Fighter’s Heaven: Muhammad Ali’s Training Camp in the Pennsylvania Wilderness

Muhammad Ali in the gym at his Deer Lake training camp, 1978.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

On a mountainside overlooking Deer Lake, in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County, is a restored boxers’ training camp called Fighter’s Heaven, originally built by Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) in 1972. The Champ, as he boastfully called himself, designed the boxing haven during the early phase of his post-three-year-suspension comeback tour in order to escape the hullabaloo of civilization as he trained for almost every fight between 1972 and 1981.

At the training camp, located just 20 miles north of Reading, Ali prepared for some of the most memorable fights of his 21-year professional boxing career — bouts with Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Ken Norton and Floyd Patterson. Ali maintained an open-door policy for Larry Holmes, Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, Sugar Ray Leonard, and other amateurs and young prizefighters to train with him at the hillside site. The media was commonly summoned there to cover what goes on in the life of a boxer. At the camp, Ali rode horseback, designed a rock garden, chopped down trees, and entertained celebrities.

What started as a mobile home and gymnasium in 1972 grew by the time he left in 1981 into an 18-building sanctuary for Ali and invited guests. The purpose of the rustic boxing haven, Ali eluded to Bob Waters of Newsday, was “to be away from the cities, to smell fresh air.”

The arrival of Muhammad Ali in Deer Lake was called “a minor miracle” by Tom Cushman of the Philadelphia Daily News. Indeed, no person in the boxing world would have thought that after spending the first half of his career training at Miami’s Fifth Street Gym, owned by his trainer Angelo Dundee, that one of the planet’s most recognizable persons would make a distant valley in central Pennsylvania his training ground. But Dundee’s facility in South Beach was crowded, humid, and overrun by rats and termites. Ali was also distracted by Miami’s Overtown, where pool halls and barbershops were obstructive to his boxing prep. And after he suffered a defeat — his first in 31 fights — in a bout with “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier on March 8, 1971, Ali conceded that neither the sultry conditions nor the distractions existent in South Beach were what he wanted in a training location.

The log gym, center, and kitchen, right, at Ali’s training camp were set in a courtyard with a large outdoor fireplace that served as a focal point for camp members who would gather there to share their special camaraderie.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

In the summer of 1971, Ali’s business manager, Gene Kilroy, a native of Mahanoy City in Schuylkill County and former public relations executive of the Philadelphia Eagles, suggested that the purchase of the hillside landscape would be in the Champ’s best interest both financially and professionally. Ali was convinced to test the idea. With Kilroy’s help, Ali provisionally secluded himself on a mink farm owned by boxing enthusiast Bernie Pollack in Orwigsburg, next to Deer Lake, where one of Ali’s former opponents, Ernie Terrell, once trained. That summer and fall, Ali worked himself into physical and mental shape for two subsequent fights: a technical knockout victory over Jimmy Ellis on July 26 and a 12-round decision over Buster Mathis on November 17.

It was after the Mathis fight in Spring 1972 that Ali officially purchased 6 acres from Pollack on Sculps Hill Road, uprooted some trees, and raised a boxing community in Pennsylvania’s Blue Ridge Mountains. As Ali’s right-hand man for the duration of the fighter’s career and as the individual instrumental in helping restore Ali’s boxing license, Kilroy enlightened Ali on the benefits of property tax deductions, while also suggesting that a remote training center would offer an escape from the media and other distractions that exist at boxing gyms in locations popularly frequented by prizefighters.

