Sooo Fast! Sooo Pretty!
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday March 6, 1999
KING OF THE WORLD
Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
By David Remnick
Random House, 326pp, $35
ISBN 0 375 5965 0
'M A LITTLE SPECIAL
A Muhammad Ali Reader
Edited by Gerald Early
Yellow Jersey Press, 299pp, $35
ISBN 0 224 05154 7
NOT many people know that Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, the handsomest, the fastest, the funniest, a man who whupped all comers to the ring, and who would later become a smooth-talking, smooth-dressing seducer of women, the Don Juan of heavyweight boxing, keeled over when he first kissed a girl. He passed out.
In David Remnick's story of Ali's early years in the ring, culminating in the taking of the heavyweight crown from Sonny Liston, we are introduced to a young man of uncommon determination and talent, to be sure - but also uncommon sweetness.
"He would flirt," writes Remnick, "he would give one girl or another his Golden Gloves pin and talk about how they would get married and have children, but when it came to more elemental moments, he was lost."
The young Cassius Clay dated his first girlfriend, Areatha Swint, for three weeks before asking for a kiss. "He didn't know how," she tells. "So I had to teach him. When I did, he fainted. Really, he just did."
That story has kept me smiling for several weeks now. But it's just one among dozens of funny, appalling and inspiring anecdotes scattered throughout this book.
It would be hard to go wrong, you might think, given the subject: Ali is undergoing a resurgence in the popular imagination - ever since his celebrated appearance at the opening of the Olympics in Atlanta and the release two years ago of the documentary When We Were Kings (about the Ali- Foreman fight in Zaire).
Still, Remnick looks like an ideal man for the job. He is the new editor of The New Yorker. He was the Washington Post 's Russian correspondent during the final years of communism, out of which came Lenin's Tomb, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book which remains terrific reading today. He has written many memorable articles for The New Yorker in recent years, including profiles of Don DeLillo, Ivan Sharansky and Benjamin Netanyahu.
This book is less a biography than a freewheeling narrative hinging on the two encounters between Liston and Clay in February 1964 and May 1965. It begins with a touching, lightly elegiac prologue, in which Remnick describes a recent visit he made to Ali's farmhouse. The pair sat watching videos of Ali's great early fights.
"See that? See me?" cooed the retired boxer, by now close to speechless and slowed by Parkinson's disease. "It's sweet, isn't it?" Or "All night! All night! Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!" And "You watchin' this? Sooo fast! Sooo pretty!"
At the end of the book, Remnick returns to that afternoon, by which time Ali has become reflective. He talks about his Muslim faith, about the need to do good deeds, about getting into Paradise. Then he stops talking entirely. Remnick thinks he has fallen asleep, when all of a sudden he opens his eyes and smiles: "Got you!"
All this is sensitively done, and in just the right tone. In the intervening pages, Remnick is unsentimental and admirably cool-eyed. Most of the narrative is devoted to providing context - both historical and contemporary - for those two heavyweight title bouts.
A worthwhile pursuit: from our perspective, Ali can seem so charismatic, so physically and mentally boundless, that he would seem to transcend mere historical details. In fact, the strange and awful stories of preceding champions such as Patterson and Liston, Joe Louis and Jack Johnson, as well as the complex story of race relations up to and around Ali's time, all add to the sense of Ali as a miraculous, if not quite so causeless, phenomenon.
Sonny Liston's baleful tale provides the perfect counterpoint to the rise of Cassius Clay. While the clean-living Clay was born into the black middle class ("black southern middle class," Toni Morrison is quick to point out, "which is not white middle class at all") all his other opponents, including Liston, were born poor.
"One of the less entertaining components of the Ali act," writes Remnick, "was the way he tried to `outblack' someone like [Joe] Frazier, call him an Uncle Tom, an `honorary white', when in fact Frazier had grown up dirt poor in South Carolina."
Clay was backed from his first days as a professional by the Louisville Sponsoring Group, a wealthy cartel of local businessmen, mainly distillers. This meant he was able to steer clear of the underworld skulduggery which, up until that time, was a sine qua non of boxing success. Liston, for instance, was controlled by the Mafia; Remnick describes how he once faked a friendly punch at Moe Dalitz, "one of the most powerful mob figures in Las Vegas and late of the bootlegging business".
"If you hit me, nigger, you'd better kill me, because if you don't, I'll make one telephone call and you'll be dead in 24 hours." Thanks.
Of course, Clay and Liston were about equally popular in the press at the time of their first bout (which no-one, incidentally, thought Clay could possibly win; Liston had knocked Floyd Patterson out twice, in near-record time).
If the press sneered at Liston because of his Bad Negro image (waking up with Liston as champion, wrote Jim Murray in the Los Angeles Times, was "like finding a live bat on a string under your Christmas tree"), they howled Clay down for being uppity: he talked too much; he boxed like a girl; he kept announcing how pretty he was.
Remnick, who started his own career as a sportswriter, devotes a great deal of space to the politics and psychology of the boxing press of the day. This provides many illuminating moments. Clay's style was not only compelling in itself, and therefore good copy: he came to represent a new order, a new consciousness, in terms of race and the generation emerging in the '60s.
The leading sportswriter of the day, Jimmy Cannon, described him as "all pretense and gas . . . No honesty. He's the fifth Beatle." Even Norman Mailer, later a fervent convert, cautioned that if Clay won the championship, it would mean that every loudmouth on a street corner could swagger and be believed.
Clay was hitting exposed nerves all over the place.
His conversion to Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam is addressed at length, and feeds into some of the most interesting sections of the book. By advocating self-determination and spurning integration, the Nation and its new celebrity convert found themselves in direct opposition to Martin Luther King's integrationist dream.
At one point, King was moved to say: "I think Cassius should spend more time proving his boxing skill and do less talking." But more privately, FBI recordings attest, the two respected each other.
The newly named Muhammad Ali had an equally fraught relationship with Malcolm X. For a while, X was Ali's close friend and confidant. But when Elijah Muhammad perceived the preacher as a threat to his own authority, he banished him, Lear-like, in a cruel power play.
Ali was forced to choose. His loyalty remained with the Nation and Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm X was murdered before Ali had a chance - or was willing - to make a rapprochement, something he would later regret.
Further insight into Ali's career, and into his huge, dizzying personality, is afforded by a new book called I'm a Little Special: A Muhammad Ali Reader. It's a volume that combines several Ali interviews with pieces from the '60s through to the '90s by writers such as Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Robert Lipsyte, LeRoi Jones, Hunter S. Thompson, Joyce Carol Oates and Gay Talese.
Can't argue with a line-up like that. And you can't argue with the back-cover blurb either, attributed to one Muhammad Ali: "The Muhammad Ali Reader is great. I advise all to read it."
But perhaps the final word should go to Morrison, if only because, unlike almost all those (male) writers, she is not in thrall to boxing and its brutal poetry. "Ali was a beautiful warrior," Remnick quotes her as saying, "and he was reflecting a new posture for a black man. I don't like boxing, but he was a thing apart. His grace was almost appalling."
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald