Talk in the air now about a possible Mike Tyson fight here recalls a time nearly a quarter-century ago when there was a heavy buzz and much anticipation about Ali stepping into the ring at Aloha Stadium.

In 1981, Lee had been three years into retirement from the Hawai'i State Boxing Commission when he was urgently summoned to the Capitol by then-Gov. George Ariyoshi one morning.

"I got a call from the Governor's office and his secretary told me, 'We need you here at 11 a.m.,'" Lee said. "I knew they were supposed to have a (commission) meeting at noon to give Ali his license to fight here. When I got there, they had a judge to swear me in and they gave me a piece of paper to take to the commission meeting to show that I was officially on the commission."

Rumor had it that Ali's camp selected Hawai'i for the fight just so that they could secure a license and then turn around and take the fight to the Caribbean.

When Lee walked into a commission meeting room packed wall-to-wall with spectators and cameras and took a seat at the table, facing Ali, boxing promoter Sad Sam Ichinose "asked me what I was doing there. I told him, 'Sam, I just got sworn in.'

"Sam congratulated me and I told him, 'Thanks, but before the day is over, I think you and I are gonna be enemies.'"

For it was Lee, with a keen grasp of the commission rules, who turned what had been the foregone conclusion of a license for the fast-fading Ali into a stunning and controversial rejection.

Lee succeeded in getting a 3-2 vote to defer the application for a week, effectively killing the license and the Ali-John L. Gardner fight because Ali, then 38, would, in four days, turn 39 — then past the age limit for a license since state law required at least another week before a meeting could be held.

The rejection prompted a firestorm of controversy. And, Lee said, even some death threats. But history ultimately underlined the wisdom of Lee's position on several fronts.

Ali, an investigation disclosed, had been forced to give up his license in Nevada after the TKO beating he took three months earlier from Larry Holmes.

Ultimately Ali fought — and lost to Trevor Berbick — later that year in the Bahamas. It was his last bout.

By then, Harold Smith, aka Ross Fields, who was to have co-promoted the Hawai'i bout with Ichinose, was declared a federal fugitive for his part in a $21 million Beverly Hills, Calif., bank swindle. Smith was eventually arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

"The governor never told me to kill the fight, but I think he knew how I felt about it," Lee said. "He (Ali) was deteriorating and people just wanted to use him and make money off of him. We didn't know then about his (Parkinson's disease), of course, but you could tell he'd already had enough."

Boxing smarts

Bobby Lee had a successful amateur boxing career before becoming a respected member of the Hawai'i State Boxing Commission. Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

"I was a catcher not a boxer and I would have gotten my brains scrambled," Lee said. "I didn't graduate from high school, but I'd spent enough time around boxing to know that much."

In a career that started "when I was 7 or 8" fighting at Pioneer Mill on Maui and on the plantation circuit, Lee had come to gain quite a hard knocks education in the sport.

Before he was a teenager he was earning 10 cents a fight by going around to various camps on the weekend.

"The workers would bet on the fights and, when you won, you got some money. A dime was pretty good money then, you could buy two cones of sushi for a nickel or a bowl of saimin."

Lee likes to say, "I thought a whack to the chin was good fun. I wasn't really smart and I wasn't a very good athlete at most sports, but I found that I could fight and I figured if I ever wanted to earn recognition at something, it would have to be in boxing."

Only it wouldn't be quite the way he might have imagined.

After his discharge from the Army in 1947, Lee got a job with the-then territorial boxing commission, the beginnings of a 56-year association with the group. Along the way he would hold senior positions with the World Boxing Council, the North American Boxing Federation, Orient and Pacific Boxing Federation and presidency of the World Boxing Association.

"I'm not saying I was this great self-made man," Lee said, "but whatever I became, I owed to boxing."