The Harder They Fall

By John Skow

MUHAMMAD ALI

by WILFRID SHEED

255 pages. Illustrated. Thomas Y. Crowell. $19.95.

Wilfrid Sheed is almost certainly the best American reviewer of books. He is also, as he has shown in Max Jamison and People Will Always Be Kind, a novelist of wit and intelligence. When his prose has erred, it has always been on the side of elegance; he has never been known to write a bad or foolish line.

That was before Muhammad Ali, another one of those brightly illustrated, all-star productions by Publisher Laurence Schiller, who previously arranged the controversial match between Norman Mailer and Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn, 1973).

Sheed has tried to function both as a desk-bound essayist, considering Ali as a charged particle visible through the tubes and teleprinters of the press, and as a reporter, observing the man in his splendid flesh, talking with him, touching him, telling us what Ali is really like. The worthwhile results might fill a short magazine article. The rest is throat-clearing, padding and prattle. "Why write about Ali? Why paint the Mono Lisa?" Sheed asks aimlessly. And elsewhere: "It was almost as hard to tell how much Ali was really suffering as it is with his fellow Capricorn Nixon--I don't believe in Astrology, but... ?" and, "He reigns on in splendid detachment, like the last Romanoff or the Aga Khan--what is an Aga anyway? Is it a place or something you do?"

Although Sheed conveys very well the discomfort of being a white onlooker among Ali's retinue of sullen Black Muslims, he digs up almost nothing new or useful about his subject's past. In fact, he finds that the slick surface Ali now presents to the world is totally impermeable. Far too often he is reduced to saying "by all accounts," "apparently," "I'm told," "seems," and "I would surmise." At his worst, Sheed writes things like "I am told by those who know that being beaten up by a gifted father has a peculiar horror to it; all that intelligence coming at you twisted and roaring." What is bad about this is that Sheed has not a shred of evidence that Ali's gifted father beat him up, as he must admit in the next sentence: "Whether Ali's childhood was like this, or anything like this, it would be impertinent to guess--and he isn't saying." This is the sort of guff that the English press writes on dull days: "Is Queen Elizabeth pregnant again? It would be impertinent to guess, and she's not saying."

Sheed appears to be unnerved by his own failure, to the extent that even his grammar comes apart. He writes that Ali "learned ... to move side to side from Louis Rodriguez and to lay on the ropes from Sugar Ray ..." "Lay" for "lie" may be a weak paraphrase of fighters' talk, though the context makes this seem unlikely. But a few pages later there is something that would earn an automatic C minus in freshman English: "No one ever looked good wearing out their hands on Chuvalo."

While not looking good wearing out his hands on Ali, Sheed raises but fails to provide adequate answers to a number of fairly basic questions. Is Ali really a bright fellow, though only semiliterate? What moves him? Is he a masochist? (This is not a basic question, but an idle one, suggested to Sheed by Ali's odd stratagem in Zaire of letting George Foreman punch him in the belly for several rounds.) If Ali really does receive his energy and impulses directly from the TV camera's red eye, as Sheed seems to believe, what will he do to get the Eye's attention when he can not bang heads for a living?

If this book does contain answers, they are in its spectacular array of photos. There must be 200 of these, mostly in color and mostly by Neil Leifer of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. They cover Ali from his middle teens to the present. They show him fighting, foaming, capering, preaching, blowing his mind at the press like a child blowing dandelion seeds. The pictures, at least, are a coherent record of an incoherent character, who has managed, for the moment, to scramble one of the country's most literate and sensible minds.

John Skow

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