MARCH 2017 16 | FRONTDOORSMEDIA .COM Planning for and executing a big event like Celebrity Fight Night obviously takes a team. Executive Director Sean Currie shoulders a lot of the load. Nancy makes sure they’re scrutinizing the expenses and determines the menu and the look of the room, among other things. For Jimmy, “the biggest challenge is time,” he said. “Just everything I’m doing but there’s a lot of people doing a lot more than me. I do get up very early in the morning. I go to bed early at night but I get up early in the morning and I don’t even consider it to be work — it’s just a passion that I have. But the biggest challenge is just trying to get everything on the plate accomplished.” He gives plenty of time, of course, to his three children and seven grandchildren. He also runs his own business, an insurance company. In 2007, Jimmy founded a program for the homeless at St. Vincent de Paul in Phoenix called Never Give Up, which serves 500 to 600 men and women every Monday. He’s there every Monday, if he’s not traveling. On Tuesdays, he leads a men’s and women’s Bible study. For 33 years, he has organized a Christmas party for low-income children, who receive bicycles — he has given away 7,000 of them — and gifts from friends of his who “chip in,” he said. COVER STORY CONTINUED “My son came to me the next day after the event and said, ‘Dad, you’re not going to believe this but I was in the bathroom and Robin Williams was in there and he’s got a football game going and he’s the quarterback … with a roll of toilet paper and he was throwing passes and I was going out for passes catching toilet paper from Robin Williams. And he was calling himself Joe Montana.” Jimmy’s Ringside Tale: Robin Williams Jimmy also organizes Celebrity Fight Night in Italy, in September. This year’s will feature Andrea Bocelli and Elton John, and it will take place in the Colosseum in Rome. “I don’t look at myself as a philanthropist because I’m not a wealthy man,” he said. “A philanthropist in my opinion is someone who gives large amounts of money. I give quite a bit of time. That’s what I’m able to give.” This year’s Celebrity Fight Night in Phoenix will have a different feel without its inspiration, Ali, who died last June. At his funeral service in Louisville, Ky., Nancy said one thing everybody was talking about was his big heart. “They all said that he had such a big heart and no matter who they were, what they accomplished in life, it didn’t matter to him. He treated everybody the same,” she said. “He had a real heart for what you may consider the underprivileged or those that weren’t celebrities, or anyone he came in contact with — he’d just want to stop and spend time with them.” That, she said, has been and will remain the spirit behind Fight Night.

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