In this reviewer’s library are no fewer than 16 books on the singular life, boxing career and now spiritual journey of the once-brash Louisville amateur whose motormouth equalled the speed of his gloved hands and booted feet, and whose mind – before he was even in his teens – was aflame with his dreams of glory. How does one respond to a 12 year old who wins a split decision in a dinky home-town ring and already pronounces himself The Greatest?
Muhammad Ali is our black Paul Bunyan, except that Bunyan’s superhuman exploits were fables and Ali’s are real. He is not merely our most famous heavyweight champion; indeed, with all respect to Joe Louis, Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, the most venerated of our celebrated athletes, he managed to reach a level of global idolisation in a manner than can only be described as transcendental. Who could have predicted in the late 1960s, when Muhammad Ali was reviled by the sporting press and most of white America as a black racist, a mouthy troublemaker, that he would be the obvious choice to light the torch at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, as a symbol of international understanding, peace and love? What would all the name-callers be thinking now, we wondered, as the puffy-faced, middle-aged icon stood there with torch held high (if tremblingly) in that famous right hand that delivered some of the most punishing right crosses of the twentieth century?
Following his auspicious debut as author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Lenin’s Tomb, in King of the World David Remnick brings to his reading of the Ali scriptures a helpful sense of recent boxing history, inseparable from political history; since all champions after the early ’60s on were black, their lives reflected the social forces at work on them. By choosing to focus on Ali’s two predecessors as champions, first Floyd Patterson, then Sonny Liston, the author nicely sets the scene for the impact The Greatest would make when he was ready to shove them aside to take centre stage.
In a discerning and sensitive portrait, Floyd Patterson – surely the most unlikely man ever to wear the crown – is the good Negro, an approachable and strangely fearful man, a deferential champion of civil rights, integration and Christian decency. So anxious about losing was Patterson in his first fight with the stone-faced Sonny Liston that he brought a disguise to the dressing-room to escape incognito from his anticipated humiliation. ‘He was champion in the sense that Chester A. Arthur had been President,’ Remnick sums up in a particularly felicitous phrase. Some other beauts: Patterson’s haunted mentor, Cus D’Amato, is ‘a cross between the Emperor Hadrian and Jimmy Cagney’ (‘a 10!’ this reader scribbled in the margin) and, a few pages later, ‘the only modern psychoanalyst who carried a spit bucket in his hand and a Q-Tip in his teeth’.
If Patterson was, in Norman Mailer’s words, ‘a liberal’s liberal’, the tamed Negro literally reformed in reform school, passive, polite and nice, Sonny Liston was the perfect counterweight, the big, bad, black stereotype in every fearful white man’s nightmare. One of at least a dozen children, Liston progressed from overgrown ten-year-old petty thief to knee-breaker for the St Louis Teamsters and the mob that owned him as naturally as a white middle-class child moves up from elementary school to junior high. It was the only possible career move for this precociously physical muscle boy who couldn’t read or write but could knock opponents down with a left jab and cripple them with jawbreaking rights. By the end of the 1950s Liston was ready for the big time, which meant he was afforded the opportunity to turn over virtually 100 per cent of his future earnings to Mr Gray, otherwise known as Frankie Carbo, acknowledged commissioner of boxing without portfolio. But who needs a portfolio if you run the fight game for the Luchese family?
With racy scholarship, Remnick traces what would seem an unlikely liaison between Mr Gray (or Mr Fury, as he was sometimes called) and James Norris, head of the International Boxing Club and heir to a grain and real estate fortune worth hundreds of millions. Madison Square Garden and the top fighters in every division were in their pocket, and this odd couple controlled the fight game until the Feds finally caught up with Mr Gray (while Mr Norris, as befitted a scion of Chicago society, was exonerated). But, as Remnick concludes, ‘through one false front or another, with a succession of ostensible managers, Liston never moved far from the shade of Frankie Carbo’. How could he? He knew no other world. In a defining moment that Remnick makes poignant, Liston flies back to Philadelphia after he takes the championship away from Patterson, expecting a triumphant welcome – and nobody shows up. The story of his life. Deep into this carefully written book, Remnick quotes the cynically literate fight promoter Hal Conrad, who knew Lucky Luciano as well as he did Floyd, Cassius and Sonny. His chilling epitaph for Liston: he died the day he was born.
