Loser & Still Champion: Muhammad Ali

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KIRKUS REVIEWSchulberg believes that ""somehow each of the great figures to hold the title manages to sum the spirit of his times,"" a social historical fact perhaps first fully recognized and exploited by Muhammad Ali ex-Clay. ""Write the book on Clay-Ali,"" says Schulberg, ""and you're drawn into the seething synthesis and antithesis of the American dilemma."" Ali consciously politicized heavyweight boxing, turning it into a confrontation sport; his fights were not simply contests between two men beating at each other under Queensberry auspices but ""a primitive dialogue on race relations,"" poverty, the War. The Fight -- The Fight of the Century -- saw ""Lieutenant Calley weighing in against Muhammad Ali. Not man to man but symbol to symbol. . . . Status quo and counterculture were waiting for the bell."" Such cycloramic hyperbolizing has its dangers if carried too far and Schulberg, an old boxing aficionado (vide The Harder They Fall), does toss a few wild haymakers -- for instance, is Ali really ""Lucky Lindy and the Brown Bomber, Bobby Kennedy and Joan Baez, all rolled up into one irrepressible folk hero"" But usually he's on target, offering firsthand observations of Ali's return (Quarry, Bonavena) and his ontological fall at the hands of Frazier -- ontological because although Frazier is now undisputed champion ""the allegorical Ali lives! -- that's the ongoing drama."" Unlike Jose Torres' . . . Sting Like A Bee (1971), the other solid book thus far on The Fight and Ali, Schulberg prefers ringside sociology to punch-by-punch description and some of it is absolutely perfect: who else has described Floyd Patterson -- ""the overreformed juvenile delinquent"" -- better? or the animus of the hardhats ""waiting for Frazier's star-spangled fists to shut up that big, unpatriotic mouth once and for all""? Direct and sharp as an axe falling.