Muhammad Ali

...By and large, he feels that Ali can do whatever he wants, because he is larger than life...

...T he book is not for the squeamish, however...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 39...

...She was paying a state visit to Washington to deliver one of her periodic lectures on international etiquette...

...On that occasion he emerged unscathed, smiling sheepishly...

...The Zairean foreign minister called Ali's manager to remind the fighter that cannibalism was not practiced in that fine country, and that "Mr...

...In form, it is a loosely strung-together series of interviews and impressions gathered over months of travel from the Tamil south to high Kashmir, a rambling Decameron of a book, insightful, entertaining, and only occasionally repetitious...

...Rajiv's elevator got stuck, and the program had to be postponed until the dauphin could be rescued...

...Penal coloAt first glance, Thomas Hauser's Muhammad Ali His Life and Times has all the earmarks of a very bad book...

...Do I go to the champ's room, or does he come to me...

...Rajiv, presumably the last of a spent political line, was more sinned against than sinning, a sacrifice to his mother's dynastic arrogance and the opportunism of a Congress party leadership that used the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty as both the key to winning over an ignorant electorate and a protective shield behind which they could continue to play corrupt politics as usual...

...he asks...

...MUHAMMAD ALI: HIS LIFE AND TIMES Thomas Hauser/Simon and Schuster/544 pp...

...with fourteen books under his belt, spent a couple of years tracking down just about everyone who played a significant part in Ali's life, and because just about all of these people had something interesting, touching, or hilarious to say about Ali...

...before the British raj was established, in 1858, anarchy and despotism had been pervasive...

...These include, among other things, Sikh and Muslim disaffection in the Punjab and Kashmir, anti-Brahmin bitterness in the South, the still unresolved plight of the "scheduled" Harijans (better known to American readers as Untouchables, and still treated as such by most other Indians), the ambiguous status of Indian women, and the pervasive corruption of the Congress party, which has dominated Indian political life in the forty-four years since independence...

...Her remark: "Okay, big-shot...

...This may be due as much to changes in the author as to changes in India...

...Muhammad, Muhammad...

...Ali, it turns out, could not swim, and rarely went anywhere near the water...

...some might even argue that it is not yet quite a nation...

...Between 30,000 and 250,000 political prisoners were arbitrarily seized and held incommunicado during Mrs...

...P overty aside, many of India's most glaring problems are of human devising...

...On page 252, we get to the first Kei Norton bout, when an out-of-shape AL went the distance while shielding a jaw that had been broken in half during the second round...

...They are self-sufficient...

...Now in his nineties, he continues to write and enlighten...

...And they serve the purpose of allowing violent people to build a society in their own image...

...On the lighter side is an anecdote by Ali's physician Ferdie ("The Fight Doctor") Pacheco regarding cornerman Bundini Brown, who unwisely showed up just before the Foreman fight in Zaire in the company of a white showgirl...

...Hauser reconciles none of the contradictions inherent in being a pacifist heavyweight champion of the world, exonerates Ali of any involvement in the scads of cruddy financial scams that have been engineered by shysters capitalizing on his name, and tiptoes past Ali's ludicrous visit with Saddam Hussein last fall...

...it has been four years since The Enigma of Arrival, and that was more of a fictionalized memoir than a full-blown novel...

...Aficionados of the manly art will notice that chumps like Gerry Cooney and Jean-Pierre Coop-man ("The Lion of Flanders") do not figure anywhere in the paragraph I have just written...

...M y favorite passage concerns Chuck Wepner, the stumblebum Heavyweight Champion of New Jersey who served as the inspiration for Sylvester Stallones moronic, subliminally racist Rocky films...

...At 59, and at the height of his fame if not of his powers, Naipaul is a very different person from the professionally obscure and emotionally insecure young writer who first set foot on the Subcontinent in 1962...

...If people wish to live in a brutal and lawless climate, why must the taxpayers bear the brunt...

...To put it succinctly, my view was, and still remains, that the liberal experiment of throwing restraints to the wind, of blaming society for the crimes committed by habitual criminals, of coddling perpetrators, resulted in an even bigger failure than Communism...

