 Good evening and welcome to our program tonight. It's a special program with a fantastic photographer. You've been watching some of the great work that Neil Lifer has accomplished over a very long period of time. I'm Don Carleton. I am the director of the Doft-Risco Center for American History here at the University of Texas. And once again the Brisco Center is very pleased to partner with the LBJ Library to co-host this evening with Neil Lifer. Our continuing partnership with the LBJ Library has included programs, book projects, exhibits, and the Center was pleased last year to publish Destiny of Democracy, which documents the LBJ Library's landmark conference on the civil rights movement. And we're grateful to the library for inviting the Brisco Center to display a major exhibit celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Brisco Center. And that exhibit, which is titled 25 Years, 25 Treasures, will be on display here at the library until January of 16th of next year. If you haven't had an opportunity to visit the exhibit, I hope you get a chance to do that. This is the first time that many of the items on display in this exhibit have ever been publicly shown. Our guest tonight is Neil Lifer, who will be interviewed by my good friend Mark up to grow. Neil Lifer's photography career has spanned more than 50 years. Beginning in 1960, his pictures regularly appeared in every major national magazine, including the Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life Magazine, Newsweek, Time, and, of course, most often, Sports Illustrated. Neil eventually became a staff photographer for Sports Illustrated before leaving in 1978 to become a staff photographer for Time Magazine. In 1988, he was made a contributing photographer at Life Magazine and spent the next two years dividing his time between Time and Life. When Lifer left Time, Incorporated in 1990, his photographs had appeared on over 200 Sports Illustrated Time and People covers over 200. Neil Lifer is the 2006 recipient of the prestigious Lucy Award for Achievement in Sports Photography. He's published 16 books, nine of which have been collections of his magnificent sports photographs. He's also photographed 16 Olympic Games over the years, 15 Kentucky Derbies, countless, and I mean countless World Series games, the first 12 Super Bowls, and every important heavyweight title fight since Ingmar Johansson beat Floyd Patterson in 1959. He photographed his favorite subject, Muhammad Ali, on almost 60 different occasions, covering his biggest fights in over 30 one-on-one studio sessions with Muhammad Ali. Neil is now a full-time filmmaker, producer, and director, and he makes his home in New York City. His most recent book is his delightful memoir, Relentless, which is a joint publication of the Doft Briscoe Center and the University of Texas Press. The Briscoe Center has long enjoyed a relationship with Neil Lifer. Our photographic archive includes important selections of photographs from his personal collection. So please join me in welcoming Neil Lifer and Mark Upnegrove. Welcome, everybody, and welcome, Neil Lifer. Well, thank you. Delighted to have you here. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Thank you. And congratulations on Relentless, which the cover which appears right there, and your favorite subject, Muhammad Ali, proclaiming that he's number one. No surprise there. The greatest? The greatest. He called himself, he called himself, his company is called the greatest of all time. So that's a pretty apt description. So let's start with the book itself and then we'll wander on to Muhammad Ali. What made you write this book, Relentless? Well, you know, as Don said, I've done a number of books that are collections of my photographs. I've never done a book of words, and this book is 85,000 words. I'm not a writer who could have tackled it without help. And I had a co-writer, she took the transcripts of our interviews and fashioned it into a book. And this Diane Shah is here today. But I wrote the book for a very simple reason. I've got a little grandkids, and my grandkids think that all I do is photograph them. They have no idea, they have no idea that I ever had a job. The pictures I take these days are my fiancee, Shantel Fauré, who's sitting out in front here as well, and my grandkids. And I decided one day when they get to read the book, they'll realize that I actually once did have a job and maybe did something important. Well, let me quote the book. Let me step back and say that we are due to the generosity of Sports Illustrated going to show some of the photographs in Neil Lifer's remarkably impressive portfolio, and Neil will hopefully tell us some stories around them. But let me quote your book. You write, there is something, a photograph, even a great photograph can't show the story behind the picture, the people, and the circumstances that came together in that one one hundredth of a second when the shutter was snapped and an image was frozen for all time. I'm going to start with an image that so many of us know. It's just a brilliant image about work. We have that first image. I'm not sure there's a better sports image than this one. Talk about this remarkable photograph and how you managed to get it. Well, first of all, I'm so, so happy you said that, that there might not be. This is my very, very favorite photograph ever. And that sounds maybe like I'm taking advantage of the opportunity because it's up there on the screen. It is the only picture that has hung in my house. I hang in diamond shape. That's Cleveland Williams on the canvas and I put him at the top. And I have a large blow up of it and it has been hanging in my home in a prominent spot for close to 50 years now. I collect other people's photographs. And so I don't have any other pictures that are my own photographs, except for that one. And and the reason it's my favorite picture is very simple. I think that when you've done as many football games and as many baseball games and as many boxing matches, eventually you get a number of times when you're luckily in the right spot. And I know the word lucky always sounds like one is being modest. Well, I've never met a good modest photographer. So I'm sure I'm sure it's not the first one. Luck in sports photography can be everything. If you're not in the right seat, if the touchdown doesn't happen where you want it to happen rather than where your competitor is, you don't get the picture. Somebody else does. So the only listed picture, for example, which is my best known picture and which most people would think would be my favorite and maybe the best sports picture ever. That was luck. I was in the right seat. I didn't miss what separates a good photographer from the ordinary one is that when a good photographer is in the right spot, he or she doesn't miss. And I didn't miss when Ali knocked that list. This picture, on the other hand, came from here. It was something I thought of. It never could have been done before. It was the first big, big boxing match in the Houston Astrodome, which called the eighth wonder of the world at the time. It was a brand new arena. And as soon as I went into the building, I realized that you could do something like this, which was impossible to do before because the lighting rigs were the camera had to be fast and was simply much too low to get this sort of symmetrical image. You could put a fisheye lens up there. And I did. And you got more of a distorted image of the ring looked a little bit like a volleyball. But to get this, you could never have done it before the Astrodome. That combined with the fact that everything that could go right did go right. And lastly, what I look at my pictures, I've had enough times when I was in the right spot for the