But he imitated Joe Lewis as a social type for reasons of being accepted by the white world, by white columnists like Jimmy Cannon or Red Smith.Īnd Patterson was a champion for a very brief time before he was utterly destroyed in the ring twice by Sonny Liston, who was another - who was a different type, who was somebody who was a destroyer, who in his time was a fighter not unlike Mike Tyson and a personality not unlike Mike Tyson, an extremely scary figure to everyone. He was not Joe Louis by any stretch of the imagination. And Floyd Patterson was certainly no era-shaking fighter. Give me an example of what you mean there.ĭAVID REMNICK: The champion at the time when Muhammad Ali - then Cassius Clay - was in the Olympics - he was then a light heavyweight in the 1960 Rome Olympics - was Floyd Patterson. You say that Ali entered the world of boxing at a time when the expectation was that a black fighter would behave with absolute deference to white sensibilities. He's also host of the podcast and radio program "The New Yorker Radio Hour." This interview with Terry Gross is from 1998, when his biography of Ali was published and shortly before Remnick became editor of The New Yorker. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1994 history "Lenin's Tomb" about the last days of the Soviet empire. His biography "King Of The World: Muhammad Ali And The Rise Of An American Hero," was honored as best non-fiction book of the year in 1998 by Time magazine. Today on FRESH AIR, we listen back to an interview with author David Remnick. Today, the nation says goodbye to Ali as he's laid to rest in his hometown of Louisville. I'm going to show you how great I am.īIANCULLI: That was Muhammad Ali in 1974, stealing the spotlight before his upcoming heavyweight title fight with George Foreman, billed as the Rumble in the Jungle. I know you got him picked, but the man's in trouble. I'm so mean I make medicine sick.ĪLI: Yeah, fast, fast, fast - last night, I cut the light off in my bedroom, hit the switch, was in the bed before the room was dark.ĪLI: And you George Foreman, all you chumps are going to bow when I whoop him, all of you. Only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick. I done handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail. I done wrestle with an alligator.ĪLI: That's right.
I'm bad - been chopping trees, I done something new for this fight.
MUHAMMAD ALI: I'm experienced now, professional - jaws been broke, been lost, knocked down a couple of times. I'm David Bianculli, sitting in for Terry Gross.
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