Like a good playwright setting up the entrance of his hero in Act 2, Remnick gives us Floyd the Good (Victim No. 1) and Sonny the Bad (Victim No. 2) to prepare us for Cassius the Baaad, the upstart to whom champion young blacks and their white hippie allies could relate. Born in still segregated Louisville, ‘wounded by the accumulated slights of mid-century American apartheid’, lying in his bed at night crying ‘as he wondered why his race had to suffer so’, young Cassius was on his way to becoming the symbol of a different kind of black man, whose role model was neither Booker T. Washington nor Martin Luther King. Malcolm X was more like it.
Just as Ali created a new style of heavyweight boxing, ‘on the principle that a big man could borrow the tactics of a smaller man’, a man like Sugar Ray Robinson, he created a new style of black man who went on to shock the world with a challenge both divisive and unifying. With Hegelian logic, in time there would be a synthesis, but when in the mid-’60s Cassius Clay embraced Elijah Muhammad’s black separatist Nation of Islam, his ‘don’t have to be what you want me to be’ spoke to the white power structure in a way it had never been spoken to before. While Ali’s conversion came as a surprise to fight fans and to the public at large, one of the most effective chapters in this book, ‘Secrets’, traces the teenage Clay’s attraction to the Black Muslims well before he won the gold medal in the 1960 Olympics. It was the increasingly bitter confrontation between pro- and anti-Vietnam War factions that moved the young black champion from the sports pages to the front pages. Teenagers in Watts wore his famous face on their buttons, and the ‘Don’t tread on me’ of black rebellion became ‘The Cong don’t call me nigger’.
If Remnick has not come up with new material for King of the World – no small task after a score of books on the subject – he’s drawn wisely from that body of work to define the arc of Ali’s ascendance from superconfident adolescent to Islam-inspired but ecumenical spiritual ambassador (only Ali was multidimensional: he could reach out to the world like Mother Teresa, but, as they say in Gleason’s Gym, she couldn’t lick Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman).
Remnick – who broke in as a sportswriter at the Washington Post and is now editor of the New Yorker – explores the difference between the civil rights movement, founded on democratic principles, and the self-sufficient, fiercely independent Black Is Beautiful movement that caught fire with Ali, captured the imagination of his generation and gave him the courage to refuse the draft, thereby sacrificing his precious championship, facing the prospect of five years in prison and, while appealing his case on the grounds of conscientious objection, being deprived of the licence without which he could not ply his trade. The cost to Ali in dollars was in the millions. But there were rewards. From Bertrand Russell came this message of encouragement:
In the coming months there is no doubt that the men who rule Washington will try to damage you in every way open to them, but I am sure you know that you spoke for your people and for the oppressed everywhere in the courageous defiance of American power . . . You have my wholehearted support. Call me when you get to England.
As Remnick quotes the poet Sonia Sanchez:
It’s hard now to relay the emotion of that time . . . when hardly any well-known people were resisting the draft. It was a war that was disproportionately killing young black brothers, and here was this beautiful, funny, poetical young man standing up and saying no!
How Ali won vindication in the Supreme Court of the United States, eight–zip, how he came back to the ring slower and inevitably more hitable but winning his title back again, and how after the tide turned against our Vietnam misadventure the unpatriotic sinner of the ’60s each year grew in stature as a man of honour and respect – maybe only a prophet could have foreseen these events. As Remnick ties it all together in King of the World, building on all those books and articles and transcripts along with personal interviews, it doesn’t read like the case history of a man (though the man is here in living colours, sometimes funny as hell) but of a comic and cosmic superman who accepts the mission of standing up for Mohammed, Allah and the human race.
While Remnick’s first-hand description of Ali’s current physical condition is disturbing – not least, as he notes, ‘because it is an accelerated form of what we all fear, the progression of ageing, the unpredictability and danger of life’ – his (our) Ali is ‘an American myth who has come to mean many things to many people: a symbol of faith, a symbol of conviction and defiance, a symbol of beauty and skill and courage, a symbol of racial pride, of wit and love’. That’s a lot of symbols for one man. But if ever there was a mighty army of men fused into one, it’s the young brash Cassius Clay self-created as Muhammad Ali. If Sonny Liston died the day he was born, here’s a fine book to remind us again that Ali was born with a gift for living (and believing) in a world without end.
