LORD OF THE RING
MURRAY, BRIAN
LORD OF THE RING David Remnick's Muhammad Ali By Brian Murray It's October 30, 1974 and the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali is about to start. Set in Kinshasa, Zaire, the bout has...
...Now, it was Ali who looked unbeatable...
...In one recent public appearance, Patterson revealed that he couldn't quite remember who he'd beaten to win his first heavyweight title...
...But until he met Sonny Liston in Miami in 1964, Ali hadn't been truly tested...
...he proved too, in his epic battles against Foreman, Ken Norton, and Joe Frazier, that he could stand up to the hardest hitters in the game...
...At the end Foreman was dizzy, shot, wide open to Ali's precise jabs and the speedy combination of hard punches that left him senseless on the mat...
...How good was he...
...Young's oddly affecting Sonny Liston: The Champ Nobody Wanted, published in 1963...
...Liston died broke and under suspicious circumstances in 1970—not long after embarking on yet another hopeless trek up the comeback trail...
...he welcomes—and leads— the crowd's cheers...
...It's an old boxing trick: The champ dawdles in his dressing room so that his challenger, alone in the ring, can consider more fully the hard flogging he's about to receive...
...As an adolescent Ali was funny, shy, polite and—like the current W.B.C...
...Ali, the new heavyweight champion, leapt exuberantly around the ring, jeering the many pressmen at ringside who had forecast Liston's quick and easy win...
...Between 1965 and 1967—when he was banned from boxing for refusing the draft—Ali defeated all challengers, including Floyd Patterson, the former two-time champ who had publicly questioned the wisdom of Ali's religious conversion, and who—in a letter to Sports Illustrated—insisted that "the image of a Black Muslim as the world heavyweight champion disgraces the sport and the nation...
...Liston "demanded respect, the solemnity due a king...
...But Ali mocked and beat him mercilessly for twelve rounds until the bout was stopped and Patterson, battered and barely conscious, was carted by his seconds from the ring...
...He was bigger, perhaps even stronger, than ever before...
...Foreman, Frazier, Norton, Jerry Quarry, Earnie Shavers, Leon Spinks: Ali beat them all...
...Under Ali's direction, Liston found himself playing Anthony Quinn's part, the gruff, aloof, seemingly invincible Strongman...
...But Ali had no interest in other sports...
...Ali read the Bible, kept out of trouble, and was so conscious of his nutrition that, as Remnick relates, he not only swore off soda pop, but "carried around a bottle of water with garlic in it—a solution he said, that would keep his blood pressure down and his health perfect...
...For his part, Ali, writes Remnick, found "his right was so sore" from pounding Patterson that "he accepted congratulations only with his left...
...in 1995, he was named New York's athletic commissioner...
...In many respects Ali was still very much a kid when, at twenty-two, he battled Liston for the first time...
...He turned pro the same year, and fought frequently, almost monthly, building a long list of decisive wins...
...But Foreman's plan backfires...
...In 1994, at forty-five, Foreman would regain his title with a knock-out of Michael Moorer...
...More recently, however, Patterson has shown signs of the sort of mental decline that now marks the lives of other veteran fighters, including Jerry Quarry and Wilfred Benitez...
...his speech is slow...
...Sometimes, he admitted, he had trouble remembering names—including his wife's...
...A year later, Ali beat Liston again, even more breezily, knocking him to the canvas within minutes of the opening bell...
...Ali utterly denied him this, calling him "chump" instead of "champ...
...Now, at fight-time, Foreman tries a psychological ploy of his own...
...Just before fighting Ali, Liston had twice defended his title by twice bludgeoning Floyd Patterson to the canvas in the opening round...
...But by its close Ali was in complete control...
...Later Ali disclosed that he had flummoxed Foreman with a "Rope-a-Dope" strategy that, he knew, would lure Foreman into wasting his energy in the early rounds...
...Set in Kinshasa, Zaire, the bout has been hyped for months, dubbed "The Rumble in the Jungle" by its promoter, Don King...
...His method was first to scare the wits out of his challengers and then flatten them...
...He paid the price...
...Unlike Lis-ton, Foreman, Tyson, and countless others, Clay didn't fit the mold of the troubled prizefighter whose decision to lace up the gloves saved him from years in the penitentiary...
