I have to be brief today. I've got a book review to do for work, so I'm going to talk about that immediately prior to doing it. Very postmodern.
It's a book about Muhammad Ali. They must have been done to death, eh? I suppose. But this one's different as far as I know in that it is a list of Ali pro fights, all 61 of them. The author is a grizzled old boxing journalist, and knew Ali when he was fighting, so the prose is crisp and to the point, but he also puts Ali pronouncements in some kind of personal context. The spiel and the slating was a performance. They were two reasons for this according to Ali: 1. to sell tickets and 2. to give him a psychological edge. Ali admits in the afterword to being physical scared when he entered the ring. He needed his opponents to fear him, particularly ferocious young fighters like George Foreman. This would give him the space he needed to pick them off.
The book is a great overview of Ali the boxer. You need to be in your sixties to remember Ali the fighter; his legacy is rather lost to the rest of us, his celebrity overshadowing it somewhat. The book changes that. You are left in no doubt what a remarkable pugilist he was: fast, brave, audacious. Like all real geniuses, Ali first mastered the textbook and then ripped it to shreds. He was the greatest, and not because he say so, because the record says so.
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