winning touchdown and you congratulate yourself and you say, wow, this sounds really good. This was quite a quite a picture or big bang up play at home plate in the world series. And then I look at the picture a week later and I see little things I might think I might have done differently if I could have known a month later, I see more things. And that's what motivates you to go out and keep trying to do something better than you did, even when you were very successful the first time. This is the only picture I have ever taken where there isn't a single thing that I would change if I could. So what makes a good sports photographer? How is sports photography as a genre different from other photography? Well, in my experience, at least with the exception of of perhaps photographing wild animals, I did a cover story for Time on the Animals of Africa. Other than that, I don't know how many instances you you you covered event where you have no idea what's going to happen that day. This could be the day when the champion is defeated. This could be the day when another perfect ball game is pitched. This could be the day when for the first time in the history of baseball over a hundred years sport, someone hits five runs in a game. When you arrive at the stadium, you have no idea what's going to happen in that day. You have no idea who the hero is going to be. You have no idea who the code is going to be. And it's kind of fun, the challenge of just trying to be there and getting whatever it is that would be this in a picture, the story of that game, the story of that event. And I always like the fact that there was a surprise. You just don't know animals in the same way. You have no idea. I spent six weeks in Kenya and I saw one leopard and believe me, we were looking like full of my leopard. I think I shot 20 year olds film on that leopard. Let's let's move on about more. Let's see the next picture. This is the fight that you were referring to earlier. This is Muhammad Ali in his second fight with Sonny Liston. This one in Lewiston, Maine after having beat Liston in Miami Beach, Florida. And then we see this image that's Muhammad Ali rejoicing in victory. But let's go to that next image, Balmor, and show the one that Neil referred to earlier. There is that, I think it's probably, as Neil suggested, the most famous photograph in all of sports. And it truly captures Muhammad Ali. This was taken in 2005. By the way, I was shooting the fight in color. The reason the other pictures in black and white is somehow between the photo lab and the editorial department many, many years ago, the color transparency disappeared. It has never shown up. The fight took place in 1965, so it was 51 years ago. That transparency had got lost, except in those days, as soon as the editors chose a picture for sports illustrated to be considered for the layout, they would make a black and white negative of it so that they could run it on the contents page of black and white. And that's why that picture was in black and white. It exists only in black and white. So talk about that moment. Do you remember? You know, number one, remember when I took these pictures, there was something of I hope some of you remember something called film. You had to put it in the camera. These weren't digital cameras and you couldn't look at the back and besides film, you had to focus the camera and it's awful easy to be out of focus. So there are so many things one had to think about in addition to which I was using strobe lights and there's a power surge every time you fire the camera. So you're sort of counting off four, three, four, five seconds before this before you can shoot your next picture or you shoot before the strobes are ready to fire and then you don't get a picture. You get an exposure that's much too dark. So I had so many things in my mind, I didn't know it. I had no idea what happened. What I knew when I took the picture is that I knew that I had gotten lucky and that the champ was facing me. Number one, number two, I knew the referee. Often there are a number of instances where, you know, at that very moment, the referee could have crossed between me and the fighters and you've got a picture of the referee's leg. I knew I had a clean shot. I also knew when I lit the ring, you lit the ring just like you do in a fashion shoot or a studio picture. There was an optimum spot. This is the spot I hoped the fight would end. Again, as I said, you have no idea. And by the way, when I talk about luck, the most important proof of it, the best proof I've ever been able to give anybody is the fellow between all these legs, Baldish photographer. That was my competitor from Sports Illustration, I've heard so much about it. And I don't have to tell you what his picture looked like. Dude, what was your reaction when you saw the photograph? Well, when I saw the photograph, I thought I had a really good shot of getting the cover of Sports Illustrated that week. I mean, Ali only threw two punches in the whole fight, I think. And of course, they used a George Silk picture from Life Magazine on the cover and not mine. It was page four and I say this again without trying to be modest about the picture because it certainly has taken on a life of its own, but it wasn't considered significant enough to make the cover of the magazine that week. How interesting it is that at the end of the century in 1999, November 1999, somewhere around November, Sports Illustrated did an issue on the greatest sports photos of the century and guess which picture they put on the cover of the magazine? There you are. But I would add that at the time that you took that photograph, it captures a great moment in a fight. What I think it does even better is capture the very vivacious, very defiant Muhammad Ali. And you see that and he wasn't quite Muhammad Ali, the Muhammad Ali who would come into legend at that time. Is that fair? It's very fair and I would say this might be where the legend really began. You know, he had been doing silly things by calling the round, predicting the rounds. But he wasn't fighting great opponents on the way up. Now he's the heavyweight champion of the world and he did this. I think the significance of the picture quite frankly is that this was this just movie star good looking beautiful athlete. And I think this is the way people as the years have gone by and certainly as recent times, this is the Ali people wanna remember. And the picture took on, I think, an even more important significance because of that. So let's talk about Ali. Don mentioned that you have photographed him on many, many occasions. But Muhammad Ali is perhaps the world's, when he was alive, perhaps the world's best known figure. Muhammad Ali used to talk about when he would drive through the most rural of areas each second, knock on that door and people will know who I am. And that was true for Ali. But you know very well, what do we not know about Muhammad Ali, the private person? Well, I got to know him. I shot him a number of occasions posing him but I never had so much as a Coca-Cola with him. He didn't drink or a cup of coffee with him until maybe 10 or 15 years after he retired. And we became very good friends over the years since I was actually in Arizona supposed to see him the week he passed away. We had dinner with his wife the week he passed away and then he was just a wonderful character. I'm gonna answer your question in a different way, particularly since we're just on the campus of the University of Texas. I lecture for college groups occasionally on universities. In fact, I did the Frank DeFord lecture here a couple of years ago. And one of the questions I am asked from students all the time. And I think my answer is gonna sum up why Ali truly was the