After 30 years, new advert lures Ali out of his corner

"I WANT everybody out there on TV to know it - I am the greatest."

After an absence of 30 years from the world of commercials, Muhammad Ali, the sportsman who invented the soundbite, is to return in an advertisement for Equitable Life together with his famous catchphrase.

Before agreeing to appear in the advert, Ali had turned down thousands of scripts sent to him over the past three decades. Most offers were filtered out by Ali's management and only a chosen few were suggested to the former heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He personally picked out the Equitable script because he liked its message. It features archive footage of a young Ali telling a little boy what he would have done if he had not become a boxer: "If it was a garbage man, I'd have been the world's greatest garbage man. I'd be able to dump more cans in 10 minutes than anybody." Trevor Beattie, creative director of TBWA, which made the advert, said: "We were incredibly flattered that he chose our script. He loved the quote and he'd forgotten he'd ever even said it." The GBP 4 million campaign starts this week and will run for the next six weeks. A spokesman for Equitable Life said: "Because of Ali's keenness to get involved and use the commercial as a soapbox to spread his own philosophy on life we were able to negotiate a particularly good deal."

Copyright 1999
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