The extensive restoration inside the log gym at Fighter’s Heaven was completed in 2018. It contains a boxing ring and many photographs and videos chronicling Muhammad Ali’s storied career.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

Ali hired Glenn B. Miller Log Home Construction Co. of Hamburg to build the camp as he trained for a bout against George Chuvalo. When finished, the training site would encompass Ali’s personal log cabin, a kitchen and dining cabin (run by his aunt Coretta Clay and Lana Shabazz), a horse stable and chicken coop, two bunkhouses for Ali’s sparring partners, two mobile homes for Ali’s bodyguards and trainers, a horse-drawn covered carriage wagon, and a small log cabin used as a mosque. The camp’s showpiece was Ali’s gymnasium that contained a regulation-size boxing ring with a white canvas and red, white and blue ropes. Though the gym had space enough for 300 spectators, crowds often overflowed when Ali trained for his bigger fights. Ali kept costs to a minimum by having an artesian well installed at the center of camp. He used a coal stove instead of electric heating. He also avoided a cable bill when he mounted an antenna at the top of Blue Ridge Mountain. “It’s like a return to the old days of boxing,” Ali’s trainer Dundee said, “when all the big fighters had their training camps.”

Originally called the Muhammad Ali Training Camp, the Deer Lake location was designed to give Ali a financial safety net. Since returning to prizefighting after an involuntary three-year hiatus from 1967 to 1970 for charges of draft evasion (the Supreme Court eventually exonerated him), training expenses had become exorbitant. The main reason his advisors considered the secluded land in Schuylkill County was due to the $250,000 price tag it cost Ali to prepare for the Frazier bout in 1971. “I’m saving money this way,” Ali explained during the earliest phase of construction, as reported in The New York Times. “This is an investment [and] it ain’t too late to start saving.” Kilroy and Dundee helped Ali conceive an investment plan, one that put aside 75 percent of his boxing purses. “I don’t want nobody whispering, ‘See that waitress, that’s Muhammad Ali’s daughter.’ That’s pitiful when you think about it,” he conceded. He was frightened at the thought of wasting his millions, a fate that might result in minimum wage jobs for his children, which was $1.60 an hour in 1972.

Ali’s training regime at his Deer Lake camp included vigorous work in the forest.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

Not only was the purchase of the land in Deer Lake financially motivated, but the solitude Ali found there would change the way boxers his age took care of their bodies, thus extending the average duration of a prizefighter’s career. With limited distractions, it was easier for Ali to lead a spartan existence, which entailed waking up before sunrise and going to sleep shortly after sundown. It was also easier for Ali and his trainers to find ways to exercise. “We’re going to the woods,” Dundee said in 1972 when training Ali for a fight against Floyd Patterson. At Deer Lake, Dundee explained, Ali would see “more trees and more hills and more animals than he ever saw in his life.”

“I’m 30 years old,” Ali explained to sportswriter Tom Cushman, once the public learned he built a camp in the Pennsylvania woods. “When I get weight on me now, it don’t come off so easy.” But at Deer Lake, Ali made a daily habit of waking up before 5 o’clock in the morning for long runs, ranging from 2 to 6 miles, depending on how close it was to a fight, with either cornerman Bundini Brown or Dundee following behind in a car. “I got hills to run up and down, and I can run any time of the day I want because I don’t have to worry about traffic.” He also had the forest at his disposal. “I get me an axe and I go out and chop down some trees,” Ali added. “[I]n places like Miami and New York you’re not allowed to chop trees.”

In August 1973 Ali hoisted a large iron bell bearing a resemblance to the Liberty Bell atop two 20-foot-tall supportive poles. Once installed, this bell rang four times a day: wakeup at half past 4 o’clock in the morning, again at 8 o’clock for breakfast, then 5 o’clock in the evening for supper, and one last time signaling lights out at 10 o’clock.

From the start, the media and public considered Ali’s mountainside camp bewildering. Tom Cushman writing in the Philadelphia Daily News described it as “Muhammad’s Mountain,” a “sprawl of log cabin architecture . . . hewed from the wilderness.” The Boston Globe’s Ray Fitzgerald called the camp “Ali’s new toy . . . as if he woke up one morning and found it under his Christmas tree.” Cus D’Amato, the former trainer of heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, said Ali’s camp was “an ideal place to train.” Even a sportswriter for The Province from Vancouver called the camp a “woodland idyll.”

