King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero

by David Remnick Narrated by Bill Andrew Quinn

Overview

The bestselling biography of Muhammad Ali-with an Introduction by Salman Rushdie



On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was "a new kind of black man" who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism.



No one has captured Ali-and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated-with greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lenin's Tomb (and editor of the New Yorker). In charting Ali's rise from the gyms of Louisville, Kentucky, to his epochal fights against Liston and Floyd Patterson, Remnick creates a canvas of unparalleled richness. He gives us empathetic portraits of wisecracking sportswriters and bone-breaking mobsters; of the baleful Liston and the haunted Patterson; of an audacious Norman Mailer and an enigmatic Malcolm X. Most of all, King of the World does justice to the speed, grace, courage, humor, and ebullience of one of the greatest athletes and irresistibly dynamic personalities of our time.

Editorial Reviews

bn.com

New Yorker editor David Remnick's biography of Muhammad Ali shows the man for what he was: larger than life. Paying great attention to Ali's early career, Remnick shows Ali as an athlete who personified a larger cultural movement and represented a sea change in American culture. Ali showed us a new path, and Remnick's book is a chronicle of how Ali became the man we remember him as. A fascinating blend of sociology, fight reportage, history, and wit, King of the World is essential for anyone who hopes to understand Ali, and the early 1960s, more completely.

Budd Schulberg

Here's a fine book to remind us again that Ali was born with a gift for living (and believing) in a world without end.
-- The New York Times Book Review

Hal Hinson

In the preface to his collection The Devil Problem and Other True Stories, David Remnick writes: "Reporters are interested above all ... in stories." If so, then Remnick has lived a charmed life. In terms of sheer drama and significance, no story in our collective lifetime compares to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Remnick covered for the Washington Post and used as the basis of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lenin's Tomb. With his latest book, King of the World, the author's subject is not only the most heroic sports figure of the 20th century, but also, as Remnick puts it, "one of the most compelling and electric American figures of the age."

The result is a book that's strong in its grasp of social forces but also sensitive in attention to human detail. What drew Remnick -- who was recently named editor of the New YorkerKing of the World is a book about a boxer, not a book about boxing. Remnick is most interested in what happens outside the ring. When Remnick begins his story, Muhammad Ali is still Cassius Clay, and must share the stage with two of his most fearsome opponents, Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. Patterson, Remnick writes, was the Good Negro, "an approachable and strangely fearful man, a deferential champion of civil rights, integration, and Christian decency," while Liston, "a veteran of the penitentiary system before he came to the ring," reluctantly took on the role of the Bad Negro. Each represented a stereotype Ali would ultimately transcend. "I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man," Ali tells the author. "I had to show that to the world."

Remnick's deft staging and insight make familiar events seem fresh in the retelling. Less well-traveled territory -- Ali's relationship with the Nation of Islam, his friendship with (and ultimate repudiation of) Malcolm X and the transition from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali -- is also handled well. Remnick only follows Ali's story through the champion's 1967 refusal to enter the armed forces. ("Man," he famously said, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong.") He saves his most impassioned writing for the fight Ali wages against the American military. As a result of his stand, Ali was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. However, the real cost for his refusal was something like $10 million in purses and endorsements. What was worse, Remnick writes, it also cost him his title. "His title, which he had coveted from the time he was twelve."

Visiting the 54-year-old Ali on his Michigan farm, Remnick finds that the three-time heavyweight champion of the world thinks about death "all the time now." Suffering severely from Parkinson's, Ali has been robbed of his most powerful weapon -- his voice. And yet he has not been silenced. Of the few remaining icons of the '60s, Remnick observes, Ali is by far the most adored. "He hit people for a living, and, yet, by middle age he would be a symbol not merely of courage, but of love, of decency, even a kind of wisdom." With King of the World, David Remnick has written a great book about Muhammad Ali -- a book that is worthy of its subject. -- Salon

Boston Globe

A worthy tribute to Ali.

Time Magazine

A most excellent book. Remnick's account of the 1964 Liston fight is so vivid one can imagine Ali saying, "How'd you get inside my head, boy?"

L.S. Klepp

. . .Intelligent, informed, enlightened. . . —Entertainment Weekly

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

It has been an amazing story, and Mr. Remnick captures the best of it in King of the World.
—The New York Times

New York Times

Penetrating. . .an amazine story, and Mr. Remnick captures the best of it.

Wall Street Journal

Succeeds more than any previous book in bringing Ali into focus.

Library Journal

Recently appointed editor of The New Yorker, Remnick, the author of Resurrection (LJ 12/97) and Lenin's Tomb (LJ 6/15/93), turns from Russia's upheavals to a different revolution: the change in black political consciousness in the early 1960s and the metamorphosis of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali. Remnick contrasts the era's three major heavyweight champions as competing models of black identity: the reticent former knee-breaking goon, Sonny Liston, who terrified opponents while being entirely the pawn of white mobsters; the introspective, Catholic integrationist Floyd Patterson, who reluctantly fought the overwhelming Liston because President Kennedy asked him to; and the mouthy, beautiful seven-to-one underdog who "shook up the world" by mastering Liston, severing the mob's claim on the heavyweight title, and trading in his "slave name" for the Muslims. Not every athlete could so fully engage a mind like Remnick's; his unlikely achievement is to bring freshness and a wider focus to the legend-tangled story while fully exploring supporting characters from Frankie Carbo to Malcolm X. Remnick's is the smartest Ali biography since Wilfrid Sheed's elegant ode Muhammad Ali (LJ 11/1/75) but with a broader cultural range. Highly recommended.--Nathan Ward, "Library Journal"

L.S. Klepp

. . .Intelligent, informed, enlightened. . .
-- Entertainment Weekly

The Wall Street Journal

Succeeds more than any previous book in bringing Ali into focus.

The Boston Globe

A worthy tribute to Ali.

Mark McClusky

Über Ali

Before there was Muhammad Ali, arguably the most famous athlete ever to walk this earth, there was Cassius Clay, a fast-talking kid from Louisville, Kentucky. Clay went to Rome in 1960 and won an Olympic gold medal in the light-heavyweight division, then returned to a country where he couldn't eat where he wanted or stay at a hotel with whites.

There was nothing new about this institutionalized racism, nothing particularly surprising about Clay's frustration with it. But the story of Clay's transformation into Muhammad Ali is the story of a society grappling with racial issues, and of how those issues played out in the boxing ring. In David Remnick's new book, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero, we see how a kid from Kentucky became the most highly visible symbol of a new society, one where achievement and flair would allow him to become a hero to blacks and whites alike.

The career of Muhammad Ali stretched through four decades and countless fights. Remnick focuses on the formative period of Ali's professional career, especially his two fights against Sonny Liston and his defeat of Floyd Patterson. In fact, Liston and Patterson are two of the more compelling figures in this beautifully written book, and the narrative begins with the first title fight between the champion, Patterson, and the challenger, Liston.

The promoters of the Patterson-Liston fight (mostly Mafia related, we learn in an informative tangent) decided to portray the fight as a battle between the cultured Negro and the frightening black man. Patterson was an introspective fighter, well-spoken, insecure in ways, deferential to white writers. Liston, on the other hand, was a sullen ex-convict, illiterate and uncomfortable with reporters. The press and public was solidly behind Patterson, but Liston destroyed him in their first fight, and did so again in a rematch.

Liston was thought unbeatable. Think of Mike Tyson at the height of his powers. In fact, the brooding Tyson has often said that Liston is a fighter he identifies strongly with. There weren't many credible challengers for the title, but into that void stepped Cassius Clay, who beat Liston twice to establish himself as the new standard bearer in the heavyweight division.

Clay was already starting to follow the teachings of Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad and his then-deputy, Malcolm X. He was a handsome, charismatic man. With this persona, he presented a new model for the black athlete. He wasn't the introspective, accommodating Patterson. Nor was he the frighteningly terse Liston. He was a different sort of man, confident, astonishingly talented, and committed to a religion that many found repulsive.

Ali showed us a new path, and Remnick's book is a chronicle of how Ali became the man we remember him as. A fascinating blend of sociology, fight reportage, history, and wit, King of the World is essential for anyone who hopes to understand Ali, and the early 1960s, more completely.
— Mark McClusky, is the chief of reporters at Sports Illustrated for Kids.

Kirkus Reviews

A literate, intelligent evocation of the great heavyweight champion. Remnick (Resurrection), the Pulitzer Prize winner who is editor of The New Yorker, opens—wisely—with the September 1962 fight between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. His profiles of both men are remarkable studies of the sociological backdrop for Ali's entrance upon the scene. Patterson was cast as the good, humble Negro aligned with God; Liston, an ex-con who worked as an enforcer for the mob, as the big, bad, scary black. The brash, poetry-spouting Cassius Clay (as he was still known) fit neither stereotype. Despite his 1960 Olympic gold medal, his obvious speed, and his boxing skills, sportswriters hated the impudent young fighter. He was "considered little more than a light-hitting loudmouth." Clay was no one's pick to steal the title from the overpowering Liston. Remick does a fantastic job of setting the stage for that February 1964 fight, noting that even Clay's people had their doubts: One insider merely hoped "that Clay wouldn't get hurt." The jabbering, taunting Clay pummeled the plodding, dispirited Liston, who simply quit after the sixth round. It was shortly after the fight that Ali's association with the Nation of Islam was revealed. His friendship with Malcolm X and his espousal of the Black Muslim creed, along with his promotional rantings of "I am the greatest!," did not endear him to the public. But he kept winning, beating Liston yet again in 1965 in the most controversial hit in heavyweight history. Remnick's reenactment of that one-punch, "phantom punch" knockout in the first round is brilliant. Remnick tails off with Ali's 1967 refusal of the military draft and hissubsequent suspension, not going into quite enough depth to explain Ali's virtual canonization by the American press and public. But no matter: This is a great look at a warrior who came to symbolize love.

