I went to that cold 2000 Super Bowl – I didn’t have a seat – and was just walking around the Georgia Dome concession stands. I was going to do some sketches for the paper but nothing presented itself and I was starting to get panicky about what to do.
I decided OK, I’m going up to the luxury boxes. I took the escalator up and began walking around. Everyone was watching the game. I saw a guard standing in front of this suite – it was the WebMD suite – and I told the guard what I was doing. He went in and talked to the people in the suite and they let me come in.
There was Cory Everson. And there was Doug Flutie. Lance Armstrong was there and the model Niki Taylor. It was getting sort of interesting but I was still trying to figure out what I could sketch here.
Half time came and all of a sudden in through the door comes Muhammad Ali. He was doing commercials with WebMD at the time. He already had Parkinson’s and his aide was with him. Ali began doing some sort of tricks with a red ball or red bandana. Then there was a lull in the conversation.
I took the opportunity to introduce myself as Mike Luckovich, a cartoonist from the AJC, and I was here drawing sketches. Ali made motions asking to see my sketch pad and indicated he wanted to use my pen. I kept holding the pad and then he started to draw. I’m not a huge person but he was big. I mean he was the heavyweight champion but you forget how big he was. I was the perfect height to be his drawing board.
After he finished the sketch shown here, he described – through the aide – what he had drawn. He wanted to be a light shining on people.
He signed the sketch and I have it framed and hanging in my foyer. It’s a really neat memento to have plus the fact that Ali took time to do a drawing for me.
