On the night of the heavyweight title fight between Joe Frazier and Jimmy Ellis, Muhammad Ali was sitting in the shadows of a Philadelphia theater. He was there to watch the fight (happening at Madison Square Garden) via a closed-circuit live action feed, and in the dark, he was anonymous.
It was February of 1970 and photographer Carl Fischer, who'd shot the iconic Ali Esquire cover two years earlier, was on assignment again for the magazine, this time photographing the Champ around his Philadelphia neighborhood and later at the late boxer's home. "Esquire thought there'd be a story there," Fischer remembers, "but it turned out not to be much so the story never ran."
The negatives sat in Fischer's archives for 46 years.
In the days leading up to Ali's death, I visited Fischer at his studio in New York City, where we uncovered the unpublished negatives and talked about that night and the time he spent with the late, great champion.
"We sat in the balcony and watched the fight, and with the lights down, no one recognized him," recalls Fischer. "But when it was over, for some reason…as the lights went up, he jumped up on the seat and yelled, 'I am the champ, I am the champ!' The crowd loved him and went crazy and it was all we could do to get out of there."
After the fight, Ali and Fischer drove back to Ali's home where friends and family, including Ali's two-year-old daughter, Maryum were waiting. In the hours that followed, Fischer continued to photograph, capturing some extraordinary moments of Ali with his daughter—moments during which the champ was seemingly completely unguarded.
"There was never a photograph Ali told me not to take," Fischer says. "He was a celebrity, he was an icon, but he never played it that way."
Have a look at these never-before-seen pictures, including the image that is now our commemorative cover of our August issue—another image we found in our search through Fischer's priceless, immense, incredible archive. It is an outtake from the 1968 cover shoot in which Ali, the greatest of all time, the unbeatable champion, is plucking the arrows from his chest. Not even those could stop him.
And may we present, our commemorative Ali cover shot for August's issue: