Ali website Blog by Peter Angelo Simon
4/2/2015
The knocking and the voice came through my motel door at 4:30 a.m. “Grab your pants and your camera, the champ is running!” The sun was just breaking through the trees when I jumped out of the car and began shooting. Muhammad Ali was ahead of me jogging along the rural Pennsylvania black top, his breath visible in the early morning cold. A cow watched from a field of daisies as he passed.
I was in and out of the car, not up to running five miles before breakfast. As he ran by a cornfield, Ali raised his arms in a victorious salute .
At the end of the run he jabbed at the air and danced in the road, cooling down, with me shooting all the while. “Get this,” he said. I raised my camera positioning for a vertical. Ali pulled up his sweatshirt and the rubber liner inside it. As I shot water poured out. “It’s called letting out the sweat,” he said. At that moment I realized that Ali had got me. He understood that I was not interested in him posing and mugging for the camera but in observing the reality of his process of preparation for the comeback heavyweight world championship fight in Africa a month away.
The people genius was right. I was writing public affairs documentary films for television when I discovered my how much excitement and pleasure photography gave me. Edward R. Murrow had said television was like reporting with a one-ton pencil. Now the pencil weighed 33 pounds with camera and recorder unattached but in sync. The Living Camera verite films that Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and a few others were making were devoted to capturing “the feeling of being there.” And that was precisely what I aspired to do with still photography.
I was astounded by what I found at Ali’s camp. “If there’s a secret to my fights, it’s how I prepare,” Ali had said. The place had an air of artistry and imagination: log cabins, magic tricks, huge power stones bearing the names of boxing greats, poetry and humor. In the next two days I went everywhere with Ali: an old people’s home; an exhibition match; watching him practice the “Rope-a-Dope;” taking tea and talking poetry with a visitor. I shot 33 rolls in those two days. Ali said nobody had ever taken so many pictures of him.
In 1974, Muhammad Ali was notoriously fast on his feet and quick with his tongue. Today speech and movement are a challenge. Well wishers worldwide continue to cherish his spirit and take inspiration from his extraordinary life.
# # #