It is not. The distance is enormous. Poitier knows this. The audience knows this. The modesty is the joke, and the joke is the truth: that what was given was not a small thing packaged in modest words, but an enormous thing, and the modesty of the packaging is its own form of respect for the giver.
He uses the past tense — “I cannot tell you his name. I never knew it.” Not “I don’t know it now.” The past tense captures something important: the not-knowing was always there. From the first night of reading lessons in the closed restaurant, Poitier was receiving something from a man whose name he didn’t know. The anonymity was always present. The relationship existed in the space between someone who gave and someone who received, without the usual markers of name and identity that would have allowed it to be retrieved later.
“But I read pretty good now” is present tense, which is also precise. Not “I learned to read.” Not “I became a fluent reader.” I read. Present, ongoing, continuous. The skill is live. The gift is active. It has been in use for forty-eight years by the time he says these words, and it will continue to be in use for the thirty years that follow.
Poitier was sixty-four at the 1992 AFI ceremony. He had been a professional actor for more than forty years. He had made dozens of films, won an Oscar, won an honorary Oscar, been nominated for other awards, written books, directed films, served in diplomatic roles. He had done all of it on the foundation of a skill that an old man had given him in a closing restaurant in New York, night after night, across approximately six months that must have seemed very long at the time and very short in retrospect.