By CASEY NEILL
“I was amazed at the adulation people had for him.”
“It was the same as if the Pope was visiting. People just loved him.”
Journal photographer Rob Carew still vividly remembers the day boxing legend Mohammed Ali met fans of all ages in Dandenong on 11 September 2000.
He reminisced about the experience in the wake of Ali’s death on Saturday 4 June.
“I knew he was very famous, but when I got there people were having a religious experience meeting him. It was full-on,” he said.
Mr Carew said “a couple of hundred packed into a small space” at Dandenong’s Visy Cares Centre on Clow Street, now called Ystop.
“He posed for photos with a lot of people. He was very generous with his time,” he said.
“He didn’t really say much, but anyone who came near him he’d do the fist or the point.”
Ali quite literally touched then-Visy Cares Centre manager Dave Glazebrook.
“He touched his bald head and made fun of him,” Mr Carew said.
“He tried to include everybody, no matter who they were.
“He seemed really happy to be there.
“I think he would have stayed there all day if he could.”
Ali’s Dandenong visit coincided with his guest appearance at the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Sydney.
He was a guest of the Pratt family, which ran the Visy Cares Centre.
Dandenong High School band played Eye of the Tiger, the Journal reported at the time, and “Ali didn’t speak at the centre but his eye contact and hand gestures made the small crowd feel important”.
Mr Glazebrook was moved by the visit, the Journal said, especially after Ali presented him with a signed pair of boxing gloves.
“It is wonderful to receive the gloves to be raffled off for the centre, but for a short while I will keep them close to my heart,” he said.
Ali was 74 years old when he died in a Phoenix hospital following a short battle with a respiratory illness.
He had battled Parkinson’s disease for more than three decades.
His boxing career stretched from 1960 to 1981 and he was regarded as the greatest professional boxer in the sport’s history, with a 56-5 win-loss record and a gold medal from the 1960 Olympics in Rome.
Ali was also known globally for his civil rights activism and earned admirers for his moves in the ring and for his wit outside it.
He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr and changed his name in 1964 after converting to Islam.
