KING OF THE WORLD:
Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
By David Remnick
Random House, 326 pages, $25
What is most surprising about former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali is that he seems to be such a striking example of what popular culture produces and even celebrates–eye-catching, attention-grabbing, brilliantly innovative impermanence–that it is hard, on some level, to understand how he has managed to transcend his built-in obsolescence and remain such a vital presence. One is pleasantly surprised at how much Ali, one of pop culture’s most impressive, even outsized, figures, has transcended pop culture itself, entering a realm of the national consciousness where few athletes and certainly few African-Americans have ever been.
Ali was, after all, an athlete in a sport that, throughout its history, was considered disreputable (no less so during Ali’s heyday of the 1960s and 1970s) and that, with the exception of big title fights, largely attracted working-class audiences. He joined the Nation of Islam, a religious cult that was a mixture of ethnic chauvinism and racially mythologized history. Ali adopted throughout most of his career the mannerisms of an adolescent: He was loud, brash, sometimes witty, often touchingly sincere, good-natured, rebellious, a showoff, egocentric, generous to a fault. He was, by turns, bitingly critical of our societal hypocrisies and filled with the rote polemical catechism of an oddly recalcitrant, homemade Islam that only he and a small number of other true believers found illuminating. This is the stuff of an uncommon crank, not a national hero.
When Ali refused military induction in 1967, he became a hero more for what he refused to do than for anything he actively did. Ali was making a case for himself to be exempted from the draft and the Vietnam War; he never actively tried to end either. It was never his intention as a Muslim to put himself on the line to reform the ways of this evil world or even to engage it, for, in his millenarian vision, he knew that Allah was on the verge of destroying evil, white America by means of a huge ship that Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad had taught him was circling the planet, awaiting God’s command to attack.
Ali’s religious beliefs would have made him passive as a political figure, as passive as some of the black Christians he railed against for believing in an afterlife and that heaven was in the sky and hell was underground. But Ali, true conservative that he was, stubbornly defended his beliefs, and in so doing he challenged the system.
But Ali never really wanted to challenge the system. He believed that segregation was good (and, in fact, the solution to the race problem), and that people shouldn’t go where they weren’t wanted (as he said about fellow boxer Floyd Patterson’s failed attempt at integrating a residential neighborhood). He hated miscegenation (constantly bragging that he never slept with white women). He was enamored of the idea of racial purity. Generally, he had no quarrel with the government (as he always said, he paid his taxes and he obeyed the law) or with authority. Indeed, his love of Elijah Muhammad and his brief but intense friendship with Malcolm X would indicate that he was seeking older male authority, not eschewing it.
None of this would seem to bode especially well for Ali’s becoming a part of our collective memory of the 1960s, let alone a national hero. He seems too insubstantial as a champion boxer and too complicated as a religious-zealot-turned-political-dissident to lend himself well to the role of unambiguous hero. That he has succeeded in becoming one says something extraordinary about the man and about the United States, about how both grew up together.
Of course, Ali’s good looks cannot be discounted in his success as a pop-culture hero. As David Remnick writes in “King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero,” “If (Ali) had had the face of Sonny Liston he would have lost much of his appeal.” His matinee-idol looks and his motor mouth, his sense of self-dramatization fed the image of the heroic. His looks were always at risk in the boxing ring, his freedom always at risk in his refusal to obey the draft law. He was the first black man in American history whose brinkmanship mattered; it mattered that he had something to lose and that he was willing to risk losing it. And it has mattered to us, in the end, what he has lost in being what he was.
“King of the World” covers the intersection of the lives of three men: Ali (both before and after he changed his name from Cassius Clay), Liston and Floyd Patterson, all champions who fought each other within a span of three years–from 1962 to 1965–in what seemed a period of accelerated American social history. In effect, the book’s narrative ends after Ali defeats Patterson in Las Vegas on Nov. 22, 1965. Remnick gives us a kind of summary of what happened to each man after this period–all, in their ways, coming to sad endings: Ali, hobbled and speechless with boxing-induced Parkinson’s disease; Liston, seemingly murdered or perhaps the victim of a self-administered drug overdose under bizarre circumstances in Las Vegas in December 1970; and Patterson, suffering from the onset of boxing-induced Alzheimer’s disease, unable to remember who he fought to win the title in 1956 or sometimes even the name of his wife.
