Sideline Cut: One by one, the chroniclers of the Ali era are being counted out. Part of the enduring fascination with the 1970s period of Ali's life surely lies in the circus cast of characters that swirled around The Champ.

There is a brief and hilarious moment in the hugely popular film When They Were Kingsthat shows the late George Plimpton, the erudite American writer, struggling with his pencil and notepad to keep pace as Don King shoots rapid-fire quotations from Shakespeare at him, with the sound of African music reverberating in the background.

In retrospect, staging the Foreman-Ali fight in the middle of the African jungle seems like a wildly extravagant and absurd venture - as the Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray famously quipped, "They are holding the world heavyweight championship in the Congo, I guess because the top of Mount Everest was busy."

The setting for Ali's comeback bout against the cool and implacable and younger George Foreman - two African American men utterly different in disposition - dazzled imaginations across the world. And while millions had to be content to keep abreast of developments through radio or television, those with the means or good reason to be there were not going to miss it.

Central to the action was Norman Mailer, the literary tough guy and sometime sidekick of Ali who passed away last week aged 84. Mailer was, of course, a self-styled brawler and was accomplished enough at boxing to survive with the former light-heavyweight champion Jose Torres as a sparring partner - though how full-blooded the professional was in his application can only be speculated upon.

But Mailer, of course, was one of the many thousands of people openly and unabashedly fascinated by and in thrall to the charisma and power and beauty of Ali. He spoke and wrote of Ali as a fan and was possibly overawed by the fact that here was someone whose ego and vanity and successes and failures and penchant for humorous braggadocio were displayed in a personality that dwarfed even his own.

Although he became known as the definitive celebrity ringside witness to the triumphs and foibles of Ali, Mailer was genuinely stirred by boxing, a sport and culture that suited his complex, pushy, macho and often eccentric world view, and he wrote with vivid tough-guy tenderness about Ali's predecessors Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, who were portrayed as the white and dark angels of the game when they met in 1961.

That had been a hugely emotive fight, an elemental battle between a black American whose persona was acceptable to the prevailing white sensibility and a black American who was portrayed as being scarcely civilised.

Patterson found the effect of losing the heavyweight championship of the world in a single, terrorising minute so profound he disguised himself in glasses and wig and caught a flight to anywhere - Madrid, as it happened - where he wandered in a daze for several days.

Famously, Mailer managed to hijack the victorious Liston's press conference the morning after by showing up drunk and convinced he alone, given half a chance, could transform a rematch into a hugely lucrative venture. Having arrived without the correct credentials, he was ejected from the room by security people responding assertively to Mailer's dare: "Carry me out."

Having inveigled his way back into the room, Mailer proceeded to harangue the new champion with his madcap theory that Patterson had existentially beaten Liston in the ninth round and tried again to advance his theory that he could be the saviour of a rematch. Liston engaged him with a mixture of patience and bemusement and laughed when Mailer accused the champion of calling him a "bum".

"Everybody's a bum," Liston replied." I'm a bum too. It's just that I'm a bigger bum than you are. Shake, bum."

Fifteen years later, Ali was probably the most famous man on the planet and was described by Mailer as America's greatest ego. "Muhammad Ali begins with the most unsettling ego of all," he wrote in a famous Life magazine essay titled Ego. "Having commanded the stage, he never pretends to step back and relinquish his place to other actors - like a six-foot parrot, he keeps screaming at you that he is centre of the stage.

"He is also the swiftest embodiment of human intelligence we have had yet, he is the very spirit of the 20th century, he is the prince of mass man and the media."

Over the years, Ali kept on boxing and slowly got hurt and Mailer had other fish to fry. The spark-eyed, barrel-chested and prodigiously busy writer lived a life that was, in its own way, as full-hearted and messy and vivid as that of his boxing hero.

He had his own furious spats that will be celebrated again now that Mailer has, to the probable disbelief of his detractors, fallen silent. Forget about his bitchy chat-show rows with literary rivals. He went bare-knuckle too. Already, the footage of his mano-a-mano fight with the actor Rip Torn, who attacked Mailer with a hammer on a film set in 1970, has been posted for general enjoyment on YouTube. It is half-riveting and half-comic, and at the end Mailer - then almost 50 years old - sits panting on the grass like a child, points at the younger man and shouts: "He's hurt worse that I am." Then he raises his dukes in a way that makes you wonder how he ever survived in the ring with Torres.

Generations of people who were not even born when Ali was in his prime continue to look back at the magnetism of the cast of characters and the depth of meaning those fights seemed to contain. Of course, the racket was probably as corrupt as ever and the commentators of the day probably tend to lionise that time somewhat sentimentally. But it was, clearly, an incredibly rich and unique chapter in sport and it seems a blessing now, in this age of electronic overload, that so many of the best essayists of the day were intrigued enough to tell the Ali story as they saw it.

Stories, as much as the balletic grace and cold power and limitless courage Ali displayed in the ring, have made him the enduring fascination of 20th-century sport. Mailer told them with all the zest and energy he could muster.

When Foreman was finally bested in that epochal fight in Kinshasa, Mailer remembered the end in The Fight.

"Like a drunk hoping to get out of bed to go to work, Foreman rolled over. Foreman started the slow, agonising lift of all that foundered bulk God somehow gave him, and whether he heard the count or no, was on his feet a fraction after the count of 10 and whipped, for when referee Zack Clayton guided him with a hand at his back, he walked in docile steps to his corner and did not resist. Archie Moore received him. Dick Sadler received him. Later, one heard the conversation.

"Feel all right?"

"Yeah," said Foreman.

"Well, don't worry, it's history now."

"Yeah."

"You're all right," said Sadler. "The rest will take care of itself."