Cynical Cinema

“I shook up the world!  I shook up the world!” 

When I was younger, I figured that there were certain titles everyone wanted.  Super-Bowl winning quarterback.  Olympic 100-metre champion.  Tour De France winner.  World Series MVP.  But the one title I figured was prized above all others was Heavyweight Champion Of The World.  That was the pinnacle of human athletic achievement, it seemed to me.  If you are Heavyweight Champion Of The World, it means that you can beat up every single other human being on the planet.  And that’s a pretty impressive thing.  I also figured it meant that you could get laid wherever you went.  (Unfortunately, Mike Tyson came to actually believe that, and the world was much the worse for it.)  I remember hearing tales of the invincible Tyson, before I was old enough to start paying attention to boxing.  Once I was old enough, I can remember getting excited for a night out with the boys watching Evander Holyfield fight Riddick Bowe.  Again.

I knew the names of the title holders, the top heavyweight contenders, and the welterweight champs.  The middleweights and the Olympic champs and all the Canadians and even the lightweights.  And I was just a casual fight fan.  Really, I was much more of a football guy.  And a hockey and baseball guy.  Boxing ranked way down the list for me.  And yet there was nothing quite like getting together with the boys for a Big Heavyweight Event.  It was the next best thing to the Super Bowl or the Grey Cup. 

Halfway through watching Ringside Ali, out now on DVD from Alliance Films, I realized something.  I have no idea who is the heavyweight champion of the world right now.  I have no idea who it was a week ago, a month ago, a year ago.  Even five years ago.  The last heavyweight champion I really remember watching is Lennox Lewis.  It’s not that I have stopped caring about boxing.  I still love watching a good boxing match.  But I don’t know when they are on.  I don’t know any of the fighters.  And even if I DID know who they were, and when they were fighting, I wouldn’t be spending fifty bucks to watch it on pay-per-view.  For that kind of money, I can go watch a hockey game.  Live. 

So it is with fondness that I look back on those carefree days of my youth, watching people punch other people until they bled and fell over, and watching crazy dudes bite the ears off slightly less crazy dudes.  And I wondered why I no longer felt the same way.  Then I realized.  My enthusiasm for professional boxing has not faded, it is boxing itself that has faded.  And it hasn’t been just in the last ten years, it has been happening ever since the days of Muhammad Ali.  His era, and his personality, and the aura he projected, was the absolute peak of a sport that had been a magical part of American life throughout this past century.  And where we are now, I certainly hope, is the nadir.

I am more interested in watching a panel of old guys dissect the fights of Joe Louis than I am in watching a heavyweight title fight right now.  I would rather watch grainy, out-of-focus footage of Max Baer fighting Max Schmeling in 1933 than go to wikipedia to find out who today’s heavyweight champion actually is.  And I would rather watch the Thrilla In Manila, thirty times over, than watch one more second of a family-friendly comedy starring Ice Cube.  In fact, I would rather watch the Thrilla in Manila at home on my big TV than attend my own wedding.  That fight was sensational!

But so too are the other fourteen fights on Ringside Ali.  This is one of the most complete sports DVD box sets I have ever seen.  Fifteen fights in total, many of them shown in their entirety.  Some of the all-time greats, the ones we all know about - the Rumble In The Jungle against George Foreman.  The Thrilla In Manila against Joe Frazier.  And of course his two memorable fights with Sonny Liston, the first one giving Ali the title of Heavyweight Champion of the World, and the second one, which gave the world that memorable photo of the Greatest standing over a prone Liston, screaming at him to get up and fight.

ESPN has provided an all-star panel to discuss these old fights, giving insight between matches and putting the fights in their historical context.  The first panel is made up of Brian Kenny, the ESPN sportscaster, Bert Randolph Sugar, a famous boxing journalist and writer, and George Chuvalo, the Canadian heavyweight who fought two memorable bouts against Muhammad Ali in 1966 and 1972.  These are the guys who discuss the first few fights on the set.  Chuvalo is invaluable, because usually he has fought each of these guys himself.  And he is very familiar with even those he never personally fought.

The first fight in the set is one against a man named Doug Jones, a fight that would set up the winner as the top-ranked challenger for the heavyweight title.  Jones was ranked #3, and Ali (then Cassius Clay) was ranked #2.  Clay won a unanimous decision in a very close fight, which was a little controversial at the time (Jones was the fan favourite, and he fared perhaps better than the cards indicated).  Sugar provides the great insight into this matchup, since he was there, at ringside, writing about it.  The victory set Clay up for a title fight, but he had to go through one more fight first.

That fight was against a Brit named Henry Cooper, and I think it sums up Ali’s attitude and career about as well as any other fight could.  Clay was famous in those days for predicting the round in which he would knock out his opponent.  Against Cooper, he had predicted the fifth round.  By the beginning of the third, he had Cooper reeling.  He was bleeding from over one eye, he was unsteady on his feet, and Clay could easily have gone in for the kill.  But he had predicted the fifth, not the third.  So he got totally cocky, and danced around him.  He teased Cooper, obviously not going after him, trying to keep him around until the fifth.  This allowed Cooper to catch his breath some between the third and fourth, and in the fourth round, he absolutely hammers Clay with a shot out of nowhere.  Totally stunned, having almost lost the fight right there, Ali buckles down and beats Cooper until the fight is stopped in the fifth - as he had predicted.

