A Review of Ali's New Autobiography

Everything, he says interview after interview, but his sharpness of mind. Remember, this is a fellow who once composed some of the most imaginative verses of his day:

Now Clay swings with a right,

What a beautiful swing,

And the punch raises the bear,

Clear out of the ring.

Liston is still rising

And the ref wears a frown,

For he can’t start counting,

Till Sonny comes down...

So does Ali, with his daughter as coauthor, write up to his enormous potential? How about describing what it’s like to be the most famous Muslim in Bush’s America? Or a chapter on having the bejesus beaten out of him by Trevor Burbick, a mediocre piece of heavyweight flab Mike Tyson KO’d in six minutes? Alas, the only thing new we learn about Muhammad Ali in “Soul of a Butterfly” is that he loves his George Foreman grill.

Not that the publisher thought we’d read it anyway. Simon & Schuster obscured the words with so many butterfly silhouettes and oversized fonts they made it clear they were interested in selling gifts, not books. And to make absolutely sure they’d scare readers away, they let Hana Ali run loose in her “Letter to the World,” otherwise known as a preface, writing that her father is “my constant truth, my strength, my heaven on earth” before launching into a poem so sappy I can only stand to quote the end of it:

No picture has ever sufficiently captured

The smile in his angelic eyes,

And no book will ever fully explain

the beauty that Ali has defined.

Seriously though, how can somebody who sees her father in such terms help him craft a sincere telling of his life? As a matter of fact, she can’t. Instead, daddy and daughter throw together an assortment of parables and aphorisms so clichéd they’d barely qualify as closing thoughts on a Dr. Phil special. “Giving because you genuinely want to help a person or a worthy cause while remaining anonymous is true charity,” Ali sermonizes. “That is the kind of giver I wanted to be . . . a giver from the heart.” Or try this nugget of 24-carat cheese: “Material things lose their value over time, while matters of the heart deepen and strengthen with age and wisdom.”

So is that what’s left of the Greatest? A purveyor of time-tested drivel? A few weeks ago, I went to a book signing to meet Joe Frazier. Putting a boxing glove in front of him to sign, I asked if he ever missed lacing the things up. “You kiddin’?” he snapped. “I put gloves on every day. Feel this, young man.” Then he flexed his heaping bicep as if he were preparing to use it. When I met Ali last Wednesday, at a promotion at the Hue-Man bookstore in Harlem, he patted my shoulder like we were old buds and laid such “angelic eyes” on me that, had I had something I say, I probably would have forgotten. Am I horrible for asking what happened to the guy who liked whupping people so bad he’d draw it out for fun? What’s a boxing fan to do—cry?