He abandoned Malcolm X when he might saved him from assassination.

Some of the things I learned about Ali I wish I'd never learned. I learned his grandfather was a convicted murderer and his great-great-great grandfather escaped from slavery to help support Union troops in the Civil War. I learned stuff about Ali that Ali didn't know.

My timing could not have been better, and my journey could not have been more thrilling. George Foreman, Don King, Ferdie Pacheco, and hundreds of others who knew Ali intimately were still alive.and willing to talk to me. His brother and three of his four wives were still alive. A serious book on Ali needed the kind of perspective that 50 years provides. Wait, could this be true? Could the kid with the poster on his ceiling actually get away with something so outrageous? Could I be the guy who writes the Ali bio? Holy shit, right?Īnd why not? It had been 50 years since Ali shook up the world, as he put it, beating Sonny Liston, becoming the heavyweight champ, telling white America to get used to a new kind of proud and ferocious Black man, joining the Nation of Islam, refusing to fight in Vietnam. And one day many years later, around 2013, it occurred to me that no one had written the big, fat biography that Ali so clearly deserved. If you were alive in the 1960s and '70s, you might have hated Ali or might have loved him, but you were almost certainly fascinated. The idea that I might one day become his biographer would not have come to me even in the wildest of my eight-year-old dreams.Īnd yet, almost half a century and 600 interviews later, here we are.Īli was not only the most spectacular athlete and one of the most riveting figures in American cultural history, he was, as Norman Mailer put it, the very spirit of the twentieth century. His image was, really and truly, the first and last thing I looked at every day. I grew up with Ali's poster pinned to the ceiling of my bedroom.

Ali a life by jonathan eig