Then comes Sonny Liston.  The panel does a great job of hyping the Liston fight.  It’s important to put this fight in historical context - much like George Foreman after him, Joe Louis before him, and Mike Tyson most recently, Liston was the heavyweight champion of the world, and he was considered invincible.  A force of nature who could, and would, knock out any man who stepped into the ring, and fast.  Cassius Clay wasn’t given a chance.  What followed was truly one of the most bizarre episodes in boxing history.  Before the fight, Clay was showing up on Liston’s lawn.  Inside Liston’s house.  Calling him out.  The most feared man in the world, and here’s this kid coming to his house to call him on.

But as far as most people were concerned, it wouldn’t matter.  Liston would pulverize this brash, cocky little kid.  Then, in the fourth round, Liston realized that it wouldn’t be that easy.  Through four rounds, he hadn’t even been able to touch Clay, let alone hit him square.  So Liston’s trainer put some kind of substance on his gloves, something that he rubbed into Clay’s eyes throughout the fifth round.  And it blinded him.  Cassius Clay fought a full round of boxing against one of the most powerful, feared men in history - blind.  And when he made it through that round, not only alive but still on his feet, and still untouched.  And then between the sixth and seventh, Liston threw in the towel.

No one seems to really know why, to this day.  There has been a ton of speculation (and of course our intrepid panel in this box set has a fair amount of their own), but it doesn’t appear that anyone really knows why Liston quit.  After the fight, Clay (who then changed his name to Muhammad Ali) suggests a reason - he had predicted the eighth round.  “I had him gone in eight.  I was gettin’ ready to take him in the eighth as you can see.  But the man stopped it, just to keep from makin’ me look so great.”  It’s kind of hard to argue with Muhammad Ali.  He was just larger-than life.  As he said, or rather yelled, immediately following the fight, he did indeed shake up the world.

More fights follow - the next one is the second (and maybe even more memorable) Ali-Liston fight.  The one where Liston didn’t wait until the seventh to quit, but instead quit at the two minute and twelve second mark of the first round.  He went down, hit by a punch that was not exactly a haymaker, and then refused to get up.  The panel here has different interpretations of this fight, and different opinions about exactly how hard Liston had been hit and how hurt he really was.  I think this fight is memorable more for the photo, the one of Ali standing over the fallen Liston, screaming at him to “get up and fight!”

Then there are a bunch of other fights - the first Chuvalo fight, with commentary by Chuvalo himself.  (Chuvalo seems to still believe, in a small way, that he could have won that fight.)  Chuvalo was never knocked down in his entire career, and Ali later said he was the toughest man he ever fought.  Former champ Larry Holmes joins the panel to talk about a fight with Karl Mildenberger, a European champ who put in a surprisingly good effort against The Greatest.  Ali and Howard Cosell, in some old file footage, provide the live commentary over his fight with Ernie Terrell.  Ali, who taunted Terrell throughout that fight, makes a public apology for “using the ring for talkin’ instead of fightin’”.

Cosell and Ali have some more verbal sparring to do before a fight with Zora Foley, which is followed by Jerry Quarry, a fight that sees Bill Cosby in the broadcast booth.  And not with today’s panel, but the 1967 panel for the bout.  Then Oscar Bonavena, then the Fight Of The Century.  Ali’s first fight (of three) against Joe Frazier.

I had a substantial luxury in watching this stuff.  You see, I didn’t actually know who had won all of these fights.  I knew Ali had lost some, somewhere along the line.  I just didn’t know when, or to whom.  All I knew was that he had beaten George Foreman in the Rumble In The Jungle, and I know that only because I am an enormous fan of When We Were Kings, the brilliant documentary about that unbelievable event.

So I watched the Joe Frazier fights with the enthusiasm people must have had when they first saw them.  And the third one, the Thrilla In Manila, might actually be the greatest boxing match I have ever watched.  Ever.  I won’t say who won any of these fights, because I hope that some people might pick up this DVD set and watch it with the same blank slate and unbridled enthusiasm I felt.  There are other worthwhile fights too - the Rumble in the Jungle is included in here, as well as a fight against Chuck Wepner (the fight which inspired the movie Rocky). 

Then Ali fights Ron Lyle, and the disc closes out with the Thrilla In Manila, which I will say again, is the best fight I have ever seen.  Those three Ali-Frazier fights are three of the greatest fights in history, and nothing came close until Holyfield and Bowe had those epic battles in the 90s.  At the end of the fight, Eddie Futch whispered in Frazier’s ear “Joe, nobody will forget what you did here tonight”.  And they won’t, as long as DVDs like Ringside Ali preserve that moment, and so many others, for us to watch.  Ringside Ali is a must for even the most casual boxing fans.

One last note - this is how amazing the Thrilla In Manila was.  My girlfriend came home when I was partly through round two.  It was ten to four, and Oprah was about to begin.  She said “you’d better put it on pause when Oprah comes on, she showing her favourite things today”.  When 4:00 rolled around, I said “you want me to flip it over to Oprah?”  And she said “hello, no.  Oprah can wait.  I’ve got to see who wins this fight!”