“Fifth Street Gym was his theater, it was his stage,” Dundee recalled. “I used to go to (the gym) five, six, seven days a week. It was like home for me. Everything was a holiday there. When you think about all those great characters who came in there, it was like going to a picnic when I went to that gym. You couldn’t duplicate that scene now. They have a new gym down there on the beach, but they teach ‘boxer-cise’ now.”
The old gym was torn down years ago, but it was a Damon Runyon classic. It lacked all the modern amenities. It was a grimy old place that reeked of liniment and sweat. It had holes in the walls that were covered by fight posters and the only music in there was the staccato sounds of speed bags, leather jump ropes and clanging ring bells.
That, of course, and the constant melodies of Ali’s loud voice rhyming and boasting.
For nearly an hour, “Made in Miami” shows you Ali as Dundee’s “kid.” In so many photos and familiar and unfamiliar film footage, we are able look beyond the regrettable human shell of deteriorating muscle twitches that the 66-year-old man has become and see Ali in his prime. There are compelling stories about his regrettable fallout with Malcolm X in the days before Malcolm’s assassination, the development of his comic alter ego and Dundee’s belief that Sonny Liston’s gloves were never doctored in that first championship fight in the Miami Convention Center. But maybe the best story is the one about of how so many locals who essentially formed his first entourage did something almost unheard of today: they protected him and kept him away from Miami’s racy bars, hot nightclubs, fast women and savory underworld (‘Pac Man’ Jones, are you listening?).
If you ever spent much time around Ali, it was fascinating to observe the character and the man jockey for space on his human stage. I remember sitting in a room with him back in the early 1980s for nearly 20 minutes before he was to appear on Oprah Winfrey’s first TV talk show on a local Baltimore station. He was a shy man who barely spoke above a whisper. No jokes. Never serious. He seemed weary of the job of always being this larger than life character he had created.
A few minutes later though, a producer popped into the green room and informed Ali that it was time to go on the set, and immediately his head snapped up, his eyes brightened, his dormant personality perked. He darted out of his chair, into the bright studio lights and you could hear his voice booming long before any microphone was clamped to his lapel.
“What he’s doing,” said biographer David Remnick, “is taking part of the American culture… grabbing what’s in the air and he’s inventing something called ‘Cassius Clay, The Greatest.’ … It’s a very American thing, and Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali is one of those classic American characters.”
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