Ali: Las Vegas Legacy is made possible in part by Jaguar Land Rover Las Vegas and Desert Valley Audiology.

♪♪♪ Las Vegas is probably the most special place in the world, the top entertainment, the top sports.

People want to come here; they want to gamble.

-The guy who started it all was Muhammad Ali.

Ali was a tremendous draw anyplace.

♪♪♪ (Jared Weiss) From about 1966 to 1970, he was stripped of his title and couldn't box.

♪♪♪ (Robert Arum) And that's when Ali said, I ain't gonna go to Vietnam.

I'm not going into the Army.

They never called me the N word, I got nothing against them, and everything hit the fan.

So as a boxer, he missed a good portion of his prime, from 26 to about 30 years old, so if you see all he accomplished and missing his prime, that stands out even more on his incredible fighting talent.

♪♪♪ The breakthrough came in 1978.

Ali was looking for an opponent, and we got him a fellow named Leon Spinks.

And nobody gave him any kind of chance against Muhammad Ali, and we were looking for a place to put that fight.

That was the first major fight in a casino anyplace in the world, and from then on, the floodgates opened.

(Mike Weatherford) Las Vegas really benefited and really got a huge bump from these fights in the early '80s.

By 1980 you could look at the entertainment roster in the showrooms, and Las Vegas was clearly in a holding pattern, clearly going through the motions.

Then voila, in October 1980, the first outdoor fight at Caesars with Ali and Holmes.

(Sig Rogich) I was worried about his health.

He hadn't been in the ring a long time, so I made him go to the Mayo Clinic to get a checkup.

He wasn't very happy about that, but they agreed to do it.

So he passed that well and he looked great, you know, and he'd spar around the ring and dance and do his butterfly thing and all the stuff that made him famous and popular.

Ali, he was so pushed internally to get down to looking good that I think he must have taken a lot of diuretics or something that sapped a lot of his strength because when he fought Holmes, he got beat very badly.

That was a big ticket; I mean, the whole world was paying attention to that.

-They announced crowd was more than 25,000 people, and then of course the pay per view and everybody else that watched it and all the publicity, this was the big event Las Vegas needed.

-I think he inspired a lot of people to want to become boxers.

I think he inspired a lot of people to speak up, be confident, be themselves.

(Pat Barry) I think if Muhammad Ali hadn't been Muhammad Ali, I don't think you'd be hearing of people like Sugar Ray Leonard and Floyd Mayweather Jr.

He certainly opened the doors for all of them.

♪♪♪ Ali: Las Vegas Legacy is made possible in part by Jaguar Land Rover Las Vegas and Desert Valley Audiology.