Muhammad Ali was mid-training at Deer Lake, his secluded camp in the Pennsylvania mountains, dripping with sweat between rounds. Ali trained there deliberately away from the world — no crowds, no press, just cabins and a ring on a hillside.
Then Elvis Presley turned up, having got past security, purely to meet him.
The two men became genuine friends. And Elvis marked it with a gift he had designed himself: a custom white robe, embroidered across the back in gold with the words “People’s Choice” — flashy, rhinestoned, and unmistakably cut from the same cloth as his own stage jumpsuits.
Ali wore it into the ring, including before his 1973 bout with Joe Bugner in London.
Elvis and Muhammad Ali, When Two Kings Met
What bound them together was something almost nobody else on earth could understand. Millions had loved both since they were very young men. Both knew exactly what it cost. Ali described Elvis as the sweetest, most humble, nicest man you could ever meet — which is not how anybody described Ali.
Then, in the summer of 1985, eight years after Elvis died, Ali went to Graceland and spoke at a memorial service before a huge crowd of fans. He stood up and called Elvis the greatest — a word he had spent his entire career reserving for himself.
Muhammad Ali Talks About Elvis
And then he explained something that reframes his whole life.
As a teenager, Ali had heard that Elvis promised to buy his mother a house and a car once he made it. So when Ali started winning professionally, he did the same. After his first fights, he bought his mother a pink Cadillac and a home.
He said what he admired most was never the records or the fame. It was the man’s gentleness.