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Business News/ Industry / How Muhammad Ali changed the art of sportswriting
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How Muhammad Ali changed the art of sportswriting

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis writes that Muhammad Ali may be the most important figure in the history of sportswriting

File photo. Muhammad Ali (right) seen here with his trainer Angelo Dundee ahead of his fight with Ernie Terrell at the Astrodome, Houston, Texas, on 6 Feburary 1967. Photo: Reuters/Action Images/MSIPremium
File photo. Muhammad Ali (right) seen here with his trainer Angelo Dundee ahead of his fight with Ernie Terrell at the Astrodome, Houston, Texas, on 6 Feburary 1967. Photo: Reuters/Action Images/MSI

One of the lasting legacies of Muhammad Ali, the three-time world heavyweight champion, was his enormous impact on sportswriters and sportswriting in general.

Or as Bryan Curtis of The Ringer wrote on Sunday, “Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, may be the most important figure in the history of sportswriting. Grantland, Red, Jimmy, Bob — they’re all ranked contenders. Ali feels like the champ."

He made careers. “The New York Times had sent me down to cover Clay’s first fight with Sonny Liston, because the paper’s boxing writer didn’t think it was worth his time. Cassius Clay was a 7-1 underdog," wrote sportswriter and author Robert Lipsyte in his tribute to Ali, on ESPN. Lipsyte was all of 26 at the time. In his piece, he recalled Ali silencing a “crabby old reporter from Boston who implied that the fight was a joke by saying, “I’m making all this money, the popcorn man making money and the beer man, and you got something to write about. Your papers let you come down to Miami Beach, where it’s warm." Rather fittingly, the Times’ long obituary of Ali was penned by Lipsyte.

And then, there were others from the ‘New Journalism’ movement that Ali attracted. Tom Wolfe’s debut for Esquire with a stunning 1963 profile of Ali (then Cassius Clay). Wolfe followed Clay around New York City in the lead up to his fight with Liston. Wolfe wrote, “He knows that his act—“I am the greatest"—is a piece of outrageous bombast and that one reason the public loves it is that they know no man could possibly mean it." In 1968, in the same pages, Leonard Shecter spent time with Ali in Chicago, where he was in exile (after his refusal to be drafted for the Vietnam War). The profile came a time after Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and he was one of the most fervent followers of a black separatist cult, the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Mohammad.

It’s hard to look past this epic account of Ali’s most storied fight with Joe Frazier, also dubbed the “Thrilla in Manila" in 1971. The great Mark Kram’s report of the fight, went down as one of “the most memorable stories in Sports Illustrated history", often quoted for the defeated Frazier’s phrase, “Lawdy, Lawdy, he’s a great champion." Kram would later profile Ali in 1989 for Esquire, when ‘the greatest’ was way past it, and battling the effects of age and Parkinson’s disease, which would eventually get him. Kram wrote, “Not all, exactly; getting old is the last display for the bread-and-circuses culture. Legends must suffer for all the gifts and luck and privilege given to them. Great men, it’s been noted, die twice—once as great, and once as men. With grace, preferably, which adds an uplifting, stirring, Homeric touch. If the fall is too messy, the national psyche will rush toward it, then recoil; there is no suspense, no example in the mundane."

And then, there’s the legendary Hunter S. Thompson, who in May 1978 profiled a 36-year-old Ali for Rolling Stone as he was preparing to fight Leon Spikes to reclaim his third heavyweight title. The piece offers a fascinating insight into Ali’s ‘Family’ in his twilight years, or what Thompson calls the ‘The Muhammad Ali Industry’.

As Curtis writes, “He attracted slumming literary figures like Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, who, in turn, helped create the category of the highly literate sports book, from Mailer’s The Fight to David Remnick’s King of the World."

Which brings us to Remnick, who in 1998 wrote ‘American Hunger’, a definitive profile of Ali, and how “as an ambitious, searching young man, Cassius Clay invented himself, and became—the most original and magnetic athlete of the century—Muhammad Ali." Remnick’s piece in The New Yorker would serve as a prelude to his book, quite aptly titled “King of the World." Remnick, on Saturday, also wrote The New Yorker obituary—The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali.

It wasn’t just American sportswriters who were drawn by ‘The Greatest’. Hours after the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight in 1974 where Ali defeated George Foreman in Kinshasa, Scottish sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney scooped a two-hour long interaction with Ali, which he filed for The Observer.

Ali’s profound impact on sportswriters is best summed up by this quote from Curtis’ piece. “A sportswriter celebrates an athlete, criticizes an athlete, or lifts his hood for inspection. Here, the athlete transformed the sportswriters, reaching through the ring ropes and lifting them off press row."

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Published: 06 Jun 2016, 03:02 PM IST
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