You can throw a dart at the timeline of Muhammad Ali’s amazing career, and identify a major work to explain virtually any place it struck. There’s David Maraniss’ Rome 1960:The Olympics that Changed the World to chronicle his first blush of fame as an Olympic gold medalist. There’s David Remnick’s King of the World to chart his ascent to the heavyweight championship, not to mention three separate books on his controversial fights with Sonny Liston to win and retain the crown. There’s Bill Siegel’s documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali to cover the late’60s after he was stripped of his title, blackballed from his profession, and faced jail time because of his refusal to serve in the Army during the Vietnam war. There’s Mike Marqusee’s Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties to help explain how Ali became a symbol of black pride in America and across the globe.
There’s Mark Kram’s Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, a portrait of the vicious three-fight series between the two polar opposites (Norman Mailer and numerous others wrote about their first fight in 1971, which became all but a proxy war over the battles of the previous decade). There’s Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, a rollicking documentary of the world-rocking 1974 fight in Zaire when Ali defeated George Foreman to regain the heavyweight crown. And there are any number of essays and articles on specific moments along the way, many of them collected by Gerald Early in The Muhammad Ali Reader.
But the main Ali 101 text is Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, Thomas Hauser’s acclaimed and comprehensive 1991 biography. Hauser talked to everyone alive at the time with a connection to the Ali story, and extensively with The Greatest himself. He read the final manuscript to Ali and his wife Lonnie for their blessing. Ali went on the road with Hauser to promote the book.
The bio set the tone for our understanding of perhaps the most complicated sports legend we’ve ever seen. As it reported on his many triumphs, it didn’t shy away from his black marks: his embrace of the Nation of Islam at the height of its jeremiad against white people; his womanzing (Lonnie was wife number four); his relentless taunting of Frazier as something less than human; his involvement in questionable business deals. More importantly, it set forth the arc of Ali’s story: from a gangly 12-year-old kid in Louisville, Kentucky, who got into boxing because someone stole his bike, all the way to a man at peace with himself in the autumn of life. Since its publication, all Ali biographers and researchers have used it as their starting point for further explorations.
Hauser didn’t leave the Ali beat after the bio. He covered him for several years thereafter, as his image morphed from revolutionary athlete and socio-political lightning rod to man of faith and conscience. It’s also the period when his Parkinson’s disease, which was beginning to manifest itself in the later years of the bio, steadily progressed, eventually robbing the never-bashful Ali of movement, speech and his youthful looks.
So any work by Hauser about Ali comes with its own degree of street cred. But Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to The Greatest, which happened to hit bookstores just days after Ali passed away on 3 June at 74, is more a celebratory farewell than a final chapter to his story — or even a new one.
Virtually all of the book — a hodge-podge of post-bio articles, testimonials and other odds and ends (including the transcript of Hauser’s radio interview with the champ in 1967 for his college radio station) — has been published before, as The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali (2005). Little of it is news to anyone familiar with Ali’s basic story. Much of it feels like a remixes-and-rarities compilation CD a record label would issue to squeeze one last dime from an artist’s catalogue.
But there is value in the book’s final section, where Hauser takes up The Meaning of Muhammad Ali. His 2004 essay, “The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali”, points out how Ali’s image was transformed in his final years, especially after his emergence from the shadows (literally and figuratively) to light the torch at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta (Michael Ezra explores how that came to be in his book Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon). That moment helped prompt a campaign to deify and repackage Ali as an icon of goodwill and tolerance, an image safe for corporate consumption, without acknowledging his prior controversies. Hauser especially took to task Michael Mann’s 2001 biopic Ali as being all but divorced from the messy realities of its subject’s life.
Hauser continues the theme in the essay “The Long Sad Goodbye”, the only new element of A Tribute to The Greatest. It appears to have been written sometime in 2015, and reads like an obituary prepared in advance. Hauser recounts family and Ali contemporaries lamenting his diminished condition. But he also acknowledges the worldwide magnetism any Ali sighting during his last years generated, even though The Greatest could do little more than smile. As he does so, he urges us to appreciate the many things Ali accomplished and represented in his lifetime.
“Most fighters are remembered by history for what they did in the ring. Ali will be remembered just as vividly for what he did outside the ropes,” writes Hauser. “He was a hero to the heroes of our time.”
A Tribute to The Greatest might stand as an eerily-timed message for a younger audience, who might not appreciate the historic importance of Ali’s life beyond his being a beloved man who was deathly ill (which isn’t that audience’s fault; no one born after 1981 was alive when Ali last fought). But such was that historic importance that people still feel compelled to write about it. You could easily compile a second Muhammad Ali Reader from all the remembrances, stories and anecdotes published in the wake of his death.
There are, in fact, many more substantial Ali stories to tell. One of them came earlier this year, and it’s a doozy. Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith’s Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X unpacks the long and careful evolution from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, as guided by Malcolm X and others in the Nation of Islam.
