‘Ali: A Life’ explores an American pariah’s uprising
F. Scott Fitzgerald notwithstanding, one famous American who had a doozy of a first act also gave us an unforgettable second. And Muhammad Ali even had a pretty good third in him. In his riveting new biography, “Ali: A Life, “author Jonathan Eig digs deep into both the mercurial boxing champ and his paradoxical country to make sense of this epic drama.
It’s easy to forget today, but at one time, Muhammad Ali — whom we first met wearing his birth name, Cassius Marcellus Clay — might have been the most hated man in America. That was partly by design: As Mr. Eig documents, the PR-savvy young heavyweight knew that his boasting, clowning and taunting of opponents, so unbecoming an athlete in the 1960s, would make people pay to see him lose. In the civilrights era, the boxer challenged America’s sense of how a black celebrity should behave. After winning the championship, he promptly announced he was joining the Nation of Islam, a blacknationalist group that turned white Americans clammy with fear, and changing his name to the foreign-sounding “Muhammad Ali.” By 1967, after establishing himself as unbeatable in the ring, Ali refused induction into the military. He might as well have peed on the flag.
But as Mr. Eig smartly shows, the complexity of Ali’s attitude toward induction is a metaphor for his journey from loquacious showman to global civic icon. Over time, Ali’s initially selfish reasons for refusing induction gave way to a religion-based stand principled enough to hold up in the U.S. Supreme Court (though boxing’s refusal to license a Vietnam-era “draft dodger” still cost Ali 3½ years of his fighting prime).
Mr. Eig vividly paints the young Ali, a man raised in the Jim Crow South, his physical beauty and unprecedented brashness: “I don’t have to be who you want me to be,” this black man told white America. Here’s Mr. Eig on Ali’s unconventional fighting style, as seen in his 1966 fight with Ernie Terrell: “Ali … boxed beautifully, changing speed and direction like a kite, cracking jabs, digging hooks to the ribs, moving in and out with no steady rhythm, no pattern. He was a revolutionary, like Charlie Parker, with an innate style and virtuosity no one would ever reproduce.