greatest than transcending his boxing ability was the greatest. Just a spectacular human being. I'm often asked by young students how they can have a career like mine. Some of them are impatient to look for a shortcut. Is there a way you can tell me that will give me a chance to have the same kind of career you did? And I've got a pretty pat answer for it. I always tell them, listen, I know the word guarantee isn't supposed to be used but I'm gonna guarantee you a career as good as mine. Maybe better. All you have to do to have a career like mine is find yourself a subject like Muhammad Ali and hitch your ride, your wagon to his life and follow him for 40 years. Muhammad Ali never saw a camera he didn't like. He never saw a reporter he didn't like. The whole shtick with Howard Cosell is a good way of looking at it. He just enjoyed people. And by the way, you did not have to be Howard Cosell or Sports Illustrated or Life Magazine. He was just as good to the photographer that showed up from their school newspaper. He just never said no to anyone. With me, it would always be the same thing. And yeah, he was aware that Sports Illustrated is gonna put him on the cover of the magazine. That sells tickets to the fight. It isn't bad business. But he didn't care about that nearly as much as he liked seeing himself on the cover of the magazine. I think he's, but Muhammad would say, okay, you took advantage last time. You asked me for 20 minutes and you took an hour. Well, I'd tell him I need 10 minutes this time and an hour later, he was still suggesting things. One instance, we named him Sportsman of the Year after he beat George Foreman in Zaire. And the picture was set. Our editors, I had sold my editors on the idea of the picture should look something like a GQ cover. Studio cover with a white soft background, this off-white background, and Muhammad in black tie. So picked him up to take him to the studio. We've got, he's got two glomad bags with him. He's looking along. I'm wondering, I mean, Tuxedo doesn't take up that much space. We got there and before I could start shooting the Tuxedo, he once opposed in the two African robes that President Mabouda gave him. All I could see is I heard the cash register ringing on the sale of photographs. But of course, I spent an hour shooting the two, two kaftans, his new sport jacket had to be photographed. And we got around, finally, we got the Tuxedo on, which ended up as the cover of the magazine. But nobody did things like that. He just, he made everybody that needed something. He made you look good. My boss always thought, wow, this guy, life is really, he's coming along. What a great set of pictures. Well, you couldn't miss. It's funny, because Ali passed away in June, as you know. The only other athlete, and I hope we'll talk about him, that comes close to him in my experience. And I didn't have nearly as much time with Arnold Palmer, but I did photograph Palmer. And they were the only two I ever met that were quite like that. Let's go into the next photograph, because we dovetailed brilliantly into the sequence here. We, of course- That's called luck. I had no idea that was the next- No, you didn't. We, of course, lost two legends this year, Mohammed Ali, and followed by Arnold Palmer just a couple weeks ago. So talk about what made this man so great. Well, I grew up in a low-income housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Golf was not exactly the game we played. Golf and skiing, I mean, tennis, we didn't do those things. We played stickball and basically tried to keep from getting in trouble with the law. I mean, it was more of that kind of neighborhood, and hopefully you grew up to become a good citizen. I'd never been in a golf course. I had never seen a golf course. When Sports Illustrated assigned me in 1962 to photograph Arnold Palmer at the Baton Rouge Open. Never heard of Baton Rouge either, I don't think, but I was very excited about going down to Baton Rouge and Palmer was such a great-looking athlete. He never wore a hat, which photographers frowned on because unlike digital, which picks up the tone between the shadow and you can photograph digitals with a hat on and can get a face underneath the hat. It's very hard to do with film. Palmer was known for no hat. He always looked great. Well, the weather in Baton Rouge was horrific when I got down there. It looked like they were gonna postpone a day or two. But secondly, Palmer had an ear infection and a bad one and he probably wasn't gonna play with it. Well, it turned out he played with these wads of cotton in his ears. Now, we didn't do an anaheim and a sweater and it just didn't look like a picture that could possibly preview the masters. And by the way, in those days, you know, I saw I suffered when a photographer appeared to shoot a cover. The first thing you heard about from the publicist at school or wherever was you're not gonna jinx us. I, you know, that I saw I covered jinx. Well, there were more instances like this with Palmer. This is the master's golf tournament and we're gonna put them on the week before the masters was my cover. Anyway, I ended up getting the cover and it wasn't my favorite cover but I was thrilled to have a cover of Arnold Palmer. And he had been very nice to me. I spent a good amount of time with him when I was down there shooting. I, you know, got to chat with him for a bit. But then I didn't see him for a while. Oh, got the cover and he won the masters that year. No jinx. It's now a few years later and I'm assigned to shoot the Westchester Open in New York. By now I was shooting golf fairly, you know, I had covered umpteen masters and a bunch of US Opens. Palmer is leading the tournament and I think it's the fourth day. It was the third or fourth day. CBS television is televising live and Palmer's ball lands quite a distance from the flag. And one of the cliche pictures, I think you'll see it, but it often produces really good pictures. On those rare occasions when the golfer chooses to leave the stick in and the caddy holds the stick, there's a really neat picture to be shot. Long lens, it was a large green and Palmer was all the way at the other end. The flag was in the middle and I positioned myself with a long lens trying to shoot under the arm of the caddy and get Palmer with this putt. And obviously if it sucked this, this was a 60 foot putt or something like that. Well, I'm looking through my lens. I'm congratulating myself because Palmer is actually doing something like this as I remember it. And I have no idea what's gonna make you standing up and looking and going like this. It fazed me. I had no idea what he was doing. And now when photographers, when the golfer complains about, certainly if you click the shutter during a backswinger, and this was a big tournament, any official, if Arnold Palmer had said move that photographer, they wouldn't have moved me a foot or two. They would have removed me from the taking my credential away and you have to be very careful about that. And the rules are fair. The rules are not supposed to be in their mind of sight. But I was so far away that it never dawned on me that he was motioning this perhaps to me. Well, he finally puts his putter down. And because the other golfer's ball was in the way, of course, where he had to walk, he walks around the outside of the green all the way around the green. And I'm watching, I figure out what he's doing. You don't line a putt up from that distance. Even I knew that by then. And he got down on one knee right next to me. He put his arm around me and he whispered to me and that he remembered my name and made me. He said, Neil, you think he could move over about a foot you're right in my mind of sight? Well, I turned stoplight red, trying not to let the official see that maybe he was thought. And I don't know if people, but all of this was on the CBS. I never saw it, because they didn't show replacers of that. That wasn't significant enough to make the evening news. But I remember just thinking, what a decent guy because he would have had such a different ending had he done what a lot of golfers would have done. It's just said, when you move that guy, he's right in my eye sight. And I can't think of anybody other than Ali who would have done something like that. So maybe this answers my question. There was an outpouring of affection when he died at the age of 87 a couple of weeks ago. We've had a lot of great golfers in the game of golf. Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player and Tiger Woods and others. But there was something about Arnold Palmer that was different. What made him special? Well, he had a charisma. He had a charisma about it. He seemed to really enjoy the other things that come along, the celebrity, the dealing with the press. By the way, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player would have been two of the others who were very anti and not Tiger. I would not have had a Tiger. That's quite the contrary. But I certainly would have added Lee Trevino to that list. There were some of these colorful characters. But I don't know, it's an intangible thing. It's hard to describe. I always call it a visual charisma as it related to my job. But as I said, we're all young. We're young writers. We're young photographers. We're young television executives. You're all trying to look good to your boss. And Arnold Palmer, like Ali, always made you look good. And what his thought process was, I have no idea. Let me quote relentless again. You said, you write in the book, once I started to get published, your photographs started getting published, I realized that a camera could be my ticket to everywhere. A kind of magic carpet, you could say, to any place I wanted to go. So let's talk about some of the places, rather, that your camera has taken you about. Well, let's look at the next image. This is a 1963 World Series Don Drysdale, who just pitched the winning game. Game of three. A wonderful shot. Talk about the events that you've been to. Talk about the greatest moments that you've experienced in those big events, the World Series, the Super Bowl, the NBA Championship. Talk about the greatest moments you could think of. Well, easy to give you those. And remember, the ticket that I got was not a ticket in the Bleaches. My son, the camera, was my ticket to get into the event. It was a ticket to the best seat in the house and access in most instances and beyond. The events that would matter to me, most of them, a lot of them were very personal. They may not have been my greatest known pictures, but I never dreamed that I would have 10 minutes in the Oval Office with Ronald Reagan, just us. You know, the White House photographer, Michael Evans, was in there with me, but that was pretty much it. I never dreamed that I'd fly with Top Gun. I wanted to be a Navy pilot, not a photographer when I was a kid. I built little warships, the battleships, and I got to go to Vietnam with the battleship New Jersey, which was a thrill. I mean, it produced some very good pictures in a couple of books. But in sporting events, I mean, seeing Ali win, I covered all three phrase of fights. I was in Manila, I was in, and then having, not only was it a ticket, but it was a ticket people were paying me to do something I loved to do, which was taking pictures. I was a rabid sports fan and a news junkie. I moved to Time Magazine because there was a whole world out there I wanted to cover besides sports. And one of the great advantages of going to Time Magazine, and we had a fabulous editor at Time Magazine, Ray Cave, who hired me and gave me an opportunity to do things I never dreamed of. But one of the things that was so appealing about making the move from sports illustrated at the time, because the same company, is I still covered the big sporting events. Sports Illustrated wasn't the only magazine that covered the Olympic Games or heavyweight title fighter or World Series set at Time. And often we did covers, our Olympic coverage. Our editor, Ray Cave, had come from Sports Illustrated. He and I sort of really had one goal when we went to the LA Olympics. The preview for the LA Olympics was to show Sports Illustrated how an Olympics really should be covered. We like to think we succeeded. Race as it broke the bank, but it was worth it. Was news photography different than sports photography? Did you bring a different sensibility to that task? I think a lot of the photographers, and you know so many of them, they would have said yes. I think that what I used in so many instances was everything I had learned in sports photography. I got a cover of President Jimmy Carter at the Democratic Convention in 1980, shooting from the floor with the 600 millimeter lens, which is something that other than a sports photographer, I don't think most other photographers would have done it that way. Just not used to using, that's a normal lens for shooting football or baseball. It isn't a normal lens for most photographers. I did a cover, well we looked at my favorite picture ever, of Holly Williams with the camera overhead. Okay, well I did an essay on prisons in America. I spent a year photographing maximum security prisons. The cover of the magazine was exactly that picture with the camera mounted right in the middle of a cell, a single cell, a prisoner at Attica. So I used whatever I learned in sports photography, I brought into my work on, you know, on just covering news, covering the White House some, I covered, I said I did essays on the animals of Africa, I did an essay on prisons, I did a thing on carrier power. The remote cameras that I used so effectively in sports photography, I lowered a camera in an underwater housing from the bow of the Carl Vincent, the USS Carl Vincent, and Shard F-14s taking off from the waist catapult, side catapult. Those are things, those were exactly the same kind of pictures I shot in sports, except the subject was different. One of the pictures that you featured in Relentless, going back to what you were saying about being in a prison cell, is of Charles Manson. It's a haunting photograph of Manson. Talk about how you came to that assignment and what it was like to photograph. Well when I sold our managing editor at the time on the idea of doing prisons, we were gonna try to do all the household work, Sam Quentin, Leavenworth, Huntsville, Attica, Reedsville, not Reedsville, I did Statesville in Illinois, and then I wanted to add to that, how does the best known inmate in America, certainly, what's it like, what's a day like with that person? And I thought of Sir Han, Sir Han, I thought of Richard Stark, the Chicago, I think Richard Stark, his name, right, the Martin Luther King's killer, and of course Manson. And I wrote to each of them, I just wrote a letter from Time Magazine, and the only one that got back to me was Manson, who wrote back to me. And we had a couple of letters between us, and I went out and, no, soon did I get to meet him, but his condition was without cameras. The warden brought me back to of all places, the church, Manson was, that was his job, he swept the church, and we sat down, we talked for about 15, 20 minutes, and all he could talk about was how much is Time Magazine gonna pay him. I said, hey listen, I just flew out here with an assistant, we came out from New York, you invited me, you know, and of course all the while, I'm trying to be very careful, I don't wanna take them off, I wanna get the pictures, but I didn't have a camera with me, and by the way, he's a little wimp, he's a, you