Ali! Ali!

IN the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper editor learns the real story of Ransom Stoddard, a fictional western hero who has built an admirable career as a statesman on his reputation for killing a notorious scoundrel. It turns out Stoddard didn’t shoot the villain after all. At the end of the film, the newsman is asked if he’ll run the story that would topple Stoddard as an icon. His now-famous reply: “No, sir! This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The film’s director, John Ford, later explained to Peter Bogdanovich: “We’ve had a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes, and you know damn well they weren’t. But it’s good for the country to have heroes to look up to.”

Michael Mann, the director of the new film Ali, might offer a similar justification for his sweepingly whitewashed biography of Muhammad Ali. In today’s America, Ali may be the most revered figure not actually mentioned in the Bible. Sports Illustrated named him Sportsman of the Century; New Yorker editor David Remnick’s biography dubbed him “King of the World”; Jamie Foxx, a co-star of the film, recently told the Boston Globe—without irony—that the former heavyweight champ was “Moses.”

About the Author

Jonah Goldberg

Jonah Goldberg is a National Review contributing editor.

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IN the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper editor learns the real story of Ransom Stoddard, a fictional western hero who has built an admirable career as a statesman on his reputation for killing a notorious scoundrel. It turns out Stoddard didn’t shoot the villain after all. At the end of the film, the newsman is asked if he’ll run the story that would topple Stoddard as an icon. His now-famous reply: “No, sir! This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The film’s director, John Ford, later explained to Peter Bogdanovich: “We’ve had a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes, and you know damn well they weren’t. But it’s good for the country to have heroes to look up to.”

Michael Mann, the director of the new film Ali, might offer a similar justification for his sweepingly whitewashed biography of Muhammad Ali. In today’s America, Ali may be the most revered figure not actually mentioned in the Bible. Sports Illustrated named him Sportsman of the Century; New Yorker editor David Remnick’s biography dubbed him “King of the World”; Jamie Foxx, a co-star of the film, recently told the Boston Globe—without irony—that the former heavyweight champ was “Moses.”