The most striking document in Gerald Early’s study is a Playboy interview given by Muhammad Ali in 1975. “Boxing will never die,” he declares, but his sense of the sport’s immortality stems from an intimation of his own, and he explains the necessity of “conditioning” the brain by taking blows to the head. As the quarter-century since that interview has shown, Ali’s diet of bruises did for his cortex, and it did for the sport, too; the fighter’s hubris – “I’m a little special” eventually mutated into “I’m the greatest” – was boxing’s inimitable apogee, and the decline of the sport’s most gifted exponent illustrates all too poignantly the human cost of pugilistic success.
Early’s collection charts, through inclusions from perceptive commentators, the rise and fall of the champion. But there is nothing from before 1962, at which point Ali – or, as he then was, Cassius Clay – had already won his Olympic gold medal and begun flattening a succession of ranked heavyweights. True, it was not until 1964 that he became champion of the world, defeating Sonny Liston in a bout that confounded all punditry and popular expectation; but it was in the years immediately after his Olympic victory in Rome that he fell under the influence of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, and it was in those early years that his rapping self-publicity and magnetic arrogance evolved.
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