King of the World
Page 35
I am grateful to the librarians at Sports Illustrated, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and The New Yorker for opening their files to me; to the boxing historian Hank Kaplan for free run of his shoe boxes filled with clippings on Ali, Liston, and Patterson; to the New York Public Library; to Bill Vourvoulias for helping to find old materials and conducting a few interviews about Liston’s death; and to Pete Wells for fact-checking the manuscript.
The reader undoubtedly understands that the passage of time could not help but make its mark on the research. Ali no longer speaks as well as he once did and Liston is gone. The quotations in the body of the book are mainly from newspapers, magazines, and broadcasts of the time, or from publications that came later. There are several books that are especially important to understanding the early Muhammad Ali. Foremost are Thomas Hauser’s excellent oral biography, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times; John Cottrell’s The Story of Muhammad Ali, Who Once Was Cassius Clay; and Jack Olsen’s Black Is Best: The Riddle of Cassius Clay. Cottrell and Olsen are especially good on Ali’s background and early fights, and Hauser provides unique material on, among other subjects, Ali’s complicated introduction to the Nation of Islam and his self-creation. To Hauser, Cottrell, and Olsen, I am indebted and grateful.
Other books that were of help were George Plimpton’s witty accounts in Shadow Box; José Torres’s Sting Like a Bee; A. S. “Doc” Young’s moving early portrait of Liston, The Champ Nobody Wanted; Rob Steen’s Sonny Boy; Robert Lipsyte’s Sportsworld; Gerald Early’s incisive essays in Tuxedo Junction and The Culture of Bruising; Joyce Carol Oates’s On Boxing; Floyd Patterson’s Victory Over Myself (with Milton Gross); Harold Conrad’s Letters to Muffo; The Autobiography of Malcolm X (with Alex Haley); A. J. Liebling’s A Neutral Corner; Norman Mailer’s anthologies The Long March and The Time of Our Time, which includes his Esquire article “Ten Thousand Words a Minute” and other boxing pieces; Jeffrey T. Sammons’s fine academic study Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society; Nobody Asked Me, But … The World of Jimmy Cannon, a compilation of columns edited by Jack Cannon and Tom Cannon; Taylor Branch’s Pillar of Fire, the second volume of his history of the King years; Gay Talese’s Fame and Obscurity, which includes his great Esquire profile of Floyd Patterson, “The Loser”; Muhammad Ali: The People’s Champ, edited by Elliot J. Gorn; The Muhammad Ali Reader, edited by Gerald Early; LeRoi Jones’s Home: Social Essays; and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.
Also helpful were Bruce Perry’s biography Malcolm; Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America; C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America; Claude Andrew Clegg Ill’s An Original Man: The Life of Elijah Muhammad; Nick Tosches’s profile of Liston in the February 1998 Vanity Fair; James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan; Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer’s Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s; Leon F. Litwack’s Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow; The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, edited by Clayborne Carson et al.; Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual; Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey, edited by Wilson Jeremiah Moses; Chris Mead’s Champion: Joe Louis, Black Hero in White America; The Autobiography of Jack Johnson; and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Nobody Knows My Name.
Sports Illustrated is the most comprehensive and accurate contemporaneous guide to the world of boxing in the early and middle sixties. The magazine helped make its name with its coverage of the Ali story. I’m grateful to the writers: W. C. Heinz, Huston Horn, Robert H. Boyle, Jack Olsen, Mort Sharnik, Gil Rogin, George Plimpton, and, later, Pat Putnam, Gary Smith, Bill Nack, and Mark Kram.
Thanks to Jack Bonomi for providing thousands of pages of transcripts from the Kefauver committee’s hearings on boxing, to HBO for its documentary Sonny Liston: The Mysterious Life and Death of a Champion, and to both the Classic Sports Network and Bill Cayton’s company, Big Fights, which provided me with videotapes of dozens of fights.
I owe a real debt to David Halberstam, who helped with the idea for the book and sets a standard for journalism and generosity, and to my friend and agent Kathy Robbins for making a vague notion a reality. I am also grateful to Jeffrey Frank, Thomas Hauser, Jack Newfield, Michael Shapiro, Jeffrey Toobin, Malcolm Gladwell, Ted Johnson, and Robert Lipsyte, who all read the manuscript with great care, and to Joy de Menil for constant help at Random House.
I am especially grateful to Tina Brown, who made a home for me at The New Yorker, to all of my colleagues at the magazine, and to Jason Epstein, who has been a force of integrity, generosity, and wit in publishing for forty-eight years.
My parents and grandmother were, as usual, an inspiration. The book is dedicated to my brother, who shared my fascination with my subject to such a degree that he even went with me to see Ali fight a professional wrestler, Antonio Inoki, via closed circuit at the Beacon Theater. And it is dedicated to my dear friend Eric Lewis, who skipped Ali-Inoki—but he is forgiven.
As ever, I owe far too much to recount here to my sons, Noah and Alex, and to my wife, Esther.
ALSO BY DAVID REMNICK
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And Other True Stories
In this collection, Remnick’s gift for character is sharper than ever as he writes about Gary Hart stumbling through life after Donna Rice; or Mario Cuomo, who now presides over a Saturday morning radio talk show, fielding questions from crackpots; or about Michael Jordan’s awesome return to the Chicago Bulls; or Reggie Jackson’s last times at bat. Remnick’s portraits are unified by his extraordinary ability to create a living character, so that the pieces in this book constitute a splendid pageant of the representative characters of our time.
Essays
KING OF THE WORLD
Muhammad Ali and the Rise of the American Hero
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.
Biography/Sports
LENIN’S TOMB
The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
This bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the collapse of the Soviet Union combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. “A moving illumination of the collapse of Communist faith and the Soviet Empire.… Remnick is the witness for us all” (The Wall Street Journal).
History
REPORTING
Writings from The New Yorker
David Remnick is a writer with a rare gift for making readers understand the hearts and minds of our public figures. Whether it’s the decline and fall of Mike Tyson, Al Gore’s struggle to move forward after his loss in the 2000 election, or Vladimir Putin dealing with Gorbachev’s legacy, Remnick brings his subjects to life with extraordinary clarity and depth. In Reporting, he gives us his best writing from the past fifteen years, ranging from American politics and culture to post-Soviet Russia to the Middle East conflict; from Tony Blair grappling with Iraq, to Philip Roth making sense of America’s past, to the rise of Hamas in Palestine. Both intimate and deeply informed by history, Reporting is an exciting and panoramic portrait of our times.
Essays
RESURRECTION
The Struggle for a New Russia
From the siege of Parliament to the farcically tilted elections of 1996, from the rubble of Grozny to the grandiose wealth and naked corruption of today’s Moscow, Remnick chronicles a society racked by change. Remnick composes this panorama out of dozens of finely realized individual portraits. Here is Mikhail Gorbachev, his head still swim
ming from his plunge from reverence to ridicule. Here is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the half-Jewish anti-Semite who conducts politics as loony performance art. And here is Boris Yeltsin, the tottering populist who is not above stealing elections. In Resurrection, they become the players in a drama so vast and moving that it deserves comparison with the best report age of George Orwell and Michael Herr.
History/Political Science
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