2023-06-11 12:14:53
“Here’s the champ, here’s the greatest!”
Muhammad Ali, known as Cassius Clay when he was young
Quelle: Getty Images
Late 1960s: Our author gave world boxing champion Muhammad Ali a cuckoo clock as a present – and he beamed like a child. Then the two celebrate New Year’s Eve in New York. There is a bloody wound on the head.
Muhammad ali’s training camp in the mountains of pennsylvania. In it a square of wooden huts. We’ll report to the kitchen barracks. There Ali’s mother, his trainer Dundee, his saying maker Bundini (“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”). And three “Black Muslims” in stiff collars and the same attitude.
He himself sits in his barracks, meditating. But equally pleased to have an audience to himself. Flowing lecture while we still set up our lamps. In a month he’s scheduled to face Frazier, then Foreman. It’s about the World Cup. But completely different images haunt Ali’s head: “I am the mastermind of my people. My people have been brainwashed. Jesus a white baby, all angels snow white, Tarzan in the jungle, a white man rules Africa. The President sits in the White House, in paradise you walk on the Milky Way. But alas, you sin, you’re already on the black list. Got it?”
Then in the training run. Ali boxing with our camera, laughing. Wherever the cameraman is aiming the grinder, Ali hits right next to it. This brain reacts in fractions of a second. Later, in sparring, he actually stands motionless on the ropes, only dodging punches at lightning speed. Yes, finds time in between to chat with us: “I have to have my world title back. Who am I otherwise? Big muscle nigger.”
Muhammad Ali beim Training, circa 1967
Quelle: Getty Images
Afterwards we ceremoniously handed over our gift: a wooden cuckoo clock from the Black Forest. The champ inspires like a child. Then a film screening of Ali’s last fight, before his title was revoked at the time because he had refused military service in Vietnam. With the now famous sentence, of course by Bundini: “I ain’t got nothing against them Cong.” During the performance with the entire court (including the third beautiful wife Belinda), Ali carries his newest little son Ibn Muhammad on his left arm. At the same time, he manically pounded his film opponent with his dreaded right hand.
Ali recognized in Times Square
The following evening is New Year’s Eve. We want to give the champ a break, but Ali wants to join the dreaded hustle and bustle of New York’s Times Square. Coach Dundee protests in vain, Ali rushes into his private bus and wants to drive himself, of course. Dangerous situation in which even the rhetoric Bundini can’t think of anything anymore.
Two hours later we are in Times Square at night. There the usual boost of millions, Ali remains unrecognized in the dark, is offended. What to do? I whip out our battery light and yell, “Here’s the champ, here’s the greatest!” In a matter of seconds, we’re surrounded by thousands of dancing fans tugging at him in search of souvenirs. If something happens to him now, God forbid, our whole station doesn’t have that much pink pink, which is then due in compensation.
Glasses and bottles are already flying out of the windows, one of the dancers is hit on the head until it bleeds. And Ali? Calmly carries the man to his vehicle, and now let’s go. Exactly one month later, a well-trained Ali takes out the dreaded “Smoking Joe” Frazier on points, and the road to the World Championship is open again. Ali will make it. We send a telegram of congratulations. The only answer, signed by Bundini, reaches us months later. It says Ali’s cuckoo clock has stopped working, what to do?
Georg Stefan Troller was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1921 and lives in Paris. His most important works as a documentary filmmaker include around 1,500 interviews, including in the context of the “Paris Journal” and the “Personal Description”.
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