As many times as Muhammad Ali’s story has been told, it will never be told better than in the enthralling eight-hour Ken Burns documentary.
As many times as this story has been told, it will never be told better than in the enthralling eight-hour Ken Burns documentary.
‘W hat’s my name?” Muhammad Ali kept asking, with his fists as well as his mouth. Here’s one to the jaw.
“What’s my name?” Bam. Here’s one to the eye.
“What’s my name?” Ali wanted to know, putting the question to Ernie Terrell in a gruesome February 1967 championship dismantling. Terrell, in pre-fight interviews, had insisted on calling Ali by his birth name, Cassius Clay. Ali had decided that was his “slave name,” although it was really his father’s name, and before that the name of a famous Kentucky abolitionist. Ali said he would punish Terrell for deliberately misnaming him, and made good on his word, throwing hundreds of unanswered blows at Terrell’s head. Terrell somehow stayed on his feet for 15 rounds, but the match was almost gladiatorial in its brutality. After the fight, with both eyes swollen shut, Terrell looked like a corpse fished out of a river.
Ali was criticized ferociously for this exercise in savagery, but something was changing about how Americans perceived our heroes and athletes, particularly black ones. Ali had suffered racist abuse as a matter of course when growing up in segregated Louisville, he was perfectly entitled to be known by his new name, and the Terrell fight was an exhilarating breakthrough in black America’s never-ending quest for respect. As vicious as the fight was, it was also a thrilling display of defiance, an assertion of personhood, not just for Ali but for all black Americans. Like the Catholic Floyd Patterson before him, who had said, “The image of a black Muslim champion is not good” and vowed to beat Ali “for America” before losing to him in 1965, Terrell struck some Americans as an apologist for the boundaries and codes that frustrated so many black hopes. What’s my name? Black Americans, taught for so long to “know your place,” were taking on a new, more assertive identity, and Ali was their boldest champion.
As examined in riveting detail in the new Ken Burns PBS documentary Muhammad Ali, the fighter became the personification of black liberation, of a rising trans-racial coalition seeking to dissolve color lines, and of a new brand of athlete-entertainer who would choose showmanship and braggadocio over humility.
Because I dislike boxing and think it should be illegal, I wasn’t sure I had enough interest in the sport to endure a four-part, eight-hour documentary on its entire history, much less on a single practitioner. But Muhammad Ali is by turns a suspenseful, penetrating, touching, disquieting, and exciting masterpiece of the form.
Muhammad Ali, the athlete of the 20th century according to Sports Illustrated and the BBC, has been since 1996 the tragic hero of sports, his fatal flaw intermixed with our collective spectatorial guilt. As the enfeebled, brain-damaged shell of the man lit the torch at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, recalls sportswriter Dave Kindred, it was evident that “the game we asked him to play to entertain us left him looking like this.”
Ali’s tragic flaw was arrogance; he encouraged blows to the head, even from sparring partners, in the belief that punishment would develop the cranial equivalent of calluses to protect his brain. Greed was a sibling to his hubris; in his late 30s, after his skills had diminished but the paydays grew ever more tantalizing, Ali foolishly submitted to the buffeting of Leon Spinks, Larry Holmes, and Trevor Burbick. Even then, observers noted that his speech had begun to slow, and the light was departing his eyes. An Ali who retired in 1977, when his ringside doctor walked away in protest because the fighter rejected his advice to quit, might have had many joyous years ahead of him, and earned a fortune as a pitchman and entertainer. Instead, his brain dissolved over three painful decades before his 2016 death at 74.
I thought I was pretty familiar with the Ali story, but this utterly captivating series proved me wrong. When I was growing up in the Seventies, Ali was a universally beloved figure, especially to kids, with his outlandish trash talk, his peacock strut, and his twinkle of self-parody. “Muhammad Ali: the Black Superman,” went a novelty pop ditty when I was eight years old. At press conferences, he’d say things like, “I’ve wrestled with alligators/I’ve tussled with a whale/I done handcuffed lightnin’ and put thunder in jail.” His preening and performative arrogance, he said, was inspired by a television wrestler named Gorgeous George who invited the audience to shower him with boos.
The documentary brings his other selves into focus. Directed and written by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, the film takes pains to establish just how hated Cassius Clay was in the mid-Sixties, by both white America and its allies among black athletes. To much of white America, the Nation of Islam — a black nationalist cult that had only a glancing acquaintance with Islam — was a terrifying hate group. There was massive popular support, which would be unthinkable today, when Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title for announcing his fealty to the N.O.I. and its menacing leader, Elijah Muhammad, a racist fanatic who said a spaceship was hovering just above the earth preparing to zap the white people from space. Occasionally, Ali would go outside with one of his wives to see if they could spot the spaceship.
Although the documentary does not bring this up, Clay-turned-Ali was reviled in much the same way that Colin Kaepernick later would be. Yet he came back strong. After the boxer was stripped of his title a second time, this time in 1967 after being convicted of draft dodging for refusing to fight in the then-popular Vietnam War, he was loathed all over again and spent three and a half years in boxing exile. Yet he was eventually rewarded for sticking to his principles. When a unanimous Supreme Court reversed his conviction on a technicality in 1971, he returned in glory, but he had lost some peak years.
The documentary highlights a side of Ali that got too little attention before: He was on both sides of race divides. He was an icon of black pride, yet he played to racists in bouts with other black fighters. Black and white writers supplying commentary for the film agree that, for instance, Ali taunted Joe Frazier in racially loaded ways, calling him “ugly.” Frazier left school as a boy to work in the fields of South Carolina, like many other black men before him, and was understandably touchy about his lack of education. When Ali repeatedly mocked his intelligence, culminating in an incident in which he tagged his opponent as “ignorant” on a Howard Cosell TV show, Frazier stood up, tore off his microphone and challenged him. Ali laid hands on him, and the two tussled, right there on the set. “The ultimate conscious black guy is engaging in banter that is basically playing to the side of the racists,” notes Todd Boyd, a black writer. “In that instance, he used his powers for evil.”
Among the documentary’s many pleasures, however, are its recaps of the almost unbearably exciting great bouts of Ali’s career, notably “The Fight of the Century,” his comeback bout in Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971. In the presence of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer, and an amateur photographer hired by Life magazine to document the contest — Frank Sinatra — Ali confronted Frazier, who had seized the crown while Ali’s license had been suspended despite his perfect record. Hence both fighters were undefeated champs — a seemingly impossible and certainly unprecedented situation. Frazier won a unanimous decision in a thrilling display of endurance. The doc is equally potent when recounting Ali’s victory over George Foreman in what the former indelibly dubbed the “Rumble in the Jungle,” and his rematch with Frazier in 1975 in the “Thrilla in Manila.” Ali, playing to native Africans who saw him as the spiritual leader of the Third World, dubbed Foreman “a Belgian” in the first fight, then pleased racists when he called Frazier “a gorilla” in the second.
In all of these matches the doc strikes the right balance between the sociopolitics enveloping matters and the visceral blood-and-guts appeal of the combat sessions themselves. You may emerge revolted or enchanted by the details, but the documentary does not steer you either way, nor does Keith David’s careful, solemn narration, which adds to the already immense weight of the Ali saga. As many times as this story has been told, it will never be told better than in this dazzling and enthralling series.
