Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest. Thomas Hauser

you were forced to look at him with honest lingering eyes, for there might never be his like again. Assessed by ring demands – punch, size, speed, intelligence, command and imagination – he was an action poet, the equal of the best painting you could find.’

      As for Frazier, Kram calls him ‘the most skilful devastating inside puncher in boxing history’, and goes so far as to rank him among the top five heavyweights of all time. That seems a bit silly. Joe was a great fighter and every bit as noble a warrior as Ali. But there’s a time-honoured axiom in boxing that styles make fights. And the list of fighters with the style to beat Joe Frazier numbers far more than five.

      Kram is on more solid ground when he catalogues Frazier’s hatred for Ali. The story of how Muhammad branded Joe an ‘Uncle Tom’ before their first fight, ‘ignorant’ before Ali–Frazier II and a ‘gorilla’ before Ali–Frazier III is well known, but Ghosts of Manila makes it fresh and compelling. Thus, Kram writes, ‘Muhammad Ali swam inside Joe Frazier like a determined bacillus … Ali has sat in Frazier’s gut like a broken bottle.’ And he quotes Frazier’s one-time associate Bert Watson as saying, ‘You don’t do to a man what Ali did to Joe. Ali robbed him of who he is. To a lot of people, Joe is still ignorant, slow-speaking, dumb and ugly. That tag never leaves him. People have only seen one Joe; the one created by Ali. If you’re a man, that’s going to get to you in a big way.’ And Kram quotes Frazier as saying of Ali, ‘When a man gets in your blood like that, you can’t never let go. Yesterday is today for me. He never die for me … If we were twins in the belly of our mama, I’d reach over and strangle him … I’ll outlive him.’

      Kram writes with grace and constructs his case against Ali’s supervening greatness in a largely intelligent way. But his work is flawed.

      First, there are factual inaccuracies. For example, Kram is simply wrong when he discusses Ali’s military draft reclassification and states, ‘Had he not become a Muslim, chances are he would have remained unfit for duty.’

      That’s not the case. In truth, Ali had been declared unfit for military duty by virtue of his scoring in the 16th percentile on an Army intelligence test. That left him well below the requirement of 30. But two years after that, with the war in Vietnam expanding, the mental-aptitude percentile required by the military was lowered from 30 to 15. The change impacted upon hundreds of thousands of young men across the country. To suggest that Ali was somehow singled out and the standard changed because of his religion is ridiculous.

      Also, there are times when Kram is overly mean-spirited. For example, Bryant Gumbel (who aroused Kram’s ire with negative commentary on Joe Frazier) is referred to as ‘a mediocre writer and thinker’ with ‘a shallow, hard-worked ultra-sophistication and ego that not even a mother could love’. Ali in his current condition is labelled ‘a billboard in decline’, of whom Kram says uncharitably, ‘Physical disaster of his own making has kept his fame intact. He would have become the bore dodged at the party. The future promised that there would be no more clothes with which to dress him up.’ Indeed, Kram goes so far as to call the younger Ali ‘a useful idiot’ and ‘near the moronic level’.

      Kram’s failure to distinguish fully between Nation of Islam doctrine and orthodox Islamic beliefs is also troubling. During what might have been the most important 14 years of Ali’s life, he adhered to the teachings of the Nation of Islam; a doctrine that Arthur Ashe later condemned as ‘a racist ideology; a sort of American apartheid’. Yet reading Ghosts of Manila, one might come away with the impression that Nation of Islam doctrine was, and still is, Islam as practised by more than one billion people around the world today. That’s because Kram has the annoying habit of referring to Ali’s early mentors as ‘the Muslims’, which is like lumping Billy Graham and the Ku Klux Klan together and calling them ‘the Christians’.

      Then there’s the matter of Kram’s sources; most notably, his reliance on two women named Aaisha Ali and Khaliah Ali.

