Muhammad Ali was the ‘most beautiful creature on the planet’

There’s a story about Muhammad Ali that might have been lost to history, disappearing among all the other Ali esoterica, but for the Los Angeles Times photographer Boris Yaro.

On Monday, Jan. 19, 1981, Yaro heard reports of a suicidal jumper on the radio. His editor wasn’t interested, but Yaro drove over to Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile regardless, where he found a young black man in flared jeans and a hoodie, perched on an office-building fire escape nine floors above.

‘‘Joe,’’ as he was named in reports, had been up there for hours. According to a police spokesman, ‘‘he seemed to think he was in Vietnam — with the Viet Cong coming at him.’’