From the Publisher

"By now we all have our notions about what Ali meant — to his time and to the history of his sport. Of course David Remnick sheds light on these subjects, but where King of the World really shines is in the ring itself. With telling detail, Remnick captures the drama, danger, beauty, and ugliness of a generation's worth of big heavyweight fights." — Bob Costa

"Succeeds more than any previous book in bringing Ali into focus . . . as a starburst of energy, ego and ability whose like will never be seen again." —The Wall Street Journal

"Best Nonfiction Book of the Year" —Time

"Penetrating . . . reveal[s] details that even close followers of [Ali] might not have known. . . . An amazing story." —The New York Times

"Nearly pulse-pounding narrative power . . . an important account of a period in American social history." —Chicago Tribune

"A pleasure . . . haunting . . . so vivid that one can imagine Ali saying, 'How'd you get inside my head, boy?'" —Wilfrid Sheed, Time 

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192549445
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

When Talese was still at the Times and writing about his favorite subjects, Patterson and Cus D'Amato, he was considered an eccentric. In the newsroom, Talese wore immaculate hand-tailored suits; he was, in the words of one colleague, "blindingly handsome." But for all his outward polish and youth, he approached his work like a reporter, seeking out ballplayers, getting to know them. In those days, this was un-Times-like for the sports department. Daley, who was the dominant columnist since the forties, derived his prestige from the paper itself; when he won the Pulitzer Prize, many of his colleagues grumbled and said that it should have gone to Red Smith at the Herald Tribune or Cannon at the Post. Daley's prose was flat, but it was the prose that the Pulitzer committee read, if they read sports at all. Most of the other sportswriters on the Times were no less imperial: they carried themselves as if they were The New York Times's ambassador to the court of baseball or the court of basketball. When Allison Danzig covered the U.S. Open at Forest Hills he did not deign to seek out a tennis player for an interview; the player sought out Allison Danzig. Not a few of the deskmen and reporters were appalled by the unorthodox presence of Gay Talese, and they could never figure out why the managing editor, Turner Catledge, had set him loose on the sporting world.

When Talese left the paper in 1965 to write books and longer magazine articles, he had one inheritor in place, a reporter in his mid-twenties named Robert Lipsyte. Like Cannon, Lipsyte grew up in New York, but he was a middle-class Jew from the Rego Park neighborhood in Queens. He went from his junior year at Forest HillsHigh School straight to Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1957. After mulling over a career as a screenwriter or an English professor, Lipsyte applied for a job as a copy boy at the Times and, to his astonishment, got it. "They usually said they hired Rhodes scholars in those days," he said. As a copy boy, Lipsyte admired Talese for his sense of style and innovation, for his ability to squeeze a distinct voice onto the uniform pages of the Times. Lipsyte made the staff at twenty-one when he showed hustle: one day the hunting and fishing columnist failed to send in a column from Cuba, and so Lipsyte sat down and, on deadline, knocked out a strange and funny column on how fish and birds were striking back at anglers and hunters. Lipsyte wrote about high school basketball players like Connie Hawkins and Roger Brown. He helped cover the 1962 Mets with Louis Effrat, a Timesman who had lost the Dodgers beat when they moved out of Brooklyn. Effrat's admiration for his younger colleague was, to say the least, grudging: "Kid, they say in New York you can really write but you don't know what the fuck you're writing about."

If there was one subject that Lipsyte made it a point to learn about, it was race. In 1963, he met Dick Gregory, one of the funniest comics in the country and a constant presence in the civil rights movement. The two men became close friends, and eventually Lipsyte helped Gregory write Nigger, his autobiography. Even as a sports reporter, Lipsyte contrived ways to write about race. He wrote about the Blackstone Rangers gang, he got to know Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. He covered rallies at which black protesters expressed their outrage against a country that would celebrate blacks only when they carried a football or boxed in a twenty-foot ring.

