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'Ali' is worthy of the champ On Friday - Bob HannaSports Reporter / Columnist 
Will Smith was Muhammad Ali's personal choice to play The Greatest from the beginning, but he resisted the role for several years because he didn't want "to be the dude that messed up the Muhammad Ali story."
As a sportswriter who is an unabashed fan of Ali, who has read two books on him, and has written more stories about him than any other athlete by far, I, too, feared that Smith and director Michael Mann would mess it up.
As much as I like Smith, how could anyone, I worried, capture the boyish charm, the spiritual strength, the humor, and the pure audacity of the most vilified and idolized athlete of the 20th century?
"You will probably be disappointed because you know his whole life," cautioned my wife.
So it was with a great deal of trepidation that we went to the Dartmouth Cinema to see "Ali."
I wasn't disappointed.
Smith is superb as Ali, maybe the only actor who could have pulled it off. I wouldn't go so far as to say it is a great film, but it is a very good film, honest and uncompromising.
It does not wallow in sentimentality as so many films of this nature do. That much was spelled out to Mann by Muhammad and his wife, Lonnie, before the film was even started.
"The one thing they feared was a sentimentalization, a teary Hallmark greeting version of Muhammad Ali," said Mann. "What they didn't want is what I didn't want."
Maybe that's what film critic Roger Ebert wanted more of. He called the movie "a long, flat, curiously muted film," giving it a paltry two stars.
His was the only negative review I have seen, and was probably due to a lack of familiarity with Ali the man (as opposed to Ali the showman) and boxing in general. Ebert criticizes the film for dwelling too much on the meditative Ali and the sadness in his life. Maybe the comical Ali was the only Ali he knew.
But there was much sadness in Ali's life: the strained relationship with his womanizing, heavy drinking father; his exclusion from restaurants in his home town of Louisville after winning an Olympic gold medal; the death of his friend, Malcolm X; his boxing exile; his disillusionment with the Nation of Islam when it, too, suspended him after his refusal to be drafted, and the revelation that people in his own entourage, including his devoted cheerleader, Bundini Brown (well played by Jamie Foxx, though he is a bit young for the part), were stealing from him.
Ebert is also critical of Mann's failure to commit to a point of view, "leaving us to draw our own conclusions."
But in the eyes of Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel, that is one of the film's strengths.
"It does not brutally impose itself on the audience," wrote Schickel. "It permits us in the audience our own reflections, not only about its subject but also about the times Ali helped shape and which ultimately, quite miraculously, helped shape him."
Offered Smith, "Michael Mann doesn't subscribe to the theory that the audience is not smart. People appreciate it when you're not spelling everything out."
Still, there are scenes which could have used a little elaboration, especially those pertaining to Ali's ties with the Black Muslims, as the members of the Nation of Islam were called then, and Malcolm X.
While Ali had already joined the Nation of Islam, an anti-white, separatist version of Islam, when he met Malcolm X, it was Malcolm who counseled Ali and deepened his trust in Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Black Muslims.
Ironically, Malcolm would later turn against Elijah Muhammad, labeling him a "religious faker." This was after a pilgrimage to Mecca that changed Malcolm's racist views of white people.
"The true Islam," stated the new Malcolm, "has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks."
After his return to the U.S., Malcolm formed the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which he described as a "non-religious and non-sectarian group organized to unite Afro-Americans for a constructive program toward attaiment of human rights."
However, it was seen as a threat to the Nation of Islam and Malcolm was subsequently shot to death in February, 1965, allegedly by Black Muslims. To this day, Malcolm X's wife, Betty Shabazz, believes that Louis Farrakhan, the current leader of the Nation of Islam, was directly or indirectly involved in the murder of her husband.
When Malcolm left the Nation of Islam, Ali was left with the hard choice of following his friend or remaining loyal to his spiritual leader, Elijah Muhammad. He chose the latter, a decision he would later regret.
"When Malcolm X broke with Elijah, I stayed with Elijah," says Ali in Thomas Hauser's excellent biography of Ali. "I believed that Malcolm was wrong and Elijah was God's Messenger. I was in Miami training when I heard Malcolm had been shot to death. ... It was a pity and a disgrace he died like that, because what Malcolm saw was right, and after he left us, we went his way anyway. Color doesn't make a man a devil. It's the heart, soul and mind that counts."
It is helpful to know this before seeing the movie, which offers little in the way of explanation, except for one scene where Ali joyfully greets Malcolm outside a hotel in Ghana.
They talk, but we are not privy to the conversation. Then the smile on Ali's face fades and he says to Malcolm, "You shouldn't have quarreled with Elijah Muhammad." He says it again, then turns his back on Malcolm and walks away.
His love for Malcolm is later seen briefly in a tear that runs down the side of his face after learning of the assassination of his friend.
The focus of the film is on Ali's conversion to Islam, his subsequent exile, his refusal to compromise his principles, and his quest to regain the heavyweight championship.
