It’s funny, I spent 12 years shooting covers for Time magazine, everyone from Charles Manson to the Pope, but the thing people think of when they think of me is Muhammad Ali—particularly the picture of Ali standing over Sonny Liston. It would be fair to say my career would not have gone the way it did if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have Ali as my subject so often. I covered 35 of his fights and probably as many one-on-one sessions.
I grew up in low-income housing projects on the Lower East Side, and I became a fight fan because my father watched the Friday Night Fights on television. When I was young, I delivered sandwiches to the great photographers at the Life magazine photo studio, never dreaming that not that many years later I’d be posing the heavyweight champion of the world in that very studio.
Ali’s glove? It represents a great part of my life. Being assigned to shoot a world heavyweight title fight, getting the best seat in the house, having my pictures on the cover of Sports Illustrated, and getting paid for it? I used to pinch myself and think, I should be paying them! Listen, where I came from, you couldn’t dream of such a thing. Ali was a career maker. That I would have the good luck to be assigned to shoot him as often as I did, that I would develop a friendship with this great fighter who became such a legend? Come on.
~ Neil Leifer, photographer and filmmaker, New York, NY