know, I'm not exactly six foot tall, but Manson came up to about here on me, and he weighed about 80 pounds, so unless he had a weapon hidden somewhere, which I suspect, he wasn't, there was nothing to fear at all, I mean, I would have had no problem handling him had he chosen to make a mistake. In any case, we talked for a while, and he finally said, well, if you're not paying me, I'm leaving, and he did, and there was nothing I could do, and I flew back to New York. Really, it's the only time in my entire career, I've come back with lousy pictures sometimes, I mean, it doesn't always, when you're only looking at my success stories, this book doesn't have a single failure in it, I don't think, you brag about your successes, not about your failures, but this was worse than the failure because I went out, spent a lot of the company's money, and came back with nothing, I never opened my camera bag, the camera bags were in the warden's office, well, we got there, the warden said before Charles, man, so we'll let you photograph me once and talk to you. So I'm sitting in my office, my feet up on the desk reading the newspaper one morning in the phone rings, and there's some guy on the phone, and he says, about a month later, a month after I came back, I was very embarrassed, I had to go in and tell Ray Cave that I had no pictures, not bad ones, none. I'm sitting in the office, the phone rings, and some guy's on the phone, he says, you're Neil Lifer, and I said, yes. He said, well, Charlie asked me to call you. I straight up, I said, who? He said, Charles, Charles Manson, you're the guy that went out, spent some time talking to Charles Manson in Vacaville, which is the prison he was in. Well, I thought this had to be a fake, I don't know how he got to me, so I said, look, I got to be in the meeting, can you give me your phone number, and I'll call you right back, I'll call you back in half an hour. And the area code was, it wasn't 415, San Francisco, it was a Vacaville area code, so I remember thinking, that's odd. Got him back on the phone, he told me that he had been in prison with Manson for a couple of years, somewhere in one of the other California prisons, and he was now writing Manson's memoir. But the funny part was, he looked at me, and he said, not looked at me on the phone, he said, I said, why is he gonna do this now? He told me if we didn't pay him, he wasn't gonna do it, but we're not paying him. Magazine doesn't pay for photo shoots, for news coverage. And he said, well, Charlie, I like you. I thought that was very funny. I see he liked me so much that I came back, I said, I could have been fired, I exaggerated a little. I wrote no pictures back, he said, well, look, I can promise you, if you come out again, Manson will give you the time you need. So I went down to Ray Cave's office, and it'll tell you what kind of entity he was, and I said, Ray, I can't, I don't have a clue what's really gonna happen, but I got this call, it turns out Charlie likes me, and wants me to come back, and he just looked and he said, you know what, it's worth the game, well, go. And I did, and I spent a whole day with him, but as I said, it was the pictures, Cantaloupe, you know, I wanted him to look the way he looks, you know, the swan stick on his forehead, for example, if you see it, if you see it when I met him, you can barely see it, it's a fading tattoo. When he's gonna be photographed, or when he's up for parole every five years, he colors it in with a pen, because he damn well wants you to see it. And I'd have been foolish not to take advantage of that in my pictures, and I did. Right, right. Well, let me go back to sports for a moment. In addition to being a photographer, you are a witness to these amazing moments. So I gotta ask this as a bar room question, but what has been your, the most exciting moment that you have witnessed in the sports that you have covered? Wow, wow. I mean, the personal moments were very exciting because I had a really good personal relationship with the athlete, but probably, probably Manila. Manila was, you know, it was a fight that nobody expected to be exciting. Muhammad was looking great, and Fraser looked like he was finished, and it's the best fight I had, and so on. It was a third of Muhammad Ali. That would probably be it. If it wasn't that, it would have been secretary. It's not winning the Belmont, but winning the Preakness because we put Steve, I'm sorry, affirmed, who won the Triple Crown, we put Steve Cawthon on the cover, and we closed the cover. The magazine printed two covers because the race goes off at 5.30 on a Saturday night. The magazine is on press at six o'clock on Saturday, and our editor, the candidates, Ray Cave, wanted to beat Newsweek. We had to bring Newsweek being out there, made Time Magazine a much better, much better magazine. Yeah. And that, there were three races in that Triple Crown year. They all ended up with nose, you know, six inches at most, separating the two horses, and the two horses coming down the stretch at the Preakness. When I knew, if affirmed wins, Steve Cawthon is the cover. When those two horses came down the straightaway, noses, just one nose apart, my heart sank. I've never seen anything that exciting. And maybe because I had something riding on it, it would have been, it would have been the same as having a huge bet on the race, not a small bet. Going back to the thrill in Manila as it was called, the final matchup between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1975. And you alluded to it, no one expected much, but it was perhaps the greatest fight of all time. That's one I have as a... Why? Well, I mean, you know, you dream of what should a fight? I mean, take a look at any of the boxing movies because they always create the greatest fight in a boxing movie. That's what Rocky did, and that's what, you know, that's what Raging Bull did. And even though it didn't single out one particular fight that was the best fight, with Ali Frazier III, it just figured to be a boring fight. It didn't figure to be very good. Everyone assumed Ali was gonna either knock him out early. I get very nervous at one of these things. It's very tense, you're sitting right. I mean, that was probably no further from Ali's corner than I am from you. So you're that close to where the action is gonna be when they're up against the ropes. You actually have to lean back because they're too close to you. This fight, I wasn't nervous at all because everyone knew it was a great time when Manila for a week, the company's expense. I mean, how could you go wrong, you know? And I wasn't really worried that it was gonna be an important fight. And sure enough, when the fight began, it was, I wasn't nervous at all because it started going just as everyone expected it would. Ali was beating him pretty convincingly for the first three or four rounds. And then suddenly, it changed and it became kind of a fight. And then it got very one-sided, Joe Fraser. I mean, Joe just beat Ali. I mean, I've never seen anybody take the kind of punishment Muhammad took. And then at the end of the fight, when it was stopped in the 15th round because Joe was beating so badly, both fighters were just dead on their feet. In addition to that, I had done the preview cover for the fight when I put Don King in the picture. So now Don King, who had a bigger ego than Ali had. So I've got Don King, Joe Fraser and Muhammad Ali and that sold a lot of pay-per-view and a lot of what it wasn't called pay-per-view in those days, whatever, you know, you pay 25 bucks to see it in a movie theater, the fight. Don wanted to repay me and so he brought me to the party the night after the fight that Emile de Marcos and Ferdinand Marcos threw. And then one old photographer was there. I mean, Howard Bingo was there, Ali's friend. That was it. There were no other cameras in the room. And Don sat me at the table with the Marcos and Ali. And so that ended, that whole two days was just a great thrill and an experience I'll never forget. Ali talked about that fight as being the closest he had ever come to hell. And it's true that it's a truly barbaric fight if you look at it. Is boxing become an anachronism because it is so barbaric? I think boxing is always gonna be, you know, somewhat barbaric. I don't quite think, I think if it's monitored right and if the referee is doing a job and the ringside doctors, it shouldn't be. There's a point at which you stop a fight, you don't let a fight to get hurt. Boxing is failing today, I think, because there are no good fighters. Yeah, yeah. I don't know the fights either. Sure, let's show the next photograph. And this is of Carl Lewis in the 1984 Olympics, just the runaway star it seems from that Olympics. Don mentioned, I believe you covered a dozen Olympics during your time. Is that right? 