Ten Favorite Ali Books

On the one hand, Ali lives on as never before possible, with his fights and speeches, poems and weigh-in antics thriving all over the internet. And anyone wanting to be cheered by watching the moral and artistic triumph of the Zaire fight can do so at will. But, while documentaries (such as ‘A.K.A. Cassius Clay’ or ‘When We Were Kings’) are pretty accessible these days, old books are another story. This list is not exhaustive, but reflects the Ali books I have for some reason held onto over my life as a fan, and is a mixture of narrative and photo works. Books I once owned by Ferdie Pachecho or Howard Cosell or others in the Ali circle have not lasted, and while the books which list Ali as author or co-author are rewarding to read, they have never caught his voice for me, especially since his real voice is now available almost everywhere. At a publishing convention I once was in the presence of a giant German book called G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time). It was too large to carry off alone and cost several thousand dollars and was watched over by its own bodyguard as I turned its oversized pages. I have not included it here, though it was very beautiful. As a fan, it’s the one that got away.

1. Muhammad Ali: A Portrait in Words and Photographs by Wilfrid Sheed (1975). Was there ever a coffee table book better than this? I have dragged it from house to house for forty years. Novelist Sheed does his elegant best to seem unsparing and independent, but this is a thinking fan’s book dominated by the magnificent photos of Neil Leifer, whose career was made by his picture of Ali shouting “Get up Chump!” over the prone Sonny Liston in 1965. I once was lucky enough to tour Leifer’s apartment in search of a cover photo for a magazine piece on boxing. We looked at some wonderful unpublished images of Ali-Norton at Yankee Stadium and other fights, then we rounded back to a framed print of the iconic Ali-Liston photo in his hallway. “Really, though,” Leifer admitted, “this is your cover.” He was right.

2) Muhammad Ali: Memories by Neil Leifer and Thomas Hauser (1992) is another beautiful scrapbook (probably one of the few boxing books published by Rizzoli and designed by Milton Glaser). It overlaps with the earlier Sheed book, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have both.

3) Muhammad Ali: A Thirty-Year Journey by Howard Bingham (1993). Bingham, Ali’s best friend and personal photographer, took many Ali photos that you know already, including one of my favorites: the one where Malcolm X is mentoring over the future champ’s leather-jacketed shoulder in 1963, and the picture of him among the pyramids in 1964, meeting Elvis or sparring with Jim Brown in 1973. If you want a sense of Ali’s life outside the ring, Bingham’s book is a beautiful chronological ‘journey’.

4) Superfight #II: Muhammad Ali Vs. Joe Frazier by Joseph Okpaku (1974). As commemorative quickie books go, this was a keeper. It is filled with black and white photos of the first two fights in the trio, and if you were a kid wishing he’d been there on March 8, 1971, it somehow helped to know what hairstyle Diana Ross had worn on her date with Barry Gordy to the Garden, or what nice seats Woody Allen or young John Kennedy Jr. had scored for the amazing night. With a knowledgable foreword by Jose Torres, who was then the former Light-Heavyweight Champion and wrote his own fine bio of the Champ, Sting Like a Bee: The Muhammad Ali Story.

5) Superman vs. Muhammad Ali (DC Comics, Neal Adams & Denny O/Neil, 1978) This one, in which Ali and the Man of Steel face off with aliens in outerspace, is goofy but evocative, with its cover showing ringside celebrities Jimmy Carter and Sonny Bono. After the 1974 win over the invincible strongman George Foreman and the larger-than-life battle of wills in the Thrilla in Manila the following year, it seemed quite natural to kids like me that Ali could take on Superman, another muscle-bound opponent probably vulnerable to the rope-a-dope technique, as long as heat-vision was barred in the rules.

5) King of the Hill: Norman Mailer on the Fight of the Century (1971). This may not all hold up as well as I remember, but as a piece of deadline writing, it was spectacular. Who would even attempt this now? Even better is the version published in that week’s Life magazine, with photos by Frank Sinatra. My man lost this one, but not by much, and got off the canvas to take their next two meetings, each deserving of its own book.

