Muhammad Ali: New Documentary Is the Greatest Ever
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.
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“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.
“All these celebrity athletes are standing there with nothing to do,” Glazer recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, I’m a movie producer now.’ So I jumped the rope, they turned on the camera and I began asking questions.”
Glazer’s impromptu interview allowed him to be credited as one of Champions' producers and the retired con artist became relatively established in Hollywood almost overnight.
“Suddenly Hollywood figured I knew how to do sports movies,” Glazer said.
Glazer viewed the initial 1990 presentation in its entirety and he realized that there was a significant amount of footage that remained unused.
“I’d edited the movie while the other producers were taking these athletes to lunch, and I knew there was lots of footage that wasn’t used—not to mention my interviews at the premier,” said Glazer. “I knew that one day it would be worth a lot of money.”
Glazer partnered with Ron Hamady and the two attempted to purchase the rights to Champions Forever from deceased litigator Ed Masry.
“They’d given it [the footage] to this lawyer, Ed Masry, and he’s the guy I negotiated with,” Glazer said. “He had this young assistant you might have heard of named Erin Brockovich.”
After much wrangling, Glazer and Hamady were finally granted rights to the footage and the revised film was finished three years ago.
Regrettably, despite the completion of the documentary, legalities prohibited the immediate unveiling of Champions to the public.
“It took that long to get approval to use the additional footage,” Glazer said. “We had to go through an army of lawyers. You don’t mess with the Ali tradition, and he’s got lots of people looking out for his interests. But we finally got the final OK, and I’m glad it’s out.”
To date, the film has mainly achieved rave reviews and USA Today recently gave Champions a sterling rating of three-and-a-half stars out of a possible four.
The 1960s and the 1970s featured some of the greatest heavyweight pugilists in the history of boxing.
Ali (56-5, 37 KOs), Norton (42-7-1, 33 KOs), Foreman (76-5, 68 KOs), Frazier (32-4-1, 27 KOs), and Holmes (69-6, 44 KOs) all had spectacular presences in the ring and each one of them would have dominated his sport had their eras not been intertwined.
Ali, 67, who Ring Magazine named as the greatest heavyweight ever in a 1998 ranking, outshone his opponents both inside and outside of the ring.
The winner of the gold medal in the light heavyweight division in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Ali was a charismatic figure whose cultural status and political views transcended boxing and revolutionized athletics as a whole.
“Before Ali, athletes made a point of being humble. He angered a lot of people. The thing is, Ali could back it up,” said Glazer. “You can credit him among other things with launching this whole ideology of the last 30 years of athletes telling you how handsome and great they were. It’s an attitude that’s common today in sports and hip-hop.”
Foreman, 60, who was knocked out by Ali in the eighth round of the famed “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire in 1974, agreed that Ali was a trendsetter whose contributions to sports can’t be understated.
“Limiting Ali as a boxer is injustice,” said Foreman, a former two-time heavyweight champion and Olympic gold medalist. “He inspired people in basketball, football, politics; even actors would see him and move up a notch. This is one of the greatest men of all time.”
Shockingly, Ali stated in the film that he never claimed to be “The Greatest.”
“I never said I was the greatest,” said Ali, who alleged that the media coined that phrase instead.
Ali, a three-time heavyweight champion, made his professional debut in October 1960 with a victory over Tunny Hunsaker in Louisville, Kentucky.
Sadly, Ali retired tardily as a prizefighter after he suffered a pathetic loss to Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas in December 1981.
A year before the Berbick fiasco, a 38-year-old Ali, who may have already been impaired by Parkinson’s disease, was battered by a fit and trim Holmes in Las Vegas.
Footage of the overmatched Ali versus Holmes debacle is aired roughly 90 minutes into the documentary after the audience has come to recognize Ali as both a physical and mental marvel.
Of all the boxers in the film, Holmes and his career garnered the least amount of attention.
One can presume that Holmes was sparsely accentuated in the film because he gained prominence towards the end of the other legends' careers.
Not coincidentally, Champions opened with video of a diminished Holmes, at the age of 38, being decimated by a ferocious youngster named “Iron” Mike Tyson.
When asked about Tyson in the film, Ali said, “When I quit the game, the game died, didn’t it? Mike Tyson, he’s good, but he’s no Muhammad Ali.”
Champions expertly captures the existences of these five fighters for the ages.
“All five of these heavyweight champs haven’t been in the same room together since then and they never will be again in the future,” said Glazer.
During a conference call, Glazer recounted how he discussed with Ali his past life as a criminal once the production of the film was finalized.
Glazer remembered that Ali asked him rhetorically, “There’s not much difference between the hero and the villain, huh?”
Glazer may not be either a “hero” or a “villain.”
However, Craig Glazer is undoubtedly a skilled producer and he created an extraordinary work of art that every genuine fan of “The Sweet Science” should own.
Champions Forever: Ali—The Lost Interviews is simply an enjoyable and outstanding boxing documentary.
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