MUHAMMAD ALI
A Tribute to the Greatest
Thomas Hauser
Pegasus
RUNNING WITH THE CHAMP
My Forty-Year Friendship With Muhammad Ali
Tim Shanahan
Simon & Schuster
MUHAMMAD ALI
The Tribute: 1942-2016
Sports Illustrated
THE FIGHT
Norman Mailer
Random House
THE SOUL OF A BUTTERFLY
Reflections on Life's Journey
Muhammad Ali (with Hana Yasmeen Ali)
Simon and Schuster
THE MUHAMMAD ALI READER
Edited by Gerald Early
Ecco
He said it best, of course: He was "the astronaut of boxing" who "handcuffed lightning," threw "thunder in jail"; the dazzling warrior "with iron fists and a beautiful tan"; "the greatest fighter that ever will be" who could "run through a hurricane" and not get wet.
But Muhammad Ali shook the world with more than his electrifying speed and power in the ring. He also shook the world with the power of his convictions: his determination to stand up to the rules of the Jim Crow South, and to assert his freedom to invent himself - "I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want."
He stood with the Martin Luther King Jr for freedom and social justice. And he stood up against the Vietnam War, refusing to be drafted in 1967 on religious grounds as a conscientious objector - a decision that would cost him his boxing title, three-and-a-half years of his career at the peak of his powers, tens of millions of dollars in prize money and endorsements, and for many years, his popularity.
Ali's willingness to speak truth to power outside the ring and his embodiment of many of the political and cultural changes that rocked America in the 1960s are also reasons so many fans spent the weeks after his death watching old videos and reading books about him, of which there are a multiplying number.
Over the years, Ali has also inspired an uncommon amount of stellar writing, from Norman Mailer's classic account of the boxer's stunning victory over George Foreman in Zaire in 1974; to David Remnick's King of the World, a powerful account of Ali's emergence as a transformative figure in American politics and culture. There are also a plethora of essays about Ali by such gifted writers as Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson and Roger Kahn, many of which can be found in a terrific anthology, The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998).
The newest Ali books, recently rushed into print, hardly rise to the top of the stack. Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest is a hodgepodge of Thomas Hauser's many essays - lacklustre in comparison with the author's valuable 1991 oral history, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.
Tim Shanahan's Running With the Champ, an old friend's reminiscences, has its share of touching moments, but proves less revealing than the 2004 book (The Soul of a Butterfly) written by Ali with his daughter Hana Yasmeen Ali - an elliptical, collage-like memoir that offered a philosophical look back at his life. Both these books give glimpses of Ali's dignified, decades-long struggle with Parkinson's, the disease that cruelly robbed him of the dazzling physical and verbal agility of his youth.
As for Sports Illustrated's Muhammad Ali, 1942-2016, it's a pretty souvenir of Ali's life in the ring, with excerpts from that magazine's voluminous archives and some of the most dramatic sports photos ever taken. They are photos that capture the boxer popping and smoking and throwing lightning bolts in the ring - testaments to what the fighter Jose Torres called "his prodigious magic." The archetypal photo of a victorious Ali, standing over the fallen body of Sonny Liston. A violent action shot of him catching George Foreman with a hard right in the Rumble in the Jungle. And one of him locked in a grim face-off with an exhausted Frazier in the "Thrilla in Manila." There are also images of a skinny, 12-year-old Cassius Clay learning to box, and a solemn Ali, surrounded by reporters, explaining his opposition to the Vietnam War.
These new books will help younger readers understand just what a long strange trip Ali's life has been, and how much social and cultural landscape he traversed.
When Cassius Clay was growing up in Louisville, the town was segregated, and even when he returned home from the 1960 Olympics with a gold medal around his neck, he was turned away from a luncheonette when he walked in and ordered a glass of juice. He would return to the Olympics three-and-a-half decades later in Atlanta in 1996 as its final torchbearer. By then, he'd become one of the most revered men in the world - "a universal soldier for our common humanity," in the words of Bill Clinton, who like many in the audience that day, wept watching Ali light the caldron, his hand trembling violently from Parkinson's disease.
This month, Louisville - where a young Cassius Clay heard calls of "nigger go home" if he ventured beyond his neighborhood - turned out to pay tribute to Ali, as his funeral motorcade made its way through the city. Mourners showered his car with flowers and rose petals; and all along the route, The Louisville Courier-Journal reported, lawns had been mowed and driveways freshly swept - out of respect for the Greatest on his final journey.
© 2016 New york Times News Service
