Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion, was confident and bold enough in his heyday to predict which round he would knock out his opponents.

Ali, who died on the weekend, made another bold prediction in 1974 in Bermuda that came true ... that a then ten or 11-year-old Angelita Diaz would one day become a beauty queen. She did, almost ten years later, when she was crowned Miss Bermuda 1983.

Diaz, now Mrs Diaz Douglass, and living in York, Pennsylvania, has fond memories of her meeting with Ali one day at the airport more than 40 years ago.

“My mom was Brenda Swainson Diaz at the time and was a customs officer at the airport,” she said.

“Apparently, she met him at the airport and struck up a conversation with him. They chatted about many things, including family and children. He asked my mom if she would bring me to the airport to meet him.

“I vividly remember her running into the house to get me ready to meet Muhammad Ali. Her excitement was contagious. When we got to the airport, I remember him standing there like a giant ... or maybe that’s how small I was.

“My mom introduced us and then he stretched out the largest hands I have ever seen to this day and lifted me effortlessly into his arms. I remember how nice and soft-spoken he was and how gently he held me. I remember him asking me the usual questions, like how old I was, etc, but have no recollection of how I answered him. The postcard in my hand was bought there in the airport for him to sign his autograph. I’ve had this photograph with me all of my life, although I could not begin to tell you where the postcard is, some 42 years later.”

Brenda Raynor recalls taking her daughter to the airport on her day off to meet the departing boxing champion, whom she remembers as a down-to-earth celebrity. “I had to have taken her to the airport, knowing he was leaving,” Mrs Raynor said. “She bought two postcards of Bermuda beaches that she wanted to give him.

“It’s been so long ago, but I can remember seeing him off at the airport. He was getting ready to check in when I approached him.

“He was very friendly, very kind, just a glowing person. Working at the airport, I came in contact with a lot of people who were famous, but there were a couple of them who weren’t friendly — you couldn’t say that about him.

“He just came up to you like you were the big star and made you feel very important. He was very kind.”

Mrs Raynor said she was a fan of Ali long before she met him; in fact, in the days when he was Cassius Clay.

“When I was younger and living in the Turkey Hill area [of St George’s], the Brangmans lived next door to me and in those days they listened to the fights on the radio,” she said. “And you would hear all about Cassius Clay or some other boxer before him.

“Boxing was always very big here in Bermuda and people would run to one another’s houses just to sit down and listen to it on the radio. I was a fan of him before I met him and hardly missed any of his fights.”