Ali rarely secluded himself at the camp. He regularly spent time entertaining the many fans who flocked there. Here he relaxes in his private cabin in 1978.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

Almost from day one, boxing luminaries and popular culture icons clamored to visit Ali’s haven for prizefighters. They were an eclectic collection of personalities—from aging boxer Stanley “Kitten” Hayward to the apprenticing Larry Holmes, but also Steve Van Buren of the Philadelphia Eagles, Jack Palance, Andy Warhol, Nancy Wilson, the Jackson 5 and the Delfonics. Several television personalities visited Deer Lake, most notably Dick Cavett, Howard Cosell and Henry Tafoya. According to the sports editor of the Pottsville Republican, the Champ’s camp had become “a tourist attraction” for Schuylkill County in general, inspiring thousands of out-of-town visitors who aided in the area’s economy. The tourists also lined Ali’s pockets, as his sparring sessions were open to the public for a dollar fee. The gymnasium at Ali’s camp was “usually choked with people,” reported the Hazleton Standard-Speaker. According to Ali, the boxing camp grew into “a little village” with accommodations for 40 people. “I’m encouraging other fighters to come up here and train,” Ali told Cushman. “It’ll be good for them.”

Indeed, it was good for the boxers. And it was good for the sport to have Ali’s playfulness back in the profession. One of the first fighters to visit Ali’s boxing sanctuary was 37-year-old, two-time heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. Though the second Ali–Patterson match was scheduled for later that month, Patterson agreed to attend the September 4, 1972, ribbon-cutting ceremony for Ali’s Deer Lake training camp. In his vintage style, Ali elected himself Deer Lake mayor for the day. In that self-appointed role, he declared September 4 “Floyd Patterson Day,” which included a buffet in Patterson’s honor after the christening of the boxing ring and workouts by each boxer — not against each other, of course. As a tribute to all of his African American sparring partners and boxing trailblazers, Ali sprinkled “black sweat” over the boxing ring during the ceremony.

Ali would eventually defeat Patterson in a seventh-round TKO on September 20, 1972. Two months later, Ali knocked out the world light-heavyweight champion Bob Foster in the eighth round. He then defeated Britain’s European heavyweight champion Joe Bugner in a 12-round decision. These fights were supposed to be part of Ali’s path to obtain a rematch against Frazier, the reigning heavyweight champ.

In 1973 Ali’s journey to a title match hit two major roadblocks. The first came when Frazier lost to prizefighting newcomer George Foreman on January 22, 1973. Frazier’s setback meant that Ali would have to wait another year to get a chance at the title, as long as it remained in Foreman’s possession.

These small cabins at Fighter’s Heaven housed members of Ali’s entourage as well as special guests and celebrities who visited the camp.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

Then in a March 1973 fight, Ali had his jaw broken in the first round by 6-foot-3-inch, 210-pound U.S. Marine Corps veteran Ken Norton Sr. and lost a 12-round split decision.

While recovering at Deer Lake after the loss, Ali told his supporters he would seek a rematch against Norton but would retire if he lost a second time. Ali then spent 11 weeks at his mountainside camp preparing for Norton. One of his sparring partners was Easton native Larry Holmes, a newcomer to professional boxing but trainee under Ali since 1971. Ali and the Easton Assassin, who would spar together at Deer Lake until 1975, pushed one another in the ring, as Holmes utilized the sessions with Ali to prepare for his own fights.

Ali was also aided by the help of a former sparring partner from the Fifth Street Gym in Miami, Vinnie Curto. The boxers would wake up at 4:30 in the morning for their daily run, chop wood, and then eat breakfast. After a morning nap, sparring sessions began at 2:30 in the afternoon and ended around 4 o’clock. They then had leisure time before lights out at 10 o’clock. “It’s beautiful,” Curto said of Ali’s routine at Deer Lake, as quoted in The Miami News. “I just came back from fighter’s heaven.”

Fighter’s Heaven. It was during this moment in the summer of 1973 that Ali’s training camp acquired its signature nickname. No, Curto was not the individual who coined the phrase. It was in fact Ali who gave his camp the name. But it was the growth of the camp’s popularity with boxers like Curto and Holmes that helped Ali brand it as a dreamland for contemporary prizefighters and a paradise for America’s pugilistic past. Visitors, the media, and eventually the current owner of the property, Mike Madden, took a liking to the nickname.

Cassius Clay Sr., Ali’s father, painted the names of fighters his son admired on the large boulders scattered around the camp.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

It was also while taking a break from training for the Norton rematch on August 13, 1973, that Ali revitalized an old idea cherry-picked from a visit a decade earlier to light-heavyweight champion Archie Moore’s training camp, the Salt Mine, located on 120 acres of rocks in southern California. The plan was to decorate Fighter’s Heaven with large boulders to honor boxing legends such as Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, Kid Gavilan, Archie Moore, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Sonny Liston and Joe Frazier. While driving around Schuylkill County, Ali noticed heavy rocks on the side of the road. “Right away my imagination could see those rocks here in my camp [and] I could imagine the names of the great boxing champions on those rocks.” Within 24 hours, a construction crew delivered Ali’s new rock collection to the camp and his father, Cassius Clay Sr., a painter, decorated each large stone with the names of boxers admired by Ali. The larger the rock, the greater the veneration Ali held for the boxer. Photographer Peter Angelo Simon said, “No one visiting Fighter’s Heaven could fail to be intrigued by the painted boulders that lined the edge of the camp.” But for Ali, “they served both as tributes to the heroes of his sport and cautionary auguries of the perils he faced.”

The volume of boxers at Fighter’s Heaven in 1973 was a boon to Ali’s disciplined routine. He stuck to a strict diet of string beans, cabbage and no dessert, and he bragged about chopping down 85 trees to get in shape for the rematch. Every time a tree fell, Ali yelled “Norton! Ken Norton!”

“Nobody’s gonna break my jaw and get away with it,” Ali was quoted in the Wilmington Morning News on the eve of his second fight with Norton. “Look at me, I’m 213 pounds [he weighed 221 for the first Norton fight]. I’m in better shape today than when I fought [and lost to] Joe Frazier. I want to win it big. I predict I’ll stop him. I’m not saying what round, but I’ll stop him. This is the first chance I’ve had to fight the fellow who beat me.”

Ali often trained with local martial arts instructor George Dillman. Pictured here in October 1973 along a dirt road on Sculps Hill after a morning run, the two discuss the forthcoming rematch with Joe Frazier scheduled for January 28, 1974.
Courtesy George Dillman

Ali eventually defeated Norton in a 12-round split decision on September 10. A subsequent victory over Rudie Lubbers in a 12-round unanimous decision on October 20 set up a rematch with Joe Frazier the following year.

Excitement over Ali–Frazier II in 1974 waned a bit, with Frazier having lost the title to Foreman. Ali’s boastfulness during preparations at Fighter’s Heaven, however, brought some excitement to the rematch. “Tell all the people I’ll be up here on my mountain getting ready in the snow to whip Joe Frazier,” Ali shouted to reporters covering his training for Super Fight II. Then, just two months before the fight, Ali invited future rival Earnie Shavers to his forested camp as a sparring partner. One session that was designed to go five lazy rounds, however, became pugnaciously violent. According to Gene Kilroy, Shavers knocked Ali down. That resulted in “a mild riot,” said Kilroy, involving the handlers of both boxers. What started as a verbal confrontation quickly turned physical and “lasted for about 10 minutes.”

