Paul Bereswill/Getty Images
The documentary Champions Forever: Ali—The Lost Interviews was released on DVD to great acclaim and fanfare on October 20, 2009, through Image Entertainment.
The film, which features candid conversations with boxing legends Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, and Ken Norton, initially premiered in 1990.
However, 30 additional minutes of revealing and insightful interviews from 20 years ago that were not incorporated into the original film are now shown in this enhanced version.
“I’m claiming, though I couldn’t prove it, that this was Ali’s last interview. Or at least his last meaningful interview,” said Craig Glazer, who produced the film that now runs 142 minutes long. “I think it’s an important part of history.”
The story of how Glazer became a renowned documentary filmmaker is fascinating in itself.
As a freshman student from Kansas City attending Arizona State University, Glazer was robbed by petty drug dealers when he attempted to purchase reefer to smoke with his frat friends on campus.
The theft chapped Glazer’s ass and he was determined to avenge his loss and get even with the peddlers who had earlier swindled him.
Glazer decided to team with Don Woodbeck, a resourceful Vietnam War veteran, and the two posed as undercover drug agents executing fake sting operations.
Surprisingly, Glazer’s and Woodbeck’s nefarious plot worked and the duo ultimately managed to seize large amounts of money from drug kingpins across the nation for an entire decade.
Eventually, Woodbeck and Kansas City’s answer to Omar Little had their scam uncovered and they were pinched by the fuzz.
Glazer was sentenced for his crimes and he was shipped to a federal prison on Terminal Island in Los Angeles to serve four-and-a-half years behind bars.
Upon being freed from the pen, Glazer was relegated to a halfway house designed for ex-convicts when he was contacted by a former inmate he had met on the inside who had begun making a documentary about boxing.
“The producers were looking for help because they knew nothing about boxing,” said Glazer, who at the age of 20 actually became the youngest special agent in the country when he was officially hired by authorities who were impressed by the skills he had exhibited as a bogus narc.
“They didn’t know which fight was which, but I was a huge fan. So I’m two days in a halfway house in L.A. and a Rolls-Royce pulls up, and the next thing I know I’m on the lot at MGM with Ali and George Foreman.”
Approximately one year later, the intriguing documentary was completed and Glazer attended the film’s premier party at Century City in Los Angeles.
A notable sports personality had been chosen in advance to interview the quintet of boxing Hall of Famers.
Unbelievably, as fate would have it, the bigwig sportscaster was belated arriving to the premier and nobody was available to converse with the five iconic pugilists.
4 Comments
Loading more comments...
This comment and all replies have been deleted This comment has been deleted Undo delete