Hana Ali doesn't look much like her father, but she sounds like him, rattling through stories at a speed that suggests she has never, in her 24 years, suffered one moment's equivocation. "The first time I knew my dad was somebody was when I was four years old and we went to a restaurant and everyone gave him a standing ovation and began chanting 'Ali! Ali!' I got goosebumps. I didn't know what it was all about, but I thought, 'Wow, my daddy's great.' "
She is the older of two girls from Muhammad Ali's second marriage, the only one of his nine progeny to have been brought up predominantly by him. Her sister Laila, two years younger and recently embarked on a boxing career, says that Hana is "obsessed" with their father. Hana has just published a book entitled More Than a Hero: Muhammad Ali's Life Lessons Presented Through His Daughter's Eyes. "I'll quit a job if I can't get time off to go visit him," she says. "If my dad's here, that's where I am. My sisters are more logical. They're not going to quit their jobs. But I figure, one day he's not going to be here, so I want every moment that I can."
The book is a slim volume containing those of Hana's childhood memories that highlight her father's moral character: the time she wanted to wear a white dress and expensive jewellery to school and her father told her it would make the poor kids feel bad; how he interrupted family outings to help beggars, buying them food and sometimes setting them up in hotel rooms and finding them jobs; all the times when people stole from him and he forgave them.
Among the recollections, and by far the most affecting part of the book, are the pre-fight poems Ali taunted his opponents with: "I injured a stone / Hospitalised a brick. / I'm so mean I make medicine sick." They remind you of those great 1960s photos of him gloating into the camera with beautiful mock menace. There is his buoyant retelling of the Sonny Liston fight: "Liston disappears from view/ The crowd is getting frantic / But our radar stations have picked him up / He's somewhere over the Atlantic." And the most famous of Ali's poems: "Float like a butterfly /Sting like a bee / Your hands can't hit / What your eyes can't see."
Hana was too young to remember most of her father's fights. The abiding image she has of Ali the athlete is of the end of his career. "I remember my dad training for his last two fights, which he did not win. I remember him sitting at the ringside with a robe on, with his head down. He was finally feeling that it was the end. It wasn't so much the fighting he loved, but the travelling, the attention, the proving to himself and the world that he could be the best. He loved to do things when everything was against him and it seemed impossible. It was hard to let go of."
Growing up as Muhammad Ali's daughter should have been fraught with the miseries famous people commonly inflict on their children: inferiority complex, identity crisis, cycles of over-indulgence and neglect. But Hana says that he was as generous to his children as to his fans and that of all of her siblings, she was the main beneficiary of his wisdom. It would sound gushy if Ali's vast goodness was not a matter of incontrovertible fact.
Laila was closer to their mother, Veronica, and it was Hana who followed Ali around like a puppy. When he and Veronica divorced, she was nine. "If anything, I saw him more after that," she says. "He was there almost every day and he tried to take us with him when he went away. He would send postcards which read, 'You're beautiful like your mother, I love you,' in his messy writing.
"He was nervous that I would forget him. When my mother got remarried he asked, 'Do you have a new daddy?' And I was like, 'Daddy, are you out of your mind? I love you more than life. No one will ever come close to replacing you.' "
"We had a lot of governesses and housekeepers and stuff. But my dad always said we could interrupt him no matter who he was talking to, even the president. The door was always open. There was never a moment when we couldn't disturb him."
He spoilt her, but whenever she showed signs of becoming bigheaded, his Muslim piety kicked in and he gently told her to cool it. "I remember bragging a lot about him. I'd say, 'I can do whatever I want; my dad is Muhammad Ali.' That sort of thing. But at the same time, I was humble too, because it was instilled in me from a young age that I shouldn't flaunt things that other kids might not have. So I was always giving stuff away, as he always gave, gave, gave."
Although Hana was exposed to celebrity from a young age, she knew her father's fame to be in some way different from that of his movie star friends. "I was used to seeing people from the TV in real life. John Travolta was always over at our house. But Daddy was different. People wouldn't just ask for his autograph when they saw him in the street. They would hug him and cry. People really loved him."
During the course of his boxing career, Hana only knew Ali to be angry twice. "My dad was never a very vicious boxer. He just did what he had to do to win the fight. The only time I saw him lose control was in a fight against Floyd Patterson. Patterson would not call him Muhammad Ali; he insisted on calling him Cassius Clay. You could see my dad in the ring, yelling, 'What's my name?' boom, 'What's my name?' boom. It was about something bigger. He was in there fighting for respect. That's the only time he threw some vicious punches."
"The other time involved his fight with Joe Frazier. My father was kept from his boxing career for three years for the stand he took [against the Vietnam draft], and here was a guy who went to war and now he was the champ and my dad felt robbed. The play turned more serious and he started calling Frazier an Uncle Tom. He believed that stuff. But when he saw on a documentary about how Joe Frazier's kids were teased and came home crying from school, he cried."
Of the two girls, Laila was the one who rebelled, dressing "immodestly", ditching Islam and taking up boxing, which Ali disapproves of as a women's sport. Hana went to a small private college in Boston and dropped out after two years because she was homesick for her father. Her intention now is to write children's books with "a strong moral message". She regrets not finishing college, but consoles herself with the lessons learned from her father. "I'm not going to follow the rules of society, I'm going to follow my instincts," she says, although it sounds a bit pat, a generation removed.
About her father's Parkinson's disease, she says it has slowed down his speech, but since he spoke so fast to begin with, it is not very noticeable. "When he's relaxed and at home, he will not shut up. He's cracking jokes, playing around. He's just the same."
Despite his disapproval, Ali attends his daughter Laila's fights. "He doesn't agree with women boxing, period, but he's supportive of her. When he's watching her at ringside, you'll see all the manifestations of emotion in his face: fear, excitement, reminiscence. My dad called me on the phone recently and said, 'Hana writes books, Laila throws hooks.' Ain't that something?"
More Than a Hero by Hana Ali is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £10.
