Muhammad Ali was still the heavyweight champion of the world in 1977, and he still talked like one. So when he turned up on TV with the Jacksons that year, it was never going to be a quiet guest spot. What fans still pass around is barely 20 seconds long, and it starts with Michael throwing punches.
Michael was 18. In the clip, he bounces around Ali on a brightly lit stage with his fists up, spinning on his toes between jabs. Ali, in a pale suit and tie, squares up to him like it’s a weigh-in and lets the kid come to him. Years later Quartz put it in a headline as “a pirouetting Michael Jackson,” which is about right.
By then the brothers had left Motown for Epic Records and become the Jacksons, since Motown kept the Jackson 5 name. They’d also landed their own CBS variety series, which ran from June 1976 to March 1977. Ali is listed among its guests that February, and fans usually credit the clip to that show, though the uploads don’t name the program.
Michael had picked the right man to spar with, and the right line to borrow. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” had been Ali’s calling card since he was still Cassius Clay, a phrase usually credited to his cornerman Drew “Bundini” Brown. Every kid who ever shadowboxed in a mirror knew it.
So Michael stopped dancing and asked. Could he ever “float like a butterfly” and “sting like a bee,” the way the champ did?
Ali never needed long to find a rhyme, and he didn’t need long here. He gave Michael the good news first. “Well, you got the butterfly part down, brother Michael, and you sing real sweet, to complete the cycle,” he said.
Then came the bad news, and it was all about Michael’s waistline. “But before you can sting people out of their wits, you got to put on some meat and keep on eating your grits.”
In other words, the slim teenager who could out-dance anyone in the room was going to need a lot more breakfast before he scared a boxer. Michael didn’t argue. He just looked at the champ and shot back, “Man, you cold, man.”
Michael asks Muhammad Ali if he can sting like a bee (fan upload, 1977)
This 24-second fan upload is the moment itself. Michael asks his question right at the start (0:01), and Ali’s rhyme and Michael’s reply follow within the next 20 seconds or so.
Quartz, which printed a transcript of the exchange, reported that Ali also had a backup plan for life after boxing. “If I’m ever out of the ring, and I find myself in a fix, I’ll join you guys, and we’ll become the Jackson 6,” he told the brothers.
It wasn’t a one-off visit to a TV studio, either. Ali’s daughter Laila, who was born in 1977, grew up with Michael around. When she shared the clip online decades later, she wrote, “MJ used to come visit our home when I was a kid.” She added that seeing the video put a smile on her face, as reported by EssentiallySports.
Ali sits down with the Jacksons in a 1977 TV interview (fan upload)
This is a fan upload of a separate 1977 TV interview, not the sparring clip. Ali calls the Jacksons over and talks about a plan to build a hotel in Harlem with them.
Ali never did join the group. He lost his title to Leon Spinks in February 1978 and won it back that September, and in the summer of 1979 Michael released “Off the Wall.”