Muhammad Ali and Donald Barrie met in New York City in 1985. Never have two more different battlers squared off.
In one corner, the champ, The Greatest, still mighty and menacing. In the other, a frail, crumpled kid in a wheelchair.
But they had more in common than met the eye on that street outside the Hilton where Don and his folks were staying on a Big Apple tour.
Ali had just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, the scourge that would eventually claim him, and maybe that’s why he was especially warm and tender with the beaming kid who rolled up to him, parents in tow.
“I recognized him from having watched some clips of his old boxing matches on TV,” Don, now 44, a journalist and web designer, wrote on his blog this year on what would have been Ali’s 75th birthday.
“I think my parents were shocked I knew who he was.
“As soon as he saw me we shook hands and got (a) photo taken. He also shook hands with my dad. He amazed and impressed all of us.”
I bet the feeling was mutual.
By then, Don, barely a teen, already had gone 12 hard rounds with life.
He was born with broken arms and legs and a fractured skull. When he coughed, he cracked ribs. “Surgery” was his middle name.
Look up osteogenesis imperfecta, or “brittle bones.” When it’s severe, it isn’t much fun.
Doctors told his mom he was a goner.
Yet here he is, at Variety Village the other day, waiting in line for a hamburger.
Don first rolled into the Village in the 1980s and has grown up to be one of its many great success stories.
The book he expects to write ought to be called, “Memoirs of a Goner.”
Don has a BA in English from my alma mater, Carleton U, and a journalism degree from Ryerson. He blogs at his own Unbreakable DB – the name’s a typically wry nod to his disease ‑ and occasionally contributes to Enables Me.
I last spotted Don a year earlier. He was zipping along Dundas St. in his electric wheelchair, a Quickie Xperience 2.
Its top speed is 10.5 kph and Don was gone before I could call out. Lost in a crowd of “walkies,” as he calls us able-bodied speedbumps.
“Sorry I missed you,” he says this week, grinning. “I was probably rushing home.” He has an apartment at Dundas and St. Patrick.
Perhaps he’d just finished hockey practice. He coaches the ferocious Bulldogs, of the Canadian Electric Wheelchair Hockey Association (CEWHA).
Or maybe he was returning from a board meeting of the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto.
Or from his website gig at Lights, Camera, Access!, an advocate for people with disabilities in media and showbiz, work that won him a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013.
Or perhaps he was attending to his other web design and writing ventures, which have included publications from the Ryersonian to the Globe and Mail to Canadian Press.
“As many irons in the fire as I can,” he tells me.
“I don’t want to limit myself.”
Ali could not have said it better.
