comes from 9 hours in the air and no clear sense of what happens next. The terminal at Aldergrove in a smaller and quieter facility than it would later become.

The taxi rank outside the terminal had three cars. Ali got into the first one. The driver was a man named Paddy Connolly, 51 years old, a West Belfast native who had been driving taxis for 14 years, and who recognized his passenger immediately, but said nothing about it because he had a policy developed over 14 years of driving that his passengers were entitled to be whoever they needed to be in his cab.

Ali asked Paddy to drive him into the city. Paddy said that was fine and pulled out of the airport and said nothing else. They drove in silence for several minutes on the road into Belfast. Then Ali said, “What’s it like here?” Paddy was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Complicated.” Ali said, “Tell me.” Paddy Connolly told him.

He told him about the neighborhoods, which streets were Catholic, which were Protestant, where the peace walls were going up, what it meant to take a wrong turn in certain parts of the city after dark. He told him about his own street in Andersontown in West Belfast, where he had lived for 30 years, where his children had grown up, where his neighbor’s son had been shot the previous spring, and the family was still not entirely certain by whom or why.

He told it without drama, in the particular tone of a man describing weather, not because it wasn’t serious, but because it had been serious for long enough that the dramatic register no longer fit. Ali listened. He did not offer opinions. He did not draw comparisons to other conflicts he had read about or speak about race in America, which would have been the easy parallel and the obvious one.

He listened in the way he He when he was genuinely interested, with his body turned slightly toward the speaker, the way people do when they are not constructing their response while the other person is still talking. They were approaching the outskirts of West Belfast when Ali asked if Paddy’s own family was all right. Paddy was quiet for a moment.

Then he said his eldest boy, Michael, had left for Manchester the previous year. He said this in a tone that was neither approval nor disapproval, simply the stating of a fact, but there was something underneath it that Ali heard. He asked Paddy if Michael had left because of the troubles. Paddy said, yes and no.

He said Michael had his own reasons, and the troubles gave those reasons an urgency they might not otherwise have had. He said his wife, Catherine, found it hard. He said the house was quieter than it used to be. Ali asked if Catherine was home. Paddy said she would be. Ali said, “Take me there.” Paddy Connolly turned to look at his passenger for the first time since they had left the airport.

He said, with the measured tone of a man who wants to be certain he has understood correctly, “You want me to take you to my house?” Ali said, “Yes.” Paddy drove to his house on Riverdale Park South in Andersonstown. It was an ordinary street of terraced houses, quiet at this hour, the kind of street that looks the same in a hundred cities except for the particular details of this one.

The painted curbstones, the flag on a house three doors down, the absence of certain things that should have been there and weren’t. He parked in front of his own door and sat for a moment as if deciding something. Then he got out and knocked on his own front door. >> Catherine Connolly answered. She was 47 years old, a small woman with dark hair going gray, wearing a housecoat over her clothes because she had been watching television and not expecting company.

She looked at her husband and then at the very large man standing behind her husband on the front path and then back at her husband. Paddy said, “I’ve brought someone for a cup of tea.” Catherine Connolly looked at Muhammad Ali for a long moment. Then she opened the door wider and said, “Well, come in then.” What happened in the Connolly kitchen over the next 3 hours was witnessed by Paddy, Catherine, their daughter Siobhan, who was 14 and had been doing homework at the kitchen table, and their youngest Marie, who was seven and had

been asleep and woken up and come downstairs to see what the noise was. Marie took one look at the situation, climbed onto a kitchen chair, and went back to sleep with her head on the table, which Ali apparently found deeply amusing and which broke whatever remaining formality existed in the room. They talked.

Catherine made tea and then more tea and then found biscuits she had been saving for the weekend. Paddy talked about the neighborhood and the years before the Troubles, when the streets had a different quality, a before and after that everyone in Belfast carried, but that was difficult to explain to someone who hadn’t lived through both sides of it.

Siobhan, who was 14 and paying attention, said, “And what did you do about it?” Ali looked at her for a moment. Then he smiled. Not the performance smile, not the Ali for the cameras smile, but the real one, the one that people who knew him described as something that changed the quality of the room it was in.

He said, “I decided to be louder than the decision.” Siobhan wrote it in her school journal the next morning. She still has the journal. At some point past midnight, Ali asked about Michael. Not intrusively. He asked the way a person asks when they have understood that a subject is present in a room even when it isn’t being spoken about.

