Muhammad Ali, Round Three: “The Rivalry” (Florentine Films, PBS, 2021)

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

This year PBS is kicking off its fall season with a four-part Ken Burns documentary on Muhammad Ali; given that PBS had already done two documentaries on Ali, an American Experience (or was he an American Master?) stand-alone show and a one-hour episode of the series In His Own Words, it was hard to imagine how much more there was to say about him. But Ken Burns and his crew, including his daughter Sarah Burns, managed to eke out nearly eight hours over four nights about Ali. I missed the first two episodes – on Sunday I was watching the Emmy Awards and two Lifetime movies, and on Monday my husband Charles and I went to the free organ concert in Balboa Park – but last night I caught episode three, “The Rivalry.” This took up Ali’s story in 1970, when his prosecution for refusing to be drafted to fight in Viet Nam was still hanging fire and every court hearing his case had ruled against him and his claim that as a Muslim he was a conscientious objector to all war unless directly commanded to fight by Allah himself. He was still facing a five-year prison sentence in 1970 – a year later the U.S. Supreme Court would set him free on the basis of a technical error in his original prosecution, after John Marshall Harlan, whom Richard Kluger described in Simple Justice (his history of Brown v. Board of Education) as “a constructive conservative,” realized that the Court had given similar protected status to Jehovah’s Witnesses during World War II. Nonetheless, the various associations that had governed boxing in the U.S. and had stripped Ali of his heavyweight championship in 1967 and pulled his boxing license so he could not fight anywhere in the U.S. were starting to relent and allow Ali to pursue his chosen profession.

What somewhat surprised me about the Ali documentary – this episode of it, anyway – was it was a much more conventional sports film than I would have expected Ken Burns to make about him. It focused on his fights, featuring generous amounts of footage of his legendary bouts during the period – his loss to Joe Frazier in 1970, his later defeat by Ken Norton (who broke his jaw in round two, though Ali managed to persevere throughout the entire fight), his comeback victory against Norton and the setup for a rematch with Frazier. The commentary by Ken and Sarah Burns and David McMahon (Sarah Burns’ husband) stressed that, while Ali had always dissed his opponents publicly and taunted them before his fights to get at them and “psych” them, with Frazier it sounded personal. Ali called Frazier an “Uncle Tom” and Frazier responded by pointing out that Ali, under his original name of Cassius Clay (ironically he was named after 19th century Kentucky Senator Henry Clay’s abolitionist son, who had been Mary Todd’s first boyfriend before they broke up and she married Abraham Lincoln), had been sponsored by a syndicate of well-off white Louisville businesses while Frazier had literally fought himself out of poverty, working in a slaughterhouse before he became a professional boxer. One commentator noted that Ali, supposedly this avatar of civil rights and equality for African-Americans, was insulting Frazier with terms usually used by white racists against Black people in general – that Frazier was ugly, stupid, “slow” in both senses of the word (in the ring and in his brain), couldn’t get women to have sex with him and had a lousy singing voice. (When he wasn’t boxing Frazier was pursuing a career as a soul singer with an act called, predictably, “Joe Frazier and The Knockouts” – and from the clip we got here he was pretty good; he wasn’t going to keep James Brown awake at night worrying about the competition, but he had a good enough voice he could have become at least a minor music star if he’d given up boxing.)

The first Ali-Frazier fight took place in 1970 and Frazier won it by decision – it’s interesting that while Ali’s 1960’s fights ended early, either in knockouts or in so-called “technical knockouts” (in which one fighter injures the other so badly he can’t continue; the losing fighter’s trainer signals he’s giving up by throwing a towel into the ring, and this is the origin of the phrase “throwing in the towel”), his 1970’s fights usually “went the distance.” (One of Ali’s opponents during this period, white fighter George Chuvalo, lasted a full 15 rounds with Ali and boasted later, “At least I went the distance” – which inspired the plot of the film Rocky.) Ali’s story in this period, stripped of its political and religious aspects (which the Burns family minimized in their script), is actually a pretty classic tale similar to most of the movies about boxing made in the 1930’s and 1940’s: young fighter moves up the ladder quickly, gets a shot at the championship, blows his career on too much partying and too many of the “wrong” kinds of women (one of the interviewees on this show was Ali’s wife Belinda, who acknowledged that early on she had to learn to live with his extra-relational activities, which sometimes included prostitutes the men in his entourage procured for him) and then has to work his ass off for a comeback. There are also hints of the later, more cynical boxing stories to come, like the 1956 film The Harder They Fall, based on a script by Budd Schulberg, directed by Mark Robson and starring Humphrey Bogart as a burned-out sportswriter hired to build up the career of a no-talent boxer who advances to championship contention via a series of fights either outright fixed or against hopelessly bad and/or over-the-hill opponents. Ali’s comeback was staged with carefully arranged bouts against fighters nowhere near his league, and as a result he got sloppy, sloughed off on his training and lost the first Frazier and Norton bouts.

So when Ali got a rematch with Norton, he retired to an estate he’d bought in Pennsylvania and outfitted as a full-fledged boxing camp, chopped down trees (something previous Black boxing champion Joe Louis had also done to build up his strength), ran 4 1/2 hours a day and did long workouts on both the light and heavy punching bags. By the time he re-fought Norton he was fully ready and had regained the speed he’d had in the ring that had enabled him to fend off opponents with more powerful punching arms. He beat Norton in the rematch – albeit by decision rather than by knockout – and he was set to re-fight Joe Frazier when the great rivalry got set back by an unexpected event. Frazier, under pressure from the boxing organizations to set up a fight that would defend his title, agreed to fight a young, unknown boxer named George Foreman – and Foreman, much to the surprise of just about everyone in the sports world, knocked out Frazier in round two. (Today George Foreman delivers commercials for a home-repair insurance program and sounds like a caricature of a burned-out fighter, delivering scripts full of boxing metaphors like “don’t get sucker-punched.”) The show also documents how the flamboyant Black hustler Don King took over from white Bob Arum as Ali’s promoter and arranged the second Ali-Frazier fight, which had to be held outside the U.S., ironically, not because of Ali’s troubles with the law (which had ended by 1974) but by Frazier’s; he was fighting the Internal Revenue Service over back taxes and was worried that if he fought in the U.S. the IRS would attach his purse money.

Ali won the rematch with Frazier and thereby gained the right to fight to regain his world championship against Foreman, and this episode of Muhammad Ali ends just as the preparations ofr that fight were taking place. It happened in Zaïre, formerly the Belgian Congo, because Zaïre’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, arranged to host the Ali-Foreman fight and also to accompany it with an all-star music festival featuring African-American soul singers. Filmmaker Leon Gast was hired to make a Woodstock-style music film about the soul concerts, which along with the revenue from the fight itself was supposed to produce a profit for the Zaïrean government (and presumably for Mobutu personally), but Gast was unable to find backing for his film and it wasn’t released until 1996 as part of a documentary on the fight called When We Were Kings. I remember Charles and I saw When We Were Kings theatrically at the late and very much lamented Ken Cinema or on an early VHS release and were quite impressed even though Mobutu was a tiny, unimposing man who looked wrong for the part. I realized that the real-life Idi Amin Dada of Uganda and Paul Robeson’s performance in the film The Emperor Jones had shaped my expectations of what a Black dictator should look like. Tonight’s fourth and last episode of Muhammad Ali focuses on the Ali-Foreman fight, the remainder of his boxing career (Ali kept fighting until 1981, and a lot of sportswriters and other authorities), his long-standing struggle with Parkinson’s disease and his ultimate near-canonization as a symbol of Black power and authority.