Remnick’s book begins with the first Patterson-Liston heavyweight title fight, held Sept. 25, 1962, with Liston knocking out champion Patterson in the first round. We learn that this was the first championship boxing match between two black men where the differences in their personalities mattered to the public. Patterson became “the good Negro” upholding the dignity of his race, while Liston, a former convict, was “the bad Negro,” illiterate, mean and connected to the mob. We learn about the early lives of both men: that Patterson was an introverted neurotic as a boy, cured when he attended Wiltwyck School for Boys (the same school that Claude Brown praises in “Manchild in the Promise Land”); that Liston came from a huge rural family (his father had 25 children by two women), grew up a street tough in St. Louis and eventually was imprisoned for armed robbery.
On the margins of this drama between Liston and Patterson is the young Cassius Clay, gregarious, handsome, boisterous, with his poetry, his predictions and his slick ring moves, who is trying to garner attention for his own chance at the title. We learn of Clay’s youth in Louisville, about his relationship with his parents and his desire to become a fighter at age 12 when his bicycle was stolen. (I differ with Remnick’s insistence that Clay had a middle-class upbringing. Clay was one of the scions of a fairly stable, black urban family that one could safely call working class.)
We also learn about the professional boxing scene of the 1950s, the federal investigations of it and the tight control gangsters exercised over it. Indeed, Remnick’s book is one of the most complete accounts of this era of the sport, rating with Jeffrey T. Sammons’ “Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society” and Barney Nagler’s “James Norris and the Decline of Boxing.” Remnick’s is a wonderfully evocative, detailed account.
From its beginning to the time when Clay first fights Liston for the title, “King of the World” has nearly pulse-pounding narrative power. Remnick tells the story of the inevitable meeting between Clay and Liston by allowing the tension to build and by recapturing, with real freshness, the era itself. “King of the World” is the best account of the events leading up to the first Clay-Liston fight I have read anywhere. But after the chapter on their first fight, the book loses a bit of its narrative steam. The account of the second Clay-Liston fight is good but less intense, less engaged with its subjects. The account of the first Ali-Patterson fight seems a bit exhausted, flat, as if the author has lost some interest in his characters and cannot dredge up enough background material to make the event as vivid as it should be.
I have a few small quarrels with the book. First, I think Remnick relies too much on Malcolm X’s autobiography for his account of Malcolm’s break with the Muslims and his friendship with Ali. Malcolm’s sudden realization when he makes his 1964 hajj to Mecca that there were “white” Muslims and that Islam was not a racialist religion is all self-serving and not true. It was largely a story concocted by Malcolm to give him some ideological space and legitimacy to start his own organization. Malcolm had been to the Middle East in the late ’50s and knew “white” Muslims there. The Nation of Islam had been embroiled in controversy with so-called orthodox Islam for several years, with Malcolm leading the fray against the Muslims who were condemning the Nation for making Islam a racialist religion. Also, I think Remnick does not fully convey why Ali would not leave the Nation to join Malcolm in 1964. Malcolm basically had an organization in name only; never an administrator, he did not have the ability to build one from scratch, and he was too busy playing black nationalist statesman and trying to overcome being ostracized by major civil rights groups. And he certainly could not have offered Ali the protection for his beliefs that the Nation could.
Second, I think Remnick should have given a more complete account of Elijah Muhammad’s imprisonment during World War II for violation of the conscription law, as I think the story has a direct bearing on Ali. Wallace D. Muhammad, Elijah Muhammad’s son, also refused to be drafted. A fuller picture of the Nation of Islam’s views on the draft would have been helpful.
Third, I think Remnick should have more fully developed the relationship between former middleweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson and Ali. Robinson was Clay’s idol and worked with him for a while. The falling out between the two men over Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the military is a poignant tale and says a great deal, good and bad, about Ali as the young religious ideologue and his own peculiar version of the anxiety of influence.
But on the whole, “King of the World” is a fine work that transcends being a boxing book or a sports book. It is an important account of a period in American social history and of some particularly significant actors from a marginal realm of cultural activity who were shaped by their era so thoroughly as to define it, and who in turn so shaped it that none of us who lived through it were ever quite the same again. Remnick reminds us, with skill and sympathy, that we cannot know the 1960s without knowing these three black men and the difference their differences made.
