Nico Ali Walsh wasn’t planning to wear his grandfather’s shorts last Saturday night. He had other plans for his ring attire, but before traveling to Tulsa, Oklahoma for his pro debut, he packed Muhammad Ali’s famous Everlast trunks into his bag just in case.
Turns out those white trunks held some kind of magic for Walsh. And for everybody else who watched Walsh knock out Jordan Weeks on ESPN.
“It was powerful. I tried them on one time, the day of the weigh-in, I moved around in them, and they looked nice and felt nice,” Walsh told me this week. “I felt ready to rock. But then I really got the feeling for them in the dressing room before the fight. I put them on, and it was like, ‘Uh oh, now it’s on.’ It was like putting knight’s armor on.”
Before Saturday night, Walsh had a different relationship with the legacy of his grandfather than most any other fan. While Ali could make the entire world stop when he arrived at a location—if you were ever near him in a real-life experience, it was like there was something different in the air—Walsh didn’t get that same sense.
Ali was his grandad, and even though Walsh read comic books when he was a kid depicting Ali vs. Superman, Walsh’s experience with the most famous boxer in history was basically the same as any other grandson to his grandfather.
But at times, the shadow of Ali has been suffocating.
When Ali died in 2016, some of his possessions were passed down to Walsh. He received some of Ali’s shirts, some of his Halloween masks, and those gorgeous trunks. He put it all in a box, and he was determined to leave them there. “I was going to let that box collect dust,” Walsh said.
Yet, perhaps as a result of Ali’s success, his otherworldly fame and his neverending legacy, Walsh’s passion for boxing couldn’t be blunted. When he told his parents—Rasheda Ali, his mother and Ali’s daughter, and Bob Walsh, his dad—that he wanted to put on the gloves and step into the ring, he got plenty of pushback.
The only pushback that would have mattered in Walsh’s eyes was from the one who turned the Ali name into a legacy. So, Walsh asked Ali about whether he should box. He tried to goad his grandfather into saying no. He tried to bait Ali into telling Walsh that the sport was too dangerous, too traumatizing, that he was too intelligent.
Ali never bit on Walsh’s feints.
“I wanted to get pushback from him, but he didn’t give it to me,” Walsh said. “All he did was encourage me. Every time I asked him, not wanting him to encourage me, I was hoping he would say, ‘You know what, Nico. You’re smart, don’t go into boxing.’ If he would have said that, I wouldn’t have gone into boxing.”
Walsh still doesn’t know why Ali never discouraged him, and he wishes now he could have asked him why. Maybe he got part of the answer, though, last Saturday in the aftermath of his first-round TKO victory. Afterward, with the chants of “Ali, Ali” still lingering in his head, he met people who claimed to never watch boxing but who had watched Walsh fight anyway. And they cried because Walsh’s performance and the trunks he wore made them remember of a time gone by or of a long lost relative with whom they had watched Ali fights in his glory days.
“I set out to continue this legacy of my grandfather, but I had no idea it would make people feel like this,” Walsh said. “… A bunch of people have been coming up to me and saying, ‘You brought your grandfather to life that night.’ The ‘Ali’ chants in the crowd, that’s something you can’t write. That’s something I would watch in black and white films with my grandfather fighting. Now they are all chanting ‘Ali’ for me.”
It won’t be long before Walsh hears those chants again. After he beat Weeks, Bob Arum, the legendary promoter whose first gig was working the Muhammad Ali-George Chuvalo fight in 1966, told him, “Next stop: Atlanta.” That means Walsh will fight on the undercard of the Jamel Herring-Shakur Stevenson fight on Oct. 23.
But he most likely won’t be wearing his grandfather’s trunks. That was probably just a one-time moment, a sprinkling of magic that Walsh will remember forever.
“I wasn’t planning on wearing them to begin with,” Walsh said. “Throughout this whole journey, it was about creating a name for myself. Fate forced me to wear the trunks this time. I believe they did. Maybe I’ll wear them again one day. Maybe for my last ever fight. But it won’t be anytime between them.”
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