When it comes to sports, Florida likes to go big, from Superbowl 55, two days from now, when hometown team Tampa Bay Buccaneers host current world champion Kansas City Chiefs, to as far back as 1964, in Miami, when Cassius Clay (who had yet to take the name Muhammad Ali) won his fight with Sonny Liston and became the world’s heavy weight boxing champ.
Amazon Prime’s “One Night in Miami” based on the “after party,” when Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown gathered in a cheesy motel room, ostensibly to celebrate, but, in this fictionalized version, pivot to a broader platform: race and race relations, personal responsibility, economic power, politics, and more.
The movie’s getting rave reviews. Here’s the trailer and another clip that reveals the close relationship, not only personally but musically, too, between Ali and Cooke.