Muhammad Ali is a Napoleonic figure in sport from the number of books documenting his life and times as the nonpareil of pugilism and so much more.
Ali still sells, even a decade after his death: he remains sui generis in the sweet science, a boxer who also shook up the world with his thunderous warrior spirit and whip smart, tartish tongue. It proved too sharp for old-fashioned folk or downright racists to swallow. Yet for the rest of us (those with brains and eyes) he not only shook up the world, but swallowed it in the end, as his spirit and humanity transcended sport, crossing borders and divisions and speaking to everyone, even after Parkinson’s disease robbed him of his second-greatest gift.
So yet another book on Ali needs to justify its presence, especially in such a rarefied weight class (McIlvanney, Hauser, Early, Kimball, Mailer, Plimpton etc). One would think there’s little left to excavate from the attic of Ali’s life. But Dave Hannigan has rummaged through the dusty boxes of the boxer’s career, and opened the green crates (likely labelled “Eire”) marking Ali’s sojourn in Ireland in the summer of 1972, when he fought Al “Blue” Lewis in Croke Park.
Previous books on the one-time most famous athlete in the world have covered this event as a footnote of a few paragraphs. But Hannigan, by scouring the archives on Ali’s time in Dublin, has spun the whole yarn – like most Irish yarns, this one began in a pub – and has tapped into not only an unlikely, slightly unreal sporting event (even now you feel, did this really happen?) but he’s also compiled a strange time capsule of puckish 1970s Irish society.
The book will certainly appeal to Ali enthusiasts, but it also holds value for readers who likely look at the Ireland of 50 years ago as a foreign country. It’s astonishing, for example, that the attendance at Croke Park to see Ali was just 18,725; Ali was a prime 30 years old, one year on from his “Fight of the Century” with Joe Frazier.
The Big Fight is not a knockout, as much material will be too familiar to Ali fans (a transcript of the Cathal O’Shannon interview etc). But Hannigan has his hand deservedly raised by the end, especially for the remarkable story of Ali’s opponent, Lewis, who went from ex-con to unlikely contender at Croker.
