I don't follow team sports at all, but I'm a boxing fan--I tape all the fights shown on US TV so I can fast-forward the dull parts or do frame-by-frame on the KO's.

As a kid, I watched "Friday Night Fights" on TV with my uncles. My favorite was Kid Gavilan, a Cuban welterweight with his famous "bolo" punch. I went to one or two fights with my uncles at the old Garden that SC described.

I also crossed paths with Ali:

One day in 1987, I had business in a Chicago suburb. I flew in that morning and out the same afternoon. While waiting at an unusually empty gate area at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, I looked up from my book--and, standing not 100 feet away, there was Muhammed Ali! He was all by himself. Superficially, he looked great: trim, not fat like most former heavyweight boxers, no gray hair, no obvious marks on his face. But his eyes told a different story: he was a million miles away, lost in space. After a minute, a little white woman walked up to him, took his arm, turned him around, and started walking him to his gate. Just then a group of little kids came over and started talking to him. A ghost of a smile came over Ali's face, but it, too, was a million miles away.

Poor guy: he was without a doubt the world's most famous man just a few years earlier--and now reduced to a shell.