To be a world champion boxer, you must be a warrior in and out of the ring, a master of both the sport and the psychology that allows one man to dominate another. Muhammad Ali, the G.O.A.T. (“Greatest of All Time”), learned this lesson at the start of his career, when he converted to Islam and faced the rage of the mainstream press during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
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But it didn’t stop there. On April 28, 1967, Ali refused to be inducted into the Armed Services to fight into the Vietnam War on religious grounds. The following day, the U.S. government stripped him of the World Heavyweight title and had his boxing license suspended. Sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, so he did what any fighter would do — he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was overturned in an unanimous decision in 1970. Ali immediately set forth to restore his reputation and his career, training harder than ever before and taking on all contenders in the ring.
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As it so happened, Ali unknowingly crossed paths with Michael Brennan that same year while the British photographer sat in an airport outside Glasglow, Scotland on a quiet Saturday afternoon. “Suddenly the departure lounge doors opened and five or six big Black guys lead by Ali came running through the airport, chanting,” Brennan says. “They went out [on to the tarmac] and up the stairs of the airplane. The door closed and the airplane took off.”
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A member of Ali’s camp was seated near Brennan and they began to chat. He gave the photographer his card and invited him to call whenever he was in the states. Three years later Brennan did just that when he moved to New York City. “In the early days, I wasn’t getting much work and I knew that if I took the bus to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, walked to Ali’s camp, and knocked on the door, he would come out. I would take a picture and that was the rent paid for the next month,” he remembers.
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