An Ebersol moment: Ali and the ’96 flame

One of the most famous images in U.S. Olympic history — Muhammad Ali lighting the Olympic torch at the Atlanta Games — almost didn’t happen.

Just seven months before the start of the Atlanta Games, Olympic organizers had decided that Evander Holyfield — a hometown hero — would light the flame. It took months of intense lobbying by Dick Ebersol to persuade the organizers to go with Ali instead.

Ebersol first learned of the Atlanta organizers’ plans during a December 1995 meeting with Billy Payne, who was head of the Atlanta committee, and other committee members. Ebersol pushed back immediately when Payne told him that they planned to ask Holyfield to light the flame.

As Ebersol recalls it, the conversation went something like this:

Ebersol originally had to convince Atlanta organizers that Muhammad Ali should light the Olympic torch instead of hometown hero Evander Holyfield. Photo by: PATRICK E. MCCARTHY

Payne: “Who would you have light the cauldron?”

Ebersol: “I don’t think there’s any question about it. It should be Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali may be, outside of perhaps the pope, the most beloved figure in the world. In the third world, he’s a hero. In the Muslim world, he’s a hero and a fellow traveler. To anybody young — just about — in the United States, he’s a man of great moral principle who was willing to go to prison.”

Payne: “Where we’re from, he’s perceived as a draft dodger.”

Ebersol: “But he wasn’t a draft dodger. He was willing to go through the legal process. He was found guilty, and he was on his way to prison, but the federal court of appeals in the state of New York threw it out and the Supreme Court refused to intervene three years later. He lost three big-money-earning years. But he didn’t run away from the country. He didn’t go to Canada. He was willing to stand on his principles.”

Ebersol left the meeting knowing that he put doubt in the organizers’ minds about selecting Holyfield and planted a seed for Ali. Now, he had to make sure Ali wanted to do it and, as importantly, was physically able to light the torch since he suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Two weeks later, he got his answer: Ali’s wife, Lonnie, told Ebersol by phone that Ali could do it.

In late May, about five months after the earlier meeting, he sent the file to Payne, who was recovering from surgery at the time. The Games were scheduled to start in less than two months.

Payne agreed. But two days later he called with a potential problem. The Atlanta organizers built a tower with the cauldron at the top of it. To get to the top, people had to walk up it. Payne doubted that Ali could do it.

Ebersol told Payne that Ali could light a fuse on a rocket that would take off and be carried all the way up to the cauldron. On July 19, 1996, the night of the opening ceremony, things didn’t go quite as smoothly as planned.

“If there’s one word that he excels at more than anyone else — he took it to an art form — it was storytelling. He did it with the Olympic features, and he did it with presenting the players and the stories around the game. He would always make sure that stories were being told that people would find compelling, and he would do it with the promotion of what people could expect and he would do it during the sports themselves. …

“Whether or not it was wrestling or ‘Saturday Night Live’ or one of a myriad of other things, he’s done a career four times over. He was always such a presence at NBC, and not just in sports. People would rely on his judgment, his creativity, his way to do things and present things. Who would be the best talent? What would be the best way to tell a particular story or handle a particular issue? …
“On a personal level, there’s no more loyal friend. He is always there, always engaged, always interesting and exciting to be around him.”

— Gary Bettman,
NHL commissioner

“Ali had rehearsed it only once and without fuel, because they didn’t want to take a chance of cars going by the stadium seeing anything going on. He would be guided up this incline to the rim of the stadium, climb to the rim of the stadium, then the light would come on as Janet Evans ran up the ramp to light his torch from her torch.

“Ali gets up to the roof of the stadium in the darkness for maybe the only time ever. They load the fuel into the rocket. He’s got all the fuel he needs in his torch. Janet Evans lights Ali’s torch from her torch. Then Ali, up on the rim of the stadium, essentially bows to the box with the IOC, including [IOC President] Juan Antonio Samaranch and [President] Bill Clinton, bows to the athletes all assembled on the floor of the stadium, bows to the crowd. He takes the torch to come over and light the rocket. Then the rocket is to go a couple hundred feet across to go and light the cauldron.

“Nothing happens.

“There’s a flame, but nothing is happening. The rocket is not igniting. The reason is that it’s been loaded in the darkness. It’s been overloaded, leaving no room for oxygen, so no combustion can take place.

“Ali may have known this intuitively. But he didn’t know it intellectually. He keeps holding the thing there, hoping that it will get lit. You can see flames licking back against his forearms. He didn’t exhibit any pain, but I kept waiting for him to drop his torch because it just looked like it was impossible with the flames licking back the way they were.

“Finally, just enough propellant burns off and the little rocket starts to go in little bits.

“Most people don’t remember it, because after that, all you saw was an edited version of this that I would show during the rest of the Olympics. Finally, after about 15 seconds of starts and stops, it took off and went up and lit the cauldron.

“When Ali appeared, it was the greatest collective gasp any of us had ever heard. As I always did, I never told [announcers] Bob Costas and Dick Enberg that it was going to be Ali. What came out of them was sheer awe.”