Laila Ali went into the family business last night. In the Turning Stone Casino in upstate New York she ducked between the ropes and squared off to April Fowler, a woman fighter of little consequence or promise. The Tale of the Tape, as they say in boxing, revealed Laila Ali as a five-foot, 10 inch, 160-pounder with no fight record. The tale of the hype had just one thing to say. Daughter of Muhammad Ali.
By entering the $200-a-round world of women's boxing, Laila Ali reckoned she was doing what she had to do. No big deal. Yet the arguments are always most frayed around the edges and the prospect of Laila Ali stepping into a boxing ring is a sight which has given pause to even the most passionate supporters of women's boxing. There should be no phoney paternalism which prevents women from boxing "in their own interest" but to see Laila Ali step out from the shadow of her shuffling, mumbling father carrying his beauty but not his boxing brain or hunger is slightly troubling. Commentators have suggested that she should look at her father and then get her own head examined.
Muhammad Ali, almost stilled these days by Parkinson's Syndrome, is himself less than pleased with the turn his daughter's career has taken. She left her family home at 18 vowing to open a nail salon in Los Angeles. Three years later she is working with a professional fight trainer, dating a professional fighter and beginning a fight career. Leaving health matters aside, Muhammad Ali was as ill-used as anyone in his profession during his career. It was scarcely what he wanted for his sons or daughters.
So little wonder that he was concerned when his daughter came to him last winter with an announcement. "Well, Daddy," she said. "I want to tell you I'm going into professional boxing, and I love you, and I want your support, and I want to tell you that even if I don't have your support, I'm going to do it anyway."
Muhammad Ali, 57 years old now and wounded at least in part by boxing, let his face cloud over. He told his daughter he didn't want her to get hurt.
"Daddy, I'm not going to get hurt," she replied. "I'm going to be fighting women, not men. And I have your genetics."
There is a note of plaintiveness about her when notes as a student of her father's career that "he didn't take many punches when he was young and it was never proven that Parkinson's Syndrome from which he suffers was caused by boxing".
"He told me that it was a dirty business," says Laila Ali now. "He let me know it's a hard business, and he let me know that he supported me."
For quite a while when her career was a theoretical thing, support was easier. She began training on the west coast with Kevin Morgan, switching later to her current trainer Dub Huntly. Last January, yet to throw a professional punch, she was introduced to the crowd at a fight in Vegas as the heir to a great family tradition. Unfortunately, the state of women's boxing precludes her from ever fully claiming that inheritance. It remains a small beer world where the biggest earner by a long chalk is Christy Martin, a ferocious brawler who earns between $100,000 and $150,000 a bout.
For now, Laila Ali must be content with the sideshow hype whipped up by her surname and her promoters. The comparisons with her father are unlikely to be flattering if she boxes as poorly as she rhymes. A clumsy couplet tagging the phrases "expectations to meet" and "painful defeat" onto successive lines is her best shot so far at the easy rap which made her father such a draw. As a rhyme it floated like a bee and stung like a butterfly.
She says it is her intention to reshape and re-invent women's boxing just as her father did for the sweet science in the 1960s. How far she will go and how far the world will allow her go are the issues. She is breezily matter of fact about the realities of boxing: "I'm going to get hit. I'm going to get my face swollen, It's going to happen", but television, which sets the boundaries to the progress of any sport these days, is less keen to get over that aesthetic hurdle.
One thing seems certain though. Laila Ali will be in demand if she can avoid the spectacle of having her nose broken or her back stretched on the canvas. She is good publicity and the world of women's boxing recognises the need to sell the connection to the greatest sportsperson of the century.
She is described by PR people as "very much like her dad, aggressive, very sure of herself, very confident. She also has an offbeat sense of humour like her father".
And in the end it is unlikely that Laila Ali will be around for long enough or will face people big enough to damage her as her father was damaged. Her adventure is about youth, about proving herself, about other needs not easily explained.
Her career raises questions of precisely what issues Laila Ali is dealing with. She never saw her father box in person, and in an interview earlier this year with the New York Times she admitted she had few memories of living with him. She grew up in Malibu with her sister Hana after Ali divorced his third wife, her mother Veronica. But by boxing she believes he will gain a greater appreciation for her as his child.
"He's naturally going to see himself in me," she said. "But for the first time, I think he actually can see that `this is my child'."
In the end this journey may be less about the need to box and more about Laila Ali's need not to be just another thrilled passenger on the voyage around her father. You can't but wish happy endings for them both.