Muhammad Ali learned to ski at Mount Snow

Muhammad Ali downed opponents in the boxing ring, but he took some knocks of his own during a ski lesson on the slopes of Mount Snow.

During the lesson, a woman nearby asked Ali if he enjoyed skiing. “He told her, ‘I’ve been down more times than Floyd Patterson,’” former ski instructor Bob Gratton said.

Patterson had lost a 1965 fight with Ali due to a technical knockout.

The celebrated but controversial prizefighter, who died June 3 at age 74, visited the West Dover resort for a ski lesson in early March 1970. He took several spills, one of them after careening downward toward a wooden fence.

At the time, Ali had been banned from boxing as punishment for his 1967 refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army. He was convicted of draft evasion and stripped of his title as heavyweight champion.

Although still uncertain of what the future would hold in terms of his career, Gratton remembered Ali in good spirits during a ski lesson.

“We had a ball,” said Gratton, then the resort’s ski school director tasked with serving as Ali’s instructor. “He was so witty.”

The experience began with Ali trying to find the right apparel at the ski shop.

“Our biggest size jacket only came about half way up his arms,” Gratton said during a phone interview from his Florida home. “He was huge, 6-foot-2 and more than 200 pounds.”

Once outfitted, Ali wanted to go to the top of the mountain, but Gratton persuaded him to start on a gentle slope for newcomers dubbed the Mixing Bowl.

The instructor then moved backwards, helping Ali inch forward with the front of his skis touching.

“It acts as a sort of plow in the snow that allows the skier to brake. This is always the initial process before letting the skis go parallel,” Gratton explained.

“In the photo I took, it looks like they’re sparring,” added his wife, Helene Gratton, who was Mount Snow’s office manager in 1970.

At some point, Ali told Bob Gratton: “Get out of the way, I want to go down!”

Helene Gratton was watching. “Muhammad wanted to be on his own and Bob let him go,” she said.   

Despite Ali confidence, he headed straight for the wooden fence.

“I thought, ‘Omigosh! He’ll break every bone in his body,’” Bob Gratton said. “Instead, he avoided the fence, got up and started all over again, falling some more."

Bob Gratton said Ali eventually became comfortable gliding on skis.

“On a one-to-one basis, Muhammad was a wonderful person,” Bob Gratton said.

Thomas Montemagni, then a Mount Snow ski instructor, was teaching another novice not far from where Ali was working with Gratton.

“I couldn’t hear everything they were saying,” noted Montemagni, now an attorney in West Dover. “But I did hear Bob tell him, ‘OK, now you’ve got it. I’m going to release you.’ Ali moved about 10 or 12 feet with his skis still touching on front. All of sudden, though, they went parallel and he was a heading straight downhill, picking up massive speed.

“What I saw was quite remarkable,” Montemagni said. “Ali put his hands up in the air, still holding the poles. It was a panic move. He yelled, ‘Get out of my way! Get out of my way!’ Little kids on the slope scrambled. He didn’t know how to stop himself. I was thinking, ‘His career is over. He’ll break both femurs.’”

But Ali defied the odds. “He got vertical,” Montemagni continued. “He jumped into the air and kicked his feet out in front of him, so the bottoms of his feet took the brunt of the crash. That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen a skier do.”

Ali finished his lesson in about two hours and went back to the ski shop. There, he encountered 6-year-old John West with his older brother Walter and their father. While riding in the chairlift, they had observed the once-and-future champion with Gratton below them.

“Ali shadowboxed with us,” West said. “My brother asked him, ‘Do you think you can beat Joe Frazier?’ He said, ‘You see me falling down on the slope out there? That’s how many times Frazier’s going down in the ring!’”

Not quite, as it turned out. Ali regained his boxing license five months after the Mount Snow sojourn. But Frazier, who held the heavyweight title, defeated him at New York’s Madison Square Garden on March 8 in 1971.

In June of that year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ali’s conviction. He went on to once again become the heavyweight champion of the world at a 1974 match in Zaire billed as “The Rumble in the Jungle.”

The Grattons have kept all the news clippings from Ali's trip to slopes in a scrapbook. Ali is quoted as saying, “This is a little harder than I thought” and “If Sonny Liston couldn’t take me, the skis won’t.”  Headlines such as “Ali KO’d by first ski lesson” still make the Grattons laugh.

“It all meant so much to us,” Helene Gratton said. “To have had that experience and now, with his passing, it’s really overwhelming.”

Correction: Muhammad Ali became the Heavyweight Champion of the World at a 1974 match in Zaire billed as “The Rumble in the Jungle. An earlier version of the story listed the location incorrectly.