Fighting bankruptcy: How suing a promoter saw Muhammad Ali star in a classic boxing movie
To love sports is to accept change into your life.
In any other form of media, one can (more or less) curate your experience of it to one specific time period. All but the most open-minded of music fans get to a point where new music doesn’t make sense, and they only listen to what they loved as a teenager. Film fans can turn their nose up at anything released after 1980. Fans of literature can spend an entire life just reading from the 1800s and still have books to spare when the reaper comes a’knocking. Not so with sport.
Now, to be clear, I don’t believe that any of those ways of being into music, books and films are healthy. Yet we’ve all seen and known those people, right? If you haven’t… well, the old adage is true for a reason. Those who don’t pay attention to stories or media released at a certain time, or indeed only pay attention to stories and media released at a certain time, can argue that it’s a matter of taste. That modern stuff repels them, and they just have to retreat into what feels good for them.
If that’s the case with someone who claims to love sport? Who obsessively watches the Yankees but only their Derek Jeter period? Who can recite the starting line-ups of each European Cup Final from the 1960s? Who knows of Fred Perry only as a Tennis player and nothing else? They probably don’t love sports because you have to keep up with changing times. You have to see dynasties rise and fall. You have to see Cassius Clay become Muhammad Ali. You have to learn to say goodbye to the old ways and embrace the new.
Which isn’t to say that the past doesn’t live with us, because with that fact comes the really fun part. The pub debates over who would beat whom in their primes. Arsenal’s Invincibles vs Man City’s Centurions. Prime Sampras vs Prime Djokovic on grass. Jordan’s Bulls vs ’01 Lakers. One might assume this is a modern phenomenon now that the internet has made armchair tacticians of us all, but in 1967, a radio producer decided to make those debates a reality with some thoroughly modern tactics.
How did a lawsuit lead to the screen debut of Muhammad Ali?
It began with Murray Woroner, who came up with a pretty dynamite plan to make fantasy boxing match-ups a reality. He claimed that he could put the stats and details of every great boxer in history into an early computer, which would decide the outcome of each match-up. This was probably all cobblers, but how Woroner presented his findings was a work of genius. He presented these fantasy matchups as radio plays. In-universe commentaries on each fight, playing out in real time.
Thus, Woroner began this fantasy tournament and ran into a big problem in the semi-finals. You see, he booked Muhammad Ali to lose to Jim Jeffries, and Ali was incensed. In fairness to the lad, he had every right to be, and not just because imagining that Jeffries in his prime stood a chance against Ali was a sign that Woroner was living in cloud cuckoo land. At the time, Ali was barred from boxing professionally for his refusal to be drafted into the Vietnam War and was very nearly bankrupt.
All he had was his reputation, which was being shredded by this con artist’s nostalgia-baiting. He threatened legal action against Woroner, who made a counteroffer that the broke Ali couldn’t turn down. For $10,000, he would turn a previous dream match that Woroner had broadcast as a radio show into a movie. He and Rocky Marciano, one of the greatest to ever pull on a pair of Everlasts, put to screen at last. Woroner’s crew would film them sparring for a few days, then edit the footage to suit what “the computer” (Woroner really) would deem as the outcome.
We all know this is Woroner’s work because Marciano won by a knockout in the 13th round, and the only thing that Marciano ever had over Muhammad Ali was popularity. At the very least, both were paid handsomely for the filming session and would become pretty friendly over the days they spent sparring. It also gave Marciano one last day in the sun before passing away in a plane crash mere weeks after the film was shot.