[1998]
Seeing Ali the other night, another Ali movie was playing in my head. A strange feeling of double vision as the reel life of the legendary heavyweight champion played out on the screen with the charismatic Will Smith doing his best to impersonate the even more charismatic Muhammad Ali, while the real life as I lived it almost from the beginning kept getting in the way. It was difficult for me to judge the stylish director Michael Mann’s film because my personal Ali movie keeps on playing in my mind.
The first time I ever saw Ali he was the twenty-one-year-old wunderkind Cassius Clay, the irrepressible ‘Louisville Lip’ given to predicting his opponent’s destruction in rhyme – ‘Archie Moore will fall in four’. The unlikely venue was the Bottom Line, an artsy hangout in Greenwich Village, the last place you’d expect to see an undefeated young heavyweight fighter who had starched all but three of his first sixteen opponents and was in New York to face the formidable Doug Jones. But there he was, sporting a little bow tie and standing toe to toe with the long hairs. The hippies had never met a prizefighter before, and no one had ever met one like this charming egomaniac who could give Narcissus lessons on narcissism.
In Madison Square Garden he exhibited that balletic movement and those rapier jabs that would be his trademark and won a controversial decision over the more traditional Jones. He was a curiosity, but I wasn’t at all sure I shared his conviction that we were seeing the next heavyweight champion of the world.
My next Cassius sighting came a few months later, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas where he had come for the second Sonny Liston–Floyd Patterson fight to hype his unlikely challenge to the brutish and seemingly invincible champion. My brother Stuart was producing an NBC documentary on boxing with star newscaster David Brinkley, and I tagged along with them when they called on young Mr Clay. He was outrageously funny, a bigger, more formidable and more beguiling version of Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself.
Stretched out on one oversized bed, his brother Rudolph Valentino Clay, a mediocre boxer, in the other, he was ordering room service. ‘Hello, room service, this is Cassius, we’d like to order breakfast, eggs, make that a dozen and a half, and bacon, about a pound, and bread – send up a loaf . . .’
That’s what I heard. The most famous news show that year was the Huntley–Brinkley Report, which would end with their signature sign-off, ‘Good night, Chet’ – ‘Good night, David.’ So now Cassius begged him, ‘David, will you do the “Good night, David” with me?’ and when David responded to Clay’s ‘Good night, David’ with ‘Good night, Cassius,’ the man-child fell off the bed laughing. ‘David, let’s do it again!’ A lovable kid, we thought. What a shame he had set himself on a suicide mission of baiting the dangerous monster who had destroyed the previous champion, Patterson, in a single round and was about to do it again.
Clay’s showmanship succeeded in goading Liston into the match, but it was almost cancelled when the Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was discovered in Clay’s camp, and news spread that Clay was taking instruction in that controversial variation on the religion of Islam. Facing a possible white boycott, my friend the promoter Hal Conrad begged Malcolm to ‘disappear’ and hid the challenger in a Jewish old people’s home where the supposedly anti-Semitic Cassius endeared himself to the clientele. ‘Such a nice boy,’ an old lady told me. ‘I can’t picture him hurting anyone. We all hope he wins.’
The fight was almost called off again after a weigh-in even more hysterical than the one in the movie. Cassius and his alter ego Bundini Brown came thundering in, banging canes on the floor and screaming, ‘Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee!’ When Cassius saw Liston he flung himself at him, screaming, ‘Ugly bear! Big ugly bear!’ Security guards had to restrain him. Liston gave him the ‘look’ that terrified most opponents into submission. Seasoned fight reporters like Jesse Abramson of the New York Herald-Tribune and Jimmy Cannon of the Post were convinced the fight should be called off because Clay was so obviously suffering from psychological hysteria. His blood pressure was 200 and going through the roof.
But half an hour later ‘Fight Doctor’ Ferdie Pacheco called me to describe a medical miracle. ‘As soon as he got back I took his blood pressure and it’s perfect. I really believe it was self-induced hysteria as a ploy to penetrate that stolid armour of Liston’s. I know nobody gives Cassius a chance of surviving more than a round or two, but Angelo [Dundee, his trainer] says we may be in for a surprise tonight.’
