• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, June 6, 2016

Somehow, media figures were bigger then.

That’s what happens, I suppose, when what we refer to as “media” amounts to a handful of giant TV networks, two dozen major-market newspapers (give or take), and a couple of big magazines. In the heyday of Muhammad Ali’s celebrity, that’s what the media world used to be like. “Media” then meant “mass media.” 

That’s not how it is today, of course. As a result, our so-called media figures of today seem smaller -- from boxers to TV stars. For example, TV personalities ranging from Jimmy Fallon on NBC to Bill O’Reilly on Fox News Channel are certainly well-known. But as we all know, their audiences cannot compare to the numbers of people who watched Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” or Walter Cronkite on “The CBS Evening News.”

When a person became a media star back then, you truly felt his or her presence. Such was the case with Ali, who was omnipresent throughout the 1960s and ’70s. When I was growing up in that period, my “media” consisted mainly of TV and Life magazine (until its demise as a weekly in 1972). Ali was a star of both.

His fame was due in large measure to his ability to command the attention of television in the 1960s (along with his athletic prowess, certainly). Otherwise known as TV’s “second decade,” the 1960s began with the presidential campaign of 1960, in which TV is credited, at least in part, with making John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie into media stars and catapulting them to the White House (in a very close race, it should be noted).

Ali was positioned for TV fame at about the same time. Then, for many years, Ali seemed to be everywhere -- verbally sparring with Howard Cosell on “Wide World of Sports,” appearing on all of the touchstone TV shows of the era from “Jack Paar” and “Carson” to “Dinah Shore” and the Dean Martin roasts, and even buying bagels at the bagel shop on the far western edge of Philadelphia near our house. (I just thought I’d throw this one in here. He lived in the neighborhood for about a year some time in the 1970s, and drove a pink Eldorado convertible.)

It’s at times like these that YouTube becomes indispensable. (At other times, not so much.) You can find dozens of clips of Ali on TV on YouTube -- particularly from the 1970s, but also the 1980s and even the ’90s. There he is on “The Mike Douglas Show,” for example, trying to remain composed while sitting in the middle of Douglas and another guest, Sly Stone, who seems to be hectoring Ali.

There are numerous clips of Ali on the “Carson” show and “Dinah.” You can see him on “Donahue” with fellow fighters Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes and Ken Norton. You can even see him in his guest appearance on “Diff’rent Strokes.” At such times, I always wonder: How did this turn up on YouTube? Who went to this effort to post a clip of Ali on “Diff’rent Strokes”?

For some years following the first Ali-Frazier fight in 1971, I kept the copy of Life magazine that came out afterward with a cover photo of the fight taken at ringside by Frank Sinatra and inside, a story on the fight by Norman Mailer.

That actual, physical magazine is gone now, but you can find the cover photo and the story -- as well as the stories behind the cover and the story -- all over the place, thanks to the Internet, where Muhammad Ali, and everyone else, now lives forever.