boxing skills had started to wane. He no longer was the floating butterfly, and the sting of the bee didn’t hurt as much. He’d lost an embarrassing title fight to Leon Spinks and then won the rematch, becoming the first man to win the heavyweight title three times. By this point I had developed my original impression of him so that it wasn’t just an imitation of his voice, it was a total portrait of the man. The piece was called “Fifteen Rounds,” and it covered fifteen big moments of Ali’s life, including his relationship with Cosell, all punctuated by ring bells. I played Ali from the age of eighteen until the thirty-six-year-old Ali loses to Spinks and plots his comeback. The last speech was a monologue that rose to a fever pitch, underscored by a full orchestra playing the stirring Rocky music. I was the last to perform at his retirement party, and once again the least known. Richard Pryor, Chevy Chase, and Diana Ross were just a few of the superstars who preceded me. But when I got onstage in front of twenty thousand people, all I could see was Ali.
To this day, I think it was one of my best performances. The great Ali laughed and cried as he watched me play him—it was surreal. I wasn’t even finished when Ali himself led the standing ovation. Afterward, he came backstage. I was standing with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase, and Ali just walked through them. He lifted me off the ground. “Little brother, you made my life better than it was,” whispered the champ. He turned and left; there was nothing more to say.
“Little Brother, you made my life better than it was.”—1979, the Forum, Los Angeles.
(Photograph by Bruce W. Talamon © 1979. All rights reserved)
The next night, I taped my very first HBO special. Michael Fuchs, the network’s creator, was the executive producer for my show. A visionary, Michael would become a big part of my career. HBO wasn’t yet the incredible network it is now, but it was already something unique. You had to pay to watch, and doing a special for HBO was just that: special. You could say whatever you wanted, uncensored, without commercials. At the time, mine was only the third or fourth stand-up show HBO had done. I didn’t want to just walk out onto a bare stage, so we built a set to look like the backstage of a nightclub, and I gave the show a story. It opened in the Stand-up Comedians wing of the Motion Picture Home, where a young reporter, Jimmy Brogan, was interviewing the now eighty-year-old me. (Clearly, even then I was looking toward my golden years, and wondering just how golden they would actually be.) Robin Williams and the very witty Martin Mull played themselves as old-timers (great makeup jobs!), and a young actor named Michael Richards made his television debut; he played an old and confused Chevy Chase tripping over bedpans and muttering, “Did I leave the show too soon?” We also had a Steve Martin look-alike with a limp arrow on his head and deflated balloon animals littering his room.
The “interview” then became a flashback to the performance. Not thinking he’d say yes, I’d asked Ali if he would do a few minutes with me onstage as a surprise to the audience. “We will shock and amaze them, little brother,” he told me. The special was being taped at a small theater in Santa Monica, only two hundred seats. The Forum event we had taped the night before was being aired that night, but Ali wouldn’t let me down. He sat on an apple box in the alley of the theater, alongside our production trucks, and watched his tribute on a small black-and-white monitor until it was time to go onstage. The audience, of course, went nuts. I got him to imitate Cosell while I played him. It was hilarious. He even recited a poem to me before he left the stage: “I love your show and I admire your style, but the pay is so cheap I won’t be back for a while.” That night, onstage, I realized, Holy shit, Muhammad Ali is my friend. This was confirmed a few
To this day, I think it was one of my best performances. The great Ali laughed and cried as he watched me play him—it was surreal. I wasn’t even finished when Ali himself led the standing ovation. Afterward, he came backstage. I was standing with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase, and Ali just walked through them. He lifted me off the ground. “Little brother, you made my life better than it was,” whispered the champ. He turned and left; there was nothing more to say.
“Little Brother, you made my life better than it was.”—1979, the Forum, Los Angeles.
(Photograph by Bruce W. Talamon © 1979. All rights reserved)
The next night, I taped my very first HBO special. Michael Fuchs, the network’s creator, was the executive producer for my show. A visionary, Michael would become a big part of my career. HBO wasn’t yet the incredible network it is now, but it was already something unique. You had to pay to watch, and doing a special for HBO was just that: special. You could say whatever you wanted, uncensored, without commercials. At the time, mine was only the third or fourth stand-up show HBO had done. I didn’t want to just walk out onto a bare stage, so we built a set to look like the backstage of a nightclub, and I gave the show a story. It opened in the Stand-up Comedians wing of the Motion Picture Home, where a young reporter, Jimmy Brogan, was interviewing the now eighty-year-old me. (Clearly, even then I was looking toward my golden years, and wondering just how golden they would actually be.) Robin Williams and the very witty Martin Mull played themselves as old-timers (great makeup jobs!), and a young actor named Michael Richards made his television debut; he played an old and confused Chevy Chase tripping over bedpans and muttering, “Did I leave the show too soon?” We also had a Steve Martin look-alike with a limp arrow on his head and deflated balloon animals littering his room.
The “interview” then became a flashback to the performance. Not thinking he’d say yes, I’d asked Ali if he would do a few minutes with me onstage as a surprise to the audience. “We will shock and amaze them, little brother,” he told me. The special was being taped at a small theater in Santa Monica, only two hundred seats. The Forum event we had taped the night before was being aired that night, but Ali wouldn’t let me down. He sat on an apple box in the alley of the theater, alongside our production trucks, and watched his tribute on a small black-and-white monitor until it was time to go onstage. The audience, of course, went nuts. I got him to imitate Cosell while I played him. It was hilarious. He even recited a poem to me before he left the stage: “I love your show and I admire your style, but the pay is so cheap I won’t be back for a while.” That night, onstage, I realized, Holy shit, Muhammad Ali is my friend. This was confirmed a few
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