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Four years later, Leifer would receive an accolade from the Observer for another of his images, an aerial shot of Ali celebrating victory over Cleveland Williams in 1966. It was voted the best sports photograph ever taken, beating the Ali-Liston shot into second spot. Ali, says Neil Leifer, the man who shot that celebrated photograph of him berating Liston, was “a gift” to anyone with a camera. “I have spent over 50 years of my life shooting photographs. I photographed everybody from the Pope to Charles Manson. But there has never been a better subject than Muhammad Ali,” he says.
It has often been said that Ali is a man of split character – that his wild-eyed antics were all for show and the second he was out of the limelight and away from the media, he would be calm, reflective and sometimes distinctly shy. For those commissioned to document the champion, Ali’s capricious behaviour made him both a handful and a curiosity. When Sports Illustrated assigned me a story about a young boxer, Cassius Clay, I had never heard of him. I showed him my underwater pictures of water-skiing to impress him that I had done a story for Life. I went to the motel where he was staying, and there he was in the swimming pool going through his workout. He was doing a hook and a jab, and I could see the bubbles. I said to him, 'That's fantastic because I see your fists going through the water, like my water-skiing pictures.' Yet, the idea for the striking picture wasn’t the photographer’s alone. Cassius Marcellus Clay, who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali in honor of his faith, had met the photographer Schulke the day prior. Sports Illustrated sent Flip Schulke to capture the young boxer who had, the year prior, taken Gold at the 1960 Olympic games. When Ali realised it was a Christian symbol he wasn’t sure whether to go through with it,” Fischer explains. “So he put in a call to Herbert Muhammad [his manager] in Chicago because he wanted some comfort to know that it was OK. He felt a little guilty but that call made him feel better. The thing is, people always want their picture on the cover; Ali was the same.”
As Flip Schulke described his last shoot over lunch one day in 1961, the nineteen-year-old boxer across the table devoured every word. Schulke, a Miami-based freelancer for Sports Illustrated, vividly explained how he had photographed water-skiers from below and published the pictures in Life magazine. At that moment, an idea formed in the young fighter’s head. Years before he would float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, Cassius Clay decided to lie like a rug.
He did that all on his own,” Schulke recalled, claiming that Life never ran the photograph because they thought he had posed Clay. “I turned around, and I was just grabbing another camera to take more pictures, and when I turned around he was standing on the bottom of the pool. And actually I have about six frames of him standing there.”Can I design desktop wallpapers? Yes, you can! You do not need to be a graphic designer for you to do this. All you need to do is to know how to save images as wallpapers, and there you go! You will have a wallpaper that suits your needs and preferences. Muhammad Ali towering over Sonny Liston in their second fight in 1965 after Liston had dropped to the canvas following the so-called ‘phantom punch’. The fight lasted just two minutes and eight seconds. Photograph: Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images 30 years too late Sonny Liston as ‘Bad Santa’ on the cover of Esquire magazine in 1963. Photograph: Carl Fischer/Esquire While meeting with the photographer, Ali recognized Schulke’s affinity for shooting underwater. The photographer recalled an article about water skiers he had recently published. Then, a day later, when meeting for the shoot, Ali was already in the pool. Perhaps, considering a cinematic moment, the nineteen-year-old boxer, charismatic and media-savvy since his earliest years, trained inside the water, telling the photographer of his “usual” underwater shadow boxing routine.
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