The greatest

David Remnick paints a complex and graceful portrait of America's most iconic boxer

by Ben Geman

KING OF THE WORLD: THE RISE OF MUHAMMAD ALI By David Remnick. Random House, 336 pages, $25.

The once Quicksilver fist of Muhammad Ali laboring to raise the Olympic torch was the most genuine moment of the 1996 summer games. Could he do it? Stricken with Parkinson's disease and wounded by too many fights, the former champion held the flame in his shaking hand for what seemed a long time. Finally, again, triumph.

Loving Ali is easy and safe today. But 35 years ago, back when he moved with speed unthinkable for a heavyweight, Ali wasn't such an obvious hero -- not when his embrace of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslims jarred the sporting press and much of white America. The brash young champion, as New York Times reporter Robert Lipsyte would write, had taken the establishment's greatest sports prize and "laid it at the feet" of the Black Muslims. Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, Ali's noisy ascendance resonated beyond the ring.

In King of the World, David Remnick weaves an absorbing narrative of this heady time. Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker and a former sportswriter, explores the Louisville native's emergence at a time when boxers symbolized both culture and politics. The nimble author fills three roles here: social historian, biographer, and chronicler of a corrupt and seedy boxing world that he reproduces in color even for readers who have seen the early 1960s only in black-and-white. In this world, Ali became a champion on his own terms.

African-American champions preceding Ali, Remnick suggests, adapted more readily to white America's expectations of blacks. Floyd Patterson was deferential and kind, backed by the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King and endorsed by the NAACP. Sonny Liston, a lumbering ex-con, was cast as a criminal -- "the big black Negro in white America's hallway, ready to do him in," as LeRoi Jones would suggest. Yet Ali was something unfamiliar, and Remnick demonstrates why. The book's photos of the boxer with Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad feel as necessary as the shots of Ali in the ring: his early career coincided with the Black Muslims' emergence as an oppositional force to the integrationist civil rights movement.

Although the book's conceptual landscape is broad, Remnick never takes his eyes far from the characters walking it. His examination of Liston, in particular, is nuanced and sad. Born into rural poverty, Liston ran away to St. Louis at an early age and quickly compiled a criminal record. He learned to fight in prison, and his bruising style seemed to fit the image of an illiterate criminal controlled by the boxing mob. Remnick makes clear that Liston's image was not mere myth, yet it was incomplete. Shortly after becoming the champion, Liston vowed to shed his image, woo the NAACP, and generally honor the title. No one gave him the chance. In one wrenching vignette, Liston's former sparring partner recalls him asking often: "You like me, don't you?"

As for Ali, our images of him today are fairly one-dimensional, in part because he says so little publicly. Remnick, though, paints a complex and thorough picture. He details Ali's wit and brilliance without seeming starstruck or sentimental. He's no iconoclast, yet he reveals Ali's crueler moments, such as his taunting of Floyd Patterson as an honorary "white American" when he dismantled the overmatched ex-champ in 1965. And, he notes, Ali's political maturity took time to develop. The boxer knew little about Vietnam when he famously declared, in 1966, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong." He would later learn much more of the war and lecture against it, but early on, he improvised. "Ali had showed his gift for intuitive action, for speed," Remnick writes, "and this time he was acting in a way that would characterize the era itself, a resistance to authority, an insistence that national loyalty was not automatic or absolute. His rebellion, which had started out as racial, had now widened in scope."

Remnick interviewed dozens of sources and watched hour after hour of tape to prepare King of the World, and the work has paid off in the form of startling immediacy. The 10-page narration of Ali's first win against Liston is so fresh that the reader can't be sure of the outcome until it's over. Still, the book never overwhelms with detail: Remnick slips perfectly drawn anecdotes into a cultural framework he's constructed with care and restraint. He could probably tell a dozen stories for each one he's presented here, such as his account of the bizarre press conference after Liston's defeat of Patterson, when a drunk Norman Mailer resurfaced after being kicked out by security and offered to promote the rematch.

Indeed, the sportswriters are very much characters to Remnick, who uses the establishment press as a barometer for Ali's reception in a country that wasn't quite ready for him. At one point, legendary New York columnist Jimmy Cannon berates Ali's floating, dancing style, calling him a "freak." Capturing the columnist's angst perfectly, Remnick supplies as good a summary as any for his subject's early impact on America.

"Clay offended Cannon's sense of rightness the way flying machines offended his father's generation," Remnick writes. "It threw his universe off kilter."

Ben Geman is a freelance writer living in Boston.