The fracas resulting from Shavers’ aggression during a languid spar was amplified since Ali was already dealing with an injury to his right hand. He had never recovered from an inflamed bursa sac around his knuckle obtained during the rematch with Norton. “I went to the doctor, had it X-rayed two times,” Ali said in the New York Daily News, evading truth that he was suffering from arthritis and his rounds on the heavy bag and with sparring partners in the ring were already limited. “He gave me a shot of cortisone and it stung — Ooh! But there’s nothing wrong now.” There was no secret among his trainers at Deer Lake, however, that Ali used a wax melting machine to treat his hand with heat.

Ali would later claim he was “playing dumb.” After his unanimous point victory over Frazier on January 28, 1974, Ali said, “I trick[ed] you with my sore hand.” The victory set up Ali’s historic fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, for the heavyweight title against George Foreman, which originally was to be called “From Slave Ship to Championship,” but was later renamed, by Ali, “Rumble in the Jungle.”

Ali used this mosque for regular prayer during his time at Fighter’s Heaven.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

Ali logged 302 miles, 241 rounds sparred, and countless hours in prayer to Allah at Fighter’s Heaven in preparation for the October 30, 1974, title fight against the 1968 Olympic gold medalist. “I’m going to run the mountains,” Ali retorted when asked how he was preparing for Foreman. He also said, “I pray daily to Allah. That Allah will help and protect me.”

In spite of a delay to the bout caused when Foreman suffered a cut to his right eye during a sparring session, Ali maintained fighting weight and enhanced his strategy against the much bigger and more powerful opponent by continuing his early morning running routine and workouts in the gym. Ali told a pool of reporters how he managed to avoid burnout: “I watch carefully to see if I’m less tired than I was a certain point yesterday.” It was a point reinforced by Dundee: “Muhammad knows what he is doing. He does not want to lose the physical edge.”

The only break in Ali’s training came in mid-September when the National Football League’s Jim Brown visited Deer Lake to interview Ali for ABC-TV’s Wide World. Brown’s discussion with Ali spotlighted each feature of Fighter’s Heaven, including Ali’s work with new sparring partner and future heavyweight contender Rodney “The Bowlus Bear” Bobick.

Against the odds, Ali eventually knocked out Foreman with a left-right combination with 13 seconds left in the eighth round to regain the world heavyweight title. He then won three warmup matches in 1975 over Chuck Wepner, Ron Lyle and Joe Bugner to set up the third and final fight with Frazier.

Ali at a training session with cornerman Drew “Bundini” Brown at the camp in 1978. Brown coined the phrase “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

During one Fighter’s Heaven training session for the Thrilla in Manila, scheduled at Quezon City, Philippines, Ali ran out onto the boxing ring dressed in a white karate gi with a black belt around his waist, wearing karate-style gloves and shoes. He ran six strides around the ring and leapt into the air and shouted, “Go tell that to Joe Frazier, that I’m studying karate.” The truth was Ali had studied karate since 1972, occasionally sparring at George Dillman’s studio in Reading.

As it turned out, Ali took an immense beating but successfully defended his title by dominating the early and later rounds as viewers worldwide watched on October 1, 1975.

In February 1976 at Fighter’s Heaven, Ali hosted the era’s most recognizable sports commentator, Howard Cosell, who was filming a special titled “Muhammad Ali versus the Greatest Heavyweights of All Time,” for ABC’s Wide World of Sports. After the program aired, however, Ali put the Deer Lake camp up for sale. He would train for four bouts in 1976, including his third match against Ken Norton, but none of the preparations occurred at Fighter’s Heaven. Ali instead trained at Kiamesha Lake in New York and at Show Low, Arizona, where the proximity to Hollywood made it more convenient to work on his first big-screen film, The Greatest.

On December 1, 1976, Ali announced he was retiring from boxing. “The worst thing I could do is go back in the ring. I’m still intelligent. Still halfway pretty.” He also wanted to work on movies and build an import-export business selling Muhammad Ali prayer rugs (neither venture ever got off the ground). After he announced his retirement, Ali was approached by the U.S. Olympic Committee about using Deer Lake to train Olympic boxers. “I don’t have time,” he said. “I don’t want to be in some old sweaty gym teaching a boxer to box. I want to do something for God, for humanity and for people.

In fact, Ali would not retire, instead choosing to defend his title twice in 1977. That year, he defeated Alfredo Evangelista and former sparring partner Earnie Shavers.

Ali relaxes in the gym’s dressing room after a sparring session in 1978.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

In September 1978 Ali, now age 36, returned to Fighter’s Heaven. By that time, however, he had lost his title in a 15-round decision to 24-year-old Leon Spinks. According to Dundee, Ali returned to Deer Lake to train for the Spinks rematch because, “in Deer Lake there’s nothing, but nothing.” Harkening back to his normal routine, Ali did his usual road work at the crack of dawn. He added a daily 90-minute calisthenics routine, then sparring, heavy bag hitting, light bag work and jump roping in the gymnasium. Ali spent five months at Deer Lake running up hills and chopping down trees. “I’m already in better shape than I was for the last fight [against Spinks],” Ali was quoted in the Miami News one month before the scheduled match.

Ali occupied leisure time in his cabin at Fighter’s Heaven brainstorming the launch of a candy bar. Three weeks before the Spinks rematch, Ali sneaked off to Lititz for a news conference at Wilbur Chocolate Co. to unveil the new Muhammad Ali Crisp Crunch, a 2½-ounce peanut and crisped rice confection that sold for 59 cents. Ali used the ceremony to trash-talk Spinks. He said, “He is too ugly to represent boxing. I call him the vampire because with his teeth missing, he looks like he has fangs. Spinks can’t have a candy bar because his face is too ugly to put on it.”

Ali would use the momentum of the time reinvested at Fighter’s Heaven to regain the heavyweight title from Spinks on September 15, 1978, where more than 63,000 fans packed the New Orleans Superdome. The victory made Ali the only boxer to win the world heavyweight title three times. More importantly, perhaps, was that this was Ali’s last boxing victory.

After no fights in 1979 — another fleeting retirement — thus ceding his title to his protégé Larry Holmes, Ali would fight twice in 1980 despite a medical evaluation stating he was suffering from brain damage. He used Fighter’s Heaven to train for both fights. Now age 38, Ali was TKO’d in the 11th round by Holmes on October 2. He later lost by decision to Trevor Berbick on December 11.

What is realized through the story of Fighter’s Heaven is that Ali never really removed himself from the world. Rather, while in the woods, the world came to him. He and his camp enabled visitors to transform into better versions of themselves — from sports journalists who used Ali’s animated personality to draw the public’s attention to a waning sport to the young prizefighters who benefited from Ali’s talents and gymnasium to launch careers. Ali’s legacy is shown in the successful undertakings of those who walked into and then out of his Fighter’s Heaven.

Fighter’s Heaven Today

In July 2016 Mike Madden, the son of former Oakland Raiders coach and NFL broadcaster John Madden, purchased Muhammad Ali’s training camp off Route 61 in Orwigsburg, Schuylkill County. The property, located on the crest of Sculps Hill Road, not far from Deer Lake on “Muhammad’s Mountain,” as members of the media once called it, had a peculiar existence since the Champ left in 1981. From then until 1997 the camp was vacant and used only as a meeting place for a single mothers’ support group. In July 1997 Ali finally found a buyer: George Dillman, his former karate instructor, purchased the property for $114,000. At the time, Ali’s log cabin was sunken into the ground and weeds enveloped every other structure at the site. So Dillman invested $400,000 into the restoration of the camp. For years, he used Ali’s camp as a martial arts school and as an inn affectionately named Butterfly & Bee Bed & Breakfast. When the annual martial arts camps became too exhaustive, Dillman put the site up for sale in 2002.

