If Muhammad Ali was The Greatest then so was Angelo Dundee. The greatest coach and cornerman boxing has ever known.

His death from a heart attack just a few months after his 90th birthday will be mourned by millions of fight fans, but especially by Ali, who owes not only his career to the perky little Italian-American from Philadelphia but quite possibly his life.

They were together for the last time less than a month ago when Ali celebrated his own 70th birthday in Louisville.


Dundee was in a wheelchair but still very much the life and soul of Ali's poignant party.

Dundee's name will be forever bracketed with the legend he helped make truly The Greatest.

Yet no one has schooled more world champions – Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Willie Pastrano, Carmen Basilio and a host of others – 15 in all in his 50 years as boxing's supreme Svengali.

"Thank God I'm in good health," he had he told me rather ironically from his home in Clearwater, Florida in the last interview he gave on the eve of his birthday.  "I've got a new hip but otherwise I'm OK and keeping as busy as I want to be."


Back in his alma mater, the newly re-built Fifth Street Gym in Miami's South Beach, a veritable emporium of fistiana again redolent with vividly nostalgic echoes of boxing's most memorable bygone era, the sixties and seventies, Dundee had been in his element once more, working with a "bunch of good looking amateurs"  some of whom are prospective Olympians. "I'm loving it." he told me then.

"Some of these amateur kids may not be ready for your Games in London, but they will be for the next Olympics.  I see some 14 and 15-year-olds now with some tremendous talent."

"Angie", as the boxing world knew him, was more than Ali's little helper. A trainer par excellence, he was also his counsellor, confidante, and occasional minder, chasing away the "foxes" when Ali, always a ladies' man, eyed a spot of horizontal sparring even on the day of a fight.

Above all he was the best cornerman in the business, from where he not only saved Ali's career, but quite possibly his life.


They were together for over two decades, from the then Olympic champion Cassius Clay's second pro fight against Herb Siler in Miami in December 1960 until, exactly 21 years later, when the washed–up shell of ring's sublime artiste, who had turned boxing into a thing of beauty, rather than just booty, was left beaten out of sight in the Bahamas by a ho-hum heavyweight named Trevor Berbick.

Their 59-fight journey from Miami to Nassau was both exotic and exciting before its poignant conclusion, embracing the moment he pushed him back to win the heavyweight title when Ali told him to cut the gloves off, believing he was being deliberately blinded by liniment on Sonny Liston's own gloves, to the triumphs of the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thrilla in Manila.

But people still ask why Dundee had stayed with Ali to that sad and bitter end, when the boxer's personal physician, Ferdie Pacheco walked away after he won a brutal fight with Earnie Shavers in  1977, Pacheco urged him to quit because of the body punishment he was taking – Ali was peeing blood for days. Dundee was criticised for not quitting too, but explained: "I honestly felt that if Muhammad was insisting on fighting on, I had to be there to make sure he didn't get hurt real bad."

This was evident in the fast-fading Ali's penultimate fight when he was belaboured by Larry Holmes in the car park of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. Even Holmes himself had beckoned to the referee to call a halt and it was left to Dundee to do so at the end of the tenth round when he defied elements in the camp apparently more interested in keeping their meal-ticket going. "I am the chief second and I stop the fight," he declared.

If Dundee saved Ali's life that night then unquestionably he had rescued his career 17 years earlier on that electric evening at Wembley when young Cassius was felled by 'Enry's 'Ammer.


"I so upset that we don't have Henry [Sir Henry Cooper] anymore and so is Muhammad," he said in our interview. "They were still great friends you know. Muhammad had a lot of respect for him. Especially that left hook."

To this day the debate still rages as to whether Dundee craftily tore Clay's glove to give him more time to recover from that fourth round knock-down. He chuckled as he denied it.

"Whatever people tell you, I never cut the glove, it was split right from the beginning. All l did was stick my thumb in it and call the referee's attention to get it changed."

Then there was his rope trick in Kinshasa before the George Foreman fight. We saw him in the ring an hour before, apparently loosening them, yet Dundee insisted: "Honest, I was actually tightening them. But the heat loosened them again. They were 24 foot ropes and I never wanted Muhammad to lay on them and rope a dope. In fact I whacked his butt whenever he did because I was worried Foreman would hit my kid in the chest and knock him out of the ring. But Muhammad being Muhammad he did his own thing. He always did. I just added a few wrinkles and put the reflexes in the proper direction.  I never trained Muhammad, I just directed him."

To Dundee, Ali was always "my kid" and they stayed in touch mainly through Ali's wife Lonnie, when the former champion found difficulty in communicating because of his illness with Parkinson's syndrome.

Dundee lost his own wife Helen following a long illness two years ago after 58 years of marriage.

He said he was happy to make 90 "because after Don King (80 last year) I will be the oldest boxing guy around.  I am forever young because I am always dealing with young people but if it's a physical endeavour, I am in trouble.  When you are 89-years-old, you are not that sprightly doing push-ups, but mentally I am there.

"I feel blessed and I am happy I had the life I had. We had fun, didn't we?  I hope I can hang around because I think I can add a little something. You gotta have something to do, or you go goofy. I don't want to go goofy."

His last words to me were:"With Muhammad every time we did something it was excitement. It is unfair to try and compare anybody with him 'cos he's a once in a lifetime guy. There'll never be another Muhammad Ali."

Nor another Angelo Dundee.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title from Atlanta to Zaire