In February 1964, The Beatles visited the 5th Street Gym in Miami Beach, where Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali, was preparing to fight Sonny Liston. Chris Smith was there to photograph the boxer and recorded the meeting.
Sport and music in the same frame
The resulting sequence shows the visitors and boxer playing to the cameras. The humour and physical arrangement make these photographs different from a formal group portrait: a boxing gym becomes the setting for a brief encounter between two kinds of celebrity.
In The Greatest, Smith recalls the visit during his time photographing Clay’s preparations. His account places the photographer at the gym for the boxing, rather than describing him as a photographer assigned to follow the band.
A note on the date
The Beatles Bible dates the meeting to 18 February 1964. Smith’s recollection in The Greatest gives that day too, although the book’s caption index gives a different date. We identify the photograph here as February 1964 rather than treating the conflicting caption as settled.
Choosing the photograph
Different photographs from a session are not necessarily the same work, crop or edition. View Ali and The Beatles for the exact image offered on this site, its print information and enquiry form. A signature by Chris Smith is not an autograph by Ali or any member of The Beatles.
For more context, explore Chris Smith’s photographs at the 5th Street Gym, Chris Smith’s biography and The Greatest: the book and its contributors.
Reference: The Greatest (GOST Books, 2024), photographs and short texts by Chris Smith, with essays by Alon Zakaim and Paolo Hewitt. This article is original editorial writing, not an extract from the book.