Ali returns to where it all began

? Muhammad Ali returned to the place where he became Muhammad Ali.

He came home to the 5th Street Gym.

So much has changed in 50 years. Sonny Liston, Malcolm X, Chris Dundee, Luis Sarria, Bundini Brown, Hank Kaplan, Martin Luther King, Jackie Gleason and John Lennon are gone.

The mouth that once recited rhymes with a speed-bag cadence has been muted by Parkinson’s disease. The body that used to float like a butterfly is frail and trembling.

The sport of boxing has been supplanted on TV by mixed martial arts, poker and rodeo.

But the gym has been reborn.

Ali came back Thursday evening to help his old trainer Angelo Dundee open the place with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Boxers, trainers, promoters and cornermen came, too, mingling around a red, white and blue ring to celebrate the reincarnation of a landmark that was torn down in 1993.

“I feel as juiced as I do before a title fight,” Dundee said.

When Ali entered through the back door, the crowd roared and chanted, “Ali! Ali! Ali!” He could not smile or speak, but he was happy he had made the trip from his hometown of Louisville, Ky. He sat at a table and flipped through the pages of an 800-page biography entitled GOAT, Greatest of All Time.

His sister-in-law, Marilyn, assisted him as he sipped water and put on sunglasses. The champ is 68 but his face is still remarkably smooth, still pretty.

The gym that was asylum, temple, theater and nerve center during the sport’s golden era is not the same, either. What used to be a grungy sweatbox now has air conditioning. It’s located between a bank and a cellphone store instead of up a flight of rickety stairs above a liquor store and drugstore where Ali used to order fresh-squeezed orange juice.

The new gym will offer Pilates and cardio boxing classes, pursuits that the old 5th Street’s regulars — Sam The Mumbler, Evil Eye Finkle, Lou Gross and “Sellout” Moe Fleischer would scoff at. The old gym was for boxing purists.

Treadmills and leotards? The cigar-chomping Emmett Sully, gatekeeper during the gym’s heyday, used to charge 50 cents admission to watch the boxers work. He taped signs to the walls: “If you spit on the floor, you can lick it up.”

At least the termites are gone.

“I used to tell the fighters not to skip rope in one section because we were afraid they would fall through the floor,” Dundee said.

Dundee, and the gym, meant enough to Ali for him to fly in for a short visit. He might have recalled his days of running across from Overtown to the gym, when Miami was a segregated city. Cops used to stop him, thinking he was fleeing a crime. In the evening, he’d run back, and after midnight sometimes he would listen to Sam Cooke, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald jam in the Overtown clubs following their performances in Miami Beach.

Later he lived in a house in Allapattah. After upsetting Liston in 1964, he converted to Islam. Miami was the place where he also changed his name and announced his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War.

“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” he said in his front yard.

It was good to remember.

“Muhammad is delighted to see all his friends here,” Dundee said.

On Thursday, it was a grand evening to remember how Ali “shook up the world” during a time of racial and generational turbulence. He returned to a hero’s welcome.

“Champ! Champ! Champ!” the crowd roared at the new 5th Street Gym.

It was almost like old times.