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Muhammad Ali with one of his famous gestures
Photo: STRINGER/ REUTERS
Well, of course, there are now media libraries, you can watch TV reports at any time of the day and even months after they have been broadcast - but if you are serious about Muhammad Ali's legacy, you will get up tonight and watch TV.
He was the man who turned the nights into days in Europe when millions set their alarm clocks to watch his fights from overseas at around three or four in the morning.
And his 80th birthday on Monday is another reason for this, because ARD is showing a long Muhammad Ali night with three brilliant contributions.
You can't get up often enough for this man.
Muhammad Ali is the greatest icon that world sport has ever produced, a person greater than everyone else, he carried the title
The Greatest
as a matter of course.
This man who fascinated and inspired artists, intellectuals, filmmakers and writers - they were drawn to him like moths to a flame.
Nobody could escape his aura, he was an idol in so many ways.
The Magic of Muhammad Ali
Its magic unfolds in full in the first documentary of this film night curated by SWR.
If Ali was the greatest, then director Leon Gast's When We Were Kings, the film about the Kinshasa boxing drama, the rumble in the jungle between Ali and George Foreman, is probably the greatest of sports movies.
The shimmering atmosphere of the 1970s, the madness of taking this fight to the heart of the Mobuto Sese Seko dictatorship in Zaire, the political force with which Ali made this fight a black cause, the concert with James Brown, Miriam Makeba and the other great artists, the colors, which were always brighter and brighter than today, plus the comments from Spike Lee and Norman Mailer - what a film.
Just as Ali was a total work of art, so is this film.
Sport, politics, art, everything came together in the boxing ring in which Ali initially acted clumsily like an old bear, a supposedly willing victim of the thug Foreman.
But then he became a butterfly, then he stung like a bee.
And the shout Boma Ye, kill him, you can't get it out of your head.
Killed a rock
This man wrestled alligators, he killed a rock, he silenced the thunder, and when he turned off the light in the hotel room, he was in bed before it got dark.
Ali said all of this at the time without making a big face.
Because you trusted him with everything.
Not only was he the greatest athlete, he was also the greatest showman.
Perhaps only those who were physically closest to Ali were able to really approach Ali: his opponents.
The story of Ali is always the story of his opponents, Joe Frazier, Foreman, Ken Norton, Leon Spinks, Larry Holmes.
Who were beaten up by him, or who beat him up themselves, like Holmes in that fight in 1981, in which Ali only aroused pity.
The second documentary of the night »Facing Ali« by Pete McCormack can be seen on German television for the first time.
It shows the boxer from the perspective of his opponents, touching interviews from those who, decades later, still considered it an honor to have stood in the ring against Ali.
They, too, became monuments to sport thanks to him.
»Ali Was All About Love«
Ron Lyle, who boxed Ali in 1975, says the sentence: »Ali was all about love«, it is a sentence as a cross sum of the life of Muhammad Ali.
Said by someone who was in prison for more than seven years for manslaughter.
The prison, also a place where Ali's life and work concentrated: the man who would rather go to jail and renounce all his titles than get burned for the United States in the Vietnam War.
In those years when Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali.
Ali died in 2016, Lyle five years earlier.
The documentary about his opponents also gets something moving because you know that five of the ten respondents are no longer alive: That is the price of professional boxing, a sport whose fascination has always been balanced by its ruthlessness.
When morning breaks, ARD closes the Ali night with »Soul Power«, the film about the music festival that formed the framework for »Rumble in the Jungle«. The chaos of that time, coupled with the feeling that everything seems possible in this decade, the struggle for the esteem of black people, their demonstrative self-confidence that they developed in these years - all this comes together when James Brown pulls his soul out of the Leib yells: "I wanna get under your skin If I get there I've got to win."
It is a nice coincidence that the ARD shows this film night on the very day that the cause of Novak Djoković is finally coming to an end.
There is no better way to make Ali's drop from today's sporting idols clearer.
Can you imagine that instead of arguing with the Australian authorities, this Novak Djoković wrestles an alligator?
The long Muhammad Ali night, on ARD from Sunday to Monday from 12:05 a.m