The Muhammad Ali Reader / More Than a Champion
Early, Gerald & Reemtsma, Jan Philipp
of the Statue of Liberty; and the Fried-mans in writings and professional work of more than half a century. Even their title, a bald statement of fact, carries with it the whiff of Gershwin. And it...
...After a bout in Germany and three more in the U.S., Ali would indeed stay in his country to confront the situation while his 1967 conviction for draft evasion was appealed up to the Supreme Court and back down...
...Then I get the look, the smile, that has closed ten thousand interviews...
...Anyone who has seen When We Were Kings, the 1997 documentary on that fight, can sense the iconic stature Ali had taken on by that time...
...I am The Greatest !"'" Now that Ali's boxing-induced Parkinsonism has reduced him to performing sleight-of-hand tricks to get a rise out of his audience—and he reportedly does so with a telling, nearEasy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood Peter Biskind Simon & Schuster 5o8 pages $25 REVIEWED BY James Bowman p eter Biskind is a scrappy reporter, in every sense of the word "scrappy...
...In the racially charged moment when he claimed to have chucked his gold medal into the Ohio River, he became the face of militant black youth...
...By 1964, when he defeated Sonny Liston to win the heavyweight crown, Clay was becoming Muhammad Ali, and being scorned in the press for his religious conversion to Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam...
...He himself points out at the outset that "In a town where credit grabbing is an art form, to say that memory is self-serving is to say that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west...
...Some people may enjoy reading such ego-projec-tions, just as they enjoy other Hollywood fantasies...
...But not all the deficiencies of his approach are his fault...
...By the time he recaptured the heavyweight championship in 1974 he was the epitome of the survivor's perseverance and a worldwide symbol of black pride...
...The industrial by-products of Tinseltown's dream factory are the JAMES BOWMAN is the movie critic of TAS and the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement (London...
...No one seems to think this was tragic...
...qlt+ giant slag heaps of denial Biskind surveys here...
...As Miller rises to leave, Ali says, "I'll tell you a secret...I'm gonna make acomeback...
...I cannot be defeated...
...Perhaps it is sheer nostalgia, but we recall our youth as a period when there was far less concern for personal safety and safety of property...
...As Joyce Carol Oates points out, "the New York Times, among other censorious white publications, would not honor" his decision to take a Muslim name through the 1960's...
...the pieces here differ on the exact wording...
...Or something like that...
...It does not make for a history in the normal sense of the word...
...Defenses of Ali's right to practice his religion figure heavily in pieces by Jackie Robinson, Gordon Parks, and—of all people — a gentlemanly Floyd Patterson, whom Ali mercilessly taunted for his adherence to Roman Catholicism before knocking him out in Las Vegas in 1965...
...We learn, for example, that Bertrand Russell "surprised Ali with a transatlantic call to congratulate him on the position he had taken on Vietnam...
...Toby Rafelson, former wife of the director Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, The King ofMarvin Gardens), is quoted as saying, "In Hollywood, if you're married to a powerful guy, you don't ask them if they're cheating on you because they are, and if The Folks Who Made Hollywood Dark and Dirty 78 September 1998 The American Spectator...
...He does just that in a 16o-page essay crammed with erudition, from classical allusions to a comment on the later work of Ernst Bloch...
...Granted, he had by now won the heavyweight championship, lost it, and won it again—and would lose and regain it once more in his career—and these are no mean accomplishments...
...He can't help calling the young man's doggerel "poetry," and quoting it at length...
...Few monarchs of ancient times could have lived as well as we have....The situation is less clear-cut in the social realm...
...n the prologue to his much shorter and altogether weirder book More Than a Champion, German intellectual Jan Philipp Reemtsma makes a game attempt to cut through the fog of "meaning" that surrounds Ali...
...But at least Reemtsma knows what he's talking about, and he offers a point or two for consideration in the matter of Ali as genius/martyr or quintessential jester...
...Indeed, among the most notable features of these pieces is how seldom they focus on Ali's one inarguable claim to greatness: his astonishing skill and cunning in the ring...
...While he preferred slipping punches early in a fight (or, later in his career, covering up and taking them round after round in his patented "Ropea-Dope" defense), his evasiveness was only a prelude to the terrible firepower he brought to bear on exhausted opponents in the later rounds...
