Facing Ali @ SILVERDOCS
Ron Lyle is one of 10 boxers interviewed in Pete McCormack's terrific "Facing Ali."
It was a different story back in 1967, when he was stripped of his championship belt, sentenced to a five-year prison term, and banned from boxing for declining to be inducted into the Army. If joining the Nation of Islam and changing his name from Cassius Clay three years earlier had caused much of white (and some of black) America to view him with suspicion, his refusal to “go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people” made him a full-blown pariah in some quarters. More importantly, it made him a hero in others. Forty years on, it’s pretty clear which impression has stuck.
Pete McCormack’s revelatory and inspiring Facing Ali shows us the Olympic gold medalist and three-time World Heavyweight Champion through the eyes of ten opponents who confronted him in the ring between 1963 and 1980. We see Ali only through brief, well chosen clips from news broadcasts and fight films. But McCormack’s on-camera interviews with Ali’s rogues’ gallery are unfailingly insightful, and their admiration comes through even when they’re bemoaning a bad call. George Chuvalo, the most loquacious of McCormack’s subjects, boasts that after he lost to Ali by decision following a 15-round battle in 1966, Ali went to the hospital to be treated for internal bleeding “and I went dancing with my wife.”
The film is full of delightful moments like this. Chuvalo, as much as anyone, emerges as the nominal star of McCormack’s expertly paced-and-edited biography. His memory is acute and his insight into the sport nuanced, but it’s his endurance of a tragedy far bleaker than Ali’s illness that makes him an appropriate ambassador for The Champ's indomitable spirit. Chuvalo lost two sons to heroin, and a third son, and his wife, to suicide. That he can survive that to show as much class and self-possession as he does here is nothing less than heroic. And McCormack’s achievement in finding a unique angle from which to profile one of the greatest athletes in all of sport makes him a worthy chornicler thereof.
Facing Ali (98 min.) screens tonight at 8 p.m. Tickets appear to be sold out, but try the stand-by line.