...Ali bobbed and weaved incessantly, easily slipping Liston's best shots...
...This fight," Ali promises, "will be the greatest upset of which anyone has ever heard...
...In 1977, Earnie Shavers had Ali hurt and reeling against the ropes, but, Pacheco recalls, "held back because he thought Ali was kidding...
...You got to get hit in that game...
...Showing you, too...
...More, he had begun to mug outrageously for the press rather in the manner of such pro-wrestling stars as the flamboyant Gorgeous George, a "Liberace in tights," as Remnick observes—and, reveal-ingly, another of Clay's early heroes...
...Ever since the first Patterson fight," writes Remnick, Liston "had allowed himself to believe that he could climb in the ring and take off his robe, and the other man would drop for the ten-count...
...Rocky Marciano, six...
...his words are slurred sometimes...
...Ali's continuing popularity owes much to his humor and generos-ity—to the easy, patient way he mixed with the public and his friends...
...People always thought he was crazy...
...Throughout the 1970s, Ali also "retired," several times...
...But his loss to Ali left him embarrassed and depressed, and in 1977 he left boxing for ten years, uncertain of the skills that had made him the sport's most intimidating figure...
...And by the time Foreman finally pushes through the ropes, it's clear that few in the packed stadium are on his side...
...But for months Ali has been publicly mocking Foreman, questioning his intelligence, his durability, his might, dismissing him as an "amateur" and a "mummy" who gained Brian Murray teaches writing at Loyola College in Baltimore...
...Jack Dempsey made only five title defenses...
...Remnick's account of Ali's early career is fairly complete but—for serious boxing fans, at least—not new...
...Certainly, with King of the World, Rem-nick has chosen his subject well...
...his title by beating "bums...
...As Remnick demonstrates, the young Cassius Clay was from the start an unusually disciplined athlete who decided to become a boxing champion while still a schoolboy in Louisville...
...Remnick reveals Ali's distinguishing traits—his drive, his moodiness, his narcissism—as well as the factors that helped shape his character and public persona...
...he's "intricate," as Dundee once put it, as both a fighter and a man...
...Long scorned in the press, Liston, writes Remnick, "resented being thought of as mobster's meat, a killer in trunks, boots, and gloves...
...He'd spent much of the match leaning far back against the ropes, taunting Foreman, absorbing a constant shelling of blows...
...Liston was imposingly different— a sullen, enigmatic man whose tough-guy front masked a range of wounds and insecurities...
...He continued to notch some impressive victories...
...The smaller, lighter Patterson—long dogged by self-doubts—was outclassed from the start...
...They're all lustily backing the handsome and amusing underdog—a man who has long billed himself as "The World's Most Colorful Fighter...
...As he waits, he shadowboxes...
...Ali's neurological and fight-related deterioration is far better known...
...God's showing me that I'm just a man like everyone else...
...Rem-nick's portraits of many of the supporting figures in the Ali drama are no less intriguing...
...He was the Fool, disrupting press events with his cartoonish antics and loud mockeries of Liston's prison record and scant education...
...In his new book King of the World, David Remnick (the recently appointed editor of the New Yorker) notes that Ali "built his boxing style on the principle that a big man could borrow the tactics of a smaller man"—a man like Sugar Ray Robinson, a middleweight and one of Ali's boyhood heroes...
...At its start the two fighters slugged it out, toe-to-toe...
...An ex-con with an excellent punch and a menacing glare, Liston was, in effect, a taller Mike Tyson...
...He was graceful, resilient, and shrewd...
...In 1981, against Larry Holmes's left jab—probably the best in heavyweight history—Ali mustered no defense...
...Eat your words," Ali shouted...
...his previous books—especial-ly Lenin's Tomb, published in 1994— show a marked talent for dialogue, narration, and characterization...
...he's a massive, mean, undefeated slugger who has knocked out thirty-seven opponents in forty fights...
...But, like Foreman, he now found himself struggling against fighters he would have outfoxed and outboxed just a few years before...
...George," he kept saying, "that all you got...
...Ali, Murray suggested, "was right, he was too pretty to fight," and could well have excelled as "a point guard," or—as Vince Lombardi also suggested—"a tight end...
...Arrogant and humble, gracious and rude, Ali remains an unfailingly fascinating character...