      Muhammad met Aaisha Ali in 1973 when he was 31 years old and she was a 17-year-old named Wanda Bolton. To his discredit, they had sexual relations and she became pregnant. Kram makes much of the fact that Wanda was ‘on her way to becoming a doctor’. Given the fact that she was a high school junior at the time, that’s rather speculative. Regardless, Ms Bolton subsequently claimed that she and Ali had been ‘Islamically married’ and changed her name to Aaisha Ali. Muhammad acknowledged paternity and accepted financial responsibility for their daughter, Khaliah.

      Kram describes Aaisha several times as ‘a mystery woman’, which is a cheap theatrical trick. Her presence in Ali’s past has been known and written about for years. More significantly, Kram uses Aaisha and Khaliah as his primary sources to trash Ali’s current wife Lonnie (who Kram calls Ali’s ‘new boss’). Indeed, after describing Ali as ‘a careless fighter who had his brain cells irradiated’, Kram quotes Lonnie as telling Khaliah, ‘I am Muhammad Ali now.’ Then, after referring to ‘Lonnie and her tight circle of pushers’, he quotes Khaliah as saying of her father, ‘It’s about money. He’s a substance, an item.’ After that, Kram recounts a scene when Ali and Lonnie were in a Louisville hospital visiting Ali’s mother, who was being kept alive on a respirator. The final days of Odessa Clay’s life were the saddest ever for Ali. Yet again, relying wholly on Khaliah, Kram quotes Lonnie as saying, ‘We can’t afford this, Muhammad.’

      The problem is, there are a lot of people who think that Aaisha Ali and Khaliah Ali aren’t particularly reliable sources. I happen to have been present at one of the incidents regarding which Kram quotes Khaliah. It involved a championship belt that was given to Ali at a dinner commemorating the 20th anniversary of the first Ali–Frazier fight. The dinner took place on the night of 14 April 1991, although Kram mistakenly reports it as occurring on an unspecified date five years later. Khaliah left Ali’s hotel room that night with the belt. I experienced the incident very differently from the way Kram recounts it.

      However, my biggest concern regarding Ghosts of Manila is its thesis that Ali’s influence lay entirely in the sporting arena. Kram acknowledges that Ali ‘did lead the way for black athletes out of the frustrating silence that Jackie Robinson had to endure’. However, even that concession is tempered by the claim that, ‘Ali’s influence in games today can be seen in the blaring unending marketing of self, the cheap acting out of performers, and the crassness of player interactions. His was an overwhelming presence that, if you care about such things, came at a high cost.’

      Then Kram goes on to say, ‘What was laughable, if you knew anything about Ali at all, was that the literati was certain that he was a serious voice, that he knew what he was doing. He didn’t have a clue … Seldom has a public figure of such superficial depth been more wrongly perceived.’

      ‘Ali,’ Kram says flatly, ‘was not a social force.’ And woe to those who say he was, because their utterances are dismissed as ‘heavy breathing’ from ‘know-nothings’ and ‘trendy tasters of faux revolution’.

      Apparently, I’m one of those heavy breathers. Kram refers to me as ‘a lawyer-Boswell who seems intent of making the public believe that, next to Martin Luther King, Ali is the most important black figure in the last half-century’. And in case anyone misses his point, Kram adds, ‘Current hagiographers have tied themselves in knots trying to elevate Ali into a heroic defiant catalyst of the anti-war movement, a beacon of black independence. It’s a legacy that evolves from the intellectually loose sixties, from those who were in school then and now write romance history.’

      Actually, Kram has misquoted me. I believe he’s referring to a statement in Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times in which I wrote, ‘With the exception of Martin Luther King, no black man in America had more influence than Ali during the years when Ali was in his prime.’ I still believe that to be true.

      Was Ali as important as Nelson Mandela? No. Was Ali in the late 1960s more important than any other black person in America except for Dr King? I believe so. Indeed, Nelson Mandela himself said recently, ‘Ali’s refusal to go to Vietnam and the reasons he gave made him an international hero. The news could not be shut out even by prison walls. He became a real legend to us in prison.’

      Kram’s remarkable