King of the World

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King of the World (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Professional boxers have often been sport’s walking wounded— kept alive by mobsters and media. Neither support group took seriously an eighteen-year-old 1960 Olympic gold-medal winner from Louisville, Kentucky, who boasted to a young sportswriter named Dick Schaap that “I’ll be the greatest of all time.” Big men were supposed to wade in and flatten their foes but not, like this kid Cassius Clay, “dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee” and have the brass to write self-celebrating doggerel about it.

The Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali phenomenon benefited from interacting forces. The usual suspects were in disarray when Clay came on in the early 1960’s. For him, gangsters were supplanted by the Nation of Islam, to whom, given his new name, Muhammad Ali pledged undying loyalty even as he rose to boxing’s pinnacle.

The book is a triangle with Sonny Liston, the bad black champ, and Floyd Patterson, the good black champ, occupying contrasting legs and Ali the base. David Remnick gives Patterson and Liston center stage early—the shy and fearful Patterson led to the slaughter by the fearsome challenger. Once Clay/Ali arrives, subtly intimidating the ex-convict who knew from jail to steer clear of crazies, Liston had no chance.

Neither the boxing world nor a color-line-obsessed society in general had ever felt the thrust of a man of independence and American originality who would transcend the Listons and Pattersons. In Remnick’s telling, Ali’s outside-the-ring gambits clinched his charisma—his resistance to stereotyping (“I’m going to be a new kind of black.”) leading to his conversion; his open defiance of his draft board (“I ain’t got no quarrel against them Vietcong!”) for which he was sentenced to five years and a heavy fine, both verdicts reversed.

KING OF THE WORLD: MUHAMMAD ALI AND THE RISE OF AN AMERICAN HERO documents what Remnick sensed from the start: Ali and boxing are two different topics. His disabling Parkinson’s Disease belongs to boxing, his courage and gift of laughter, to the world.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCV, September 15, 1998, p. 172.

Library Journal. CXXIII, October 1, 1998, p. 104.

Money. XXVII, November, 1998, p. 207.

National Review. L, November 9, 1998, p. 59.

The New York Times. November 17, 1998, B1, p. 8.

The New York Times Book Review. CIII, October 25, 1998, p. 11.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, October 5, 1998, p. 68.

Sports Illustrated. LXXXIX, October 19, 1998, p. R16.

Time. CLI, November 2, 1998, p. 97.

The Wall Street Journal. October 21, 1998, p. A20.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, October 18, 1998, p. 1.

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