Muhammad Ali: The pain and the glory

Among the many approving noises accompanying next week's British premier of the £72m film of Muhammad Ali's life, and acclaim for a virtuoso performance by Will Smith, is the reservation of Michael Katz, a New York boxing writer. "It's wonderful as long as you keep your eyes shut," he says. "Smith has captured every nuance of Ali's speech, but the problem starts when you take a look at the screen.

"Then you have to wonder how many times in the history of entertainment has an actor been less pretty than the character being portrayed – maybe it happened a few times with Ethel Merman, but outside of that I just can't imagine."

Katz's point is less superficial than it may seem to those too young to know of Ali other than by fragments of film or the impressions of those who saw his artistry, felt his power and magnetism and knew, as surely as they knew anything, that this was a force, this was a man, who could never be truly reproduced, either in life or on celluloid.

The best that could be done, it was the solemn consensus, was to offer a flash of insight into the unique dynamism of a character who did not, as the movie inevitably suggests because of the constriction of its form, arrive all of a masterful piece, flaying opponents, trampling over prejudice, defying the most rancid corners of American life all the way from the Ku Klux Klan to the military-industrial establishment. Rather through trauma and fear and doubt, he gradually acquired such ballast, such impregnable gravitas, that it could be said that this prizefighter of scarcely rudimentary education had become arguably the most charismatic, compelling figure of the 20th century.

This was the burden that Smith, the accomplished star of Independence Day and Men in Black, carried on to the set for the first day of filming and that, some would say, inevitably consigned all his acting talent to somewhere within the boundaries of honourable failure.

Perhaps unconsciously, Smith revealed his understanding of the essential problem confronting him when, after working out with the great Sugar Ray Leonard and another former world champion, James Toney, he said: "You can't play a character like Ali without experiencing pain. You have to be true to the journey." Here, whatever Smith's good intentions and interpretative skills, is a classic example of Hollywood meeting reality, and coming up with a toy sword in the equivalent of a Vietcong firefight.

Ali changed the course of his life and, so damagingly, his career, when he declared that he had no argument with "them Vietcong" and refused to step forward for induction into the US Army. It was a gesture of supreme defiance and the genesis of the character who even now, locked into silence by the effects of Parkinson's disease and living in a Michigan farmhouse sustained by medication and the care of his fourth wife, Lonnie, as he approaches his 60th birthday, retains an inexorable power to touch the world.

The most stunning example of this came in the Olympic Stadium in Atlanta five years ago when the spotlight of the opening ceremony picked out the frail but still majestically defiant Ali fighting, successfully, to play his part in the ritual of an event that, however flawed by commercialism and politics, could still produce a moment of emotion that swept around the world. Strong men could not fight back the tears as Ali took them all the way back to Rome, 36 years earlier, when he won his Olympic gold and presumed, falsely he learned quickly, that this automatically made him an American hero of the first rank.

There are historical inexactitudes in the film made inevitable by the compression of the story into the period between Ali's sensational ascension to the world heavyweight title in Miami Beach's Convention Hall in 1964, when he beat the formidable Sonny Liston, who for publicity purposes had been harassed by, among other devices, the brandishing of a bear trap, and the equally seismic triumph over George Foreman in Zaire eight years later.

Though the fight sequences have been praised for their technical authenticity, the first fight has Liston landing a series of heavy blows. They never happened. Despite Ali's pre-fight blood pressure readings alarming doctors, and convincing some that he was in the throes of a nervous breakdown, he fought immaculately, thoroughly divesting Liston of his ogre's image. In the second fight, which ended so controversially, Ali's knock-out punch is portrayed as a full-blood connection. In fact it was a glancing blow that was described by many as a tap; hence the controversy.

The range of Ali's womanising is restricted to the shuffling of wives, when in reality it was much more comprehensive; and the famous incident when his second wife Belinda flew into town in outrage, having read that Ali had not corrected President Marcos of the Philippines when he publicly assumed that the fighter's beautiful companion, Veronica, had already become his third wife, was put back a year and moved from Manila to Kinshasa. There is story-telling licence here, and acceptable as such, but the deeper problem cannot be so easily dismissed.

It hangs, immovably, over Smith's claim that he had to feel the pain to be true to the journey. This particular pain, imprinted so indelibly on to the consciousness of a watching world, could not be transferred, and the journey was manifestly unique. Smith could never know how it was to lie face down in a farmhouse in deepest Georgia when white racists came with guns to disrupt his preparation for a comeback fight with Jerry Quarry, or to take the punches of Joe Frazier or Kenny Norton or Foreman or, when the last of his talent was ebbing away in the late Seventies, those of Earnie Shavers on a night in Madison Square Garden when the match-maker Teddy Brenner said: "I never thought I'd see the day when Muhammad Ali's greatest talent was to take a punch." After that fight, Ali yelled for the lights to be turned out in the dressing room. He said they were like needles in his eyes. His medical advisor, Ferdie Pacheco, quit that night, after telling Ali that terrible damage was being caused to all parts of his body, even his bowels.

Covering such bleak reality, when we know that Ali's medical condition was so exacerbated by the amount of punishment he took in the last years of his career, a phase of fighting that was darkly anticipated by his own admission that he felt "near to death" at the climactic point of his stupendous third fight with Frazier in Manila, giving proper weight to the intricacies of his relationship with the Black Muslims, including what some consider his betrayal of Malcolm X, were some of the film's more intractable problems. But perhaps the greatest was capturing Ali's sheer exuberance, encapsulated in the superb docu-film When We Were Kings. The lead role was played not by a skilful actor but by the man himself, and for the scale of the challenge facing Smith you have only to reach for the video, which shows Ali when he beat Foreman and, in his own graphic phrase, "done fucked the world's mind". He said that to the sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney, who once wrote: "Ali only needs to look into the bathroom mirror each morning to re-invent himself."

Not all Ali's inventions were inspired or impregnable. One remembers visiting him in his training camp in Deer Lake, in Pennsylvania, as he prepared for one of his last big fights against Larry Holmes in 1980, and finding not the man of the century but a prisoner of a day filled with angst. Mine was the first visit to the camp by a sportswriter for several weeks. He was dismayed by the drift of interest in him, and he hated the demands of training. He was already taking the diuretics that would leave him a smooth, polished shell of a man, utterly defenceless against the power and competence of Holmes, and one could only mourn the loss of that confidence that for so long had persuaded him that nothing was beyond his powers.

Never had he been so mesmerising than in the build-up to his first astonishing – and losing – fight with Frazier in New York in 1971. He told 700 journalists: "Fifteen referees! I want 15 referees because there ain't no man who can keep up with the pace I'm going to set except me. There's not a man alive who can whup me. I'm too quick, too smart. I should be a postage stamp. That's the only way I'll ever get licked. When I go into the ring they'll be waiting everywhere. England, France, Italy. Egypt and Israel will declare a 45-minute truce. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, even Red China and Formosa. Not since time began will there be a night like this."

It was the time of certainty – and doggerel. "Joe's gonna come out smokin'," declared Ali. "But I aint gonna be jokin'/ and I'll be pickin' and pokin'/ pouring water on his smokin'/ This might shock and amaze ya/ But I'm gonna destroy Joe Frazier."

Ultimately he would do that, but it would take him three fights of such elemental force that it was perhaps only to be expected that the eventual loser would never completely expel his bitterness at the profundity of his defeat. Frazier was bruised and diminished permanently by the force of the psychological and physical assault, and even Ali's warmest admirers cannot deny that in it there was both cruelty and gracelessness as well as the finer instincts of a supreme warrior.

Such, though, is the inherent complexity of Ali's nature – and the meaning of his life. Gathering it into two-and-a-half hours of film-making was always going to represent a huge challenge. For Will Smith the reward for accepting it may come with the Oscar for best actor. But if it happens, he will be wise in his speech of triumph if he refrains from speaking again of feeling the pain and making the journey of Muhammad Ali. These are, after all, untouchable properties of a man who lives on in a Michigan farmhouse, with his imprisoned thoughts and his frozen doggerel, but also the mute, sustaining belief that once he was the King of World, a role he played beyond the power of anyone's imitation.

Biography

Born: Cassius Marcellus Clay, on 17 January 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky. Took name of Muhammad Ali, 1964.

Parents: son of Cassius Marcellus Clay Snr and Odessa L Grady.

Family: Married first wife Sonji Roi 1965 (divorced 1966); second Belinda Boyd (changed name to Khalilah Tolaria) 1967 (divorced 1977); third Veronica Porche 1977 (divorced 1986); fourth Yolanda Williams 1986. Seven daughters and two sons.

Education: Central High, Louisville.

Boxing career: Amateur boxer 1954-60; Olympic Games light heavyweight champion 1960. Professional boxer from 1960 to 1981: world heavyweight title 1964, defeating Sonny Liston; stripped of title after refusing to be drafted into US Army 1967; returned to boxing in 1970, regained world heavyweight title 1974, defeating George Foreman in Zaire; lost title to Leon Spinks 1978, regained the same year; defeated by Larry Holmes 1980.

Honours and appointments: Member of US Black Muslim movement; Special Envoy of President Carter to Africa (to urge boycott of 1980 Moscow Olympics) and of President Bush to Iraq, 1990; UN Messenger of Peace, 1999; holder of Amnesty International Lifetime Achievement Award.

Autobiography: The Greatest (1975 – turned into 1976 film The Greatest)

He says: "Float like a butterfly, Sting like a bee!"; "I ain't got no beef with no Vietcong. No Vietcong ever called me nigger" (on his refusal to fight in Vietnam).

They say: "Clay is a good enough fighter, but it's unfortunate that he's a black muslim. A champion should represent all sects not just one" (Joe Louis, former heavyweight champion).