When We Were Kings. Produced by David Sonenberg, Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford; directed by Leon Gast; cinematography by Maryse Alberti, Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, Albert Maysles and Roderick Young; edited by Leon Gast, Taylor Hackford, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Keith Robinson; color, 90 minutes. A Gramercy Pictures release.

reviewed by Ben Carrington Chelsea School, University of Brighton, UK

When We Were Kings is an important yet problematic film which purports to be about the 1974 World Heavyweight Championship clash in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, but is in reality a mini bio-pic of the former. The film is funny, inspiring, and frustrating in almost equal measure, but despite its problems does powerfully show the intelligence and beauty of Ali.

I watched the film on its opening in Brixton, the spiritual home of black Britain, and my experience highlighted some of the film's ambiguities. To many of the young blacks in the packed theatre, Ali was clearly 'their man' - perhaps the ultimate symbol of black pride and resistance, embodying a majestic and fear- less form of black physicality. As Spike Lee accurately notes in the film, 'Ali was a beautiful specimen, a fighting machine. He was handsome, he was articulate, he was funny, charismatic and he was whupping ass too!'

Twice during the film the novelist Norman Mailer suggests that Ali was frightened of Foreman. At these points a few people shouted at the screen, telling Mailer to 'Shut the fuck up!' From that moment, Mailer and the other white voices were seen as partial impostors; here was their man (and by implication themselves), almost immortal in his presence, being described as scared. As the fight comes to its climax, Mailer is again inserted at a crucial point, breaking the visual flow, to provide the definitive account of what is occurring. For one young black man in the audience this was too much and he shouted out, 'What the hell does this old white man know? Fucking white idiot!', which he repeated when Mailer reappeared again at the film's end.

As the credits rolled, a white man and the black man stood face-to-face, apparently ready to fight over the incident. By the time I had left the cinema they were outside. The young white man had called the bluff of the black guy, who was obviously not expecting any white man (in Brixton!) to challenge his public

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76 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW FOR THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORT 33( I)

pronouncements on racism, and was clearly not going to fight with only his embarrassed girlfriend by his side. Most of the audience, seemingly dismayed by the affair, walked quickly away into the night, shaking their heads at the episode.

How can we begin to understand such reactions? The reasons are obviously complex, but part of the answer undoubtedly lay in some of the problems with the film's structure. Thomas Hauser (Ali's biographer), Norman Mailer, and the journalist George Plimpton, all provide the (white) 'authoritative voices', mean- ing that Ali's diasporic significance as a politicized black athlete seems to be lost - it is almost as if no black voice was capable of comprehending Ali's signifi- cance. We rarely get to see what Ali meant to blacks in Africa, or elsewhere for that matter, and the weight given to Zairean and other African voices in the film is negligible. You can almost see the film-makers' response to this as they insert one Zairean voice (Malik Bowens) and add, most curiously, statements from Spike Lee, to avoid the charge that this is simply a white male view of Ali.

The misrepresentation of Ali's revolutionary black political stances is high- lighted by quotes from two of these speakers. Lee states that one of the problems with Ali's legacy is that young blacks do not know who he is. This is rubbish. Ali is well known throughout the black diaspora, but it is his political significance that is often misunderstood, and which the film ultimately fails to come to terms with. Absent from the film is Ali's (admittedly, not always consistent but never- theless real) critique of capitalism as part of his advocacy of third world politics. The biggest danger today is not cultural amnesia about Ali and others, but the deliberate down-playing of their simultaneous critiques of colonialism and capitalism. The irony, of course, is that it is Lee himself who has done most to promote such distortions through his own films and endorsements for firms like NIKE!

Perhaps, though, the most misleading moment comes from Mailer. The film ends with a story of Ali meeting Mailer and his wife a few years after the fight. As Mailer goes off to the toilet, Ali apparently makes a pass at his wife. The delighted Mailer recounts this story as a defining moment of what Ali meant and says 'For me that's Ali, you can't even turn your back on him!' Ali's significance is not captured by his ability to sleep with the wives of ageing white American male novelists! This may be how the white male imaginary would like to con- struct - or contain - Ali, as the super-Negro, able to fight and fuck. But to reduce Ali's role to this sexualized stereotype is reprehensible, and tells us more about the film-makers' (and Mailer's) perceptions of Ali, than about the man himself.

Further, Leon Gast, the director, appears to have had no idea of what to do with the (lack of) female presence in this homosocial space of sport, except to use images of exotic and dangerous black femininity to provide the context for Africa. The only major female character is the 'witch doctor' who appears at the beginning, middle and end of the film, chanting various 'African curses' (she was supposed to have put a spell on Foreman to lose the fight). With the exception of a brief appearance by Ali's mother, the only other significant black female figures are members of James Brown's dance troupe, one of whom eventually bares her breasts to camera. You do not need to be an expert semio- tician or feminist to spot the reinscription of profoundly racist and sexist stereo-

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types about over-sexualized, and ultimately destructive, black females. This aspect of the film is deeply disturbing.

Another central problem is that the film fails to track Ali's political transition from the separatist teachings of The Nation oflslam to his more sophisticated and holistic understanding of Islam. In this sense it falls into many of the same traps as Lee's film Malcolm X, allowing a black conservative appropriation of Ali, while at the same time doing little to challenge, and indeed change, white mis- conceptions about black masculinity and racism (Boyd, 1997). Thus, Ali, as the mass-mediated icon, ultimately becomes distanced from the seriousness of his messages about black liberation and is able to be consumed by white audiences who can feel safe with the non-threatening, almost minstrel-like, Ali re-present- ed to them (Boyd, 1997; McKay, 1995; Sabo and Curry Jansen, 1992; Wilson, 1997).

This reading of the film, however, may be accused of underplaying the centrality of ambivalence to the complex processes of representation, identity and meaning and the extent to which individuals renegotiate how they are inter- pellated. It might be possible to argue that the reactions of the young men in the audience that night were an attempt to reconcile their different readings of the film by, literally, trying to silence each other's voices.

The film throws up a whole series of important questions about the capitalist commodification of, and white (male) fascination with, black culture; issues surrounding racialized masculinity and nationalism; and the position of sports within black resistance. As such, When We Were Kings is one of the most impor- tant films of recent times and deserves to be analysed critically by students and scholars alike in the hope that Ali's historical and contemporary significance may at last be rediscovered.

References

Boyd, T. (1997) Am I Black Enough For You? Popular Culture From the 'Hood and Beyond. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

McKay, J. (1995) '"Just Do it": Corporate Sports Slogans and the Political Economy of "Enlightened Racism"', Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 16: 191-201.

Sabo, D. and Curry Jansen, S. (1992) 'Images of Men in Sport Media: The Social Reproduction of the Gender Order', in S. Craig (ed.) Men, Masculinity, and the Media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Wilson, B. (1997) '"Good Blacks" and "Bad Blacks": Media Constructions of African-American Athletes in Canadian Basketball' ,International Review for the Sociology of Sport 32(2): 177-89.

AUDIO-VISUAL REVIEW (continued)

reviewed by Scott A.G. M. Crawford College of Education and Professional Studies, Eastern Illinois University, USA

I watched When We Were Kings the same week that the tortured front cover of Sports Illustrated labeled boxer Mike Tyson a 'madman' and 'crazed'. One could not have conceived of a Muhammad Ali ever sinking to a level of being headlined

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