...Some boxing analysts have argued that this approach—while aesthetically in-triguing—was all wrong for a man of Ali's size, forcing him to rely too often and for too long on footwork and speed...
...Ali, meanwhile, assumed Richard Basehart's role...
...Still, Ali improved steadily as a puncher...
...Ali, Murray noted, "even though he may have been the best of all time, was miscast as a fighter...
...Liston, as Remnick reveals, came to a particularly bleak end...
...The fight had provoked wide publicity, for Ali had recently converted to Islam and aligned himself with the Black Muslim movement and its message of racial separation...
...But, as Ali himself told Remnick, he has no regrets about his chosen profession...
...In an era unusually rich in heavyweight talent, Ali never dodged a foe...
...Of course, Foreman-Ali proved to be one of the most celebrated bouts in modern boxing history—the subject of Norman Mailer's The Fight, first published in 1975, and Leon Gast's fine 1996 film documentary, When We Were Kings...
...By the seventh round, Lis-ton—humbled and worn—ended the fight by quitting on his stool...
...Ali's already in his corner, but for several long minutes Foreman refuses to appear...
...Except for the British champion Henry Cooper and the aging Archie Moore, most of Ali's early opponents had been journeyman stiffs, steps up the ladder to a championship fight...
...Dundee—who also worked with such champions as Carmen Basilio and Willie Pastrano—succeeded mostly by letting Ali be Ali...
...I know why this happened," Ali told Remnick...
...Another lopsided loss to the overrated Trevor Berbick proved conclusively that, by 1981, the Ali of old was irretrievably gone...
...As a promising amateur, Cassius Clay won state and national Golden Gloves championships and enjoyed wide support in the Louisville community...
...Liston, certainly, hasn't been so fully portrayed since A.S...
...The more honorable and articulate Patterson took up various civic activities...
...Remnick is a skilled and lively writer...
...Ali first gained wide notice when, fighting as Cassius Clay, he won a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics...
...Like his old friend Joe Louis, Liston washed up in Las Vegas, where he mingled with mobsters, and—like Louis— turned increasingly to drugs...
...The late sports columnist Jim Murray once noted that rough and ruthless men like Jack Dempsey and Jake LaMotta were virtually born to be fighters...
...But against Patterson, Ali displayed his darker side—what Remnick calls the "flashes of dismissive cruelty" that flared, not infrequently, in the early stages of his career...
...football, he told the sports-writer Robert Lipsyte, "was tooooo rough...
...A lesser man," Remnick writes, "could be forgiven some hours of darkness, for here is a performer who was robbed of what seemed to be his essence—his physical beauty, his speed, his wit, his voice—and yet Ali never betrays self-pity...
...Remnick underplays the crucial role of the fighter's long-time trainer, Angelo Dundee, whose record of ring success is nearly as impressive as Ali's own...
...Thus, unlike the durable Jack Jackson—another of his heroes—Ali failed to develop the defensive skills that are part of the repertoire of a truly masterful boxer...
...as Foreman, the knock-out king, hauled back and hammered away...
...It is perhaps true, as Murray has suggested, that Ali's career "was caked in tragedy...
...Ali shows nothing but confidence and calm...
...he prays...
...title-holder, Lennox Lewis—the product of a fairly stable lower-middle-class household...
...As Ferdie Pacheco, his long-time physician, points out, "Ali became impossible for his opponents to gauge...
...He didn't try to transform the fighter's unorthodox style, but he refined it in countless ways, building the foundation for Ali's continuing success...
...He was a three-time heavyweight champion who defended his title nineteen times—fewer than Joe Louis and Holmes, but far more than other heavyweights in this century...
...But as his fight with Foreman showed, Ali—though still faster than most heavyweights— was slowing down...
...As he later would with Foreman, Ali cleverly made Liston wear himself out...
...Ali's early career and his two stunning defeats of Liston form the core of King of the World...
...I am the king...
...they "couldn't be anything but...
...But there was method in Ali's technique...
...Foreman is the reigning heavyweight champion and heavy favorite...
...King of the world...
...He was still bombastic, ever willing to ham it up before cameras and microphones...
...Predicting victory before the fight began, Ali turned his bout with Liston into a weird remake of Federico Fellini's 1954 film, La Strada...
...He looked dazed, slow and pathetically vulnerable...
...For more than a decade Ali's movements have grown increasingly labored...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 13