Mike Madden, center, cuts the ribbon at the official grand opening of Fighter’s Heaven on June 1, 2019. Special guests that day included Gene Kilroy, second from left, a prominent member of Ali’s inner circle who was instrumental in Ali’s choosing to build the camp at Deer Lake and former heavyweight champ Tim Witherspoon, second from right, who got his start at the camp as a sparring partner to Ali. Also pictured are, first from left, camp manager and media relations director Sam Matta and, from Madden’s right, his fiancee Susie Lorenzi, Philadelphia boxing judge Lynne Carter, and director of economic development for Carbon Chamber & Economic Development Corp. Kathy Henderson.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

Madden purchased the property from Dillman soon after Ali’s death on June 3, 2016, at 74. Madden had learned about the camp while conducting a Google search of Ali’s life, and it stuck in his head. He paid Dillman $520,000 shortly after walking the site for the first time. The California real estate investor has since expended another million dollars into restoring 13 log structures including Ali’s mosque and gymnasium, the boulders honoring boxing greats, the bell tower, and the furnace that were present on the grounds between 1972 and 1981. Madden has also officially renamed the camp Fighter’s Heaven. The camp reopened on June 1, 2019, with a ceremony that featured Madden, former heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon, and Gene Kilroy, Ali’s personal assistant and the one who advised Ali to make Deer Lake the location of his training camp.

The restored dressing room in the log gym at the camp. In addition to getting massages in this space, Ali often held court with members of the press here.
Photo, ©Jeff Julian

Fighter’s Heaven is currently open to the public on weekends in the spring and summer. The exhibits and guided tours of the grounds follow the lead of camp manager Sam Matta, former sportswriter in Bucks County, who calls the site “priceless” because Ali was a unique person for anytime in our history. “Ali was down-to-earth and able to get along with people from all walks of life.” Matta often welcomes students and teachers on tours of the camp. The team of Madden, Kilroy and Matta aspire to use the camp for overnight corporate retreats. The reopening of the camp in 2019 makes it all the more remarkable that with all that has been written about Ali, this place once played such a large role in the Champ’s boxing success and celebrity. The reopening of the camp means visitors literally walk in the footsteps of an American icon. For more on hours, tours and events, visit fightersheaven.com.

Fighter’s Heaven recently received a Community Initiative Award, presented by the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office (PA SHPO). The awards — a program of PA SHPO’s #PreservationHappensHere initiative to encourage Pennsylvanians to discover, share and celebrate historic places in their communities — recognize organizations, municipalities, agencies, individuals and others for their preservation successes throughout the commonwealth. For more information, visit phmc.pa.gov/Preservation.

Further Reading

Bockris, Victor. Muhammad Ali in Fighter’s Heaven. London: Hutchinson London, 1998. / Cushman, Tom. Muhammad Ali and the Greatest Heavyweight Generation. Cape Girardeau, MO: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2009. / Eig, Jonathan. Ali: A Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. / Muhammad Ali Unfiltered: Rare, Iconic, and Officially Authorized Photos of the Greatest. New York: Gallery/Jeter, 2016. / Remnick, David. King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. New York: Vintage, 1999. / Simon, Peter Angelo. Muhammad Ali: Fighter’s Heaven 1974. London: Reel Art Press, 2016.

The author and editor wish to acknowledge Jeff Julian, for making his photographs available for this article, and George Dillman and Sam Matta, for providing helpful information on Fighter’s Heaven.

Todd M. Mealy, Ph.D., resides in Lancaster County where he teaches at Penn Manor High School. He is the author of six books and is a frequent contributor to Pennsylvania Heritage. His recent articles include “Indomitable: Ora Washington, Philadelphia’s Ultimate Sports Trailblazer” (Winter 2020), “100 Games: The Penn State–Pitt Rivalry” (Summer 2019), and “Keep the Boys in College! How World War I Produced a Penn State Football Legend” (Winter 2017).