On October 2, 1980, my parents took me to the home of family friends who subscribed to OnTV so we could watch 38-year-old Muhammad Ali come out of retirement to fight heavyweight champion Larry Holmes. And like every one of the 2 billion viewers this side of Holmes’s mother, I rooted desperately for Ali as Holmes picked him apart round by round.
Why did a 12-year-old suburban White boy who didn’t really follow boxing and knew nothing about Ali’s heroic stances on race and Vietnam want so badly for him to win? It’s a testament to the spell cast by the man who went from being one of America’s most divisive figures to perhaps the most famous and beloved person on Earth.
Only five months removed from Hemingway, the most recent opus from Ken Burns & co., comes Muhammad Ali, whose life is as epic — in its own way — as Burns’s most sprawling subjects (e.g., the Civil War, the Roosevelts). And although the uninitiated couldn’t ask for a better overview on history’s most transcendent pugilist, those already familiar with him may come away feeling they’ve heard most all of it before.
“Round One” (each of the docuseries’ four parts is perhaps too quaintly identified as a round), which covers the first 21 years of Ali’s life — when he was known as Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. — supplies the least well-known biographical material, including information on Cassius Sr., a charismatic and proud Black man who was at times violently abusive to young Cassius’s mother; and on the 11 Kentucky businessmen who managed the first two years of Clay’s professional career.
Partly because of benign auspices of the latter, a group of White men who not only took good care of the young fighter’s finances but protected him from the mafia (at the time a cancer in the boxing world), Clay was disinclined to speak out on race matters. But with the rise of the Nation of Islam (for context, we get sidenote bios on Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, who would shortly become major figures in Ali’s life) watering the soil of a race conscious made so fertile in childhood by his father and various events (e.g., the murder of Emmett Till), by age 22 Clay-cum-Ali was a vociferous embodiment of Black pride almost unheard of in American history.
Covering 1964–’70, Round Two is the most joyous of the four parts, highlighting The Greatest at the height of his powers, when his combination of lightning quick feet/hands/mind/mouth made him one of the most striking individuals the world had ever seen. Shortly after claiming the heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston — revealed in a short bio to be something of a “hero” (says novelist Walter Mosely) rather than the simple villain of Ali lore — Clay officially becomes Muhammad Ali and “tore the mask off White comfort,” to the point that a 1966 mainstream newspaper article labeled him “the worst influence on people since Adolf Hitler.” The schism of the American public’s love-hate relationship with Ali (he was nothing but loved abroad) came in 1967, when he refused military induction, a stand on principle that cost him his boxing license, his athletic peak, millions of dollars, and very nearly five years in prison. (Details of the trial proceedings against him reveal that, contrary to popular conception, the Supreme Court ultimately overturned his conviction not because they vindicated his sincere religious objection to the Vietnam war but because of lower-court procedural errors, including one that was the ironic result of the FBI monitoring the phone calls of Elijah Muhammad and MLK.)
At the beginning of Round Three it’s 1970, and Ali the boxer is back in action, a turn of events so terrible to some that Georgia Governor Lester Maddox called for a day mourning when Atlanta agreed to host his return match. Although by this time hatred of Ali had generally lost its edge — White America wasn’t quite as panicked about Black Power as it once had been, and public opinion had turned severely against the war — Round Three explores the dark side of Ali’s personality. Although he may not have been abusive toward women, All was nearly insatiable sexually, unfaithful in marriage (including a period when he was a bigamist) to the point of hiring prostitutes.
But it was in his treatment of Joe Frazier, his greatest rival, where Ali’s cruelty is revealed. For the sake of hype and showmanship, the low road of Ali’s public and relentless demeaning of Frazier — who was kind enough to lend Ali money while Ali was struggling financially during his boxing ban — sank all the way down to racist tropes.
But Round Four is the saddest of all. Upon the resumption of Ali’s career, with his once preternatural ring speed slowed to relatively mortal proportions, Ali “discovered he could take a punch” — a blessing and a curse, noted Ali fight doctor Ferdie Pacheco. Although in the mid ‘70s Ali is rich and almost universally adored, we see a man in his mid 30s already sliding into obvious decline, his speech patterns sluggish shadows of what they were just a few years earlier. By the post-fight press conference after the Holmes debacle, the change is painful to behold.
From here it’s mostly downhill, with a Parkinson’s diagnosis in 1985 and Ali’s withdrawal from public life. His lighting of the torch at the opening ceremony of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta is recalled here more sadly than I experienced it. Yes, it was shocking to see this most vibrant of souls as a locked-in, quivering mass, but what I remember is loving to see him after so much time, and loving to see the obvious outpouring of love for a one-time hurricane of controversy who was now a national treasure.
This, ultimately, is the story of Muhammad Ali as much as it is about the man himself. Previous material may cover specific aspects of Ali’s epic journey better than what Team Burns offers (for example, 1996’s When We Were Kings is a far more compelling document of “the Rumble in the Jungle” than the pro forma review we get here), but it’s the arc that makes this eight-hour journey. “It was striking to see this evolution not in Ali,” reflects New Yorker editor David Remnick, “but in us.”
Individuals and societies change, often in unforeseeable ways. The Louisville Lip ended his life in near silence, humble and repentant of his personal foibles. And the world had nothing but love for him. Go figure.
Muhammad Ali premieres September 19–22 at 8–10pm on PBS.