The Zen Of Muhammad Ali

Sport can be epic, squalid, noble, cheap, dramatic and mundane; its contrasts between winners and losers should be easy pickings, and its opportunities to broaden the plot to weightier matters are wide open. Yet it is often badly served by writers, which is why Davis Miller's book is especially welcome. The focus of the first half, Muhammad Ali, was once the most famous man on the planet and is still one of the most admired. The essay My Dinner with Ali was celebrated on its original publication in 1989 and remains a superb piece of writing today, a warm and touching tribute to a great idol and an empty husk of a man, but one who keeps a strange dignity. Added to that is the Zen to Muhammad Ali, a follow-up essay to his seminal, and often mocked, attempt to capture the legend and the reality of the man, The Tao of Muhammad Ali. His similar tome on Bruce Lee also receives an echo here, again an esoteric attempt to get to the centre of a legendary figure. Sugar Ray Leonard receives a more simplistic, though always personal, appraisal, before the book goes on to matters closer to home, some based on sport, some on relationships, some on families, and all nestling under the guise of 'observations'. Beautifully written in a fluid, personal, slightly worldly-wise manner - part Norman Mailer, part Garrison Keiller - this is a gripping book, a window on sport through which we can view other (not necessarily bigger) issues, dealt with profundity, wisdom and wit. Highly recommended. (Kirkus UK)