...He himself seems to me to have something of the Hollywood sensibility in that he is able to report on quite despicable behavior as if he were assuming an attitude of moral censure toward it at the same time that he is getting rather a thrill from its "outrageousness...
...Having arrived unbidden after recognizing the Champ's camper in the driveway, Miller is treated to autographs, a family dinner, and a screening session of some of the great fights with a seemingly somnolent Ali...
...Besides, one ought occasionally to read a book that reminds one of the reasons for such a prejudice, and Biskind's certainly does that...
...He is in no position to explain just how much he knew about whom he was duping, and when he knew it...
...But he had not, as Norman Mailer would have it in his article, invented a "psychology of the body" (whatever that might be), or become, despite Hunter S. Thompson's claims, "a brown Jay Gatsby...
...And when he lit the torch at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the poignancy of his physical debility was not lost on his fellow baby-boomers, for whom he perhaps represented their own impending fade-out...
...Still, in the end we do get a few realistic portraits of the man as a man, and of the progressive Parkinsonism he now suffers from as a result of the punishment he took on the ropes...
...Or, sometimes, "y has no memory of this event...
...He stops dancing and points a magician's finger at me...
...up—in some ways enormously better, in other ways, worse...
...He was 'more than a champion' because he was the best and most interesting boxer there had ever been until then...
...The winter before, Ali had declared that his status as a minister for the Nation of Islam made him exempt from military service, asserting to the press, "I don't have no quarrel with those Vietcongs...
...Regardless of the right or wrong back there, that is where I was born...
...Thanks to the horrible toll his greatness took, Ali isn't talking...
...Add in his chapter-long analysis of all the Rocky films in terms of Ali's career trajectory, and you wind up with a very odd artifact indeed...
...And wise enough to hint, however softly, that it may not be enough...
...It is 1962 and Muhammad Ali is still Cassius Clay, an Olympic gold-medalist with striking good looks and a strikingly big mouth, and even Liebling falls under the fighter's spell to some degree...
...I heard this white The American Spectator • September 1998 77 fellow say, "I am the World's Greatest Wrestler...
...But for those with sterner intellectual expectations or pre-postmodern sensibilities, patience will not long survive immersion into Biskind's literary hot tub, which is full of deeply unattractive beautiful people...
...his sources are also to blame...
...Hollywood is a place where the borderline between reality and fantasy has been permanently blurred, a place where people (especially rich and powerful people) are accustomed to remodeling reality to their liking...
...According to Parks, the young star ended up drafting him as a sort of image Feat of Clay: The Making of the Ali Myth 76 September 199 8 • The American Spectator consultant, and Parks was delighted when Ali announced at a London press conference, "I thank my draft board for letting me come here to defend the title...
...Oki formed his militancy into martyrdom or treason...
...But that impression may just be my prejudice against anyone prepared to take the posturing ninnies who run (or used to run) most of the film industry in the least seriously...
...Depending on the interpreter, his three-year exile from boxing for refusing to fight for his country in Vietnam transJOHN LILLY is co-owner of Libreria Vertice, a bookstore in Seville, Spain...
...That is where I'm going to return...
...Although its argument may be hard to follow, it is valuable as a compendium of revealing quotations—revealing not only of the moral squalor that prevails throughout the entertainment industry but also of the reasons therein why that industry's products are generally so bad...
...And it should remind us that the term "the dismal science" is a misnomer, in that it is precisely the market's champions who are at pains to emphasize man's capabilities and not his limitations...
...And, one might add, that so many found themselves duped into believing that Ali meant so much more than he did...
...Again and again Biskind will tell a story: x fires or curses at or beats up or pulls a gun on or bankrupts or sodomizes y. And then will follow this little disclaimer: "x has no memory of this event...
...It's not nostalgia, of course...
...For structure, Reemtsma relies on three-round chunks of play-by-play from Ali-Frazier III (a.k.a...
...At times this may literally be true, since all the major figures in this history seem to have been drugged up to the frontal lobe most of the time...
...In "My Dinner with Ali," originally published in 1989, Davis Miller describes a dreamlike evening at Ali's mother's house in Louisville...
...As they recount the extraordinary course of two lives spent extending the realm of human freedom, they are brilliant enough to know which direction we must ever choose for material progress...