Catherine told him. She told him about Michael’s phone calls, which were regular but never long enough, and about the particular silence that a house develops when someone who grew up in it is no longer there. She told it carefully, not to a famous person, but to a man who was sitting in her kitchen at midnight and had asked with his full attention.

Ali listened to all of it. He did not offer solutions. He did not say that things would improve or that Michael would come back or that the situation would resolve. He said that Michael sounded like a young man who was doing what he needed to do. And that Catherine sounded like a woman who understood this even when it was hard, and that both of those things could be true at the same time.

Catherine said, “Yes, that’s it exactly.” She said this quietly, the way people say things when something has been named accurately after a long time of it being unnamed. Herbert Muhammad called Patty Connolly’s phone at 12:45, having obtained the number through a process he would later describe as the most complicated 20 minutes of his professional life.

He told Ali that accommodation had been arranged at a hotel in the city center and that a car was waiting. Ali told him he would be there in the morning. Herbert was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “All right.” and hung up. Ali left the Connolly house at 7:00 in the morning. Marie, the 7-year-old, was awake by then and insisted on walking him to the door, which she did with the proprietary confidence of a child in her own home, explaining to him, as they walked down the hallway, that the picture on the wall was her grandmother

and the plant by the door was fake, but her mother didn’t like it when you said so. Ali crouched down at the door and shook her hand formally. He said it had been a genuine pleasure. Marie said, “Yes, it had been.” and went back inside. Patty drove him to the hotel. They didn’t talk much on the way.

When they arrived, Ali paid the fare and then paid it again, and told Patty to use the extra for something for the house. Patty said he didn’t need it. Ali said he knew that, and left it anyway. >> [snorts] >> He never spoke publicly about that night. It does not appear in any interview, any biography, any documentary.

The Connolly family mentioned it to friends and neighbors over the years, as families do, and it passed through the Andersonstown community the way things pass, person to person, gaining and losing details in transit, until what remained was the essential shape of it. Siobhan Connolly became a doctor. She works at a hospital in Dublin.

She has the school journal from 1972 in a box in her spare room. She has told the story of that kitchen to her own children, who are old enough now to understand it. She tells it not as a story about Muhammad Ali, though that is what it is, but as a story about what it means when someone sits down in your kitchen and decides that what you have to say is the most important thing happening in their world at that moment.

She says that is rarer than most people think. >> [snorts] >> She says Ali did it without effort, the way some people do things that most people find impossible. The school journal entry from the morning after reads, in the handwriting of a 14-year-old girl, simply, “A man came to our kitchen last night. He said to be louder than the decision.

I am going to remember that.” She remembered it. Marie Connolly still lives in Belfast. She is not certain, she says, whether she truly remembers that night, or whether she has remembered her family’s telling of it for so many years that the two things have become the same. She remembers walking a very tall man to the door and shaking his hand.

She remembers that he took her hand seriously. She thinks that is probably enough to remember. What Belfast gave Muhammad Ali that November night is harder to name than what he gave the Connellys. The Connellys got a story and a quote and the particular comfort of having been fully listened to by someone who had no obligation to listen.

These are measurable things or at least nameable ones. What Ali got was something that doesn’t translate easily. He sat in a kitchen in a city that was tearing itself apart along lines that were different from the lines he knew and he listened to a family talk about loss and absence and the specific weight of loving a place that keeps asking too much of you.

He didn’t fix anything. He didn’t offer anything except his presence and his attention which in that kitchen on that night turned out to be exactly what was needed. He left Belfast the next morning on a re- scheduled flight to London. The appearances went ahead. The fight with Bob Foster happened.

The career continued on its extraordinary trajectory toward Kinshasa and Manila and all the rest of it. The kitchen on Riverdale Park South continued being a kitchen. The tea got made. The biscuits that Catherine had been saving for the weekend were replaced by the following weekend. Siobhan went to school and wrote in her journal. Marie grew up.

Paddy kept driving his taxi. And somewhere in all of that ordinary continuation, the night settled into the Connelly family the way important nights settle. Not loudly, not with ceremony, but permanently. A before and an after. The kind of memory that doesn’t fade because it doesn’t need to be maintained. It just stays.

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