Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami. Out tomorrow. (*******7/10)
Muhammad Ali: Made In Miami is a PBS documentary that comes out today, August 12th, from Paramount Home Entertainment. It deals with the Greatest’s time in Miami, which was really the place which was the starting point of his career. He went there to train with Angelo Dundee, the man who would be his trainer and mentor throughout his career. The movie talks about the racism that Ali (then Cassius Clay) and other black men had to deal with in the city. It takes us through his Miami years thoroughly and compellingly in a packed sixty minutes.
His first title fight with Sonny Liston, when Clay sounded off in interviews before fighting the world’s most dangerous man. “Ain’t he ugly?” He asks. And he ends up being right on the money, when Liston tries to blind him as soon as he starts losing the fight. Liston has come from prison, where he was as feared as he is in the boxing ring. But the one guy no one in prison (even Sonny Liston) wants to fight is the guy who’s squirrels-in-the-banana-house crazy. And Cassius Clay, with his boastful, over the top interviews and afraid-of-nothing personality, came off as certifiable nuthouse material. And Liston, in the end, succumbed to that intellectual warfare for which he was definitely not prepared.
The movie goes on to detail Clay’s relationship with Malcolm X, the split that occurred in the Nation Of Islam, and his casting off of his “slave name” to assume the moniker of Muhammad Ali, a name bestowed upon him by Elijah Muhammad as a way of pushing Malcolm X further out of the Nation. The movie continues through Ali’s second fight with Liston, the one where many boxing historians think Liston threw in the towel, and of course goes right up to his refusal to fight in Vietnam. An incredible document of the most important athlete the world has ever seen, Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami is more than worth picking up on DVD.