![]() ![]() Jonathan Eig, then, deserves kudos on a couple of fronts. Otherwise it was like trying to take in the entirety of a mountain when you stood at the base of it. ![]() 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. 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”. 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. Norman Mailer wrote one of the defining sports books, The Fight, about Ali and George Foreman’s Rumble in the Jungle. 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. And, as a subject, “the Greatest” has attracted some of the best. N o sportsman’s life has been more chronicled than Muhammad Ali’s, or it certainly feels that way. ![]()
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