...A Million Mutinies Now, the solid wins out, albeit narrowly...

...It was her government that initially gave covert support to both Sikh extremists in the Punjab and Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and Southern India, the groups responsible for their respective assassinations...

...And most of them seem to feel that, despite the retired champion's terrible condition today, as he turns 50, Ali has had a nice sojourn on the planet...

...Don't you hear what I've been saying...

...Given—to use one of Naipaul's favorite phrases—the still "raw" nerves of many Indian intellectuals, only a few of the wisest among them have been able to accept the British role in the genesis of modern India...

...Then see how many white-collar criminals remain...

...Her failures and contradictions, and the sheer humbug of many of India's political pretensions are glaring...

...Other critics have faulted the book for its loose editing, but I do not agree...

...Bad people exist and, as Tald discovered, most of them end up behind bars...

...Ironically, both mother and son were the victims of Indira's particularly nasty brand of divide-and-conquer politics...

...Three decades after his maiden journey he seems more at home with his subjects and himself...

...He can also now afford to travel first class, and has easy entree with the political, business, and cultural elites of India's big cities...

...Even in normal times, legitimately elected state governments are routinely disbanded and subjected to "direct rule' from New Delhi at the slightest prime ministerial whim...

...With the exception of Frazier, who still seems genuinely to dislike Ali, his contemporaries tend to feel that it was an honor just to step into the ring with him—even when, like Ken Norton or Jimmy Young, they were probably cheated of victories by the judges...

...he assumed Liston would destroy the young Cassius Clay, and didn't want his Nation of Islam associated with a loser...

...Incompetence, corruption, and caste, religious, linguistic, and regional animosities continue to undercut a shared sense of nationhood...

...TO WHICH YET EVERY ONE OF US THREW OUT THE CHALLENGE: `CIVIS BRITANNICUS SUM' BECAUSE ALL THAT WAS GOOD AND LIVING WITHIN US WAS MADE, SHAPED, AND QUICKENED BY THE SAME BRITISH RULE 0 INDIA: A MILLION MUTINIES NOW V. S. Naipaul/Viking/521 pp...

...The book has a conventional chronological structure, with the author punctuating his own highly adulatory account of Ali's life with hundreds of comments from fighters, cornermen, promoters, managers, journalists, wives (four and counting), public nuisances like Howard Cosell, and Ali himself...

...As for Rajiv, having met him more than once, I cannot help but think of him as an amiably weak victim of others'—and mother's—ambitions...

...The fact that the book was written with Ali's cooperation provides further cause for trepidation: it is hard to imagine any written documents that are consistently less informative or truthful than books about jocks that have been written with the full cooperation of those same jocks...

...T here is little grounds for confidence in India's political future and yet, considering the pre-colonial history of the Subcontinent, it could be considerably worse...

...But there is no whining here, no sophistry or phony orchestration...

...The most striking thing about Hauser's book is the ceaseless outpouring of affection for the now apparently brain-damaged Ali by the great fighters he taunted, reviled, and humiliated outside the ring before taunting, reviling, and humiliating them inside it...

...11\l' othing to Declare is, in the end, the chronicle of a man born to wealth and privilege, by his own admission spoiled and dilettantish, who is brought to earth by his own profligacy and arrogance...

...engaging look at a number of interesting Indians...

...As Ved Mehta wrote in The New India: [India] had no tradition of parliamentary democracy, of general elections, of civil liberties...

...Unfortunately, so is Don King...

...There is also a wonderful story about the young Ali suckering Life magazine into doing a photo-essay about his rigorous daily underwater training regimen...

...If he is still capable of work on the level of A House for Mr...

...Part of the humiliation the Indian feels comes from the ambiguity of his response, his recognition that the Indian system that is being overthrown has come to the end of its possibilities, that its survival can lead only to more of what has gone before, that the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility than the India of a century before...

...Taken from the dedication page of his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, it could serve equally well as an acknowledgment of the source of many of modern India's finest qualities: TO THE MEMORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN INDIA WHICH CONFERRED SUBJECTHOOD ON US BUT WITHHELD CITIZENSHIP...