6) King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David Remnick (1998). This is the most thoughtful account of Ali’s transformation — from Louisville kid to Olympic and Heavyweight champion to Muslim and conscientious objector and civil rights figure. It does not tell the story of his return. Remnick expands on Mailer’s idea of Liston, Patterson, and Ali as three points on the black political spectrum of the 1960s. And then he goes from there. As a teenager, Remnick paid to see Ali fight the Japanese wrestler. That’s a fan. As good a biography as we have, but not a full life.

7) The Fight by Norman Mailer (1974). The fight in question is the Rumble in the Jungle, winning the title back from George Foreman ten years after beating the similarly invincible Sonny Liston. You live in a world in which you can watch the Zaire fight almost at will, but most of the readers of this work were desperate to see the delayed tape of this great event. It was largely written for Playboy (I remember my dad helpfully cutting out the article, which still had smutty cartoons about cavemen that puzzled me as an 11-year-old). Whenever I watch this fight I am reminded of Mailer’s lines about Ali “leaning as far back on the ropes as a deep-sea fisherman is braced back on his chair when setting the hook on a big strike.” Or at the glorious end of the eighth, with his big exhausted opponent sufficiently softened, “the best punch of the startled night, the blow Ali saved for a career. Foreman’s arms flew out to the side like a man with a parachute jumping out of a plane…” Watching the Zaire fight is one of life’s great pleasures, but this book, despite Norman’s typical indulgences, remains a great critical text to accompany the play.

8) The Muhammad Ali Reader edited by Gerald Early (1998). Himself a wonderful essayist on boxing and other subjects, Early knows his fights. This collection has most of what you would expect or hope for (profiles by Gay Talese, Tom Wolf, A.J. Liebling, Ishmael Reed, Hunter Thompson, Roger Kahn, Gary Wills, and Murray Kempton) but also some more rarefied stuff, including forgotten interviews with Muhammad and later pieces by Wole Soyinka and David Maraniss.

9) Muhammad Ali in Perspective by Thomas Hauser (with the cooperation of Muhammad Ali, 1996). Hauser has written several decent books about and with the Champ. This is a coffee table telling of the great tale, not as beautifully done as the Sheed book but knowing that this is how Ali himself preferred his life story to be laid out adds something meaningful, from having his bike stolen and taking up boxing when he was 89 pounds to lighting the Olympic torch in 1996, the year this book was published.

10) Great Men Die Twice: The Selected Works of Mark Kram (2015). I am not a fan of Kram’s book revisiting the Ali-Frazier rivalry, Ghosts of Manila, which reads like a bitter return journey. But this posthumous collection compiled by his son has Kram’s best sportswriting, chiefly the stories that made him famous while he covered the the biggest and most exciting beat in the 1970s, writing about Ali for Sports Illustrated. His account of the Thrilla in Manila, “Lawdy Lawdy He’s Great,” is still as good as it gets, but this book also includes his 1971 account setting the scene for their first Superfight as well as profiles of the emergent Don King, Gil Clancy, Eddie Futch, and other characters from the scruffy epoch. The book opens with Kram’s long goodbye to the Champ, his 1989 Esquire piece witnessing Ali’s early treatments for Parkinson’s, (“propped up slightly, a skim of sweat on his lips and forehead, eyes closed, an almost imperceptible tremor to his eyes and head”) which a doctor at the time had convinced him was simply the result of pesticide poisoning and could be cured through blood cleaning. Kram’s eloquent farewell to Ali was published almost 27 years before the end, and highlights how long and dignified was his decline.

“For twenty years, “ Kram writes, “while he turned the porno shop of sports into international theater, attention was paid in a way it never was before or has been since.” Watching his blood leave and return to his body in the hospital, Ali remarks to Kram, “You die here, they take you home?” The nurses roll their eyes at the innocence of the question before one of them answers, with a deadpan expression, “You die, we take you home, Muhammad.” Great men die twice, Kram concludes, “once as great, and once as men,” and preferably, “with grace.”