Muhammad Ali, Round Four: “The Spell Remains” (Florentine Films, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the fourth and final part of Ken Burns’ mega-documentary on the life and times of Muhammad Ali – I missed the first two parts but I can probably catch them on “streaming” from PBS itself or Amazon Prime if I’m really interested (about the one thing I found myself missing from the parts I hadn’t seen was however Burns and his collaborators, daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon, handled the break between Ali and Malcolm X in 1964, when Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam to form a group called Hanafi that aligned itself more with traditional Islam than the bizarre theology of Elijah Muhammad; though Malcolm X had recruited Ali to the Nation, he stood with Elijah Muhammad as Malcolm X left and was murdered a year later, ostensibly by members of Elijah’s “Fruit of Islam” security force but more likely by the white power structure – in his autobiography, Malcolm had predicted both his own assassination and Martin Luther King’s, saying the white power structure would permit neither of them to live). The fourth part was called “The Spell Remains” and told Ali’s increasingly sad story, from one of his triumphs – the fight Ali called the “Rumble in the Jungle,” his 1974 regaining of the world’s heavyweight championship by defeating George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaïre – to the string of fights he continued to have long after most people thought he should have retired (his last professional bout was in 1981 and he lost on a decision), his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease, his second and third marriages (and the inveterate womanizing he did outside of his marriages), and his final moment in the public eye when he was chosen as the last torchbearer in the U.S. Olympic opening ceremony in Atlanta in 1996. Ali’s participation in that event was a closely guarded secret – though my recollection is that word was starting to leak out and so his appearance wasn’t the total surprise the Olympic organizers were hoping for – and by then he was so severely debilitated by Parkinson’s that it was anybody’s guess whether he could even make it up the stairs to the Olympic torch. For me it was like watching the film of Fred Astaire’s last public appearance, to accept a lifetime achievement award (the sort of thing the late director Billy Wilder called the “quick-before-he-croaks awards”) and this man, who had dazzled his audiences with his superb control of his body, could barely hobble up the stairs to the stage to accept his award.

One of the quirks of this treatment of Muhammad Ali’s life is that it was, at best, a sports film; other documentaries have focused more on Ali the political symbol of racial equality and war resistance and relegated his actual career to the sidelines. Not this one: it showcases long excerpts from his most famous fights and reminds us that, for all his public protestations of piety and pacifism, Ali still made a living in one of the most violent forms of entertainment ever devised. And despite Ali’s attempts to make himself not only a great boxer but a symbol of Black resistance to white oppression, there’s an uncomfortable feeling about seeing these repeated shots of two Black men (virtually all Ali’s professional opponents were also Black) beating each other up in public for the delectation of whites. It’s an uncomfortable reminder that one of the main roots of professional boxing as an American sport was the practice of slaveowners to pit their prize slaves against each other in all-out fights, as if you could prove yourself a bigger man than your neighbor if your slave could beat the shit out of his slave. But then Ali’s career is full of contradictions: the man of peace who made his living through violence (though when he asked about the contradiction – why he could fight other people for a living but would not fight in his country’s war – he said, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing”), the contradiction between his public morality and his messy sex-filled private life (though that’s an all too common one among Black males, and indeed among males in general; on a posthumously released live album from his last concert tour, Marvin Gaye tells his audience, “I’m a very spiritual person” – right after he’s sung three songs in a row about sex); the committed athlete who often was too busy partying or showing off to train properly (virtually all of Ali’s five defeats in the ring were at least partly due to him coming in without having done the full training regimen); and the brash trash-talker whom his family remembers as a quiet, private man when he wasn’t in the public eye or preparing to be. In one sense Ali’s story is of a man who not only outlived his enemies but was often ahead of his time – one point this film made was that in 1967, when he refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army to fight in Viet Nam, most Americans supported the war and Ali was called an ingrate and as traitor.

By the time he came back in 1970 a majority of Americans now opposed the war and Ali was considered the prescient hero who had tried to alert them to how stupid the war was. (According to the Burns père/Burns fille/McMahon script, by 1970 most Americans had concluded that the Viet Nam war was a “mistake,” though I remember liberals and radicals having arguments over whether it was a “mistake” or a deliberate expression of U.S. imperialism. I ended up coming to the conclusion that it was both: it began as an imperialist war but turned into a mistake when the U.S. government threw far more men, materiel and money into it than Viet Nam was worth, and past the time when genuinely rational imperialists like the French would have withdrawn, as they indeed had after losing at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.) At the same time one often overlooked point about Ali was that he literally saved the sport of boxing. In the early 1960’s two fighters, Davey Moore and Benny Paret, had died of injuries sustained in the ring, and many people – especially progressives – were calling for Congress and state legislatures to make boxing illegal. Then Ali came along, and progressives who admired Ali for his politics found themselves becoming boxing fans so they could support Ali. When San Francisco 49’ers Colin Kaepernick took the knee during the national anthem before a football game to protest police brutality against African-Americans, one of my oldest friends messaged me to ask if this meant we were going to have to start liking a bloodthirsty sport like football because we wanted to support Kaepernick – and I pointed out that something similar had happened in the 1960’s. People who had previously called for the elimination of boxing now embraced it because they wanted to show support for Ali. Ali’s story has an unusually sad ending: between the Atlanta Olympics appearance in 1996 and his death 20 years later, he was more just surviving or existing than actually living, and for a man who had lived such a rich, full life those final years, trapped in a once beautiful and graceful body that no longer functioned for him, and a man largely forgotten by the American public until – as so often happens with faded or fading stars – his death reminded the public of how he had lived and what he had done.