King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9798874828394 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HighBridge Company |
| Publication date: | 07/02/2024 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Bill Andrew Quinn is a veteran in the voice-over world. In addition to hundreds of commercials and audiobooks, his many credits include work on The Sopranos, The Montel Williams Show, and Showtime at the Apollo, as well as characters for Grand Theft Auto IV and other video games. Totinos, Corona, Lincoln-Mercury, and McDonald’s are among his many television campaign clients.
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."
Table of Contents
| Prologue: In Michigan | xi | |
| Part 1 | ||
| 1 | Underground Man | 3 |
| 2 | Two Minutes, Six Seconds | 27 |
| 3 | Mr. Fury and Mr. Gray | 43 |
| 4 | Stripped | 69 |
| Part 2 | ||
| 5 | The Bicycle Thief | 81 |
| 6 | Twentieth-Century Exuberance | 99 |
| 7 | Secrets | 125 |
| 8 | Hype | 145 |
| Part 3 | ||
| 9 | The Cross and the Crescent | 163 |
| 10 | Bear Hunting | 173 |
| 11 | "Eat Your Words!" | 183 |
| 12 | The Changeling | 205 |
| Part 4 | ||
| 13 | "Save Me, Joe Louis . . ." | 221 |
| 14 | Gunfire | 233 |
| 15 | The Anchor Punch | 253 |
| 16 | What's in a Name? | 267 |
| Epilogue: Old Men by the Fire | 285 | |
| Notes on Sources and Acknowledgments | 307 | |
| Index | 311 |
What People are Saying About This
Remnick is . . . one of the signature figures in a wonderful new generation of nonfiction writers.
Remnick is . . . one of the signature figures in a wonderful new generation of nonfiction writers.
By now we have our notions about what Ali meant -- to his time and to the history of his sport. 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.
Remnick constructs a narrative very much like Ali himself: astute, double-hearted, irresistible. He is so completely in charge of his craft that it becomes an art.
Interviews
Q: Are there any current athletes that you would consider on par with Ali in terms of significant social impact?
A: Only Michael Jordan compares to Ali, but the comparison is apples and oranges, perhaps. Ali and Jordan are sublime athletes, the best in the history of their sports: fierce, fast, extraordinarily dedicated and intelligent, craftsmen, and attentive to the smallest detail. And yet, without any disrespect to Jordan, I'm partial to Ali because of the way his story was played out in interesting times, under enormous political and social stresses, the way he brought a sense of wit and worldliness and cunning to his game. Ali's courage was athletic, but also political and religious; he took up challenges that helped African Americans and reflected a general humanity that is exemplary for all of us.
Q: What was the biggest surprise you discovered while writing King of the World?
A: Maybe the biggest surprise was the varieties of tension put on the shoulders of one man, a kid, really: In Sonny Liston, Clay faced the most fearsome fighter since Louis, and at the same time Clay kept his personal and religious transformation a secret for fear of losing the chance of a lifetime.
Q: What are your thoughts on the tough times that boxing is experiencing these days?
A: Boxing is popular in certain areas of the world and among various groups here and there, but there's no doubt that overall it's dying. Part of that is that we've woken up to the fact that while boxing's thrills and even beauty are undeniable, so, too, is the damage, the toll. I think as time goes by, certain sports decline (boxing) and others rise (basketball, soccer). What parent wouldn't prefer their kid take up baseball or basketball (or just about anything) and not boxing?
Q: If you could choose one book to receive this holiday season and one book to give, what would they be?
A: Among other books, I love the latest from Philip Gourevitch, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, and John McPhee. But you're getting me in trouble: A lot of New Yorker writers have published this season, and I want to get to all of them.
Q: Who would you consider your literary influences?
A: Talking about your own literary influences seems a little grand to me, but I can tell you that the writers I love (the dead ones) include Orwell (the journalism, especially), Akhmatova, Chekhov, Melville, Kafka, Hawthorne, and dozens of others. Influence is a strange thing, but clearly the wave of nonfiction writers of my youth in both The New Yorker and Esquire and elsewhere were very meaningful and thrilling: Mailer, Talese, Didion, Kempton, Liebling and Mitchell (of an older generation), Baldwin.