...A.J...
...Liebling's article "Poet and Pedagogue," reprinted here, is a rare exception: a straightforward account of the man as a boxer, preparing for a bout at the start of his professional career...
...April Fools," he says...
...How can this be, if most of Ali's professional fights ended in knockouts or TKO's...
...A glance at the table of contents of The Muhammad Ali Reader reveals a list of over two dozen authors—including such virtuoso mythmakers as Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and Murray Kempton — most of whom dwell in one way or another on Ali as celebrity and as symbol...
...It is an optimism that resonates throughout our political sector, what distinguishes Ronald Reagan's "morning in America" from Jimmy Carter's "malaise" or Pat Buchanan's "trench...
...Moreover, defect of memory is a shield that enables people to go to work in the morning, protecting them from the unspeakable behavior that is taken for granted there...
...Gordon Parks's profile (very prematurely entitled "The Redemption of the Champion"—the next year Ali would be stripped of his title and banned from his sport) shows Ali at his most vulnerable, baffled by the firestorm of press criticism and a nearly universal urge to attach a larger meaning to his every move...
...Ali graciously reciprocated with an invitation for Russell to join him at ringside in London for the second Henry Cooper fight...
...But even as he embarks on his project with such a healthy attitude, Reemtsma acknowledges that, where boxing is concerned, "As is our wont, we go all intellectual and a bit sly...
...Having made the excellent suggestion that, "Progress, if it exists, leads away from a punch in the face," Reemtsma goes on to elaborate his thesis: "Only because Muhammad Ali was a great boxer was he some other things, too...
...compulsive frequency—he cannot develop this theme at any length...
...Among the writers assembled in The Muhammad Ali Reader, the book's editor Gerald Early offers the aptest analysis of Ali's status as political symbol in those days : "Ali cannot be taken seriously as a martyr because: first, other athletes...lost several years of their athletic prime, serving in the Armed Forces during World War I, World War II, or the Korean War...
...In his introduction, Early correctly points out that, "What is amazing is that Ali has managed to fascinate so many first-rate writers for so long...
...Toward the end, this understanding of man's potential leads them to the closest they come to introspection...
...Having cleared up his legal problems and returned to the ring in 197o, Ali completed his redemption with his 1974 title victory over George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire...
...The world at the end of our life is very different from the world in which we grew The Muhammad Ali Reader Edited by Gerald Early Ecco Press /30o pages $26 More Than a Champion: The Style of Muhammad Ali Jan Philipp Reemtsma Knopf / 172 pages /$23 REVIEWED BY John Lilly W ith a gold-medal victory for the United States at the 1960 Rome Olympics, Muhammad Ali assumed the protean symbolic aura that would stick with him for the rest of his life...
...It is this sort of insight—a momentary window on Ali's character and its relation to boxing and to other people, rather than the all-too-common evaluations of Ali as a political or cultural phenomenon—that leaves a lasting memory for the reader, and probably makes for a better assessment of the man...
...Materially, the wonders of science and enterprise have greatly enriched the world—though some products of science, like atomic energy, have been a mixed blessing...
...The Thrilla in Manila"), building his other chapters around these matter-of-fact accounts of Ali's third great fight...
...But he also offers a fair analysis of Clay's "skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water," even if in the process he makes the oft-repeated and mistaken claim that the boxer lacked power and "seemed to make only glancing contact...
...For those who are not already close students of the Hollywood power elite in the 1970's, the story told in his book will be hard to follow, and even for those who are it will come across rather like a collection of anecdotes on index-cards...
...Ali signed off on the call with an old standby phrase: 'You're not as dumb as you look.'" The anecdote befuddles like a good parable: which of these two great men emerges as the greater fool, and in what sense ? In More Than a Champion, Ali recalls the man from whom he learned so well the occult arts of mass-market japery: "`I began predicting the outcome of my fights,' Clay once explained, `after watching Gorgeous George, the great wrestler...
...The Greatest gives him a show of shadow-boxing—a performance so quick and graceful from what moments before was a doddering, mumbling victim of Parkinsonism, that in the end Davis finds himself convinced: "I believe," I hear myself say...
Vol. 31 • September 1998 • No. 9
