From The London Times October 30, 2008
Was the Greatest really a racist?
. . .
Yet the so-called Thriller in Manila, as argued in a new documentary of the same name, was marred by
the racist antics and erratic behaviour of Ali, whose relentless abuse of Frazier became strangely obsessional and ultimately revealed the dark heart of a beloved sporting hero.
. . .
During Ali’s three-year ban from boxing because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, it was Frazier who offered him support, financially and professionally (by appealing to boxing commissions to revoke their withdrawal of Ali’s licence). But after Ali’s return to the ring in 1970 the relationship soured, and by their third and final fight in Manila in October 1975
Ali’s traditional pre-fight antics had become ugly, obsessive (he stalked Frazier’s hotel even when the media weren’t around), and defined by
sinister racist rhetoric — Ali’s team caricatured Frazier as a gorilla, wore gorilla T-shirts and regularly humiliated him in public, while
Ali called him an “Uncle Tom”, a “flat-nose”, and implied that he was intellectually inferior.
“He’s the other type negro, he’s not like me!” Ali famously said, during his Parkinson interview in 1974, alluding to his status as a racially superior African American. “There are two types of slaves, and Joe Frazier is worse than you [pointing to Parky] to me!”
Sunni Khalid, an African American sports journalist, clarifies this in the movie.
“An Uncle Tom is someone who is considered subservient to white people or the wishes of white people,” he says. “It is probably the greatest insult that one black man can call another.”
. . .
The smoking gun in the avalanche of racial abuse is a short interview that Ali gave to New Zealand television in 1975, just weeks before the fight. Here, as Ali espouses his strident racial beliefs (including a complete separation of the races), he boasts about attending a Ku Klux Klan rally. “It was a hell of a scene, all those white hoods, the bonfire, and me on the platform talking,” he begins, with something approaching pride. “I says: ‘Black people should marry their own women!’ I says: ‘Blue birds with blue birds, red birds with red birds, pigeons with pigeons, eagles with eagles! God didn’t make no mistake!’ And they say [imitates cheering]: ‘Yeahhhhh! Now you teach the rest of them niggers and everything’ll be all right!’ ”
In any context,
this is a startling confession to come from an African-American, especially one, such as Ali, so frequently associated with the civil rights movement, and so unapologetically lionised in movies such as When We Were Kings and Michael Mann’s Ali. But in the context of the documentary it merely confirms the premise that history has got it wrong, that Ali is far from being The Greatest, and that perhaps the quiet “Smokin’ ” Joe Frazier was the real champ after all.
“When we found that piece of archive I was like: ‘This is f***ing nuts!’ ” says the Thriller in Manila director John Dower. “But
I’ve always sensed that people would rather brush all the difficult stuff about Ali under the carpet because it doesn’t fit with the myth of the great freedom fighter of the 1960s.” Dower’s film explicitly turns its back on Ali who, unsurprisingly, did not want to take part in it (his agent and publicist were both approached for this article, but neither responded with comment). . . .
And yet one suspects that Ali’s multimillionaire demigod status must rankle, especially to a man such as Frazier, who is living out his retirement in a back room in his gym, in the badlands of North Philadelphia. Frazier’s manager, Les Wolff, certainly thinks so. “Ali has always been a huge marketing industry,” he says. “He was surrounded by highly professional marketing and PR people, while Joe was surrounded by family. I really believe that if Joe had been equally marketed, Ali would be in his shadows today.”
. . .
Ultimately, Dower says, what the movie does, and what the subsequent debate will hopefully engender, is a re-evaluation of Ali that might remove some of his stardust but will also, thankfully, return to him some of his complexity and conflicting humanity. “In a way, Ali’s been done a disservice recently by being turned into something benign,” he says, “whereas he’s a much more interesting character than that.”
Thriller in Manila is being screened at Sheffield Doc/Fest on Nov 5 and 8, and is on More4 on Nov 11 at 10pm
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 039559.ece
