Ken Burns on his new “Muhammad Ali” doc, Denver’s guest-starring role
On June 18, 1963, after besting Henry Cooper in a match in London, 21-year-old Cassius Clay turned his attention to Denver-based boxer Sonny Liston — the only thing standing between Clay and the world heavyweight title.
“Liston will fall in eight (rounds) to prove that I am great,” Clay told the assembled cameras, having referred to Liston as a “tramp,” a “bum” and an “ugly bear.”
Liston responded in kind: “Well, I imagine that if he would come to me, I’d kill him,” he said in a TV interview. “And if he (runs), I’m going to catch him and kill him.”
Clay did come to him, in fact. The psychological game that Clay was so masterful at included driving from Chicago to Denver in an old bus he owned, emblazoned with the “Liston will go in eight” boast, before an event that solidified their high-profile fight. Ever the needler, Clay pulled his bus into Liston’s Denver neighborhood (Liston once said, “I’d rather be a lamppost in Denver than the mayor of Philadelphia”) at 1 a.m. on Nov. 5, 1963, and laid on the horn.
“We woke him up and he came out in the middle of the night in his underclothes, his robe, and he had a big stick …,” Clay later said. “He got mad and we argued for about an hour, and then the (Denver) police came with dogs. … The scene that we had that night, it was a major thing. Martin Luther King was demonstrating (it)” outside of Denver.
The trip culminated in a press conference at Denver’s downtown Hilton in which the boxers committed to a February 1964 fight in Miami Beach, Fla. Clay, who would soon change his name to Muhammad Ali, backed up his boasts in a stunning upset, defeating Liston in a seventh-round technical knockout.
“It’s just classic Ali,” said director Ken Burns, who produced a new, four-part PBS series, “Muhammad Ali,” that recounts these and dozens of other stories. “You don’t need a promoter, really, when you’ve got the greatest promoter on earth. He understood that … and he made the news enough in Denver that almost 60 years after the fact, documentary filmmakers felt it was worthy enough to tell that story.”
The 2½-hour “Round One,” directed by the Emmy-winning Burns, covers Ali’s career from 1942 through 1964. It premieres at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 19, on Rocky Mountain PBS, and PBS stations nationwide, as well as the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. The streaming service costs $4 per month with an Amazon Prime or Prime Video subscription, via amazon.com and streaming providers. The rest of the episodes arrive Sept. 20, 21 and 22, respectively.
While the first one follows Cassius Clay’s rise from “boastful amateur boxer to contender for the heavyweight championship,” as the doc puts it, there’s plenty in the ring for the other three rounds.
“We still have an authorship to it, but we’re not going to tell you what you already know,” Burns, 68, said of the oft-covered Ali.
The documentary was written and co-directed by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, whose collaborations with Burns include “The Central Park Five,” “Jackie Robinson” and “East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story.” As with all of Burns’ projects, the series puts Ali into a greater social context while also looking into his revolutionary persona through the lens of social justice.
Ali’s incredible, early-career accomplishments — including a 1960 Olympic gold medal win when he was a teenager — did little to prepare the world for his activism, conscientious objection from the Vietnam War, and conversion to Islam, the latter influenced in part by his discussions with Malcom X.
“We found hundreds of interviews with him, thousands of hours of archival material, and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with his friends and family,” Burns said of the series, which he and his editors cut down from more than 400 hours of visual storytelling. “There’s some anxiety about trying to find a new way to do it, because we wanted to do something that was extraordinarily deep.”
As with his sports career, the documentary closely tracks Ali’s battles with the U.S. government and his role as a Black man challenging racism during the civil rights movement. When he made a faith-based decision to not go to war for the country, it was seen “only in political terms, not in the context of courage,” Burns said.
“I just find his wisdom to be so profound,” Burns said of Ali, who died in 2016 at the age of 74. “You can see early on that he feels he has a larger purpose in life. It intersects with all the major themes in the 20th century. This is about sports and its role in society, civil rights, the Black athlete, Black power, a new definition of Black masculinity — which he defined — war and politics, faith and Islam. It’s all of those things.”
Even as the series moves through Ali’s other major bouts, such as “The Fight of the Century” and “The Thrilla in Manila,” both against Joe Frazier, and “The Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman, it keeps the focus on Ali as a person. And what a subject: Ali’s ebullient, poetic, often hilarious shenanigans and showmanship forever changed not only sporting but the nature of celebrity.
“It was his own bus, for crying out loud,” Burns said, laughing, of Ali’s Liston stunt in Denver. “He outfitted it, pre-Ken Kesey, pre-hippie road trip, for this. You just can’t make this stuff up.”
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