No sportsman’s life has been more chronicled than Muhammad Ali’s, or it certainly feels that way. And, as a subject, “the Greatest” has attracted some of the best. Tom Wolfe wrote at length about “the Marvellous Mouth” – then still Cassius Clay – in 1963, as he prepared for his first title shot against Sonny Liston. Norman Mailer wrote one of the defining sports books, The Fight, about Ali and George Foreman’s Rumble in the Jungle. Foreman’s knockout was memorably recorded: “He went over like a six-foot 60-year-old butler who has just heard tragic news.” Hunter S Thompson was also in the press pack in Zaire in 1974, but contrived to miss the epic contest.
Latterly, David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, traced the boxer’s early years in his 1998 biography King of the World: the invention of “the most original and magnetic athlete of the century”. Ali, who died last year, aged 74, had a story so outsized that all of these writers decided it could only be digested when it was broken into chunks: individual fights or chapters of his life. Otherwise it was like trying to take in the entirety of a mountain when you stood at the base of it.
Jonathan Eig, then, deserves kudos on a couple of fronts. His new book feels comprehensive: it starts with Ali’s birth in 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky – his name, we learn, was misspelled “Cassuis” on the certificate – and wraps with his funeral procession, after decades of being gradually diminished by Parkinson’s disease. Eig informs us in his notes that he has conducted hundreds of interviews with 200 individuals over the course of five years.
More noteworthy is how much of Ali’s well-documented life has been overlooked by previous accounts. Eig’s writing doesn’t have the razzle-dazzle of Wolfe or Mailer, but he’s breezy to read while also being a stickler for detail. Ali: A Life is especially strong on analysing the boxer’s cognitive decline. Although he was famous for his wit and poetry, Ali’s speech began to slow and slur in his 30s. Eig worked with scientists to show that between the ages of 30 and 40, Ali’s rat-a-tat delivery slowed by 26%, at a time when it shouldn’t, under usual circumstances, decline at all. And yet he kept fighting until just shy of his 40th birthday.
Eig – who has previously written books on Al Capone, the baseball players Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig, and the scientific discovery of the birth-control pill – also gives voice to two of his subject’s four wives. Ali might have been a saint to many fans, but he was a terrible husband. He slept with prostitutes, sometimes just before his biggest fights. He instructed his second wife, Belinda, or Khalilah as she became, to book hotel rooms for his mistresses. He even brought these women into his home while his wife and children were there. At the bottom of it, Eig suggests, was a desperate need to be loved. According to Khalilah, Ali didn’t even especially enjoy sex.
There is a tonal difference in Eig’s telling from most accounts of Ali’s life and achievements. It is by no stretch a hatchet job, but it’s no hagiography either and doesn’t shy away from stories that reveal Ali’s fallibilities and extreme views. The Nation of Islam, which he joined in the 1960s, is shown as a manipulative organisation that preached radical racial segregation: “redbirds stay with redbirds, and bluebirds with bluebirds…” It’s certainly a different picture from the swagger and charm of the Michael Parkinson interviews. The book was not authorised: in fact, Eig only ever met Ali briefly, at a fundraising dinner, and Ali, then very ill, didn’t acknowledge Eig or say a word.
My heart sank a little when I saw there was another Ali biography, and Eig’s doubtless won’t be the last. This one, though, is proof that, even in the most examined lives, there are corners where it is revealing to shine a light.
• Ali: A Life by Jonathan Eig is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To order a copy for £21.25 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