In the winter of 1963-64, the Times's regular boxing writer, Joe Nichols, declared that the Liston-Clay fight was a dog and that he was going off to spend the season covering racing at Hialeah. The assignment went to Lipsyte.

Unlike Jimmy Cannon and the other village elders, Lipsyte found himself entranced with Clay. Here was this funny, beautiful, skilled young man who could fill your notebook in fifteen minutes.

"Clay was unique, but it wasn't as if he were some sort of creature from outer space for me," Lipsyte said. "For Jimmy Cannon, he was, pardon the expression, an uppity nigger, and he could never handle that. The blacks he liked were the blacks of the thirties and the forties. They knew their place. Joe Louis called Jimmy Cannon 'Mr. Cannon' for a long time. He was a humble kid. Now here comes Cassius Clay popping off and abrasive and loud, and it was a jolt for a lot of sportswriters, like Cannon. That was a transition period. What Clay did was make guys stand up and decide which side of the fence they were on.

"Clay upset the natural order of things at two levels. The idea that he was a loud braggart brought disrespect to this noble sport. Or so the Cannon people said. Never mind that Rocky Marciano was a slob who would show up at events in a T-shirt so that the locals would buy him good clothes. They said that Clay 'lacked dignity.' Clay combined Little Richard and Gorgeous George. He was not the sort of sweet dumb pet that writers were accustomed to. Clay also did not need the sportswriters as a prism to find his way. He transcended the sports press. Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, so many of them, were appalled. They didn't see the fun in it. And, above all, it was fun."

A week before the fight, Clay stretched out on a rubbing table at the Fifth Street Gym and told the reporters who gathered around, "I'm making money, the popcorn man making money, and the beer man, and you got something to write about."

The next day, Lipsyte heard that the Beatles would be dropping by the Fifth Street Gym. The visit had been arranged, of course, by the eternally hip Harold Conrad, who was publicizing the fight for MacDonald. The Beatles were in Miami to do The Ed Sullivan Show. Liston had actually gone to their performance and was not much impressed. As the Beatles ripped through their latest single, the champion turned to Conrad and said, "Are these motherfuckers what all the people are screaming about? My dog plays drums better than that kid with the big nose." Conrad figured that Clay would understand a bit better.

Lipsyte was twenty-six, a card-carrying member of the rock and roll generation, and he saw that for all its phoniness, a meeting between the Beatles and Clay was a meeting of the New, two acts that would mark the sixties. The older columnists passed, but he saw a story.

The Beatles arrived. They were still in the mop-top phase, but they were also quite aware of their own appeal. Clay was not in evidence, and Ringo Starr was angry.
"Where the fuck's Clay?" he said.
To kill a few minutes, Ringo began introducing the members of the band to Lipsyte and a few other reporters, though he introduced George Harrison as Paul and Lennon as Harrison, and finally Lennon lost patience.
"Let's get the fuck out of here," he said. But two Florida state troopers blocked the door and somehow kept them in the gym just long enough for Clay to show up.
"Hello, there, Beatles," said Cassius Clay. "We oughta do some road shows together. We'll get rich."
The photographers lined up the Beatles in the ring and Clay faked a punch to knock them all to the canvas: the domino punch.
Now the future of music and the future of sports began talking about the money they were making and the money they were going to make.
"You're not as stupid as you look," Clay said.
"No," Lennon said, "but you are."
Clay checked to make sure Lennon was smiling, and he was.

The younger writers, like Lipsyte, really did see Clay as a fifth Beatle, parallel players in the great social and generational shift in American society. The country was in the midst of an enormous change, an earthquake, and this fighter from Louisville and this band from Liverpool were part of it, leading it, whether they knew it yet or not. The Beatles' blend of black R&B and Liverpool pop and Clay's blend of defiance and humor was changing the sound of the times, its temper; set alongside the march on Washington and the quagmire in Vietnam, they would, in their way, become essential pieces of the sixties phantasmagoria.

For most of the older columnists, however, this PR-inspired scene at the Fifth Street Gym was just more of all that was going wrong in the world, more noise, more disrespect, more impudence from young men whom they could not hope to comprehend. "Clay is part of the Beatle movement," Jimmy Cannon would write famously a few years later. "He fits in with the famous singers no one can hear and the punks riding motorcycles with iron crosses pinned to their leather jackets and Batman and the boys with their long dirty hair and the girls with the unwashed look and the college kids dancing naked at secret proms held in apartments and the revolt of students who get a check from Dad every first of the month and the painters who copy the labels off soup cans and the surf bums who refuse to work and the whole pampered style-making cult of the bored young."

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