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When Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to photograph Muhammad Ali in Florida in 1966, it marked the start of one of the most important relationships in Ali’s career. The champion was 24 and preparing to fight Henry Cooper in London, but he had recently alienated many fans in the States by joining up with the Nation of Islam, speaking in favour of racial segregation and declaring that he would not fight for his country in Vietnam. “I don’t have no quarrel with those Viet Congs!”
Parks was a significant figure in black American culture – he was not only a photographer but also a novelist, musician and film director (he went on to make the 1971 movie Shaft). He went to see Ali on something of a mission. He wanted to reclaim the fighter as a true American hero, show Ali’s humanity at a time when the press was calling him a brash and “shameless traitor”. Parks was encouraged as soon as he walked into Ali’s hotel room. “Sit down,” Ali said. “They tell me you’re the greatest.”
In the weeks that the pair spent together, Parks gained the full trust of the boxer, watching him training, but also relaxing with his family and friends and in private moments of prayer and meditation. In return, in an extraordinary series of pictures and a long essay, Parks began to shape a new understanding of Ali, calling his story “The Redemption of the Champion”. This picture, not published with that original essay, but now included in a book of Parks’s photographs of Ali, shows the photographer finding a way to express what he saw as the fighter’s inner peace and strength. A surprising image of the “motormouth” at the time, it now looks an entirely natural portrait of the man Ali was to become.
Gordon Parks: Muhammad Ali is out now (Steidl, £45). An exhibition of the photographs is at the Nelson‑Atkins Museum, Missouri, 14 February–5 July
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