16 of them. Winter and summer, not that old. Yeah. Talk about the most vivid moments that you recall that we just had a summer Olympics, the very memorable games. What are your most memorable moments among the Olympics that you've attended? Again, not one of my greatest known pictures, not one that's really pretty unknown, but my favorite ever. I went to Tokyo in 1964. I had never been to Asia at all. I never dreamed of covering an Olympics. And I'm sort of bothered by the way they've, each Olympics today, I'm just jumping ahead for a second, the opening ceremony, the tradition of the games works. They have traditions, the things they do. And one of the great traditions used to be that one man, it used to be, it could be a woman, certainly, and that should be when the right woman athlete is there, they should indeed choose the best representative of the country to carry the final torch up to the, and light the Olympic flame. And it used to be that that person, the whole stadium would just, your heart would stop and you'd sit there, and finally in came this one runner. And he circled the track and then he went right up, the stairs to the very top of the stadium in the LA Coliseum, or in Barcelona, or in any, in Moscow, in Madrid, in London, and wherever you did, and lit the torch. Today now, they all, you know, in Barcelona, they had somebody firing arrow to light it. In Montreal, I remember they had a couple light it together. They've gotten away from the tradition, but my first Olympics was in Tokyo. I've been the last, actually, Rayford Johnson did it in Los Angeles. That was the last time it was done the old traditional way, but in Tokyo, I was positioned in an aisle, oh, I must have been 50 feet from the emperor of Japan who I had seen in all the war movies. I mean, and there was the emperor with his son who was the emperor today. I believe, and the empress was sitting there, and I was just in an aisle, and in came the torch bearer. And I mean, I remember I was shaking, and he came running around the track with that torch, and that picture, it's not a great photograph, but when that picture was chosen for the cover of Sports Illustrated that week, it was just a great thrill. It's still, if not my very favorite, it's certainly right up there at the very top. Later on, I had obviously better credentials and better opportunities to be in better positions to shoot, but nothing, I don't remember anything as well as I remember how excited I was when I saw that torch for the first time. I'd seen Rome on television, I think, in 1960, but in 1964 there I was, and I looked to my right, and there's the emperor, and then here comes this guy with the torch, I mean, I pinched myself because I didn't believe I could possibly be sitting there at that event. So what made you different? Talk about what made you pick up a camera to begin with, and why did you break out from the pack? I didn't get into medical school. It wasn't like my mother wanted to know. The lower east side, as I said, was a place where a lot of kids were getting in trouble. I was really never in danger of getting in trouble. I was a good student and I wasn't going to end up with drugs or anything, but there were gangs, there were drugs, there were, you know, this is the mid 50s, mid to late 50s, and the way you kept kids off the street were there were things that they call them settlement houses, they're community centers in some other cities. We call them settlement houses. The Hedder Street settlement is still in business. It's about, it's over 150 years old I think now, and what they tried to do was they had programs to give kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had primarily just because they couldn't afford it. So for example, they had a music program and kids could go into days a week and learn to play piano or learn to teachers, learn to, and it was keep kids off the street. All I wanted to do in spite of my height was go to the gym and play basketball every night, but they didn't let you do that every night. So one of the other programs was a photography program and I got involved in it and the importance of a good teacher really is, I'll never forget why I got motivated was because the lady who taught, the little Polish lady who taught photography and taught the photography class and we had, you can go two days a week and she just made photography fun and exciting and they gave us a roll of film because I really couldn't afford film or a camera and each weekend you were supposed to go out and shoot some pictures. You can go to the Bronx Zoo where you could shoot. We had a contest every year which unfortunately I never won. I always wanted to, we had a contest every year on who could take the best picture of the tree in Rockefeller Center. So these were things that were accessible to everybody. How can you put your imagination to use? What are you gonna do to make the tree look better than everybody else's picture in your picture? One guy reflected the picture of it, reflected in the window. Another guy sort of got up high in the building somehow and had the skating rink below but you would do that on the weekend, you shot a roll of film. If you're class, it was either Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday and the first day they nearly supervised your learning to develop that roll of film into a roll of negatives and you would pick a negative so the next day you came in you would be learning how to make a print of the negative and I just got hooked and I really liked it and as I said later on when I found out that someone would pay me to do this and put me in the best seat at an event, even if you have money you can't buy that seat. Right. And I had no chance to buy the seat of the bleachers, so. The LBJ Presidential Library has a vast archive and included in it our 650,000 photographs taken by the White House team of photographers. The principal of whom was Yoshio Komodo who really redefined White House photography in so many ways but we don't have this next photograph which I'll show you now, which was taken from the lens of the old, that's the wrong, sorry, that's the wrong photo, that's from, you were before in Africa and I believe that's Kip Kano. This was, no, it was two Kenyans but not Kip Kano in an effort to, again, to clobber news week, Time Magazine spent a lot of money on our Olympic preview for the LA Olympics and I went around the world, I covered 14 countries, I know you're gonna come to the Cuban picture later so I'll wait on that story but this was, the idea was to photograph the star athletes of various countries in front of the picture postcard of their country so I did an Egyptian athlete with the pyramids, no Photoshop in any of this, it was all done for real but it was the Egyptian athlete in front of the pyramids, the Indian hockey team which were defending champions at the Taj Mahal in Agra, a London Sebastian co in front of Windsor Castle and running et cetera, great Japanese gymnast who won the gold medal with Mount Fuji in the background, the Chinese gymnast on the great wall. This was my picture in Kenya, the Kenyan roundhouse. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the Johnson administration whatsoever, except that Johnson was tall. Let's go to the next one, there we go, and they're fabulous, so that is President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson at a Washington Center. Well traditional for the president to throw out the opening pitch and I went to sports on the street, I would die in the photograph, the president, I'd never done it with credentials, with White House credentials, and what the White House, this was Griffin Stadium in Washington and in those days of course you could sit the president and the vice president right next to each other, Ed Derson's in the picture, Mike Mansfield's in the picture. The box was surrounded by half of the powers that be in Washington. That's a who's who of Washington. Yeah, and I was really excited about going and of course I confess I wasn't thinking about photographing Lyndon Johnson, I was thinking of photographing John Kennedy, who like Arnold Palmer didn't wear hats, in fact hated hats apparently, and didn't wear an overcoat and they sat for the game, but they sat down and I thought this is gonna really be exciting, and I shot some color as well and I thought maybe I'd get lucky and Kennedy would need a hot dog and get a little mustard. Maybe he would have moped at some point and I wasn't really paying a lot of attention to Johnson until I realized that every time I looked up, Johnson was eating a hot dog, drinking a beer, he was jumping up and down, rooting for the senators I assume. I got more good pictures of Lyndon Johnson than I ever got of Kennedy because there weren't any to be gotten till about the sixth or seventh inning, seventh inning it started getting cold and the first thing Kennedy did was put on his overcoat and then he put this hat on and years later, for a period of time, I was fairly good friends with Caroline Kennedy and I showed her this picture once and she said it was the only one she could remember seeing. He did wear a top hat at the inauguration of her father with a hat, but the picture happened because he was sitting there again still doing nothing and I was really disappointed. I knew I didn't have an exciting picture and then a foul ball came in the direction the catcher was running over towards the presidential box. I was in the White House pool, I think they call it the tight pool where you're sitting, there were like a wire service photographer, cameraman, television and I was the magazine pool photographer just sitting on my camera case. The only time in my life I ever sat with my back to a sporting event because I was sitting about 15, 20 feet in front of the presidential box, maybe 30 feet at most and foul ball is coming in the direction and I never titled my pictures. This is one of the few that I always say and then this happened and I like to call it the Kennedy administration leaning to the left. You talked about the ineffable quality that Arnold Palmer had, a certain charisma, certainly Muhammad Ali had charisma as well. Did you see that in John F. Kennedy? Not that day. No, I don't know whether he was with, I did see it. I covered Kennedy twice at Army Navy football games and they're fascinating. The tradition is the president being the commander-in-chief sits on whoever the home team is that year sits on the Navy side with the CNO for the first half and then he's escorted down. I got a wonderful picture which is a great trivia question that I've taken of Kennedy. He was sitting on the Army side, on the Navy side first and he's escorted down by a midshipman and a naval officer to the middle of the field, usually the CNO, whatever, where he's handed over to the Army group. Now the Army group is coming back and I'm looking right at them and there's a little known general just behind the president and of course it turned out to be General Westmoreland. But I got great pictures of Kennedy at the football game. I mean I also shot him at the Orange Bowl once in the crowd but at the baseball game for whatever reason he just didn't do anything and made good pictures so I didn't see it. Well we'd love to add this to our archive, that's just a hint. Well now wait a minute now, there is someone in the audience who also, the one person I didn't thank is Karen Carpenter who made the SI pictures available for the book and has helped you here as well. We appreciate that Karen. So there's the person you wanna talk to. I'll be giving you the Johnson treatment after this. So the next picture shows why Neil might have been on John F. Kennedy's enemy list. I could have been working for John F. Kennedy then and then. So this is also in the book along with a fabulous story. Talk about this picture and how it came to be. Well before we came in I asked, I asked Mark if I should tell the PG of the R rated version of this. I'll do, I'll come down the middle of the road. PG plus. That's exactly, I'll take that. The only picture and there were 14 athletes around the world that I photographed as I said in Chinese gymnast, the weight lifter in Moscow and Red Square, I did all of these things. But one picture I appealed to the Cubans. David Kennerly helped me get to somebody in the, we didn't call it an embassy, the special interest section I think in Washington and I said I wanted to photograph Castro for this piece because he would be the picture postcard of Cuba and I wanted to photograph him with a great box of T. O. Phil Stevenson who had won two or three gold medals already by then. And it went back and forth and they never told you whatever you want to shoot anything in Cuba. Excuse me. Even if it was for Time Magazine, they would invite you. They wouldn't promise that you're going to get Castro. I'm just going to take a cough drop just because I'm going to tickle. Sorry. You're harkening back to the cigar perhaps. Likely. Excuse me for just a second please. Yeah, I noticed this shot. It is extraordinarily difficult for an audience with Fidel Castro. That's why this photograph really caught my attention. Also, again I'm coming back to the charisma. Your photographs, more than so many that I could think of from other photographers really captured charismatic individuals and you see here there is a charisma to Fidel Castro. Oh, he's another one you couldn't miss. I did a portrait of him as well. But anyway, I took the pictures of him with, well first, when we were ready to pose the pictures with Stevenson, I told him I wanted to have him with a cigar in his mouth. He took out this little Cigarello type, looked like a cigarette. He was no longer smoking large, the big cigars. And I told him this wouldn't look very good in a picture. And he said, well, I don't have another cigar. This is what I'm smoking. And you have to be a little, you can't be afraid or intimidated when you're shooting at this point, this kind of thing. And it would have been easy to say whatever you like, Mr. President. But I said, well, I brought some cigars. I know you like cojibers. And I had bought half a dozen of the biggest cojibers, which are the ones who used to smoke. And I handed it to him and he said, okay. And as soon as I handed him the cigar, he started taking the wrapper, the little, not wrapper, what do you call it, the cigar band or cigar, which surprised me. And I remember and I said to him, and by the way, Fidel Castro spoke