In Thomas Hauser's biography of Muhammad Ali, His Life and Times, the journalist Mark Kram explains his feelings about Ali in the following terms. "I like the man immensely. I just never shared that great fascination the American people have for Ali. I could never understand the mythologizing."
A critical exploration of the gap between man and myth seemed like the premise for a great book. A decade later Kram has produced Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. It's a well-written book, not a great book.
Speaking to Hauser, Kram set out his stall. He was uneasy with Ali's Nation of Islam beliefs. This seems to have festered. His mistrust of the Nation of Islam is such a recurrent theme in Ghosts that Kram comes over as the last white man in America to feel threatened by Ali's toned down version of his own religion.
And much else about the book seems disappointingly spiteful. Ali is now such a benign and harmless figure that it seems patronising for a white sportswriter who sucked greedily at his teat back in the day to chastise him over his choice of creed or how he makes his money. Somewhere in the swirl of advances and publishing proposals, the reasonable part of Mark Kram's arguments got lost.
What's new here? Well, we knew Ali could be mean as an alley cat, easily riled by those who persisted on calling him Cassius Clay. Ernie Terrell knew this before Joe Frazier did. Ali humiliated Ernie by way of punishment. "What's My Name?" Ali asked as the blows deluged. "What's My Name" he shouted, demanding that Terrell answer with the words: "Uncle Tom". All done by Hauser.
Ditto for the lingering sourness between Ali and Frazier. "I hated Ali ... I hated that man. First two fights he tried to make me a white man. Then he tried to make me a nigger," says Frazier, before moving his animus into the present tense.
"The way I feel I'd like to fight Ali-Clay, whatever his name is, again tomorrow. Twenty years I've been fighting Ali and I still want to take him apart piece by piece and send him back to Jesus." And in the paragraphs below Hauser quotes Ali's regret, his sorrow at having hurt Frazier.
Was Frazier's inability to move on in life, his hatred of the public embrace of Ali, really worth an entire book? Kram brings his own defects to the party. A wonderful writer, rococo in style, but compelling nonetheless, he wrote one of the landmark sports pieces when he travelled to Manila to cover the final Ali/Frazier fight. That piece represented a personal breakthrough for Kram in conquering his own pathological fear of flying, which kept him away from other big Ali events, not least the epochal "Rumble in the Jungle" in Kinshasa.
When it came to Manila in 1975, according to Michael McCambridge in The Franchise, a history of Sports Illustrated magazine, Kram agreed to go only on condition that he could travel with Ali. On that trip Kram met the woman who would become his wife. If there were flies in the ointment of his happiness at the time, Kram didn't let on.
The story which he filed from Manila marked the high point of Kram's career. He describes in detail the condition of both fighters after the bout and stitches their battle into the context of the times. Therein lies a humanity and affection which is surprising as if you have just read Ghosts. Explaining (in the New York Times) the absence of any expression, at that time, of his negative feelings towards Ali, Kram said recently that the fighter was too important commercially to Sports Illustrated for him to be allowed to criticise Ali.
This is moot. We don't know enough about the inner workings of Sports Illustrated to be able to pass judgement there, but we do know that Kram's own relationship with the magazine came to a gory end. He was dismissed amidst allegations that he had taken cash from the promoter Don King. Kram explains in The Franchise that the money he took was for two separate movie development deals.
Whatever. He was dismissed for gross misconduct or as he told the New York Times in May "gross misjudgments".
Even in liberation his feelings towards Ali failed to surface. In Great Men Die Twice (Esquire 1989), he once again enjoys the access of a friend, this time to loom at Ali's bedside as he gets blood transfusion treatment in South Carolina. Ali is described with honour and affection: "His immense talent, his ring wisdom, his antipathy for chemicals, argued against destructibility. All he would ever do was grow old. For 20 years, while he turned the porno shop of sports into international theatre, attention was paid in a way it never was before or has been since."
Ali is "very much a mystic". He would "instantly brighten faces during his favourite tours of prisons, orphanages and nursing homes". Kram also describes him playfully teasing his closest friend, Howard Bingham, a non-Muslim, about his beliefs.
If Ali was a pawn of the Nation of Islam, Ali alone paid the price. If somebody else made up the line "I ain't got no quarrel with no Vietcong," who fed Ali all the other more dazzling pieces of lyricism? This guy was so bad he made "medicine sick". This man "handcuffed lightning". Yes.
Kram's suggestion that Ali's theatrical approach to fights was inspired as much by fear as bravado does not diminish him. Anyone facing Liston, Foreman or Frazier had his entitlement to fear. That's what made Ali human. I thought we all understood that.
I once saw a cartoon, by Tom Mathews I think, which depicted a man sitting alone in a corner of a crowded pub. It was called The Man Who Knew U2 When They Had Nothing. I thought of it again when I read Mark Kram's book.
