**** It’s so easy to
forget. I had forgotten how pretty Muhammad Ali was. It seems so
long ago that his battle with Parkinson’s disease became
public. All my memories of the champ are recent, where he is a
little bloated, a little stiff, his voice slow and deliberate. I
had forgotten how quick-witted Ali was. How athletic. How
rebellious. He was the greatest, and I am thankful to Leon Gast
for helping me remember.
When We Were Kings is ostensibly the story of “The Rumble in
the Jungle” – the 1974 heavyweight championship fight
between Ali, the contender, and George Foreman, the champ. More
accurately, it is a beautiful biography of the man who was once
the most recognizable person on Earth.
I had forgotten that Muhammad Ali was such a rebel. When he
announced that he had joined the Nation of Islam and was
renouncing his “slave name” Cassius Clay, he was daring
the establishment to challenge him. It did. Ali went to prison
for refusal to enter the armed forces during the Vietnam war.
“No Viet Cong ever called me nigger,” Ali said.
When We Were Kings chronicles the greatest fight of Ali’s
career. He was attempting to regain the heavyweight title that he
had lost when he entered prison as a conscientious objector in
1967. He was facing George Foreman, a heavyweight who was younger
and stronger than Ali. The fight was staged in Kinshasa, Zaire,
after that country’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, put up $10
million for the two fighters to divide equally. (Ali shrugged off
criticism of a poor Third World country spending that much on a
boxing match. “Countries go to war to get their name on the
map,” he observed. “And war costs a lot more than $10
million.”)
This documentary works on every level – as history, as
biography, as a celebration of one of the most charismatic
figures of the 20th century. With George Plimpton, Spike Lee, and
Norman Mailer providing a ’90s perspective on an event which
happened 22 years earlier, When We Were Kings has both a modern
feel and a historic touch. It is interesting to see how the two
main figures, Ali and Foreman, have changed. Then Ali was the
glib care-free champion of the people and Foreman was the surly,
uncooperative fighter that no one loved. Today Ali has trouble
talking, while Foreman is the beloved grandfather of the sport.
Gast began pre-production work on When We Were Kings in 1973. It
took him 23 years to finish it because he shot so much footage he
couldn’t afford to have all the film developed. Luckily,
music talent manager David Sonenberg came along and helped Gast
finish the documentary, which last year won an Academy Award.
With a soundtrack including James Brown, B.B. King, and Miriam
Makeba (from a music festival which preceded the fight in Zaire)
and a contemporary offering from the Fugees, this movie sounds as
good as it looks.
“After putting the film together, I discovered something
that stunned me,” said Sonenberg, the film’s executive
producer. “Many of my young rap artists had no idea who Ali
was. They knew he was a fighter but that was basically it. It
became important to me to make a film that would reach a young
black audience. The perfect way to do this would be to present
Ali as he first appeared to me … ‘The Original
Rapper.’”
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