Muhammad Ali re-invented the way we look at sports. He understood hype as nobody before him had and brought his own poetry to the business of it. He knew the fascination people have with seeing the braggart walk the high wire. He knew his own heart most of the time too, and the certainty with which he dealt with the issues that touched his life helped him transcend sport.
Prior to the publication of David Remnick's King of the World it seemed as if there was nothing left to say about Ali. He has been eulogised, analysed and studied like few other 20th-century figures. One would have thought that after the publication of Tom Hauser's wonderful oral biography of Ali seven years ago that the canon was complete, yet even today, a decade-and-a-half after Ali's retirement, bookshops carry more books on him than practically any other personality.
But Remnick has managed to blow away the dust from another side of Ali. He has given us a new way of looking at the century's most loved and most beautiful face. Remnick has given us context and backstory and a wonderful portrait of the time in which Ali created himself.
It starts with Floyd Patterson, that poignant loser, who tiptoed through the heavyweight division crippled by shyness, embarrassment and depression. Patterson was haunted by pathos all his life. In an uncomfortable piece written by Gay Talese in the New York Times, Patterson interrupts training to fly half the breadth of the US to confront a kid who has been ragging on his daughter, then finds him and has nothing to say. No fighter before or since has spoken so openly and often about the cold fear at the bottom of the fight game.
Patterson's career was hammered out on the politics of the times. Liberal white opinion and a significant portion of black opinion needed the genial Patterson to prevail over Sonny Liston, the brooding, illiterate ex-felon. Patterson couldn't do it. He failed to last a round and, to the mortification of a good portion of America, Sonny Liston became world champion.
The story of Floyd and Liston makes an interesting counterpoint to the general 1990s indifference to the crimes and exploitation of Mike Tyson, but Remnick eschews the easy points and describes in a series of deft strokes the essential loneliness of Liston. We tend to think of Ali's current state of frozen serenity as the great tragedy of 20th-century boxing, but Ali knows a contentment which was never Liston's.
Remnick's account of Liston's post-fight homecoming to Philadelphia - as he fills himself with earnest resolutions about how he will make his people proud of him, only to find not a single soul waiting for him at the airport - is touching and serves to pull the curtain back for the entrance of Ali.
The emergence of Ali as a sportsman is well documented: the stolen bike episode; the meeting with Angelo Dundee; the indenturing to a group of Louisville businessmen. His development as one of the most vivid characters of the century is less fully understood. Therein lies Remnick's greatest service to us.
He spools out the threads of various social forces which bore down on Ali, finds the origin of his fascination with the Nation of Islam, the sheer bravery of his audacious approach to psyching out Liston.
THE metamorphosis of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali and the man he would become was one of the defining journeys of the 1960s. From the confused fumbling for a view on racial politics which sat easily in his heart, to his cruel abandonment of Malcolm X, this was a trip towards self-realisation and it is part of the prism of the times.
The bravery of Ali had ramifications way beyond the ring, and forces outside the ring always exerted some sort of gravity on events within. Remnick, unlike many who love Ali, does not spare him when it comes to clear-eyed analysis of some of the positions and actions he took during that period. Ali could be cruel and he could be wrong. A more complete picture of him detracts nothing from his legend.
A former sportswriter but now merely the editor of The New Yorker, Remnick writes up the fight scenes wonderfully. Each major bout of the era was a stepping stone in our consciousness of the times. It's hard to imagine it now when we look at the tawdry sideshow which Don King runs in his tent, but presidents and preachers alike fretted about the outcome of heavyweight fights back then.
Through it all the young Ali emerges grasping tightly his talent and his unique self-awareness. Beyond the realm of politics he is practically the only figure of that turbulent time not to have bobbed along helplessly on the tide. He was a performer and a participant. Remnick's wonderful work illuminates both the stage and the actor.
Tom Humphries is an author and an Irish Times journalist. Earlier this month he was awarded an ESB National Media Award for Sports Journalism