fairly good English. He had graduated from Columbia, Columbia University. And his English, he just didn't like to speak English with reporters. Maybe he was just a little bit not confident enough in his English. He started with me with an interpreter at the beginning of the session and then pretty soon, he was no longer using the interpreter, he was speaking English to me. So we were now speaking in English. The session was over really. And I said, why don't you take off the little wrapper, the band that's on there. And he said, because I'm photographed all the time. And we have a very good cigar. We sell cigars in Cuba. It's one of our biggest industries. And if I'm photographed with a cojiba, people aren't gonna buy Monte Cristo or Romeo and Juliet or any of the others. He said, so I don't want anybody to know what I smoke. And so he took my cigar and took the pictures. And now when I finish shooting, I have for years and it's fun to look back now. When I started doing it, I just did it because I thought it would be fun to have. Now I look back and it's nice to see these moments that were so special in my life. I always take a picture with the subject. Nobody says no. You're in the Oval Office and you ask the president, I may have a picture with you. You get the time. Even if the session is over, the president's gonna say sure. So I said to Castro, could I take a picture of you? And I have a special picture I'd like. I'd like to have a picture of you lighting my cigar. In battered eyelash, I think he just took the label off my cigar, is that right? But you know, there is no label on it. Well, I don't smoke. I never smoked cigarettes. I never smoked a pipe. And I never smoked a cigar. So Castro was using little matches. See, I could have been working for the CIA because he's got these little matches. His cigar is lit and I can't get the cigar lit. And the first match goes right down to his thumb almost. If he blows it out and puts another one, he's looking at me a little bit. Get the damn thing lit. Second match, by the third match, he was about to give up. And now, now you have to know, my assistant was a guy named Tony Suarez, who was a Bolivian, whose first language was Spanish. And he is shooting these pictures from 10 feet away from me, so he could hear clearly what was going on. And right behind Castro, even though it looks like we're in an empty place, there were 20 or 30 people. He had a lot of military people came out because they wanted to meet the athletes. He brought not only Stevenson, but they brought the Olympic Committee, brought a bunch of athletes to pose with him. And suddenly, they are all rolling and laughed at. And I don't speak Spanish, and I haven't got a clue why they're laughing. They're laughing at me, obviously, but it can't just be because I can't get the cigar lit. Castro is doing his best version of Edgar Bergen, a ventriloquist. He's got his teeth clenched, and he's saying something to me in Spanish, which turns out there are two different ways you can say it. And I'll give you the PG rated version, is he is basically telling me... Well, he's saying exactly what you would say to a little girl or a little boy when you give them a lollipop, and you're trying to tell them how to handle the lollipop, and he is... And I think we finally got the cigar lit. We have one last photograph, which I promised to Anne Wheeler, our PR director. She wanted some eye candy. That is a 57-year-old Paul Newman taken in 1982, I believe in Connecticut. Yes, that is... That is near his home in Connecticut. One of many actors or stars that you've taken. Talk about Paul Newman. Well, Paul Newman had just finished the verdict. It was about to come out in time. Time did two on rare occasions, three entertainment covers a year, and they decided the verdict was a film that would be certainly around at Oscar time. And Newman had never won an Oscar. His performance was fabulous in it. I was assigned to shoot a cover of Paul Newman at his home in Westport. And I spent a day with him. He couldn't have been nicer again, but this was one of the pictures just taken on this property. Yeah, as we wind down, talk about the future of still photography. You're one of the greats in that medium. We've gotten to a point technologically where you could almost pluck a part of a video out and make a great still photograph. So what happens to still photography as a medium? It's a great question. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, not only can you do what you're saying, and it's being done now already. You can do it pretty well. But we're gonna get the pictures published. I mean, you have to have magazines and newspapers, and they're all struggling. It's a tough time in that business. I mean, television, cable news. You know, I think the editor at Time Magazine, and I don't know her personally very well. I've met her a couple of times, but Nancy Gibbs, I think Time Magazine is an excellent magazine. She's putting out a very good magazine. No one's reading it. I mean, here we are in the middle of a presidential race, and I haven't been to a dinner party that I can remember this year where someone said that you see the cover of Time last week. When I was working at Time Magazine, that would, you'd have had that in every conversation. It usually would be the beginning of the conversation of an evening was, wow, did you see what Newsweek put on the cover last week? Did you see what Time did? So the markets are going, and that makes it harder and harder for, you know, a young photographer's come to me that are full of enthusiasm, and I never wanted to discourage anybody, but what's in the back of my mind is how are you gonna make a living? You know, how are you one day, you know, we all wanna at some day, you know, be able to support a family and live nicely, and how are you gonna do that in a business that is very tough? I hope there's an answer to your question. I don't know it. Everybody can take photographs now with their phone, and good photographs. Has, and they're posted everywhere on Instagram, on Twitter, they're all these mediums for photography. Has the, have still photographs diminished in importance as a result of the abundance of them out there, or can they still be as powerful as they once were? Oh, I think they can definitely still be as powerful. Or you know, every once in a while, you see, sadly, so often they're disaster events that take, you know, the terrible train wreck, the refugees coming out of Syria. You're gonna see them with this hurricane coming up the coast. No, a powerful image is still a powerful image, and I also believe I'm asked all the time about his digital, because it is easier. It's a lot easier, but it's so interesting to me that the best photographer's still taking the best pictures. Whether it's Andy Lieberwitz, or David Kennerly, or any number, any number of great photographers that grew up with film have made the transition because you don't have a choice now. I think it's still the photographer, and the abundance of pictures doesn't make, doesn't make them all great. How many, it's not a matter of quantity, it's a matter of quality. And I think that the quality is still there. When you see it, you know it. I mean, there's a, you know, no matter what newspaper you read, there's always one guy you can pick out who's really kind of the dean of the photographers, and his pictures, or her pictures, are better all the time. Well, Neil Lifer is certainly one of the great photographers, as you've seen tonight. Neil, I can't thank you enough for being here. The book is relentless. It's still on sale, I believe, outside. Neil, thanks again for being with us tonight. Thank you. Thank you, man. Thank you. Sorry about the question. You're not at all. I'm not at all.