GUUS DUBBELMAN
(NL, 1957)
Sports journalists sometimes jokingly call him “the white one with the black heart. Guus Dubbelman has to grin about it. The description comes from colleagues who appreciate him, but sometimes also make fun of the subject - black culture - about which Dubbelman can’t get an answer.
Dubbelman was an 18-year-old high school student who had spent years making scrapbooks of Ali when he first saw him in real life in 1976. The boxer, who died in 2016, was in the Netherlands at the time to promote his autobiography. Dubbelman waited in the lobby of Hotel Okura for hours for his hero. In a brief interlude, Dubbelman said he didn’t think it was neat that Ali was still married but had traveled to the Netherlands with another woman. “That excited him,” Dubbelman recalls. “Because he immediately said that the woman he was married to had cheated him before he had.” Because Ali thought it was funny that a petite boy from Holland was taking the measure of him, he invited him to join his company.
Dubbelman had several meetings with Ali. The photographer went to Ali’s last boxing matches, but he also visited him in 1985 at his huge house in Los Angeles. Dubbelman stayed there for five days, photographing Muslim Ali during morning prayers. “It’s the most intimate photo I’ve taken of Ali,” he said.
The 15-year-old photographer saw in Ali a father or big brother. Ali did think Dubbelman was a funny, articulate guy, with a genuine interest in the ups and downs of the boxer and other black people, Dubbelman thinks. Dubbelman’s fascination with Ali lies first and foremost in his graceful athleticism. “Boxing is for the physical elite. And of that select group, Ali was the chosen one. I myself have always been quite thin, maybe that’s where my interest comes from.”
