Everyone’s seen this picture a million times in the last 12 hours, but you have to hear the story of how it happened:
Neil Leifer, possibly the best sports photographer of his generation, covered Ali for Time and Sports Illustrated from the early 1960s through Ali’s fight against Larry Holmes.
NEIL LEIFER: “How good was Ali at self-promotion? Let me tell you a story that shows his genius. After he turned pro, Sports Illustrated did a piece on him. They assigned a free-lance photographer named Flip Schulke, and Ali—he was Cassius Clay then—asked, ‘Who do you work for?’ Schulke told him he did a lot of work for Life. This was when Life was the biggest magazine in the country, and Ali wasn’t that big then. He’d won the gold medal, but that was it. There was no reason for Ali to be in Life magazine, so when he said, ‘Man, how about shooting me for Life,’ Schulke told him, ‘I’d love to, but I’d never get it past the editors.’
Well, Ali accepted that, but a few minutes later, he was asking questions again. ‘Tell me some of the photographs you’ve done.’ And Schulke explained that he did a lot of underwater photography; that was his specialty. And Ali thought of something on the spur of the moment, which shows what an absolute genius he was. His eyes widened, and he told Schulke, ‘I never told nobody this, but me and Angelo have a secret. Do you know why I’m the fastest heavyweight in the world? I’m the only heavyweight that trains underwater.’ Schulke said, ‘What do you mean?’
And Ali explained, ‘You know why fighters wear heavy shoes when they run? They wear those shoes because, when you take them off and put the other shoes on, you feel real light and you run real fast. Well, I get in the water up to my neck and I punch in the water, and then when I get out of the water, I’m lightning fast because there’s no resistance.’ Schulke was skeptical, but Ali swore it was the truth, and to prove his point, he told Schulke, ‘Tomorrow morning, you can see me do it. I do it every morning with Angelo, and no one’s ever seen it before. I’ll let you photograph it for Life magazine as an exclusive.’
So Schulke called up Life and suggested the piece, and I think they ran five pages of Ali up to his neck in a swimming pool. And the two things I remember most about that were, first, Ali couldn’t swim, not a bit; and second, Ali had never thrown a punch underwater in his life. It was a total bullshit story he made up, but it got him in Life, and Life didn’t do it as a joke. They were convinced he trained underwater. Now that’s a genius you don’t see in people very often. Genius and a bit of a con man, too.”
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