In 1966, Gordon Parks was sent by Life magazine to photograph Muhammad Ali at a pivotal moment in the young champion’s life. Just two years after defeating Sonny Liston to claim the heavyweight title, Ali had become one of the most polarizing figures in the United States—his name change from Cassius Clay, conversion to Islam, and outspoken political views placing him at the center of intense public scrutiny. Parks set out not simply to document a famous boxer in training, but to determine whether Ali was “really as obnoxious as people were making him out to be.”

Over several weeks in May and June 1966, Parks spent time with Ali in Miami and London, producing hundreds of photographs and a first-person essay published in the September 9, 1966 issue of Life as “The Redemption of the Champion.” While he made images of Ali fighting, training, and addressing the press, Parks was equally attentive to quieter moments of rest and play. Together, his photographs and text—many of them unpublished—construct a more expansive portrait, one that moves beyond spectacle and controversy to moments of vulnerability, humor, and introspection. The project, as a whole, reveals a man actively defining himself on his own terms.

In the essay that accompanied the article, later republished in Gordon Parks: Born Black (1971), Parks recalled his first encounters with Ali:

“I had met Muhammad Ali in Miami a month earlier when he started training for Cooper, the first of his summer series of overseas fights. His public image was then in tatters. He stood accused in the press of sins ranging from talking too much to outright antiwhite bigotry. There had been rumblings of dislike for him ever since he became a Muslim after the first Clay-Liston fight in February, 1964. Then, late last winter, when he declared “I don’t have no quarrel with those Vietcongs!” he became, in the public eye, not just a loud-mouthed kid but a “shameless traitor,” as one paper put it.
At that point I began to feel a certain sympathy for him. I was not proud of him, as I had been proud of Joe Louis. Muhammad was a gifted black champion and I wanted him to be a hero, but he wasn’t making it. I felt, however, that he could not possibly be quite so bad as he was made out to be in the press.
He lay on his bed, in the small bungalow he always rents in Miami, half-covered by a sheet, only his chest and his powerful bare shoulders exposed. He smiled broadly as I came in.
“Sit down,” he said in a surprisingly soft voice. “They tell me you’re the greatest.”

While the published photo essay emphasized Ali as a disciplined athlete and public figure, Parks’s larger body of work tells a broader, humanist story. Rather than focusing solely on the drama of the ring, he photographed Ali’s daily life in the time between his public appearances. These images present Ali as contemplative, generous, playful, and, at times, disarmingly ordinary.

Parks, for example, frequently photographed the champion in the company of children, who were drawn to him wherever he went. As he recalled, Ali would call groups to his side, joking about his own celebrity: “Only difference in me and the Pied Piper is he didn’t have no Cadillac.” In other photographs, Ali is seen driving his 1964 Cadillac DeVille near Miami Beach, where his training gym was located, projecting ease and confidence. Such moments are offset by quieter images of stillness, including one in which he sits with his hands wrapped, head lowered. Together, these photographs register both the visibility of celebrity and the weight of expectation placed upon him. Such images stand in stark contrast to those that defined Ali’s public image, and convey both the glamour of celebrity and the weight of expectation placed upon him.

In London, Parks photographed Ali at Lord’s Cricket Ground during a visit to meet the West Indies team as they competed against England. In one image, he is formally dressed, standing against a staircase, appearing peaceful and contemplative. These moments of introspection extend to other images as well. In one, Ali sits alone, reading a magazine article about himself and confronting with his own public image. Through these images, Parks underscores the distance between the man and the myth.

Four years later, in 1970, Parks photographed Ali again, as he sought to reclaim the heavy weight title from Joe Frazier. While images from this later assignment convey the intensity of Ali’s training, they also extend Parks’s earlier sensitivity, capturing moments of vulnerability and repose—glancing wide-eyed in the locker room, surrounded by young admirers in a Miami restaurant, or resting in the afternoon after training.