[caption id="attachment_67649" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Muhammad Ali training ahead of his fight in Dublin in 1972."]
Picture the scene. A Monday evening in the long ago summer of 1972. Muhammad Ali was in the RTE Studios in Donnybrook, Dublin 4, getting made up for an interview with Cathal O'Shannon when suddenly the boxer's trainer Angelo Dundee asked that the fee for the sit-down be paid in cash rather than by check. This sent the staff into a bit of a frenzy. The banks had already closed. The clock was ticking in the studio. The most famous athlete in the world was about to slip from their grasp until somebody came up with the idea of rifling through the cash registers in the canteen to cobble together 100 pounds in used notes.
"We knew that he had been to the BBC a year before and done a Michael Parkinson interview, and they had flown over about twenty of his people with him especially and had to pay him 14,000 quid," O'Shannon said. "We paid him one hundred pounds. Imagine that."
That one of the most famous interviews in Irish television history (some might say the most famous) cost £100 (even in 1972) is an extraordinary detail and a story worth retelling following O'Shannon's death at the age of 83 on Oct. 22. Even allowing for the media's natural tendency to exaggerate the significance of its own, this was the passing of a true giant in broadcasting. He achieved much in his career, most notably in the documentary genre, but of course, it is for the once-off Ali show that he has earned a place in the folklore.
It was fitting that so much of his chat with the fighter was posted online by various people over the past week because it is a program that has aged very well, class being permanent and all that. Revisiting it now, the most obvious thing you glean from the footage is how comfortable Ali seemed with this man he'd never met before, how much he seemed to be reveling in the conversation that ensued between the pair of them.
Indeed, it says much for O'Shannon that his interview with Ali compares with anything ever produced on American or British television. Not many Irish shows you can say that about. The most ironic thing is he had no great interest in sport. He brought to the table a mountain of well-researched questions and the ability to coax a story from someone. Of course, the yarn about how O'Shannon and John Condon, a director at RTE, pulled off this coup in the first place is worth recalling too.
"We went up to Opperman's [the hotel in the Dublin mountains where Ali was billeted] to meet him," said O'Shannon when I interviewed him for a book I wrote about Ali's visit to the country. "He'd already been there for two or three days and it seemed to me that every whore in Ireland had turned up there, including black whores from Manchester and London. God knows how they all got in. Within an hour of us arriving at the hotel, his mother arrived and she had his infant child Muhammad Jr. When she saw all these black whores, she chased them all out of it and then she gave out yards to him.
"She gave out stink and we all witnessed this right in front of the check-in desk. She followed him around, shouting 'Get rid of these bitches!' and all sorts. Anyway, they were cleared out and he looked very sheepish. Rahaman [his brother], a very smooth looking fella with a little moustache who reminded me of a black Errol Flynn, cooled the mother down. In the midst of all this stuff, we chatted to Ali for a few minutes about the possibility of an interview, and he said 'Yeah, I'll do it.'"
The interview was shown at 10.45 the night after it was recorded, immediately following an experimental color broadcast of "Showjumping from London." It was hoped Ali's appearance would pique the interest of an Irish public which wasn't exactly crazy about buying tickets to watch him take on Al "Blue" Lewis at Croke Park later in the week. As it turned out, "Muhammad Ali versus Cathal O'Shannon," as it was advertised didn't do much to bump up the attendance but it did turn into one of the RTE's finest hours. And endured long after the fight was forgotten.
Of course, there were one or two glitches on the night. Shortly after Ali performed one of his trademark magic tricks that culminated in him using silver paper to burn O'Shannon's hand, one of the recording machines broke down in the studio. Disaster. As technicians scrambled to get it running again, O'Shannon made small talk with Ali and Angelo Dundee started to get anxious in the front row. The trainer didn't want his fighter sitting around a draughty television studio for any longer than was necessary in the week of a bout.
"Come on," shouted Dundee more than once. "Get this thing finished. Get it done."
The machine was eventually repaired, the interview went on and culminated in O'Shannon asking Ali to recite a poem he'd written about the Attica prison riot. On an evening of drama, it was a suitably theatrical ending to proceedings.
"It's strange but you know with Ali, there was no way you could go wrong from an interviewer's point of view," said O'Shannon with characteristic modesty. "You knew he would react properly because he was such a bloody showman. A total and absolute pro. If I had dropped myself in it, I felt he would have picked me up out of it. I was in the safest possible hands. I'd worked out the questions but didn't even go over them with him before. I just said we're going to cover this sort of area and that was enough. I had interviewed John F. Kennedy before that but, to tell you the truth, this was a much bigger deal."
Ar dheis De go raibh a anam.
