“The Life of Ali”, a comprehensive portrait of one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century

If Muhammad Ali was not already an undisputed world figure, a legend, perhaps one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century, nothing could stop his rise to the category of myth after the publication Fight (Little, Brown and Company, 1975; journalistic work initially appeared serially in the magazine Playboy), a non-fiction novel by Norman Mailer dedicated to the fight in which the boxer took on the then-young boxer George Foreman, on October 30, 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaire. There have been other books since then, but perhaps none have had such a comprehensive and definitive approach as Ali’s life, the monumental work of the journalist Jonathan Eig (New York, 1964), who not only researched new documents in archives that had been closed to study, but also interviewed ex-wives and friends who remained in the background. Eig tries to show a man with his lights and his shadows, without hiding his many flaws, his contradictions, marked by the lack of paternal love, with which he had to live in his childhood, a circumstance that, the author claims, encouraged him to grow as a person who is constantly seeking affection and admiration. The book deals with various aspects of the life of Cassius Clay (Louisville, Kentucky, 1942-Scottsdale, Arizona, 2016), who converted to the Muslim faith and was renamed Muhammad Ali. Not only his family life and his sports career, with its successes and failures, he deals with his civic and political obligations in issues such as anti-racism and the struggle for the rights of the African-American population in the United States, with his complex vision of integration and his relationship with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Or even his stance against the Vietnam War. As seductive as he is unsympathetic, self-centered as he is magnanimous, arrogant and eloquent as he is gentle, even in his last incapacitating illness, But on these pages he shines with an animalistic and seductive power rarely seen.