Champ

King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David Remnick.  Vintage.  352 pp.  $14.39. *****

Of all the subjects I would have thought I knew everything about, Muhammad Ali is right at the top of the list.  I started following his career in 1960, when he won an Olympic Gold Medal in Rome.[1]  His pro career began soon afterwards, with his obsessive publicity campaign to fight Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship.  Part of that campaign was a comic LP which he made, and which I actually bought and listened to many times.  (“If I tell you a cow can lay an egg, don’t ask how, grease that skillet.”)  Though I loved Ali and all his bluster, I didn’t think he had a chance in the world against Sonny Liston, who had knocked out the previous champion, Floyd Patterson, in one round, then did the same thing in a rematch.

The man then called Cassius Clay cured me forever of betting, when I bet a substantial amount on Liston in the title fight.  I don’t remember what the amount was, I can’t imagine it was more than ten dollars, but that represented three record albums in those days (I was collecting R&B and jazz) and maybe ten paperback books, the other thing I was buying.  That was hard-earned money, but I thought that bet was a sure thing (I think I had gotten some odds), and when I lost, I thought, That’s it, I’m never going to bet again, and I never did.[2]  I didn’t attend the closed circuit live broadcast (I didn’t have the money, or a reliable means of transportation), but I listened to the fight on a transistor radio, in my room, when I was supposed to be asleep.  I couldn’t believe what I heard.  Clay lasted through round after round, even one where he had a foreign substance in his eyes (Liston’s handlers had doctored his gloves) and fought about half the round blind, just dancing to stay away.  Liston was totally flummoxed by Clay’s speed and movement, and didn’t come out for the seventh round.  And of course I was stunned the next day when Clay announced he has a member of the Nation of Islam, and eventually acquired the name Muhammad Ali.  I was equally stunned when he refused induction into the army and subsequently lost his title.  All that was way beyond my understanding in those days.  I just wanted to see the man fight.

David Remnick didn’t just fill in the gaps in my understanding.  He brought that entire period to life; this is as much a book of history as it is a sports biography.  He crammed the book with portraits not just of Ali and the men he defeated, but also trainers, sports writers, gangsters who controlled the fight game (to an extent that I didn’t begin to understand), religious and political figures.  I felt that the previous Remnick book that I read, Hold the Note, was an homage to musicians whom he had loved, a kind of sideline to his more important writing, but King of the World is a major work, which involved a huge amount of research and careful writing.  It was a huge pleasure to read.

Ali was a world class loudmouth pretty much from the time he was born; even when he was a little kid, way before he thought of fighting, he would have a front porch full of kids spellbound by his storytelling and boasting prowess.  All the bragging boasting loudmouth fighters since him have paled in comparison.  Supposedly he never thought of fighting until he went to some expo or other in Louisville where his bike was stolen.  He went to report the theft and encountered a man who told him he should channel his anger into boxing, and said he could show him how to do it.  Almost immediately Ali was not only going to the gym in the afternoons, but getting up every morning to do roadwork, at the age of twelve.  He was as dedicated then as he ever got to be.  And he was already saying he would be champ of the world.

No other heavyweight ever fought like the young Ali (I’m not sure any fighter ever fought like him, though he modeled himself on Sugar Ray Robinson).  He danced around the ring and carried his hands low, not protecting himself at all; when a fighter swung at him, he moved his head back, or to the side, to avoid the blow.  Moving your head back was considered suicidal by purists, but Ali had uncanny reflexes and an amazing ability to see punches coming.  People just couldn’t hit him.  Sonny Liston barely touched him, and supposedly dislocated a shoulder trying.  People scoffed at that after the fight, but I think it was at least possible.  He was swinging with huge fury after all the months of being baited by this fresh kid, and he was just hitting air.

The book concentrates on Ali’s ascent to the title, and on three fighters primarily, Ali, Floyd Patterson, and Liston.  Patterson comes across as an almost tragic figure, a modest sensitive man who had been raised in horrible poverty and never bragged or acted tough the way other fighters did.  He beat an aging Archie Moore for the title[3] to become the youngest man ever to win it, then lost it to Ingemar Johannson (who knocked him down seven times) only to avenge himself some months later and become the only man ever to regain the title.  That whole time, Sonny Liston was the number one contender, but Liston had a criminal past and Patterson was supposedly not fighting him because that would be a bad example to the youth of America, or some such thing.  Actually, everyone said Patterson was afraid to fight him, and his reluctance proved to be well-founded.  Liston in those two fights with Patterson seemed the most fearsome fighter in the world.  He made Ingemar Johannson look like a cream puff.

If Patterson was a tragic figure, Liston was by far the saddest story in the book.  He was raised in a huge family—I believe it was 25 kids—in Arkansas by a horribly abusive father.  At the age of fourteen he ran away from home, sold some pecans from his farm to get train fare, and went in search of his mother, who had left for St. Louis.  The fourteen-year-old Liston was expecting a small community like the one he had known in the South—he thought he could just ask people and they would know where his mother was—and of course was bewildered by St. Louis.  He spent a couple of days in the police station, then ran into a wino who said he knew a woman who “favored” him.  Sonny knocked on the door and his sister answered.

