New Ali documentary doesn't come close to revealing the true champ

MUHAMMAD ALI has a big heart, a kind heart, a generous heart. Loves kids, especially his own, which number seven or nine, or more, depending on who is doing the counting.

Heavyweight champion in a brutal sport, loves his kids, nice story line, but you can't stretch that into a 2-hour documentary, no matter how many cute-as-a-cupcake phone conversations you include.

They try in "I Am Ali," which opens in theaters today. It is no more a complete and honest depiction of Ali than any of the books, magazine articles, films and documentaries that preceded it.

Maybe next year. Maybe the brilliant director, Ang Lee, gets the funds to make an insightful 3-D movie about the Ali-Joe Frazier rivalry . . . maybe Leigh Montville in Boston or Jonathan Eig in New York comes up with previously untold stories in the books they're writing about Ali.

"I Am Ali" wants to focus on Ali, the family man. Family man? Ali has had four wives and has been brazenly unfaithful, bringing Veronica to Manila for that third and gruesome fight with Frazier while still married to Belinda.

It probably made sense to the producers. They had this treasure trove of recorded telephone calls, Ali cooing softly to his daughters, all warm and fuzzy. Finger presses the record lever, screen goes dark, except for squiggly lines, and the conversation appears in subtitles.

Endearing the first couple of times, annoying the last eight times. Makes you wonder about the recordings they didn't use, the ones featuring lustful adults of the female persuasion. And whatever happened to the law about getting permission from the other person before hitting the record button?

I knock the documentary with a heavy heart because it features a good friend, Gene Kilroy. Kilroy was Ali's business manager for years, the guy perched on one shoulder whispering good deeds in his ear.

Kilroy tells a powerful story about a young boy, suffering with leukemia, who visits Ali's training camp in Deer Lake, Pa. The boy is frail, bald from the chemotherapy, thrilled to meet his hero.

Ali comforts him, tells him he will beat George Foreman and the boy will beat cancer. Weeks later, the boy's father calls Kilroy with the gloomy news that his son is in Children's Hospital, dying.

Ali gets the word and leaves camp to come to Philadelphia. He tries to reassure the boy, telling him again he will beat Foreman and the boy will beat leukemia.

"No," the boy says. "I'm going to meet God. And I will tell him that I know you."

I believe it happened that way. I have my doubts about two other segments of the film. One involves George Lois, who designed that memorable 1968 Esquire cover, with five arrows in Ali's chest and another in his right leg. It was based on a Botticini painting of St. Sebastian. Lois saw the cover reflecting the incendiary issues of the Vietnam War, race and religion, with Ali as a martyr.

He gets to tell a story about Ali interrupting the photo shoot, gazing down at the arrows stuck to his chest and assigning names to them, Lyndon Johnson, Gen. William Westmoreland, Donald Rumsfeld, enablers of that unpopular war.

Ali couldn't have picked Westmoreland out of a lineup of Sri Lanka badminton players. "I ain't got no quarrel with Viet Cong" was the extent of his political awareness.

And then there's Marvis Frazier, talking about Ali's cruel insults to his father, and how, years later, the men embraced, making teary-eyed peace. Was Marvis the lone witness to that moment? Did he achingly want it to happen, and imagined it?

I kept thinking about that moment, in Miami, on a street corner, the morning after Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston. He tells us he has joined the Nation of Islam and has a new name. Some of the writers remind him he is the heavyweight champion of the world and should act the part.

"I don't have to be what you want me to be," Ali says swiftly.

The authors and the filmmakers keep ignoring that line, and that is sad. Maybe next year, maybe next year.