Vale Muhammad Ali

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Ali was so great, he whupped Superman and found out he was Clark Kent...

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I'm not old enough to remember JFK but I remember where I was when Ali did the unthinkable and beat Foreman.
 
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Magpiespower said:
Easily the best sports book I've ever read...

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Click to expand...


A superb read from one of America's great authors writing about one of the world's greatest sportsmen.
 
A very sad day indeed, I was a fan from a very young age. My parents would allow me to stay up late when he was fighting. The only time we (my parents and I) was when he fought our 'enry.

RIP Champ
 
Sad to note his passing but I have always had mixed feelings about the guy. Greatest boxer I have ever seen but also the greatest trash talker of all time, in fact he is probably the father of trash talk. I can remember the first time I saw Ali interviewed on TV and I thought who is this guy? He is telling us all that he is the greatest, who does he think he is? He was right though, he was the greatest fighter ever and I would not have wanted to argue that point with him.

Who could ever forget Clay, as he was then known, dropping his guard with both gloves at his side while taunting his opponent to hit him. I never saw the Brown Bomber but Clay was something.

RIP Muhammad Ali.
 
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I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'

- Troy Chaplin
 

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Yeah got some mixed feelings as well. I wonder what Frazier would day if he was alive now. On one hand did some great things for civil rights but was seemingly racist towards Frazier with his gorilla comments as well.
Greatest heavyweight fighter we'll ever see.
 
Friday night/Saturday morning I started watching some of the Ali funeral procession around Louisville but it was obvious it was going to take all day so I flicked over to SBS watched Monica Bellucci then flicked back to ABC News24, they were getting to the end of the procession but I fell asleep on the couch for almost 4 hours and woke just before Billy Crystal gave his Eulogy to Ali. It was brilliant. He told the story how as a young stand up comedian he had worked out this routine on Ali and legendary US TV sports broadcaster Howard Cosell. In 1974 there was some TV event on for Ali and another comedian had dropped out so the TV producer asked who they could get. One of the assistants mentioned Crystal, he got the gig, Ali loved his impression, gave him a hug and whispered in his ear you're my little brother - and called Billy that for the next 42 years. Watch near then end when he talks about how they sat together at Howard Cosell's funeral and the laughter and fun that followed after Ali asked Crystal, "Little brother do you think he is wearing his hair piece?" He talks a lot about Ali the human being who befriend a couple of Jews in Crystal and Cosell and didn't show any of the animosity you have between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East. For those who don'y know who Howard Cosell was and the relationship he had with Ali I wrote about it and put up a couple of videos at this post in the thread on Ali

https://www.bigfooty.com/forum/threads/muhammad-ali.1053848/#post-32174552




Here is the video from 1979 that Crystal talked about in his video 15 Rounds, which was about taking that 1974 sketch and turning it into a full production show about Ali's life from 18 to 37. There is an insert of Ali watching Crystal perform and you see his reaction in the top left hand corner of the screen.



Then Bill Clinton finished off the 3 or 4 hour memorial service straight after Crystal and delivered a speech like only Clinton can.

 
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Someone beyond the sport. He is,was a true human spirit to and always will hold dear to my heart. RIP
 
The great doco maker Ken Burns has made a doco series about Ali and Part I was on SBS last night at 8.30pm after debuting on PBS in the states in late September. It was 2 hours long and was part 1 of 4 parts.

Burns in his usual style does a thorough job - worked on it for 5 years - and part 1 looked in great depth at Ali's life up until he beat Sonny Liston in February 1964. it basically finished with him on the verge to change his name, proudly say he is a Muslim rather than saying nothing and scare the promoters and $$$ away and his relationship with Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and I guess the rest of the world was to change.

It's the most detailed doco of his early life and his early fights i've seen. I missed the first 20 minutes but will watch it online. It gave a really detailed profile of Sonny Liston and how a poor illiterate kid from the south had done so much to lift himself out of the crap life he had to live in southern USA and become such a dominate world champion. He smashed ex champ Floyd Patterson in his two fights before Ali. Ali was an 8-1 underdog and no one at the time tipped him to win. Liston died in 1970 aged 40.


www.sbs.com.au

Muhammad Ali

The life and career of three-time heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali.
www.sbs.com.au www.sbs.com.au

NY Times review of the doco
www.nytimes.com

‘Muhammad Ali’ Explores the Many Layers of ‘the Greatest’ (Published 2021)

A new four-part documentary series by Ken Burns paints a sweeping portrait of a man whose life intersected with many of modern America’s most profound changes.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
..................
Eig, the biographer, shared a huge trove of contacts with the filmmakers, and they started their initial interviews in 2016, a week after Ali died. Dozens of writers, friends and boxing ambassadors participated: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Holmes, Jesse Jackson, the novelist Walter Mosley, the ESPN writer Howard Bryant, the boxing promoter Don King. Over the next several years, the filmmakers unearthed more than 15,000 photographs and dug up footage that had not been seen publicly. A production company that had shot the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali’s third and final bout with Joe Frazier, in the Philippines, had folded before the film could be used. Their footage was buried in a Pennsylvania archive.

“This woman pulled these boxes out and said, ‘They say “Ali” on them — I don’t know what they are,’” McMahon said. “This is Technicolor, it’s 16-millimeter, shot from the apron [of the ring] — it just pops. And you see the fight in ways that had never been seen before.”
......

The series comes to a close as Ali has become, as Ken Burns described it, “the most beloved person on the planet.” The footage of his trembling surprise appearance at the 1996 Olympics, in Atlanta, is a crucial piece of Ali’s lasting image and mythology. But as Burns put it, “mythology is a mask.”

Bryant (ESPN writer), who argued that Ali changed the relationship between athletes and fans, was more direct about the boxer’s evolving public image in those later years.

“People hated his guts, and white people didn’t love him until he couldn’t talk,” Bryant said. “There were people — Black and white — who still called him Cassius Clay; there were people who still did not want to give him his due. And there were people who still held a lot against him.”

“Then he couldn’t talk, and suddenly he belonged to everybody,” he said.

Ken Burns suggested that this public redemption was akin to “a funeral where people are talking really nicely about other people.”


And if you are a Ken Burns fan this is the list of projects he is working on and expect release dates.

Future releases
  • Benjamin Franklin (2022)[71]
  • The Holocaust & the United States (working title) (2023, with Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein)[72]
  • The American Buffalo (2024)[73]
  • Leonardo da Vinci (2025)[74]
  • The American Revolution (2025)[74]
  • LBJ & the Great Society (2027, with Lynn Novick)[75]
  • From Emancipation to Exodus (working title, also called The History of Reconstruction) (TBA)[74]
  • Winston Churchill (TBA)[74]
 
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