“He wrote his own rules in the ring and in his life.”

These are the words of narrator Keith David in Ken Burns’ docuseries, “Muhammad Ali” which premiered Sept. 19 on the Public Broadcasting System.

A special showing of the film was presented at Ali’s “Fighter’s Heaven” training camp at Deer Lake in Orwigsburg, and was attended by several dignitaries including camp owner, Mike Madden who purchased the 6 acres of property located on Sculps Hill Road in 2016. Since then, Madden has refurbished and preserved the camp’s 18 buildings, and has left much of the site exactly as it was after Ali’s last fight in 1982.

A man with a mission

“I was an Ali fan since I was 11 years old,” said Madden, who is the son of Super Bowl winning coach and Hall of Fame broadcaster John Madden. “I had such a youthful passion about the man. He was a large part of my childhood.”

Madden recalled Ali’s death in June five years ago and how one day later over a second cup of coffee, he was thinking about purchasing the camp that had been abandoned for years.

“I was having an Animal House moment with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other about buying the property that was for sale,” he explained, “and then in July, I traveled from California to the site. I saw how it was overgrown with weeds, but the boulders were still there, each with the name of a heavyweight champion that had been written on them by Ali’s father. I thought this is where it all happened, where he had trained for his biggest fights since 1972. I had to keep this part of his history alive.”

Madden’s proclamation to honor Ali is written on a placard inside Ali’s on-site boxing gym.

“Through the preservation and restoration of the training camp, we’re creating a destination that will, for decades to come, remind some and educate others about the remarkable and inspirational life of Muhammad Ali.”

Members of the dream team

Also accepting invitations to attend the premiere were Lynda Pollack-Shiffer and Harold Hazzard Sr, who was Ali’s personal assistant for eight years.

“All the credit has to go to Mike Madden for returning this camp to what it once was when Ali was here,” said Pollack-Shiffer. Her father, Bernard, sold the property to Ali after their good friend, Gene Kilroy, had helped convince the heavyweight boxer that the country air and surrounding solitude would be a great environment to train for his fights.

Hazzard took care of all of Ali’s travel schedules, his wardrobe, and anything else that was requested of him. He drove the champ everywhere - in Ali’s limousine, his Rolls Royce, his Stutz Bearcat, and a bus Ali purchased following the night after they had a terribly rocky air flight from Chicago to Canada.

“I was with him all the time, not just fight time,” said Hazzard, who added, “I was at every one of Ali’s fights, sweating like crazy. It was like I was in the ring fighting his opponents.”

The legend and the legacy

Part 1 of Burns’ four-part docuseries begins with the childhood of Cassius Marcellus Clay in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky during a time of racial segregation and the emergence of the civil rights movement. Clay’s fascination with boxing occurred accidentally when his bicycle was stolen and he ran into a building to ask for someone to help him find it and saw boxers training for amateur fights.

Narrator Keith David chronicles Clay’s childhood years from ordeals with his abusive father, through his early days as a boxer up and to the time when the “Mighty Mouth” proclaimed, “I am the greatest champion in the world!” just days before his first title fight against Sonny Liston.

The Louisville Lip, as he was called, was despised by many, but Clay’s mouth became an extraordinary marketing ploy to bring fans to his fights to jeer and cheer him, and it worked as boxing arenas were filled to capacity for a young man who craved the adulation.

In author Norman Mailer’s words, “Ali was the very spirit of the 20th century.”

Burn’s presentation is divided by years into four parts, and holds back no punches in portraying Ali as arrogant and often narcissistic, yet in contrast, a sincere, but confused man outside the ring being pulled into different directions by two opposing leaders of the Nation of Islam.

Gene Kilroy - who met Cassius Clay at the 1960 Olympics where the young fighter had won a gold medal - became Clay’s closest and most trusted confidant. Kilroy was very close to the fighter’s family, and was a pallbearer at both of Ali’s parents’ funerals.

“The real history of Muhammad Ali will tell the truth that he was not a racist just because he was a devout member of the Nation of Islam,” said Kilroy, who oversaw the construction of “Fighter’s Heaven” in 1971. “Ali made friends and time with everyone. I only could have wished that God would have given me more people like him in my life.”

Kilroy - a former member of the United States Army - had no issues with Ali, who had refused induction on the grounds his faith made him a conscientious objector.

“He told people he had no quarrels with the Viet Cong,” said Kilroy. “Besides that, fighting in a war was forbidden by the Nation of Islam. As for me, I respected Ali for staying true to his faith, and we should have never sent a single soldier over there in the first place.”

Sam Matta is in charge of Media Relations for Fighter’s Heaven and has overseen previous documentaries filmed at the camp by the BBC and HBO.

“I believe that Ken Burns should win an Academy Award for bringing great exposure to a story that will show what great impact Ali had upon society. His film is the crème de le crème of all the documentaries.”

Burns shows in graphic detail how many Americans vilified Ali. They didn’t like his religion. They despised his lack of humility, especially for a young black man who should have known his place in a white man’s country.

“He was ungrateful, offensive, and he needs to be stopped,” said an unnamed man in the film. Yet, Ali never wavered and became a voice for repressed blacks all across America.

“I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” he said to the press.

The Greatest

Of course, Ali’s braggadocio continued to sell tickets to those who’d come to root against him, but as he marched toward his big fights with Joe Frazier and George Foreman, he was gaining an attractive popularity with more and more white Americans who had begun to admire him not only for his incredible boxing skills, but for his unyielding confidence to stay true to himself.

Throughout his often, self-inflicted turbulent times, Ali kept a sense of humor with his poetry and his wit. When he had failed the aptitude test for the selective service, he remarked, “I said I was the greatest, not the smartest.”

And yet, “the greatest” had always believed in something much greater than himself. In 1978, at the age of 38, Ali said, “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”

Once he retired from the ring and transcended into a beloved, world-renowned ambassador of good will, history will say that the man who had once changed his name and then changed the world had lived up to the highest standards that he had set for himself before passing the torch for others to do the same.

Perhaps Harold Hazzard’s words best say what his friend meant to him and to everyone else whose lives were touched by Muhammad Ali.

“He was just a beautiful person.”