...Gandhi's 1975 State of Emergency...

...24.95 Joe Queenan 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 ost-independence India is a more ir tempting subject for critics than for admirers—never more so than in the wake of recent violence and resurgent Hindu chauvinism...

...Our first encounter took place in the early 1980s, during Indira's last term as prime minister...

...What's more, the most interesting, touching, or hilarious remarks are by and large made by the men who actually got into the ring with the greatest fighter since Joe Louis, and arguably the greatest boxer of all time...

...Before being knocked silly by Ali in a dreary 1975 fight, Wepner had given his wife a blue negligee with instructions to wear it the evening of the fight because "after the fight, you'll be sleeping with the heavyweight champion of the world...

...If India...

...And yet, all this notwithstanding, Muhammad Ali is actually worth reading...

...In An Area of Darkness and India- A Wounded Civilization, he emphasized the squalid...

...He no longer sees India as a "wounded" or decayed civilization, rather as a teeming, seething nation in the making, troubled and turbulent, but vital...

...Whether the speaker is trainer Angelo Dundee discussing the loose ropes in Zaire or a physician from UCLA examining whether Ali has Parkinson's syndrome or is merely punch-drunk, the book is fascinating from start to finish, one of the few books I have reviewed in the past couple of years that does not seem like a couple of magazine articles padded out to manuscript length...

...Certainly, he is less pessimistic than in his two earlier works...

...that it will have a larger idea of human association, and that out of this larger idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self-analysis, things that seem impossibly remote from the India of Russell . . . For all its faults, it was the relatively conscientious, humane British administration of India, and the exposure it gave educated Indians to concepts of Western jurisprudence, commerce, technology, representative government, and nationalism, that made an Indian nation possible...

...As for less violent scoundrels: "Take away every penny from them, I say...

...Even the tradition of "maintaining law and order" and the independent judiciary to insure it were not indigenous...

...The man's still living...

...One regrets that Naipaul, with his eye for telling detail and ear for revealing dialogue, has for the time being set aside novel writing...

...He ruminates over this human failing throughout: I was imprisoned for too short a period to really qualify as a con, but the few times I have given my views in public, the so-called experts took offence...

...V. S. Naipaul, cosmopolitan man of letters by vocation, 'llinidadian by birth, and Indian by descent, has written three books on his ancestral land, sometimes stressing its squalid, sometimes its solid sides...

...injust six months in 1976, two million people were sterilized, many if not most of them against their wishes...

...Is V. S. Naipaul optimistic about India...

...And best of all, whatever happens, he'll- always be Muhammad Ali...

...he's making money...

...Iaki proposes that penal colonies may be the best solutions for career bad guys...

...Naipaul senses this without quite coming to grips with it...

...P erhaps too much so, since almost all of the Indians we meet in Naipaul's company are, by the standards of their country, privileged...

...there's a roof over his head...

...nies are run by the inmates themselves...

...But I will always think of poor Rajiv as having ended his days still trapped in a political elevator of his mother's making...

...A Million Mutinies Now is not a serious analysis of India, it is an Aram Bakshian, J1: writes frequently on Indian history and literature His chronicle of the former princely state of Hyderaba4 'Shadow of Empirn" was published in the January 1989 issue of History Today...

...Another delightful passage records the outrage of the Mobutu government when Ali warned Foreman that when he got to Zaire he would be put in a pot and eaten...

...On page 164, Ali's 1967 victim Ernie Terrell charges that Ali pushed his eye down into the socket, breaking the bone and giving Terrell double vision for the rest of the figh...

...Hauser treats Ali's refusal to fight in Vietnam the way History has treated it: Ali told everyone to go to hell, and paid the price, forgoing the best years of his fighting life...

...The day she was to speak at the National Press Club, her heir-apparent in tow, the Press Building was in the midst of a massive renovation...

...Hauser lets Ail off easy on such subjects as marital infidelity (boys will be boys), and his embrace of the sinister Elijah Muhammad (who kept Malcolm X away from Ali's camp before the first Liston fight...

