Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest
Pulitzer prize nominee and William Hill award-winning writer Thomas Hauser’s tribute to Ali, the greatest sporting icon the world has ever seen.
Few global personalities have commanded an all-encompassing sporting and cultural audience like Muhammad Ali. Many have tried to interpret in words his impact and legacy. Now, Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest allows us to more fully appreciate the truth and understand both the man and the ways in which he helped recalibrate how the world perceives its transcendent figures.
In this companion volume to his seminal biography of Ali, New York Times bestselling author Thomas Hauser provides an updated retrospective of Ali’s life. Relying on personal insights, interviews with close associates and other contemporaries of Ali, and memories gathered over the course of decades on the cutting edge of boxing journalism, Hauser explores Ali in detail inside and outside the ring.
Muhammad Ali has attained mythical status. But in recent years, he has been subjected to an image makeover by corporate America as it seeks to homogenise the electrifying nature of his persona. Hauser argues that there has been a deliberate distortion of what Ali believed, said, and stood for, and that making Ali more presentable for advertising purposes by sanitising his legacy is a disservice to history and to Ali himself.
Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest strips away the revisionism to reveal the true Ali, and, through Hauser’s assembled writing and hitherto unpublished essays, recounts the life journey of a man universally recognised as a unique and treasured world icon.
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GENERAL NON-FICTION
Missing
The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea
For Our Children (with Frank Macchiarola)
The Family Legal Companion
Final Warning: The Legacy of Chernobyl (with Dr Robert Gale)
Arnold Palmer: A Personal Journey
Confronting America’s Moral Crisis (with Frank Macchiarola)
Healing: A Journal of Tolerance and Understanding
With This Ring (with Frank Macchiarola)
A God to Hope For
Thomas Hauser on Sports
Reflections
BOXING NON-FICTION
The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing
Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times
Muhammad Ali: Memories
Muhammad Ali: In Perspective
Muhammad Ali & Company
A Beautiful Sickness
A Year at the Fights
Brutal Artistry
The View from Ringside
Chaos, Corruption, Courage, and Glory
I Don’t Believe It, But It’s True
Knockout (with Vikki LaMotta)
The Greatest Sport of All
The Boxing Scene
An Unforgiving Sport
Boxing Is …
Box: The Face of Boxing
The Legend of Muhammad Ali (with Bart Barry)
Winks and Daggers
And the New …
Straight Writes and Jabs
Thomas Hauser on Boxing
A Hurting Sport
Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest
FICTION
Ashworth & Palmer
Agatha’s Friends
The Beethoven Conspiracy
Hanneman’s War
The Fantasy
Dear Hannah
The Hawthorne Group
Mark Twain Remembers
Finding the Princess
Waiting for Carver Boyd
The Final Recollections of Charles Dickens
The Baker’s Tale
FOR CHILDREN
Martin Bear & Friends
HarperSport
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Portions of this book were previously published as The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali (Sport Classic Books) and Muhammad Ali: The Lost Legacy (Robson Books)
First published by HarperSport 2016
FIRST EDITION
© Thomas Hauser 2016
Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Front jacket shows Untitled, Miami, Florida, 1970.
Photograph by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
Thomas Hauser asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008152444
Ebook edition: June 2016 ISBN: 9780008152468
Version: 2016-06-04
Muhammad Ali belongs to the world.
This book is dedicated to Muhammad
and to everyone who is part of his story.
CONTENTS
The Importance of Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali and Congress Remembered
Ali as Diplomat: ‘No! No! No! Don’t!’
Rediscovering Joe Frazier through Dave Wolf’s Eyes
Reflections on Time Spent with Muhammad Ali
‘I’m Coming Back to Whup Mike Tyson’s Butt’
Muhammad Ali at Notre Dame: A Night to Remember
Muhammad Ali: Thanksgiving 1996 – ‘I’ve Got a Lot to Be Thankful For’
Pensacola, Florida: 27 February 1997
‘Did Barbra Streisand Whup Sonny Liston?’
Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, which was published in 1991, is often referred to as the definitive account of the first fifty years of Ali’s life. This is the companion volume to that book. An earlier version was published in the United Kingdom in 2005 under the title Muhammad Ali: The Lost Legacy. At that time, it contained all of the essays and articles I’d written about Ali. Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest contains recently authored pieces, including the previously unpublished essay, ‘The Long Sad Goodbye’.
Thomas Hauser
PART I
(1996)
Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr, as Muhammad Ali was once known, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on 17 January 1942. Louisville was a city with segregated public facilities; noted for the Kentucky Derby, mint juleps, and other reminders of southern aristocracy. Blacks were the servant class in Louisville. They raked manure in the backstretch at Churchill Downs and cleaned other people’s homes. Growing up in Louisville, the best on the socio-economic ladder that most black people could realistically hope for was to become a clergyman or a teacher at an all-black school. In a society where it was often felt that might makes right, ‘white’ was synonymous with both.
