Celebrating The Greatest

By WILFRID SHEED

Although some politicians still find it worth their while to campaign against the 1960s, there's a sad silence now from the other end of the line. John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Janis, Jimi...where is everybody? Even the sassiest of them all has fallen publicly silent, which makes it a pleasure to pick up his voice again, or at least its echo, in David Remnick's haunting new book, King of the World: The Rise of Muhammad Ali (Random House; 336 pages: $25).

Since those giddy days, Muhammad Ali, ne Cassius Clay, has done two things nobody thought possible: he has finally stopped talking, and he has become universally popular. Those who know him now only as a benign, spectral presence at sports events and testimonial ceremonies can have no idea how much noise this man once made or what confusion he sowed in some people's heads. Previous athletes had been loved or hated, and that was that, but Ali had been both at the same time. Half of you wanted to see his head handed to him, the other half sort of hoped the rascal would get away with it, and all of you showed up for more the next time.

As Remnick tells it, Clay learned the uses of confusion by age 12, when he tied on his first gloves and discovered that his mother Odessa's serenity combined with his daddy Cassius Sr.'s maddening braggadocio sold tickets, captivated journalists and drove opponents clear up the wall. The phrase "I am the greatest" seems to have been almost Ali's first words, but the joke was that the words were absolutely true. The sweet little motormouth from Louisville, Ky., was about to become the greatest fighter in history, fast as a flyweight, strong as an ox and sly as a fox, with time left over to recite poetry between punches.

Like a good dramatist, Remnick centers his whole story on one amazing night when Ali proved his claims, cashed in his chips and changed his identity for good. Up until his epic first fight with Sonny Liston in 1964, Clay and his chatter had been just a good joke. Suddenly he was the heavyweight champion of the world, a position that, like Queen of England and Archbishop of Canterbury, carried certain moral responsibilities. So was Clay planning to be yet another credit to his race, like Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson, or was he going to be the other kind of black champ, a devil incarnate, like Liston then and Mike Tyson now?

Although the powers that be, from the President to Frank Sinatra, prayed for another saint, the public was happy either way. Hating a Liston was just as much fun as respecting a Patterson, and just as painful for the victim-challenger. In brilliant sketches of the archetypes, Remnick suggests Liston was trapped in his badness--people wanted him to be a bum forever--while Patterson lived in constant fear of not being good enough.

But Ali floated like a butterfly around such cliches. Instead of a saint or devil, why not both in one package? Or why not just go crazy and leave them guessing? On the day of the Liston fight, Clay summoned all the thespian training he had picked up in the rings of Louisville to go so thoroughly crazy that his vital signs went crazy too, and Liston was scared out of his mind. The worst mistake you can make in writing about Ali is to leave out the boxing, but Remnick's account of the fight that followed is so vivid that one can imagine Ali saying, "How'd you get inside my head, boy?"

Something else changed after that night. Whereas Cassius Clay's jests had all been geared strictly to boxing, Muhammad Ali's tongue became valuable advertising space, and it began to beam Black Muslim messages that jarred strangely against the fight hype and made Ali some real enemies, as opposed to the make-believe ones of sport.

But today in his Parkinson's-induced silence, Ali has had time to sift through the Muslim blarney and has returned to the more generous wisdom of the late Malcolm X, whom he regrets having deserted. "Malcolm was a very, very great man," he tells the author in his now halting speech. Odessa Clay's sweetness has manifestly overwhelmed Cassius Clay Sr.'s blather, and there is nothing left about their son not to like. At which point Remnick trips, for the first and only time, on his way out the door by tacking on a routine death-of-boxing editorial that is simply not big enough for the rich, reverberant world he has just given us. Fortunately, it comes much too late to harm a most excellent book.