Angelo Dundee sent postcards. They came from everywhere. "With Willie in Puerto Rico," one said. Another, "Dupas in Miami tonight." He carried an address book and sent postcards to sportswriters. It was so quaint, postcards showing he'd thought of you. Sometimes, he called.

"Mailing you something," he said.

"What is it?"

"Helen found it," he said.

Such a sweet, sweet man. Angelo Dundee, the son of an Italian shepherd, came to be boxing's most famous trainer. He was an island of sanity in Muhammad Ali's mad world. He was in the corner for a dozen champions, among them Willie Pastrano, Ralph Dupas, Carmen Basilio, Jimmy Ellis, Luis Rodriguez, and, if only for one fight, George Foreman. Sixty years ago at a fight, the short, dark, Italian immigrant's son met a luminous, willowy model named Helen Marone. "She is," he would say, "my greatest champion." They were married three days after she came to Miami to tell him she couldn't marry him because her very Southern Georgia parents would never allow such a mismatch.

"Helen found this thing looking for something else," Dundee said. "You'll like it."

The mailman delivered a memory. It was an 8x10 photograph of an impossibly beautiful young man, 18 years old. There was a sunrise in his smile. He flexed his arms overhead, a strongman's pose. He sat on a fighter's stool. His name ran in script letters across his white workout shirt: "Cassius Clay." All of life awaited him. Behind Clay, Dundee leaned on the ring ropes. Behind Dundee, light came through a pair of tall windows painted with block letters: GYM. The trainer and the kid were in the 5th Street Gym, Miami Beach, 1960.

Two weeks ago, he and Ali were still together. God only knows how Dundee did it. Up from nothing, scrambling for survival through the Depression, street-smart, sly, and unfailingly optimistic, he came to Ali with a psychological gyroscope that kept him even-keeled in a quarter-century of unprecedented turbulence. Dundee's partner in Al...