Like everyone else, they used Hauser’s biography as a starting point, along with Remnick’s coverage of the era’s social and political turmoil. But Roberts and Smith lay out the critical 1961-65 period in detail, starting when Clay first took a direct interest in the Nation’s teachings. At the time, the Nation (or “Black Muslims”, as they were also known) was America’s bogeyman, with their unabashed dismissal of white people and any notion of reconciliation between the races. They were seen as a hate group, and even black voices within the Civil Rights Movement compared them to the Ku Klux Klan. Aligning with them publicly would have been career suicide for an up-and-comer like Clay, and he knew it.
At the same time, the seeds of the power struggle between Nation founder Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were already sown. By then, Malcolm had already become the public face of the nation, and his incendiary comments in the media were beginning to make Muhammad most uncomfortable. But Malcolm also learned of the Nation’s dark side: the affairs Muhammad had been having with women in the Nation, and the viciousness that greeted Nation members who dared go astray. And this made Malcolm most uncomfortable.
Malcolm and Muhammad initially agreed that the Nation had no place in boxing. But Clay’s rising prominence in the ring changed that thinking. Muhammad thought that embracing Clay, who by that point had become a frequent visitor to Nation events and had taken to quoting Nation teachings in media interviews (unbeknownst to those reporters), would lend credence to the group (and help attract new members). Malcolm thought that embracing Clay would give him a leg up in his battle with Muhammad.
For his part, Clay tried to keep his Nation status on the down-low. But he was regularly featured in the Nation newspaper Muhammad Speaks, and was almost outed by the mainstream press more than once. Meanwhile, he and Malcolm gravitated towards each other, and developed a big brother-little brother friendship. Malcolm found that friendship especially useful during his censure by the Nation after his “chickens coming home to roost” comment about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was in Clay’s Miami camp during the run-up to his 1964 championship bout with Liston, which most people figured Clay would be lucky to survive intact, and among the celebrants after Clay shocked the world by winning.
But that wouldn’t be the only time Clay shocked the world that week. The day after the fight, he all but declared himself as a member of the Nation, and moreover as a free-thinking and unashamed black man. “I don’t have to be who you want me to be,” Clay told reporters at a press conference, “I’m free to be who I want.” A few days later, Clay announced his preference to be known as Cassius X. Muhammad soon went that one better, giving him a new name: Muhammad Ali.
Malcolm still clung to Ali, hoping the champ would follow him once his separation from Muhammad was complete. He didn’t. Ali instead stayed loyal to the Nation, even as he experienced international adoration on a trip to Africa later in 1964. During that trip, he ran into Malcolm, who was wearing traditional Muslim attire after his pilgrimage to Mecca, and rejected him for not remaining true to the Nation. On the day of Malcolm’s funeral in 1965 (after being killed by Nation loyalists), Ali was in Chicago, giving a lighthearted boxing exhibition as part of a Nation event.
Roberts and Smith dove deep into newspaper archives and FBI records (as the feds trailed Malcolm and Muhammad, they also took note of Clay’s presence) to weave this intricate, compelling story. As seemingly is the case with all stories Ali, Blood Brothers is as much about the tenor of the moment as it is about boxing, if not more so. But Ali was never just a boxer, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many stories to tell about him. In Blood Brothers, we see how politics — internecine Nation battles, American racial struggles, and global freedom movements — crossed his life, helping to propel him from a brash, upstart athlete into a global icon of black liberation.
There’s more to tell about Ali’s relationship with the Nation, which lasted until Muhammad’s death in 1975. The Nation exerted massive control over Ali, influencing just about everything except his choice of opponents. They were quick to profit from him and guide his thinking — but less so to support him during his three-year exile from boxing (when he wasn’t making any money except for speaking gigs and one-off projects). Ali’s post-Malcolm relationship to the Nation merits as extensive a treatment as Roberts and Smith provide in Blood Brothers on how they came together.
So too does Ali’s career in the back half of the ‘70s, after he regained the crown and completed the brutal Frazier trilogy. By then, there was no one on his level to fight, but he badly needed the money, so he kept fighting. He’d also learned he could now capitalize on his legend more than ever before (he participated in a kiddie album dramatizing the fight against tooth decay, and became a pitchman for pest control products). His presence kept boxing afloat, but would exact a terrible cost.
We know he lost the title to Leon Spinks in February 1978 and regained it from him seven months later, a feat that should have capped off his career right then and there. We know he should never have entered the ring in 1980 to take that awful beatdown from Larry Holmes. We know the initial stages of his long illness came on the heels of all the pounding he took in the ‘70s. What remains for a detailed telling is how he’d blown up to such international proportions by then, and why he just couldn’t rest on his laurels.
The story of his final years, as he lived with a cruel and progressive disease, remains for the telling, as well. We’ve seen accounts of encounters with him during that time (as in Davis Miller’s Approaching Ali: A Reclamation in Three Acts), and Ezra’s work outlines the efforts to rebrand Ali. But we don’t yet have a chronicling of how Lonnie, the family, and his associates cared for the champ and managed his interests when he was no longer able to do so himself. Hauser’s “The Long Sad Goodbye” is the first marker on that path; surely one fine day, someone will endeavor to chart those days in full — just as has been done with every other phase of Ali’s audacious, remarkable life.