The fight I watched from Clay’s corner was as controversial as the build-up. The speed of hand and foot tormented the dour bully who was used to fighting men who stood in front of him until they got themselves knocked senseless. Cassius opened an ugly gash in the stone-faced champion’s cheek, and blood was oozing from the stone. In the fourth, Cassius was blinded by something – we’ll never know what – and came back to his corner screaming, ‘Cut the gloves off! I can’t see.’
As Angelo began washing out Ali’s eyes with water, a pair of suspicious Fruit of Islam enforcers moved in on the little trainer, accusing him of selling out Ali by wiping some alien substance into their hero’s eyes. The quick-thinking Angelo slapped the sponge against his own eyes to prove his innocence, and as the two bodyguards retreated, Angelo managed to wash the offending liquid out of his fighter’s eyes. Crouched just below the apron of the ring, I was taking all this in as the bell rang for round five and Angelo slapped him on the butt and said, ‘Big Daddy, get in there. This is your night!’
Cassius, as he was still called, managed to run and recover through that curious round, and then was ready to resume his flashy punishment of Liston in the sixth.
When the old champ refused to come out for round seven, claiming shoulder trouble, the 10 to 1 underdog was the youngest champion in the history of the division, on his way to his legendary place in ring history.
At the press conference the morning after, the new champion scorned the press that almost unanimously had given him no chance to survive. But gone was the loudmouth braggadocio now. In a master stroke of public relations, he made us lean forward to hear his pious whispers. ‘My name is Cassius X now.’ No more ‘slave name’. Then he issued his signature declaration of independence: ‘I don’t have to be what you want me to be.’
After the conference I managed a few minutes alone with him. Now that he was the champion, I asked, what did he plan to do next? He thought a moment, made a serious face, and said, ‘Now that I’m champion of the world, I plan to travel all over the world and meet with the great leaders of the world.’ It was hard to take seriously. He actually saw the championship belt as the emblem of an international ambassadorship. He would be the people’s roving ambassador to the world. With due respect for the relative abilities of Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson, can you imagine any of them saying with a straight face that he now planned to meet with all the leaders of the world? But the then Cassius X (on his way to becoming Muhammad Ali) not only said it, he did it. A few days after the triumph in Miami, he was off to Egypt, then China, and he’s been at it ever since.
With Angelo and Dr Ferdie, Bundini Brown, and camp manager Gene Kilroy, I travelled to Houston to see him destroy the puncher Cleveland Williams. I saw him beg the referee to stop him from beating any longer on poor Buster Mathis. After the fight, I’ll never forget seeing Mathis in his dressing-room, sobbing like an overgrown baby. As humane as Ali was with Mathis, a streak of cruelty showed in his punishment of Ernie Terrell and Floyd Patterson, who paid the price for insisting on calling him by that now despised ‘slave name’, Cassius Marcellus Clay.
When he refused the Vietnam draft and had his title and his boxing licence promptly revoked by the patriotic boxing commissions, I was one of the Ali loyalists – a motley crew that included James Earl Jones, light heavyweight champion Jose Torres, fellow writers Truman Capote and George Plimpton, film director Sidney Lumet – who posed in a New York ring for the cover of Esquire declaring that Ali should be deprived of his title only by losing it in the ring. In vain, Ali’s promoter, Hal Conrad, tried to arrange matches for him in Canada and Mexico, offering to bring a US marshal along and to return to the States with him immediately after the fight. I attended several gigs with him at college campuses where he was hailed as a hero of resistance to the war. I remember an improbable night at Harvard where he played to an overflow crowd and where he verbally took on the hawkish Dr Kissinger in an unforgettable performance.
When the Supreme Court, in an unprecedented unanimous decision, decided Ali’s appeal in his favour, qualifying him as a legitimate conscientious objector and restoring his licence after a three-and-a-half year exile, I was in Atlanta for his comeback fight with the tough, white Jerry Quarry from my home town, Los Angeles. At a lakeside cottage 25 miles outside Atlanta, Ali held court. Sidney Poitier came from Hollywood, Jesse Jackson from Chicago. It looked like a convention of black celebrities. Ali’s no-nonsense trainer Angelo Dundee was having a fit. He liked peace and quiet on the day of a fight. Ali was hosting a coming-out party.
