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Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies, and director of the Center for Humanities at Washington University. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the editor of several volumes, including This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s; The Sammy Davis Jr. Reader; Body Language: Writers on Sport; Speech and Power; Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation; and My Soul's High Song: The Collected Works of Countee Cullen, as well as the author of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism; One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture; Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood; and Tuxedo Junction.

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Muhammad Ali is The Greatest. From Heavyweight Champion of the World to his ongoing battle with Parkinson's disease, Ali has captured the imagination of our finest writers and won admiration and scrutiny the world over.

With sixteen pages of classic photographs, this collection brings together thirty-two essays, interviews, and articles by the best contemporary sportswriters and literary journalists. Spanning four decades, these pieces chronicle the highs and lows of Ali's career -- his first pro fight in New York; his affiliation with the Nation of Islam, his epic battles with Joe Frazier and George Forman; his Vietnam draft refusal, and the subsequent stripping of his title; and his ultimate return to the spotlight at the 1996 Olympics -- memorable milestones in a truly extraordinary life.

Awe-inspiring, controversial, and beloved, Muhammad Ali, the man and the legend, comes out swinging in a collective portrait that is as illuminating as it is celebratory.

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The Muhammad Ali Reader

Harper Perennial

Chapter One

    TALES OF THE WONDERBOY

    Part One

Such latter-day disfigurements leave out
All mention of those older scars that merge
On any riddled surfaces about.
--Weldon Kees, "A Good Chord on a Bad Piano"

There exists a great fear today, or at least there should, thatMuhammad Ali, no stranger to the most intense sort of adulationreserved usually for certain psychopaths, mystics, and movie stars,may become absolutely overesteemed by the society in which he lives.This would put him in danger not only of having his considerablesignificance misunderstood, but also, ironically, of being diminishedas both a public figure and a black man of some illustriouscomplexity. Ali, as a result of his touching, or poignant, orpathetic, or tragic (take your pick) appearance at the torch-lightingceremony at 1996 Olympics Games in Atlanta has become, for newgenerations that did not grow up with him and for the oldergenerations that did, the Great American Martyr, our new Lincoln, ournew Martin Luther King, Oh, Father Abraham, Oh, Father Martin, Oh,Father Muhammad: the man whose hands, once unerring pistons ofpunishment in the prizefighting ring, tremble from boxing-inducedParkinson's disease; the man whose voice is such a slurred whisperthat he, who was once called the Louisville Lip because he lovedtalking so much, does not like to speak in public and rarely does; theonce-uncompromising black nationalist now reduced, like Orson Wellesat the end, to performing magic tricks for the crowd as if he wereparodying his own pop-culture greatness, exposing it as anillusion, just as his nationalism had been, just as hiscultist/religious self had been. Everything in popular culture writheswith the throb of impermanence, its significancethreatened by the triteness it cannot hide, by the banality it bloatsinto eminence through a personality that blends the public and theprivate. And no one embodied American popular culture, its excesses,its barbarities, and its disarming densities, more than Muhammad Ali.

    The public rarely responds to this sort of demise of a greatpopular performer with anything approaching good sense orobjectivity, and almost certainly with nothing approaching a kind ofgracious humor, something that, in this case, the subject himself mayvery much embrace and seems to be trying to instruct us in how toachieve. This is even less likely to happen when the figure inquestion is a black man, a cunning archetype who is already soburdened by a baggage of both sentimentality and taboo as to be likelya virtual walking expression of the culture's irrationality even ifhis old age had been a bit less marked by illness. And Ali had been alightning rod for the culture's irrationality all of his life,sometimes provoking it purposely, sometimes a veritablerepresentation of it himself. This was, after all, the man who not onlybrilliantly playacted a combination panic attack/nervous breakdownat the weigh-in of his first championship fight with the dreaded SonnyListon in 1964; served as the redoubtable, tricksterlike black comicto Howard Cosell's liberal Jewish straight man; had a highlypublicized religious conversion to a strange, if influential, cultthat disliked whites but wanted to be a perfect imitation of them,aggrandizing their importance while humanizing their stark doctrine;and who said that no Vietcong ever called him "nigger"; but who alsobelieved for some several years that a mad scientist named Yacubinvented white people by grafting them from blacks, that satellitesfrom Allah circled the earth and would imminently destroy the UnitedStates, and that blacks who dated or married whites should be killed.

    Now the public, because of Ali's illness, wants to drown him in abathos of sainthood and atone for its guilt. This is principally trueof whites who spend a good deal of their time when they think aboutrace (and to think about Ali is to think about race because Ali madeit such a prominent subject in his public rantings and sermons, sosuccessfully that he, in fact, succeeded in making over his mostinner-city-like black opponents, the blackest of the black, into whitemen), either denying that it is a problem they caused or confessingthat they have committed such atrocities against blacks that only themost abject deference to them can make up for it all. (For a blackperson to experience this is a great deal like being caught between benignneglect and affirmative action, tough love and a comforting paternalism, theamputation of virulent racism and the gangrene of liberal racism.)This guilt arises largely from Ali's stance against the Vietnam War, awar we have come to see as at best misguided and as at worst evil, andhis subsequent three-and-one-half year exile from boxing; and from afeeling that somehow, we, the American public, or the white Americanpublic (since blacks were in no position to abuse him through a rathercapricious application of the Selective Service Act), are the cause ofhis current affliction. And we did this to him because he became aBlack Muslim and spoke out frankly against racism and whitedouble-dealing, something no black athletic hero had ever done before(or since, really). He was severely maimed by and for our racialsins, our racist use of the system against him.

    Thus, it seems no accident at all that Muhammad Ali should bere-awakened in the public's mind, largely as the subject of theAcademy Award-winning documentary, When We Were Kings, along withJackie Robinson, as we celebrated in 1997 the fiftieth anniversary ofhis breaking the color line in major league baseball with the BrooklynDodgers. Yoked together in the public's consciousness this year were,arguably, the two most influential American athletes of the twentiethcentury, the American century, the first and maybe not the last,hallowed nearly as handsome, transcendent, boyish American angelshovering over our leveled playing fields of dreams (where merit andromance walk hand-in-hand), sacrifices on the altar of ourhypocritical democracy, emblems of the double V, the victory on twofronts, the real world of social relations and the fantasy world ofathletics: the noble black American male as inventor of a hereticalAmericanism, demonstrating what it cost a black to have democraticideals and to force whites to live up to them. Ironically, Robinsondid this by insisting he was an American and Ali by insisting he wasvictimized because he was never considered an American, but both paidthe price. What do we remember most about Robinson but that hesuffered, that he endured insults and provocation, that he died at therelatively young age of 52, prematurely aged, we feel, from the abusehe took as a player in order to integrate the Great American Game. Inthe dim lighting of the distressing paradox of American racerelations, we forget, though, that Robinson received more universalacclaim during his life than virtually any black person had beforehim.

    It is no slight schizophrenia that besets us when in today's society youngblack men are so often represented in our popular culture asbuffoonish thugs or coonlike clowns, in our collective imagination asreal, certifiable thugs and rapists. When the police mistreat a blackman like Rodney King or when a sports hero like O. J. Simpson fallsfrom grace, we hardly know whether to be outraged or relieved. Yetwhen it comes to Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali these days,...