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Q: I recently saw a documentary on TV called "The Kings," about Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns, but wasn't there already one with that title about Muhammad Ali? Was it a series or something?

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Author: 
Adam Thomlison / TV Media

A sport with a history as long as boxing should be able to come up with more metaphors — you're actually thinking of two different documentaries with very similar titles.

"The Kings," which aired over four nights last year on Showtime, was indeed about Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns, as well as Roberto Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard. They were collectively known in boxing circles as The Four Kings, because they all fought in the same weight class at the same time and helped revive popular interest in the sport.

But before that, in 1996, a feature-length documentary called "When We Were Kings" was released. It received a lot of attention and a best-documentary Oscar for its account of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's famous Rumble in the Jungle fight in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Without diminishing the legacy of Duran, Leonard, Hearns and Hagler, if anyone has the right to be dubbed the king of boxing, it's got to be Ali. To this day he remains one of the best-known figures in that — or just about any other — sport.

 

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