Me and the Champ

   Feeling pretty good today and enjoying not being on chemo.  I still have some swelling in my feet and calves but there's no soreness. 
   A new term:  People who have faith-based type beliefs, based on no facts and contrary to the last century of actual experience, that government spending, rather than government austerity, during recessionary or near recessionary times destroys rather than creates jobs should be called "job creationists."

   Since I'm running out of blog material, I thought I would provide a chronology of my near contacts and actual contacts with the great Muhammad Ali.  I was always a fan from the time I started hearing about Cassius Clay predicting the round his fights would end and often providing a fun rhyme for the fight.
1.  I remember listening to the first Ali - Liston fight in Feb. 1964.  We could only get round by round summaries of the fight on the radio in my freshman dorm.  Ali won when Liston wouldn't come out for the start of the 7th round.  Ali had predicted an 8th round victory.
2.  For my birthday, my Uncle Ries bought us tickets for the closed-circuit viewing of the 2nd Ali - Liston fight in May 1965.  Liston took what I'll always believe was a dive at 2 minutes of the first round.  I have the picture of this scene above me right now in my computer room with Liston lying down in a classic knockout position and Ali yelling at him to get up.  Ries was very upset and said he'd never go to another closed-circuit fight whereas I thought just seeing Ali come into the ring was very exciting and worth the price of admission.  And I went to some future fights.
3.  In the fall of 1967, during my one year Masters of Accounting program at Penn/Wharton, Ali, who was under suspension for challenging his draft status which he eventually won, was coming to Penn to speak.  Unforutnately, he was speaking in an auditorium at 4:00 and I had an exam in Advanced Accounting with a Professor known as Sadistic Sam from 3 to 4:30 on the same day.  Linda offered to save me a seat but I kept saying there was no way I would be able to make the talk.  Nevertheless, as has continued to this day, Linda ignored my protestations and did what would be best for me, in this case saving a seat.  When I got to class that day, I wrote on the board in the front of the classroom:  "WE WANT TO SEE
                                                                                                     MUHAMMAD ALI"
Sadistic Sam came in 15 minutes late, convincing me I had no chance to see the Champ.  He looked at the Board and gave a sneering type smile.  Then I got my first break.  He passed out the exams, asked one kid to collect them after an hour and half and bring them to his office, and then left.  My second break was that the exam was all short (at least to me) one or two paragraph answers that required no detailed accounting analysis.  I raced through the exam, completing it in 35 minutes, dropped it off with the collector, and left to the cheers of some of my classmates.  I got to the auditorium by 4:00, found Linda and the good seat she had saved for me in the SRO crowd and enjoyed hearing from the Champ.  By the way, I got an A- on the exam; but had the Prof known I had left early, I'm sure it would have been a much lower grade.
   To be continued.
Elkan - Friday afternoon