Going the Distance with Muhammad Ali.

The short, broad-shouldered guy with arms like a weightlifter and belly like a beer drinker was very insistent. He wore a white tee shirt with the words "Puerto Rico, Jackpot" and a picture of an overflowing slot machine stamped on it. "I am all the way down from Montreal," he tells the fellow from Salsa Productions, "and I want a picture with him."

"Sorry," the fellow says, "I can't arrange it." "Look, it cost me $170 to come down here one way," the guy says. "I have to have a picture with him."

"We've got 200 people coming in from Belgium," says the fellow, "and it's going to cost them a lot more than $170."

"Of course," the guy says. "He's the God." Jacques Dessurault does not look like your ordinary "groupie," but he says he has been following Muhammad Ali wherever the heavyweight champ has been fighting since his 1966 bout with Cleveland Williams in Houston. "I've been at both [Joe] Frazier fights, and I was at the [George] Foreman fight in India."

He means, of course, Africa, right?

Dessurault, a pipe coverer for Union Carbide in Montreal, shrugs: India, Africa, what's the difference? He did not go there for the sightseeing. He went--at a cost of $895--to see Ali wreck Foreman, and now he is spending a vacation with his wife in Puerto Rico to watch the champ crush his next opponent, Jean Pierre Coopman of Belgium.

"I want a picture with him to show my friends," says Dessurault, "so they'll believe I was here."

Susi has only been following Ali since three years ago, when she met him in Beirut. She missed out on his Manila fight with Frazier, but she saw him again when he recently boxed an exhibition in the Bahamas.

Susi says she is 22, but looks 16. She is from Houston, she says, and "in the oil business."

Someone who has been observing her the last few days says she spends money like if she is not in oil, she has got a rich relative who is. "She gives out $10 tips like they were dimes." Notes the observer, "and she keeps buying new cameras to take pictures of Ali during his workouts."

"God brought us together," says Susi. "He [God] spoke to me in Beirut and said I was to follow him [Ali]."

What else was new Tuesday at El San Juan Hotel where Muhammad Ali is preparing for his heavyweight championship fight? Well, you could buy in the hotel's upper lobby an "I Like Ali" tee shirt for three dollars, a "Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee" pin or an 8x10 glossy photo of the champ for one dollar, a copy of The Greatest: My Own Story...