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“The man to beat me has not been born yet,” words of fallen World Boxing legend Muhammad Ali.
But did you know that away from his amazing boxing career, Ali also had a pretty crazy personal life?
Ali was married four times, and has left behind nine children to show for it. His first wife, Sonji Roi, was a cocktail waitress he met in August 1964 — they tied the knot just one month later, but broke up in January 1966. They had no children together.
Just a year and a half later, Ali fell in love with Belinda Boyd and like Roi, August was the month for marriage. Boyd would convert to his Islam religion and changed her name to Khalilah. Together, the pair had four children: Maryum, Jamillah and Rasheda (twins), and his only biological son, Muhammad Ali Jr.
Muhammad started seeing Veronica Porsche in 1975. The affair ruined his second marriage. Ali married Veronica in the summer of 1977, she was already pregnant with their daughter, Hana. Their second daughter, Laila, was born in December 1977. They would split up in 1986.
In the years before Ali’s death, family disputes broke out into the open between his last wife and widow, Yolanda ‘Lonnie’ Williams, and Ali’s younger brother, Rahman.
A cousin of Ali’s cousin, Charlotte Waddell, also claimed in an interview two years ago, that Lonnie “controls everything” that Ali does, admitting to The Daily Mail, that “I can’t stand to be around her. It wouldn’t take me two seconds to spit in her face!”
Lonnie, who married Ali in 1986 after moving to California to be Ali’s full-time nurse three years after his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, is reported to have used her power of attorney over his affairs to estrange unwanted family members from Ali’s complex web of relationships.
In a separate interview, Muhammad Ali Jnr was reported to be living in a garret in a Chicago ghetto, telling a newspaper in 2013 that he had been almost entirely ostracized from his father since 2004.
Rahman Ali, now 72, and himself a former professional boxer who reportedly had six wives and was a main member of the Ali’s entourage after he finished his own brief career, was reported to have been forced by Lonnie out of their mother’s family home into a “modest flat”.
