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What: “Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel”

Where: HBO, tonight, 10.

An interview British broadcaster David Frost taped with Muhammad Ali in April is the featured segment in this edition of “Real Sports.” The interview is compelling for a number of reasons, but mostly because Ali is so lucid.

“He can still knock you out with his words,” Frost says, although the sharp edge is long gone, destroyed by Parkinson’s disease. But the subtitles HBO uses to add clarity to Ali’s words are barely necessary.

The piece opens with clips from a 1974 interview Frost did with Ali. Frost notes that “Ali was not known for his modesty” back then, which is an understatement. Ali is shown saying such things as, “I have wrestled with an alligator and tussled with a whale; I handcuffed lightning and threw thunder in jail.”

There also are clips of an interview Frost did with Ali in 1968, when Ali told Frost “all whites are devils.” Frosts asks Ali about that in this interview, and Ali says, “That’s not true. Anybody can be a devil. Anybody can be evil. It’s the mentality, not the color.”

Ali talks about his Muslim religion and about Sept. 11. He says it’s right to stop terror, but aptly dodges questions about who is to blame and if the U.S. should attack Iraq. As Frost notes, “The former Louisville Lip is now watching his every word, concerned by what might offend someone.”

Says Ali, “I’m not as dumb as I look.”

At one point Ali appears to doze off. “Teasing,” Ali says as he snaps out of it.

“You had me fooled,” Frost says.

“You are as dumb as you look,” Ali says.

Ali does not blame boxing for his disease--”There are a million people who are not boxers [who have Parkinson’s],” he tells Frost--and he says God has blessed him because he could be in worse shape. He says his mind is better than ever.