You could be forgiven for assuming that a book about Muhammad Ali that contained barely a mention of Joe Frazier or George Foreman would be a complete dud. Did not Ali's fight with these men define his greatness as a boxer and go a long way towards justifying the existence of boxing as a sport? Well yes, but Pulitzer Prize winning author David Remnick (2000) is more interested in how Ali changed not just boxing but society. It is a risky strategy but it works. And it works because King of the World is the compelling story of society and boxing before Ali.
Although for most people the 1950s and early 1960s were terribly drab, the sport of boxing was inhabited by a cast of characters straight out of Damon Runyon. And Remnick (2000) uses them all - the guys and dolls, the gamblers and the broads, the boulevardiers and the ever present Mafia. In a sense the author had little choice but to use this strategy. Any biographer wishing to produce a book about Ali would be faced with a problem that nowadays Ali can barely stand let alone talk. Instead of yet another version of the "Rumble in the Jungle" we are reminded of the biggest beast in the jungle - Sonny Liston. Thought to be invincible, and from whom Ali first won the heavyweight championship, Liston's life was so tragic that at his funeral in 1971 one of his friends was heard to intone: "Sonny Liston died the day he was born". (Remnick, 2000)
An inept thief known to the police as the yellow shirt bandit with inevitable consequence of arrest, Liston was one of 25 children born to a brutal Arkansas share cropper. Liston ran away at 13 and was serving a five-year sentence in Missouri State Prison by the time he was 20.
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