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Eig, the biographer, shared a huge amount of contact with the filmmakers, and they started their first interviews in 2016, a week after Ali died. Dozens of boxing writers, friends and ambassadors attended: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Holmes, Jesse Jackson, novelist Walter Mosley, ESPN writer Howard Bryant, boxing promoter Don King. Over the next few years, the filmmakers unearthed more than 15,000 photographs and unearthed images that had not been seen publicly. A production company that had filmed “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali’s third and final fight with Joe Frazier, in the Philippines, had folded before the film could be used. Their images were buried in archives in Pennsylvania.
“This woman took out these boxes and said, ‘They say’ Ali ‘on it – I don’t know what they are,’” McMahon said. “It’s Technicolor, it’s 16 millimeters, taken from the apron [of the ring] – it jumps. And you see combat in a way that has never been seen before. “
Ali’s relationship with Frazier, who as a young fighter had been one of Ali’s fans, is one of the more thorny aspects of the documentary. Ali’s treatment of him before their fights was pretty cruel, employing some of the language of “racist whites,” as one commentator on the show puts it, to denigrate Frazier (who has never forgiven him). This is part of the complex picture of Ali that the series provides: a champion of the people who could be mean; a devout Muslim who was a serial womanizer; an idealist who made many people angry at his refusal to conform to public expectations.
Bryant, the ESPN writer, said he didn’t think “people understand why this story is so heroic, so important and so unique.”
“We just seem to think that every person, if they protest something, if they say something, if they face some sort of sanction, we put them in the same category as Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson,” he said. he continued. “And that is so absurd.”
“Name me another athlete where all the weight of the United States government has fallen on one person. I’m not talking about the NFL saying you can’t play when you’re already a millionaire. Colin Kaepernick obviously sacrificed himself and lost some things. It’s not the same thing. It’s not even close.
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