Ali: A Life

719 Pages·2017·33.08 MB·English

by  Jonathan Eig

For Lola
CONTENTS
PREFACE: Miami, 1964
PART I
1. Cassius Marcellus Clay
2. The Loudest Child
3. The Bicycle
4. “Every Day Was Heaven”
5. The Prophet
6. “I’m Just Young and Don’t Give a Damn”
7. America’s Hero
8. Dreamer
9. “Twentieth-Century Exuberance”
10. “It’s Show Business”
11. Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee
12. The Ugly Bear
13. “So What’s Wrong with the Muslims?”
14. Becoming Muhammad Ali
15. Choice
16. “Girl, Will You Marry Me?”
17. Assassination
18. Phantom Punch
19. True Love
20. A Holy War
21. No Quarrel
22. “What’s My Name?”
23. “Against the Furies”
PART II
24. Exile
25. Faith
26. Martyr
27. Song and Dance and Prayer
28. The Greatest Book of All Time
29. Stand by Me
30. Comeback
31. “The World Is Watching You”
32. A Different Fighter
33. The Five-Million-Dollar Match
34. Ali v. Frazier
35. Freedom
36. Trickeration
PART III
37. A Fight to the Finish
38. Heart of Darkness
39. Fighter’s Heaven
40. “Ali Boma Ye!”
41. Rumble in the Jungle
42. Moving on Up
43. Impulses
44. Ali-Frazier III
45. Getting Old
46. “They May Not Let Me Quit”
47. “Do You Remember Muhammad Ali?”
48. Staggered
49. Crown Prince
50. Old
51. Humpty Dumpty
52. The Last Hurrah
53. Too Many Punches
54. “He’s Human, Like Us”
55. A Torch
56. The Long, Black Cadillac
POSTSCRIPT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
APPENDIX: Career Record
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INDEX
PREFACE
Miami, 1964
ROUND 1. THE CHALLENGER: CASSIUS CLAY
A
long, black Cadillac glides past waving palm trees and stops in front of the
Surfside Community Center. The afternoon sun flashes off the car’s chrome
bumpers. Cassius Clay gets out. He’s dressed in a custom-made denim jacket
and swinging a dandyish walking stick.
He checks to see if anyone has noticed him.
Not yet.
He shouts, “I’m the biggest thing in history! I’m the king!”
Clay is tall and stunningly handsome, with an irresistible smile. He’s a force
of gravity, quickly pulling people into his orbit. Horns honk. Cars on Collins
Avenue stop. Women lean out of hotel windows and shout his name. Men in
shorts and girls in tight pants gather around to see the boastful boxer they’ve
been hearing so much about.
“Float like a butterfly! Sting like a bee!” he yells. “Rumble, young man,
rumble! Ahhhh!”
As the crowd grows, the chief of police arrives and tries to move Clay off the
street and into a parking lot where he might cause less trouble. A newspaper
photographer points his camera, but instead of smiling Clay opens his mouth
wide in a pantomime scream. He throws a left jab that stops inches short of the
camera.
“I’m pretty and move as fast as lightning,” he says in his sweet Kentucky
accent. “I’m just twenty-two and I’m gonna make a million dollars!”
ROUND 2. THE CHAMPION: SONNY LISTON
Sonny Liston’s left hand is a battering ram, his right a sledgehammer. Bom!
Boom! Bom! Boom! He pounds the heavy bag so hard the walls shake and
sportswriters’ hands jump as they scribble ornate synonyms for “scary.”
Liston is the most punishing boxer in more than a generation, with fists each
measuring fifteen inches around and a chest jutting forth like the front end of an
M4 Sherman tank. He is fearless and vicious. How vicious? Once, he started a
fight with a cop, beat the cop senseless, snatched his gun, picked him up and
dumped him in an alley, and then walked away smiling, wearing the cop’s hat.
Liston does not merely defeat his opponents; he breaks them, shames them,
haunts them, leaves them flinching from his punches in their dreams. Sonny
Liston is America’s curse. He is the black menace sprung from white racist
stereotypes. And he likes it that way.
“There’s got to be good guys, and there’s got to be bad guys,” he says,
comparing the world to a cowboy movie. “Bad guys are supposed to lose. I
change that. I win.”
When he learns that the young man he will soon fight for boxing’s world
heavyweight championship is outside the community center where he trains,
Liston steps into the sun to meet the troublemaker. He swats away the
outstretched hands of fans and marches until he’s nearly within punching
distance of Cassius Clay.
Liston stops and smiles.
“Clay,” he tells a reporter, “is just a little kid who needs a spanking.”
ROUND 3. THE MINISTER: MALCOLM X
In a cramped hotel room near John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, thirty-
eight-year-old Malcolm X talks into the night, telling his life story to a reporter.
Malcolm is a tall, lean man with a strong jaw and horn-rimmed glasses. Even
smiling, he bears a stern expression.
Malcolm paces as he dictates, sitting only to scribble notes on napkins. He
can’t wait until old age to produce his autobiography. He’s recently been
suspended from the Nation of Islam for disobeying the radical group’s leader,
Elijah Muhammad, and doesn’t know if he’ll ever go back. A few months
earlier, Elijah Muhammad had ordered his ministers not to comment on the
assassination of President Kennedy, out of respect for a nation in mourning, but
Malcolm had spoken out anyway, saying the killing was an outgrowth of the
violence sown by America in Vietnam, the Congo, and Cuba. “Being an old
farm boy myself,” Malcolm had said, “chickens coming home to roost never did