At first it is a personal thing, but later in a training run scene through the streets of Zaire, where he is joined by adulant natives, he begins to realize the enormity of his quest.
"I'm not going to be the champion you want me to be," he tells the press after winning the heavyweight title and revealing his allegiance to the Nation of Islam. "I'm going to be the champion I want to be."
One of the best and most revealing scenes in the movie is when he expresses, in rat-a-tat fashion, his feelings on the draft to reporters.
"They're not my enemies," he says of the Viet Cong. "You're my enemy. You want me to fight against people I don't even know in some foreign country, but you won't fight for me right here in this country."
For his stand against the draft and his association with the Black Muslims, who were viewed by the white establishment as an anti-white, anti-American militant group, Ali was branded a coward, a draft-dodger, a traitor, a racist, and a disgrace to American sports. Not only by the self-serving politicians and athletic commissioners, but by the leading sports columnists of that time.
Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Milton Gross, Gene Ward, Arthur Daly, Murray Robinson, they all ripped into him like jackals at a fresh kill. Never in my lifetime have I seen an athlete so viciously attacked by the media.
"They're coming after you, you know that," Howard Cosell warns Ali in the movie.
Esquire magazine depicted the merciless assault with a cover photo of Ali in boxing trunks, his bleeding body pierced by arrows.
But Ali, his livelihood unjustly taken away (his case was still under appeal) never wavered. And then a remarkable thing happened. The tide of hate began to subside and a new wave of adoration for Ali began to sweep the country, particularly on the college campuses.
Then on June 28, 1971, eight months after he returned to the ring against Jerry Quarry, the Supreme Court ruled he was sincere in his conscientious objection and unanimously reversed his conviction for draft evasion.
It should be noted, too, that while the Nation of Islam may have preached hatred for the white man, Ali never did.
When promoter Don King rebukes Ali's white trainer, Angelo Dundee, in the movie, Ali is quick to chastise King and defend his trainer. I suspect this scene was meant to demonstrate not only Ali's loyalty to his white friend, but his tolerance for all people of all colors.
But I would have liked to have seen it stated more clearly, as in Hauser's biography:
"All the hating in the world is wrong," says Ali. "Forget about nations. Forget about color. Forget about different religions. People are people. God created us all. ... Here in this country, we've been making progress on how people get along. But there's still hatred, and hating someone because of his color is wrong. It's wrong both ways. It don't matter which color does the hating. All people, all colors, got to work to get along."
The biggest fault I had with the movie was Ron Silver's portrayal of Dundee. Everyone else in the movie, especially Jon Voight's Howard Cosell (despite a pasty, puffy look from all the makeup), was right on the mark.
Silver's Dundee is a rather tense and unsmiling worrywart, whereas the real Dundee is a laid-back guy, capable of delivering his own funny lines.
The movie also fails to credit Dundee for saving Ali's rear end in the first Sonny Liston fight. While the film faithfully records Ali's temporary blindness in the fourth and fifth rounds, it doesn't include his panic.
When Ali came back to his corner after the fourth round, he was yelling, "I can't see. My eyes, I can't see." Something -- Dundee speculated that it was a coagulant that Liston's cornermen used for his cuts -- had gotten into Ali's eyes and they were burning.
Even though he was clearly winning the fight, Ali told Dundee to cut his gloves off. "We're going home," he said.
"Forget the bull----," retorted Dundee. "This is the championship. Sit down." Dundee worked feverishly to rinse out Ali's eyes, but when it came time to go out for the next round, Ali was still yelling, "I can't see."
"I was scared they'd stop the fight," said Dundee. "So I got his mouthpiece back in, stood him up, and said, "This is the big one, daddy. Stay away from him. Run!"
Ali didn't run, but he danced and backpedaled on those magnificent legs until his eyes began to clear. Then he went back to the business of beating the hell out of Liston.
The movie also exaggerates a little the pounding Ali took from George Foreman in the film's climactic fight scene, making it look like Ali took a fearful beating for seven rounds before summoning the strength to knock Foreman out in the eighth round.
In reality, Ali took most of Foreman's punches on his arms and shoulders as part of his now famous rope-a-dope strategy, which he inserted in the second round, much to the shock and dismay of Dundee and Brown.
The pre-fight plan was to box and move, but after tasting Foreman's power at long range, Ali decided that wouldn't work. The rope-a-dope was designed to let Foreman punch himself out as he had a history of tiring after the fifth round.
Right on cue, Foreman began to wilt in the sixth and was totally exhausted by the eighth, when Ali delivered the coup de grace.
But these are minor discrepancies, inserted, I'm sure, to add a little drama to what everyone knew was coming.
One of the most difficult things for a biographic film of a famous person to overcome is the inherent lack of suspense.
The movie, "Ali," accomplishes this with its honest, meticulous approach, its realistic fight scenes with real fighters (James Toney does a nice stint as Smoking Joe Frazier), and a great cast.
But most of all because of Smith's remarkable, Oscar-caliber portrayal of The Greatest.
Bob Hanna is a columnist for The Standard-Times.
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