Word: alie
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world champion was Muhammad Ali. Ali's majordomo. Drew Bundini, who captured the ring essence of Ali in his famous exhortation to him to "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," had an equally elegant explanation of why Ali, stripped of his title for refusing to be drafted, retained the status of world champion. "The world," Drew Bundini said, "is a black shirt with a few white buttons...
...Clay the world beyond the buttons had taken a fashion to the fast-handed fighter who stunned Sonny Liston with contemptuous authority. But, when after falling under the spell of Malcolm X, the religion of Islam, and the disciplined dignity of Elijah Muhammad's followers. Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Ali attracted the wrath of white American bureaucratic brontosaurs like the WBA, the Selective Service, and the American Legion, the world beyond the buttons developed a clinging passion to the man who had become their champion. In Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world, even in Europe...
...while, in America, sportswriters and boxing buffs--mainly whites, but some blacks, too--were doing the Saint Vitus Dance over what they called the irreparable damage Ali was doing to the fight game and its top honor. Like unctuous clergy defrocking a black sheep priest, they mumbled about heresy and the sovereignty of the faith as if pugilism were the true church of Christ in Everlast and Fat City the terminus of the Celestial Railroad. So, they shore Ali of his title, and with silent supplications for the second coming of the Great White Hope, called for a new idol...
...Peckinpah Traveling Repertory is on hand: Ben Johnson, Bo Hopkins, Dub Taylor, Slim Pickens. As usual, their small parts are all nicely etched, and there is a superb bit of character work by Richard Bright as a cheap thief who swipes a suitcase full of loot from Ali MacGraw. Al Lettieri, as a hamhanded, slow-talking killer, and Sally Struthers, as a giggly little moll, both overact, in contrast to McQueen and MacGraw...
...Ali MacGraw is a movie star, and a movie star ought to have her hands and feet stuck into concrete. So decided Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, picking Ali as the 158th celebrity to get the concrete treatment outside its doorway (the last person so honored was Gene Kelly in 1969). To her dismay, Ali found the site crowded not only with fans but with demonstrators, who greeted the heroine of Love Story with rude placards. Urged one: LET US GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE. ALI MACGRAW, WHO ARE YOU!! Ali knelt anyway, pressed her extremities into...