In the dressing-room before the fight, the unbelievable happened. Bundini Brown, Ali’s incorrigible ‘assistant trainer’ and phrasemaker – ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ – had forgotten Ali’s protector, the essential leather guard worn under the trunks to protect a man’s vitals. A substitute was produced and Ali tried it on, standing on a chair and looking at himself in the mirror. ‘No,’ he decided. ‘It don’t make me look pretty.’ While Ali’s army, including the convention of Rolls-Royce pimps and their foxes in his-and-hers floor-length minks, patiently waited, the abashed Bundini raced back for the ‘pretty’ protector.
The bloody demolishment of the sacrificial lamb Jerry Quarry was almost an anticlimax to the mad cosmetics in that dressing-room.
As a member of the wedding at the historic Ali–Frazier I in Madison Square Garden in ’71, I have three seems-like-yesterday memories you won’t find in the movie.
(1) I’m driving to the Garden from the New York Hilton with Ali and Angelo. In a little boy voice Ali asks, ‘Angelo, I’m not only bigger than Jimmy Ellis [his ex-sparring partner and interim champ during Ali’s exile], I’m faster, right?’ Angelo: ‘Sure, champ, Jimmy’s fast but you’re even faster.’ Ali: ‘And I punch harder?’ Angelo: ‘Absolutely, much harder.’ Ali: ‘So, if Jimmy held his own pretty good with Frazier until he got tagged, I should be able to do better than Jimmy, right?’ Angelo: ‘No doubt about it, champ. You’re gonna win it.’ Ali leaned his head back and didn’t say another word until we reached the Garden. My God, I wondered, was the lionhearted Ali questioning his ability to stand up to the undefeated, heavy-fisted Frazier? When we reached the fabled arena, I had my answer. As the limo door opened and the waiting fans swarmed in, Ali went through a night-and-day personality change. ‘I am the greatest!’ he shouted. ‘The Greatest!’ Whatever back-seat doubts he had had in the limo were gone now as he went on shouting, strutting in for his ‘High Noon’ shoot-out with his most dangerous opponent.
The next morning, after being ignominously floored in the 15th round and on his way to losing that bitter encounter, I went to see him in the hotel. A hideous haematoma had rearranged that pretty face into a grotesque gargoyle. It was the first loss of his career, and the talk in Toots Shor’s had been that Ali’s grandiose ego would be so bruised as to take him to the brink of suicide. ‘They better have a net outside the hotel,’ the anti-Alis were predicting.
Instead I found still another Ali, a philosophical Ali focused on his role as a leader of his people: ‘In every fight someone has to win and someone has to lose. Now I have to show my people we have our victories and we have our disappointments, and when we lose, how to fight back again.’
That resilience inspired my writing the book Loser and Still Champion from which, somewhat to my embarrassment, he asked me to read aloud in the dressing-room before he evened the score with Joe Frazier in Ali–Frazier II.
(2) In Zaire, where I shared a villa with Angelo at President (dictator) Mobutu’s estate, N’Sele, Ali presided like an African king. Always the master of pre-fight psychology, he had managed to cast big George Foreman as the personification of white colonialism. Of course, dumb George (a distant cousin to the smart George of today) played into Ali’s hands by unknowingly arriving with a menacing German police dog, which happened to be the symbol of Belgian colonial oppression of the native Zairians.
At night, along with all the Westerns he loved, he studied Foreman fight films, particularly Foreman’s two ten-round bouts with the Argentine light heavyweight Gregorio Peralta. ‘Now look at that!’ he’d cry out. ‘There’s that little old man, and he’s layin’ back on the ropes and big George thinks he’s killin’ ’im an’ allatime that little ol’ man is givin’ ’im nothin’ but shoulders ’n elbows an’ big George is gettin’ so tired!’ Ali’s fertile mind was spawning the strategy of the rope-a-dope that would sucker Foreman into thinking he was winning when all he was doing was wearing himself out and setting himself up for the knockout that would put Ali back on top of the world again.
Back at N’Sele at dawn, after the tropical downpour that melodramatically lashed the ring moments after the fight was over, Ali came at me outside his villa: ‘All right. I took care of big George an’ now it’s your turn!’ The once-again king of the ring and the 60-year-old fight writer engaged in an improbable few minutes of spurious fisticuffs. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t have the series of photos in my office to prove it.
