BOOKS

The making of a hero

SUSAN RAM

Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties by Mike Marqusee; Verso, London and New York, 1999; pages 310, price not stated.

King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David Remnick; Picador, London, 1999; pages 326, œ 14.99 (hardback)

FOR biographers, Muhammad Ali poses a special challenge. Part of it resides in the extraordinary drama of his life: the passage from obscurity in small-town Kentucky to a celebrity status that penetrated every corner of the globe; the transformation of a boxer focussed on his sport into arguably the pre-eminent symbol and spokesperson of black America in anger, defiance and revolt. There is the difficulty of getting to grips with, and doing justice to, Ali's persistent playfulness, his mock seriousness, his outrageous cheek: here is a 'subject' whose lips, along with his pugilist skills, could never be subdued. But perhaps the biggest challenge lies in relating Ali to his times, in judging his contribution to events and processes beyond the boxing ring , in pinning down what exactly it was that made him 'great', in a sense reaching far beyond the confines of sporting achievement.

Two new biographies, different in approach and pursuing contrasting agendas, set out to explore again the ramifications of the Ali phenomenon. For David Remnick, current editor of The New Yorker and a former sports writer for The Washington Pos t, Ali represents the quintessential American hero, the stuff of legends, a myth replete with different meanings: "a symbol of faith... of conviction and defiance... of beauty and skill and courage... of racial pride, of wit and love." The projection of Ali as an American hero is, in contrast, explicitly rejected by Mike Marqusee, a United Kingdom-based writer of American origin. Marqusee's essentially political exploration adopts Ali's life as a path through the 1960s, as a lodestar capable of capt uring the political and cultural processes of the turbulent decade in all their ambiguity and complexity. For Marqusee, it was precisely Ali's readiness and ability to transgress American norms - to repudiate the 'American way' as defined by the corporat e capitalist establishment - that enabled him to build his vast global constituency to stir, excite and inspire.

Notwithstanding their contrasting characterisations of Ali as role model, the two books offer complementary, at times overlapping coverage of their subject. Remnick, from his position within mainstream U.S. journalism, deploys his writing skills to recre ate the magnificence of Ali the athlete, celebrating his "marriage of mass and velocity" and his unique fighting style, calculated to infuriate the purists. This is more obviously a book for boxing aficionados: in his reconstructions of Ali's landmark en counters, Remnick narrates with a ringside immediacy that both thrills and disturbs. For the reader less persuaded by boxing's brute allure, Remnick offers insights into the history of the sport in America, including its long domination by organised crim e (Ali, he suggests, was the first boxer in modern times to break free of the mob). There is also a more straightforwardly biographical focus on Ali - his origins, upbringing and sporting development.

Marqusee, in contrast, focuses unerringly on the political; his book is less a biography than a political exploration, a contextualisation, an attempt to capture the interplay between individual lived experience and the larger forces shaping that experie nce and being shaped by it. Two basic questions are posed. How was it that Ali, at the start of the 1960s an apolitical if impudent presence on the fringes of American consciousness, became within a handful of years an international symbol of anti-Americ an defiance - and the most reviled figure in the history of American sports? And what was the process by which Ali, from the late 1970s, was detached from this experience, co-opted and transformed into "yet another corporate signifier", a suitably commod ified American hero?

Part of the strength of Ali's pull as a role model and symbol, suggests Marqusee, lay precisely in his status as a black prizefighter. If sport in general is amenable to being charged with meanings, boxing, with its inherent egalitarianism, culture of se lf-restraint, self-discipline and deferred gratification, and historical links to the black community, is particularly so. "In America,"says the writer, "the 'representativeness' of black fighters gave their careers, in and out of the ring, a special int erest for the black community, and not least among the precariously positioned black middle class." By virtue of the 'strategy of symbolic representation', a concept coined by Manning Marable in his 1991 study of W.E.B. Du Bois, black leaders held that b lack sportsmen and entertainers could help their community secure symbolic space within the 'nation' - if they were successful and of good behaviour.

Like generations of black celebrities before him, Muhammad Ali would confront a double-headed challenge: that of simultaneously being a delegate from his people and an embodiment of his community as a whole. For Marqusee, what was to mark Ali out, to ele vate him into a 'symbolic representative' head and shoulders above the rest, was his instinctive acknowledgement of his own accountability - both to black America and to his legions of supporters across the globe.

BY contrast, Remnick's assessment of Ali as role model emerges as constrained and orthodox. This is partly explained by the book's own limitations: its focus, after Ali makes a delayed entry into the proceedings on page 82, is on what Marqusee would call the boxer's first career: the period between 1964, when he famously defeated Sonny Liston to seize the world heavyweight crown, and 1967, when his refusal to be drafted into America's imperialist war against Vietnam saw him stripped of his title, put on trial and debarred from the boxing arena. In Remnick's book, the post-1967 phase of Ali's life and boxing career is compressed into a 20-page epilogue. After reading Marqusee's exposition of these years, including the 'second career' that Ali magnificen tly built in the 1970s, one questions Remnick's judgment.

At a more fundamental level, Remnick's study is hamstrung by mainstream assumptions. The template the author employs to make sense of his material is none other than the hoary 'good Negro'-'bad Negro' polarity by which white America has traditionally jud ged black boxers of great talent. The emergence of Ali is thus set in the context of a presumed pattern of such polarities within the black boxing world: the 'bad' Jack Johnson confronting the 'good' Joe Louis; Floyd Patterson the 'gentleman' versus Sonn y Liston, the 'bad Negro' trailing a long record of violent crime. Remnick might argue that part of Ali's greatness lay in his ability to transcend such polarities and render them redundant: "I don't have to be what you want me to be," was how Ali himsel f put it. For Marqusee, however, the counterposing of 'good' and 'bad', of 'bad nigger' and 'Uncle Tom', is understood as a construction 'by and for white people', and by that token an analytical dead-end.

If, to an extent, there is a complementary aspect to the two books, it is Marqusee's which comes closer to capturing Ali in all his brilliance and complexity. Paradoxically, this is linked to the writer's less strictly biographical focus: it is Marqusee' s sensitivity to the politics and society in which Ali grew to greatness which enables him to tease out the specialness, to establish connections, to reveal dimensions of Ali's life that remain hidden to Remnick, the more orthodox of the two biographers. In particular, we gain a sense of the intensely political nature of Ali's contribution, first announced to an outraged white America by his 1966 declaration, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong." This, as Marqusee points out, was far from being a throwaway comment by a boxer not noted for his scholastic aptitude; a man of his times, Ali was articulating sentiments in the heady air all about him, his sensitivity heightened by his closeness to the black activist Malcolm X.

To read Marqusee's study is to be quickened by the excitement of Ali and his times, to be astonished afresh by the audacity and sweep of the Muhammad Ali story. And if, today, the ageing process, Parkinson's disease and capitalism's endless capacity for containment and co-option have taken their toll of the legendary fighter, there is a quality to the story that can never be destroyed. "In his heyday," writes Marqusee, "Ali was like a computer virus, reversing polarities, short-circuiting connections, i nfiltrating the marginal into the mainstream." Corporate capitalism may neutralise the virus: it will never eliminate the challenge.