...Finally, on page 325 there is the spectacle of the ruined Joe Frazier, with both eyes firmly closed, hauling himself out of a hospital bed after the 1974 Thrilla in Manila to attend a "victory party" given by his own entourage, and even belting out a few numbers with the band...

...Biswas, Naipaul could do a lot with some of the picaresque characters he has met in his travels in India and, a few years earlier, in Dixie (see his uneven but intelligently appreciative A Tian in the South...

...Ali's remarks were damaging our image...

...Brown bailed out by persuading the woman to wear a headband and try to pass herself off as an Indian...

...This is an embarrassment to many modern Indians, who would like to credit all of their country's virtues to an ancient, mythic past and blame all of their current ills on the relatively short span of British rule...

...In his desultory way, using his characters as vehicles, Naipaul touches on a few of the million mini-mutinies he perceives as permeating India...

...For most of the years since the British granted Indian independence in 1947, the "world's largest democracy" has been ruled by three generations of a single dynasty, father Jawaharlal Nehru, daughter Indira Gandhi, and grandson Rajiv Gandhi...

...After taking twenty-three stitches in his face, which hadn't really looked all that good before the fight, Wepner got back to his hotel room to find his wife in bed, wearing the negligee...

...with the exception of the final fifty pages, when the book gets a bit misty-eyed, Hauser has done an excellent job...

...One is further dismayed by the knowledge that the book includes musings by such intellectual flyweights as Bryant Gumbel and James Michener, such roving weirdos as Ramsey Clark, and such pugilistically irrelevant observers as Hank Aaron, Jimmy Carter, Julian Bond, and Kris Kristofferson...

...In a telling description of his feelings on reading the 1858-59 Indian diary of Sir William Russell, the quintessential Victorian war correspondent, he confesses: It is hard for an Indian not to feel humiliated by Russell's book...

...While Taki's short course in criminology is incomplete at best, one is reminded once again that reality is the midnight mugger of rosy intentions...

...T he man who has come closest is I probably that magnificent if irascible Bengali autodidact and man of letters, Nirad C. Chaudhuri...

...Since 72 percent of India's 850 million people live in the countryside, and since 64 percent cannot even read, this is an introduction not so much to a nation as to a relatively small elite—one with few ties to an Indian majority which, if not silent, is at least cut off from the "modern" Indian economy, culture, and political life...

...The reader who can wade through the extraneous ramblings of the Wilfrid Sheeds and Sylvester Stallones, concentrating instead on the comments of George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Floyd Patterson, Ernie Shavers, and all the other headbangers who once, twice, or thrice climbed into the ring with this guy, is in for a real treat...

...This is a Champions-Only Paragraph...

...India is not yet quite a democratic nation...

...On page 275 comes the description of the awesome punishment Ali subjected himself to in his 1974 victory over then-champion George Foreman, when he allowed the hardest puncher of the past quarter-century to wear himself out pummeling the Great One's body...

...It is worth reading because the indefatigable Hauser, a New York lawyer Joe Queenan writes for Barron's and other publications...

...the man's still eating...

...They disliked my opinions, even disparaged them...

...Hauser does not report how many stitches she took...

...When asked about Ali, Leon Spinks, no stranger to speech difficulties and aberrant behavior himself, says: "What for should I feel sorry for Ali...

...After thirty years of fights, press conferences, and extravagant public relations stunts by Ali himself, not to mention the scores of books, films, television programs, plays, and documentaries dealing with one of the most famous and least timid men on Earth, the reader may feel that he has a legitimate quarrel with Hauser's assertion that "the true Ali is largely unknown...

...Chaudhuri deserves the last word on the subject...

...While it barely scratches the surface of its subject, that is more than can be said of many a weightier, more pretentious volume...

...On the basis of insight as well as seniority, Mr...

...As Pacheco remembers it, "This was supposed to be an all-black show: a black promoter, two black champions, a black country, the height of black consciousness," so Brown's gaffe was enormous...

...24.95 Aram Bakshian, Jr...

...In India...

...her considerable economic, social, and intellectual achievements, and the enduring richness of India's many uneasily co-existing cultures are less obvious at first glance...