The kid was 15 years old but barely looked a day over 12 when he knocked on the champion's hotel room door, 29 years ago last month.

Belinda Ali answered the door at her Sutton Place suite, looked down at the young man carrying a scrapbook and a tape recorder and invited the stranger in to Muhammad Ali's life.

Michael Pomer remembers it like it was yesterday, his eyes lighting up as he tells the story, his voice getting louder.

"I wonder if he would remember me," said Pomer, knowing Ali will be in Toronto this weekend for the Parkinson's fund-raiser at the Argonauts game. "I understand he's as sharp as he ever was. It just doesn't show because of the disease. I'd love to see him again."

Muhammad Ali was and is his idol. Pomer kept a scrapbook, collected magazines that featured him, bought every biography you could find on the subject. That Saturday in 1973, when Ali came to Toronto to do colour commentary for ABC on the Clyde Gray-Jose Napoles welterweight title fight, Pomer knew he had to meet him. He just knew.

The kid went with two friends down to Sutton Place hotel, where he had read that a young promoter named Don King was staying. He figured if one boxing guy was there, maybe Ali was staying there as well.

He walked in, carrying a suitcase with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, his Ali scrapbook and all his hardcover biographies. He walked in and began looking around for his idol.

He walked floor by floor, asking maids and room service men if they knew where Ali was staying. On the 10th floor, he found a hotel worker who barely spoke English. He showed him a picture of Ali and the worker smiled and pointed down the hallway.

"I gave the guy five bucks," said Pomer, better known around town these days as a local tout named Ca$h. "Do you have any idea how much money five bucks was for a kid in those days?"

He told Ali's first wife that he was the champion's biggest fan. She asked him in, introduced him to her husband, and Ali and Pomer spent the next two hours talking on tape, going through the books and the scrapbooks, clowning around.

"I had forgotten I'd left my friends in the lobby," he said. "After about an hour, I said 'Do you mind if I invite my friends up?' "

He went and found his friends, went back up the elevator and knocked on Ali's door. Ali answered, this time wearing a Richard Nixon mask. He pulled Pomer in by the collar, slamming the door on the other two kids.

Ali then went back into the hallway, still wearing the mask, saying "I am not a crook," before grabbing the shocked kids and pulling them into the suite.

The old tape has since been turned into a CD. The Ali you can't hear anymore sounds so vibrant and so alive on the crackling sounds of almost three decades ago.

"And who are you?," Ali playfully demanded to know of Pomer on the tape. "Are you the local Howard Cosell? Who are you anyway, coming up to my hotel suite and asking these questions?"

Their meeting didn't end at Sutton Place. That's only where it began. Ali invited Pomer and his friends to join him that afternoon in the limousine ride to Maple Leaf Gardens and to be his guest at the welterweight championship fight.

When Ali got out of the limo, his publicist and an entourage around him, they began walking into the Gardens when the doors shut on the kids.

"Hey, we're with the champ!" Pomer yelled desperately.

Ali stopped, turned around, made sure the kids got their tickets. That wasn't the last time Pomer sat down with Muhammad Ali.

Two years later, Ali was back in Toronto, again to do television work on a promotional debacle that had George Foreman fighting five tomato cans in one afternoon of boxing. If it worked once, Pomer thought, why not try it again?

This time it was the Four Seasons and the 34th floor. And this time, Ali was thrilled to see "my main man, Mike."

By then Pomer was a tiny 17 year old, Ali was 33. Again Ali invited his young friends to the fight. Again he sat down for an unscheduled interview.

"I like your interview and I like your style," Ali said on the tape, "but fella, your pay is so cheap I don't want to see you for a while."