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you had to be home. They’re paying you to do something that you love to do. I like the satisfaction of doing good pictures at a fight, and where am I? I’m on the ring apron! I’m going to the biggest fights in the country, and the world sometimes, and I’m given the best seat in the house and asked to do something that I thoroughly enjoy doing – something I’d pay them to do. I mean, how can you beat that? I have the greatest job imaginable. And
Taking photographs is very simple. It’s exactly the same as an artist; an artist walks into the studio, first thing he has to decide is the size of the canvas he wants to paint on. But then he has to decide, “Am I going to do a vertical painting or a horizontal painting or a square painting?” The format, right? When you take pictures, you start with nothing in the frame and you’re creating a piece of art, always. That’s what you try to do with the frame that you have in
created that picture. I figured it out, and it was not an accident.
elevator. So they could bring the gondola up 50, 60 feet over the ring, might’ve been like 70 feet, so even the nosebleed seats had a clean view of the whole ring. From that elevation, you could get the entire canvas. So I put the camera in the middle, and the rest is history. I didn’t fire it with a radio control; we wired it, which meant about a thousand feet of wire that they ran down from the gondola to ringside. And it really was not very complicated. It was a good idea, and the timing was right, because suddenly you could do something that wasn’t done before. As a photographer, you’re always looking for something that hasn’t been done before, and this hadn’t been done before because it couldn’t have been done before. Not that way. The Ring: Have you ever spoken to Larry Merchant about him being in the Ali- Liston photo? NL: Oh, yeah! Larry came over to me many years ago and he said to me, “Neil, can I get a copy of that Ali-Liston picture? I’d love to have it. I’m in it!”
I said, “What do you mean you’re in it, Larry?” The bald photographer on the ring apron [between Ali’s legs] is a guy named Herb Scharfman, who was the other Sports Illustrated photographer that night. You know the famous Marciano-Walcott picture with the crushed face? He took that picture. So he’s a pretty damn good fight photographer. So Larry says to me, “I’m in that picture.” I said, “Bullshit.” And even when he told me he was the young guy, I thought he was joking. I thought he was trying to con me out of a picture. (laughs) I hope I gave him a picture – I think I did eventually. Larry was a good guy, but I was a hundred percent sure he was full of shit. (laughs) And it turned out he wasn’t! He told me he was a young writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and that is him with his mouth wide open, and I certainly didn’t recognize him then. I still look at the
picture and I wouldn’t know that was Larry Merchant, but it is him.
The Ring: I have to say that the first time I saw that picture on the box for the GOAT book, the one you need a forklift for, I thought it was a painting. NL: Yeah, Taschen put it on the cover of a book about Muhammad Ali and it doesn’t show Ali’s face at all. You can’t not look at that photo.
The Ring: You mentioned before that Herb Scharfman had the unlucky seat that night. Were there ever instances where the roles were reversed and you were the photographer who got a picture of the fighter’s butt? NL: Oh, too many times to admit, but I’ll give you the best one. For Frazier-Ali at The Garden, the first fight in 1971, there were so many credentials from around the world that The Garden could not seat every magazine photographer who wanted to be there. Even the biggest magazines. So they created a pool, like the White House has a pool, you know? When you can’t have 15 people in the same room, you assign two. One was a newspaper pool and the other was a magazine pool. Because Sports Illustrated was the sports magazine, we got to run the pool, which meant that two Sports Illustrated photographers – me and Tony Triolo – would be on the ring apron. And what would happen is the film was processed that night, and
The Ring: How did you come up with the idea for that photo, and did you do it specifically in anticipation of a knockout? NL: In hopes for a knockout. I think that angle would’ve been a good picture had there not been a [knockdown or a] knockout, but just a nice punch being thrown from above. Long before I was shooting – certainly it goes back to the ’50s – photographers were putting remote cameras over
then they publish my pictures in the magazine with a big photo credit: “Photo by Neil Leifer.” I still get a kick out of that. As a kid, my hobby, I was a Navy buff; I wanted to be a Navy pilot and fly off aircraft carriers long before I ever thought I’d be a photographer. My earliest pictures, I shot all the aircraft carriers that I could. Whenever they came into New York City, I would cut school and shoot that stuff. I built little
“The way I evaluate photographers [is] when you get lucky, you’re not supposed to miss. They’re paying you not to miss.”
The Usyk-Verhoeven matchup was more symmetrical than most expected.
plastic models of the ships, and one of the ships I built was the U.S.S. New Jersey. Well, I got to spend two years photographing the New Jersey – I went to Vietnam with the New Jersey for Life Magazine. So I got to do a lot of things that were not glamorous in terms of things like shooting Ali, but having wanted to be a Navy pilot … I got to fly with TOPGUN for Time Magazine! I always considered my camera my ticket to open any door. Listen, how many guys like me would have an opportunity to be at H.E.’s home with the sculpture, of all things, of my Ali- Liston picture? I always get excited about that kind of stuff. The Ring: There’s photojournalism, which is documenting a real news event, and there’s art photography, which is about creating something new. You sort of do both. NL: My favorite picture ever, ever, ever – I’ve said this in 8 million interviews – is the overhead of Ali-Williams. That’s definitely a piece of art. It is a canvas that got painted perfectly, you know?
your rangefinder when you look through a camera. There’s your frame. What are you going to put in there? How are you going to compose the frame? And I do try to do that. I’m always asked why I prefer the Ali- Williams picture to Ali-Liston, and [for] the Ali-Liston picture I did my job and did it very well. I’m very proud of it – really proud of it; don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. But I was in a lucky seat. The photographer between Ali’s legs was the other Sports Illustrated photographer ringside – I don’t care how good he is; he’s got a picture of Ali’s rear end. I got a picture of Ali’s face scowling at Liston to get off the canvas, or whatever the hell he was saying. I was in the luckiest seat, and I didn’t miss. The way I evaluate photographers [is] when you get lucky, you’re not supposed to miss. They’re paying you not to miss. Ali-Williams, I came up with that idea; yes, I was lucky in that it happened to be a knockdown with the fighter on the canvas looking straight up at the camera. But it was one frame, just like Ali-Liston, not a sequence. And I executed it. I
the ring. The problem was the way a boxing ring was lit traditionally. The way it’s still lit, actually. There’s a grid that holds the ring lights, and the lights are normally 20, 25 feet above the canvas. And the scaffolding is roughly the same size as the ring, maybe a little bigger. So when I was shooting, you really couldn’t take a picture straight down and get the whole ring, except with a fish-eye lens. But the fish-eye lens distorts the ring; the ring apron is curved. You’ll get the whole ring, but it’s not the same as a clean, square picture. The widest angle lens was probably a 21mm, but you couldn’t get all four corners of the ring in the picture – it just wasn’t wide enough from 20 feet up. If you went higher than 20 feet, then you had the grid itself obscuring the canvas. So most of the remote cameras in those days were put up in a corner of the ring. You’ve seen remote pictures of Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson done that way. In the Houston Astrodome [where Ali-Williams took place], instead of the grid being 20 feet over the ring, they had a circular gondola, which is like an
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