He was illiterate all his life—he had never had much schooling—and got into a life of crime.  When he eventually took up boxing, he was immediately successful.  The man was an incredible physical specimen.  Gangsters controlled the fight game in those days, something I’d heard before, but I had no idea how much they ripped off their fighters.  Liston got just a small percentage of his purses.  He was the number one contender for years but couldn’t get fights.  When he finally fought Patterson he showed us why.  By that time the young Cassius Clay was already badgering him, in a campaign not just to get a fight, but to get inside the man’s head.  Liston finally gave him a fight because he knew it would be a huge payday.

If Liston had lived at any other time, he would now be regarded as one of the greatest heavyweights who ever lived.  Instead, he spent years being mocked by this kid from Louisville (nobody seemed to care how Liston felt), then lost two fights to him, both of them somewhat mysterious.  In the first fight, after an especially difficult sixth round, Liston came back to his corner and said, “That’s it,” and his handlers thought he meant something like, all right, I’m going to get down to business.  Actually, he meant he was giving up, and when the bell rang for the seventh he stayed on his stool.  The first person in the arena who understood was Ali, who immediately started dancing, then famously draped himself on the ropes and yelled at all the reporters, “Eat your words.”  I of course didn’t see every heavyweight who ever lived, but I’m not sure anyone could have beaten Ali that night, Jack Dempsey Marciano, Joe Louis, Joe Frazier, Mike Tyson.  He wasn’t fighting like a heavyweight.  And though he was young and brash, he was in his prime.

For years Ali had been interested in the Nation of Islam.  It was regarded as a subversive organization in those days, and people felt that, if he had joined before the first fight, he wouldn’t have been given a title shot.  But once he was champion there was no reason to hold back; he announced his allegiance to the organization and soon Elijah Muhammad had give him his new name.  He had been good friends with Malcolm X, but once Malcolm grew distant from Elijah Muhammad, Ali grew distant from him.  Not long after that, Malcolm was murdered.

The second Liston fight was far more controversial.  There was concern that the Malcolm X faction from the Nation of Islam might retaliate by assassinating a prominent figure themselves, and Ali was mentioned as a possibility.  The fight was therefore moved to a tiny gym in Lewiston, Maine, of all places.  I read elsewhere that no less an authority than Joe Louis (who was by that time, according to Remnick, addicted to cocaine) still thought Liston would win that fight, and had bet on him, but before the fight Liston said, “I’m just not right, Joe.  Just not right.”  Trying to warn him.  The theory goes that Liston was afraid of being shot in an attempt on Ali’s life, and he took a dive in the first round.

Remnick (though not without his doubts) is among those who thinks that the short right hand that Ali delivered actually knocked Liston out.  Liston had that point had only lost one fight, had never been knocked off his feet—even in that one loss, in which his jaw was broken—and he went down like a ton of bricks from a punch that I, for one, can’t really see, though I’ve watched the You Tube several times.  The famous photo of Ali taunting him looks fierce, but he may actually have been yelling at Liston to get back up.  In any case, Ali retained his title, and Liston got a one-way ticket to Palookaville.  Within a few years he would die of a mysterious heroin overdose (people who knew Liston said he had a deathly fear of needles).  He was 38 years old, an age when Archie Moore was just getting started.

I was absolutely thrilled by this book, which I picked up as a diversion from my more serious reading, but I found that a certain segment of my life, a precious time, burst open before me.  Remnick says at one point that he was not really interested in boxing, but in Ali.  I had a thing for boxing for some years (it’s long gone at this point), but for a period of time Ali was boxing; there was no one else.  He changed the sport, and changed all sports, forever.  He was the perfect person for that moment in history.

If only he had known when to quit.  But fighters never seem to know that.

[1] I think of those Olympics as the first ones ever televised, and I watched them obsessively.  John Thomas losing the Gold Medal in the high jump.  Wilma Rudolph blowing past every woman sprinter.  Dave Sime finishing second in the hundred yard dash, though the American favored to win had not even made the finals.  Bill Neider defeating Parry O’Brien and Dallas Long in the shotput, which would eventually become my event.  I turned twelve years old that summer.

[2] With one exception.  The guy who had made that bet with me, Quincy Love, did not understand how pro wrestling worked, and how profoundly it was fixed.  In a match where Gorilla Monsoon was wrestling Bruno Sammartino, he couldn’t believe Monsoon wouldn’t win; he was so much bigger than Bruno.  I explained to him that wrestling was fixed and that Bruno would never lose such a match in Pittsburgh, his native city, but Quincy didn’t believe me.  So I took his money.  I got my revenge.  But I never bet again.

[3] That was the first prize fight I ever saw, with my father.  The reason it was so special to me was that I spent the whole evening with my father.  We had gone to the house of a neighbor who had a swimming pool, a real novelty in my neighborhood.  Actually, I think the guy was subletting the house from the owner.  When we got to the house our host startled me by removing his artificial leg and getting to the pool with crutches.  My father hadn’t told me the man had only one leg.  Afterwards we went home and my father had a snack of buttermilk and Triscuits.  That was the first time I ever had a Triscuit, though I passed on the buttermilk.  My father told me Archie Moore was a great fighter, but he thought he was too old to beat the much younger Patterson.  He turned out to be right.  I was eight years old.