Mark Kram, one of Sports Illustrated’s most lyrical writers of the 1960s and ’70s and the author of a recent book about the tormented relationship between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, died Friday in Washington. He was 69.
The apparent cause was a heart attack, said Mark Kram Jr., one of his sons.
Mr. Kram signed a contract with HarperCollins Publishers last month to write a book about Mike Tyson and had returned June 9 from five days in Memphis, where Tyson was knocked out by Lennox Lewis the night before.
Mr. Kram was familiar with boxing from his years of covering the sport for Sports Illustrated. But while still an admirer of Ali’s boxing skills, Mr. Kram portrayed him in his Ali-Frazier “Ghosts of Manilla” as less of a political and social force than others have.
“I saw a quote in a magazine that said Ali was second only to Martin Luther King in his social influence,” Mr. Kram said in an interview with The New York Times last year. “I said, `What did he do?’ I tried to figure it out. And it was nothing. He was about the Muslims and he was about himself. But this image was so embedded in the public consciousness that he’s some sort of saint that it’s hard to disabuse people of it.”
Mr. Kram grew up in Baltimore and was a three-sport athlete in high school. His minor league baseball career ended when he was beaned by a pitch in a game in Burlington, N.C. He attended the University of Georgia for a few weeks, “but was home by Thanksgiving,” Mark Jr. said.
Mr. Kram is also survived by his wife, Rene, five other children and six grandchildren.
Kram’s writing was largely self-taught. He was known to be a brooding writer who wrote some of the most literary and incisive articles about boxing of his era.
After Sports Illustrated dismissed him in 1977, he wrote for Playboy, GQ and Esquire.