(3) Then there was the scene at the Hotel Concord in the Adirondacks where Ali was training for his third Norton fight I was covering for Newsday, with my late wife, actress Geraldine Brooks, along as official photographer. Having seen a lot of Gerry’s television work, Ali asked for an impromptu acting lesson. She obliged and improvised a scene in which he’d be provoked into anger. His performance fell far short of Gerry’s professional standards, and after another unconvincing effort she decided on a strategem worthy of Elia Kazan. She whispered in his ear with utter conviction, ‘I hate to tell you this but everybody here except you seems to know that your wife is having an affair with one of your sparring partners.’ I watched Ali’s eyes. Rage. The jockey-sized Geraldine was outweighed by a hundred pounds, but she had a ton of heart. ‘Let’s do the scene again,’ she ordered, and the Method worked. Ali played angry and won Gerry’s hard-earned praise.
Then the mischievous Ali had another idea. ‘Let’s go to the middle of the lobby and you turn on me and in a loud voice call me nigger.’ Again Geraldine obliged. As they were walking along, Gerry the consummate actress suddenly stopped. ‘Damn you, Ali, I came up here to do a photo shoot on you and you backed out on me! You promised!’ Ali improvised, ‘Don’t bother me, lady. I never promised you nothin’, now leave me alone.’ Then Gerry dropped it on him. ‘You know what you are, you’re just a goddamn lying nigger!’
Ali’s bodyguards, his sparring partners, his entourage, the whole bristling Ali brigade started moving in with bad intentions, and I was thinking that this time Ali the mischief maker had gone too far. But at the last moment Ali announced that this whole mad scene was his idea – they were just practising acting together – and the tension dissolved in nervous laughter.
Whenever I followed Ali there was merriment, along with all the serious stuff. In Dublin, where we went for the Hal Conrad-promoted Blue Lewis fight, Ali was as much of a Pied Piper as he had been in Zaire. Wherever he went, thousands of delighted Dubliners materialised, and the once-reviled black separatist who loved to be loved and loved back so convincingly always took time off for them. He’d do his magic tricks. He’d spar with a half-scared, half-thrilled 12 year old. He was the toast of Dublin, and oh do they know how to toast in those delicious Dublin pubs!
There was that sad last hurrah in Vegas when the 38-year-old Ali came back to face his worthy successor Larry Holmes, who had been one of his $100-a-day sparring partners back in Zaire. In his hotel suite that day the ageing comeback kid was admiring himself in the mirror again. ‘Look at me! Look at me! Same waistline! Same weight! Same pretty face! I’m goin’ to surprise the world!’ And of course the loyal entourage, who had lived high on the hog all the way and couldn’t bear to see their meal ticket falling from under them, obediently fed back to the ex-champ what he wanted to hear. ‘You look beautiful, champ! You gonna eat ’em up, champ! You look baaad, Ali!’
But alas, we saw the ghost of Ali that night, if you can picture a battered ghost, and this time it was Larry Holmes’s turn to beg the referee to spare the defenceless Ali any more punishment.
As time went on, Ali lost another battle, to Parkinson’s (though ‘Fight Doctor’ Ferdie diagnosed it as dementia pugilistica). The rapid-fire delivery slowed to a halting whisper. The Nureyev of Fistiana whose winged feet bedazzled all the heavy hitters of the ’60s was reduced to a sleepwalker shuffle. Whether this was the Fighter’s Disease or its copycat Parkinson’s, the motor was gone. But not the mind. The hand that lit the torch for the ’96 Olympics in Atlanta might have trembled, but the mind behind that flame knew where he was and who he was. The prickly Black Muslim of 1965, rejected by most of white America as the threatening symbol of Black Power, had somehow morphed into the black Mother Teresa, the heavyweight saint of international peace and interracial, interreligious understanding. Adored from Jackson, Mississippi, to Beijing, China, Ali celebrates his 60th birthday with a hundred-million-dollar Hollywood movie, with all those great leaders of the world he once aspired to meet now envious of his popularity, as revered as the pope and an even more ecumenical icon.
From irrepressible teenage Olympic gold medallist to provocative Black Muslim champion to world-acclaimed three-time heavyweight champion to his current elevation to third-millennium sainthood – what a journey of lightning bolts and rainbows!
With all due respect to Michael Mann’s Ali, I saw something that could never be condensed into even a long Hollywood movie. I saw the life.
[2002]