Muhammad Ali: Ringside [Hardcover]

John Miller (Contributor), Aaron Kenedi (Contributor), James Earl Jones (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 1999

Perhaps no other figure in recent history has had the wide-reaching impact of the man many know simply as The Greatest. For four decades Muhammad Ali has been a symbol of honesty and strength in sports, politics, religion, and civil rights. Throughout his remarkable career, Ali was one who truly had to be seen to be believed. But while Ali's achievements have frequently been chronicled in prose, never before has his extraordinary career been documented in images. Muhammad Ali: Ringside is dedicated to one of the most popular athlete-entertainers of all time. Included are vintage posters and programs, fight tickets, handwritten letters, classic photographs, speeches, scorecards, contracts, and rare autographs, all from Ali's personal memorabilia. Divided chronologically into four sections, one for each decade from the 1960s to the 1990s, the book includes written narrative recountings of Ali's accomplishments by noted writers and entertaining quotes from Ali's contemporaries.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

How do you capture an icon? If the icon is The Greatest, some knockout prose, knockout photography, and a knockout presentation certainly helps. Ali gets all of that in Ringside, a beautiful celebration of a remarkable talent. But it's something else that gives the book its distinct flavor: short, sharp testimonies woven throughout the book that come from the folks who knew Ali, fought him, and observed him. The book's centerpieces--long selections from Alex Haley, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Peter Richmond--attest to the enormous shadow Ali cast. It's the smaller reflections, though, that capture his controversial greatness. Witness Floyd Patterson, the former champ Ali twice humiliated in the ring: "I came to love Ali. I came to see that I was a fighter and he was history." Witness basketball legend Bill Russell: "I still envy him. He has something I have never been able to attain and very few people I know possess. He has an absolute and sincere faith." Witness Joe Frazier, second-billed in three enormous ring dramas: "I hate Ali.... Twenty years I've been fighting Ali, and I still want to take him apart and send him back to Jesus." Witness writer Pete Hamill: "His fights resembled some bloody offshoot of ballet."

Ali has always inspired the wordsmiths, and he's always inspired the people, and you can taste that inspiration on every page here. Artfully assembled and generously illustrated with photos of Ali, Ali memorabilia, and Ali artifacts--fight posters, tickets, even the media betting pool for the famed "Rumble in the Jungle" and the X-ray of his jaw after Ken Norton broke it--Ringside is aptly named. It's a front-row seat to an amazing story. --Jeff Silverman

About the Author

Editors Aaron Kenedi and John Miller run Big Fish in San Francisco, packaging books for Bulfinch Press, Chronicle, and Rizzoli. Big Fish has created more than fifty art and literary books, including Lovers: Great Romances of Our Time, Legends (with Anjelica Huston), San Francisco Stories, and Paul Gauguin's Noa Noa.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Bulfinch (September 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821226266
• ISBN-13: 978-0821226261
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 10.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,585,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the only Ali book you need!, December 13, 1999

By 

Mark R. Miller - See all my reviews

This review is from: Muhammad Ali: Ringside (Hardcover)

If you're a boxing fan or just an Ali fan, this book will help you relive memories like no other photo book or biography will. If you're NOT, you will still marvel at the art and the wonderful writing on page after page. The text is not sappy, faceless writing like so many other photo or art books. Instead, these are well-written essays from people who know boxing and know Ali -- and their appreciation will make you appreciate Ali's achievements, charisma, and larger-than-life persona that has led so many to name him the athlete of the century. (If you're looking for more of a narrative, Davis Miller's new "The Tao of Muhammad Ali" is the perfect complement to this book.)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Mild Disappointment, March 3, 2001

By 

cgabriel223 (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Muhammad Ali: Ringside (Hardcover)

Overall, this strikes me as a somewhat lazy book. Rather than offer any original writing, the editors simply cobble together previously published writings by Alex Haley (actually a "Playboy" interview of the young Ali by Haley), Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Peter Richmond, along with a very short introduction by James Earl Jones. The book jacket also boasts of "contributions from" the likes of Malcolm X, Jackie Robinson, George Plimpton, Jim Brown, and numerous others, but this turns out to refer simply to brief quotations that pepper the book, mostly as photo captions.

The quality of the text by the four featured writers is fine. Certainly you can't go wrong with Norman Mailer. His book "The Fight," from which the chapter in this book is excerpted, was one of the first serious works about boxing and Muhammad Ali that I read back in the 70s, and the first thing I ever read by Mailer. I was a big fan of Ali going in, and a fan of Mailer as well coming out.

One can always quibble with editing decisions in a book like this, but being familiar with Mailer's "The Fight," I found some of the choices made here rather peculiar. For example, in Mailer's very lengthy account of the Ali-Foreman fight itself, he presents the fifth round as the most dramatic, action-filled, significant round of the entire fight. In this excerpt, the editors choose to include some of Mailer's set-up for that round (e.g., "[Foreman] came out in the fifth with the conviction that if force had not prevailed against Ali up to now, more force was the answer, considerably more force than Ali had ever seen."), but then simply replace that entire climactic round with ellipsis.

I don't believe I had previously read the other three selections, or at most I had read excerpts from them. But none of them are newly rediscovered gems that will come as revelations to serious Ali fans. They are not weak or uninteresting, but they are recycled material with which many readers will already be familiar.

Similarly, there are many fine photos in the book, but little that has not appeared in one or more similar Ali books in the past. (In terms of both text and photos, I strongly prefer Wilfrid Sheed's superficially similar picture book "Muhammad Ali" to this one.) One exception is that this book includes many fight programs, posters, and tickets that I had not previously come across.

The book is marred by many factual errors committed by the editors in their photo captions. There are many things that a proofreader even minimally familiar with Ali's career should have caught, so one must unfortunately infer considerable sloppiness or laziness on the part of those who put this book together.

For example, contrary to what this book tells you, Ali did not defeat Joe Frazier by fifteen round decision in their third fight. Ali was awarded a technical knockout when Frazier's handlers conceded between the fourteenth and fifteenth rounds. Ali's 1972 fight against George Chuvalo was not a fifteen round decision, but a twelve round decision. (He had defeated Chuvalo by fifteen round decision in an earlier fight in 1966; that might be what confused the editors.) The book states flatly that Ken Norton broke Ali's jaw in the second round of their March 1973 fight. Maybe, but different parties have claimed anything from the first to the twelfth round, so the matter is not without uncertainty. The photo identified as being from Ali's 1971 fight against Jurgen Blin is in fact a photo from the 1974 fight against Foreman.

Though flawed, this book still has worthwhile elements. With such a compelling central character, you would expect nothing less. It's not the best Ali book out there by a long shot, but insofar as it recruits a few more young newcomers into the legions of Ali fans, and gives the rest of us an excuse to reminisce about an extraordinary man and his extraordinary life, it cannot be all bad.

3.0 out of 5 stars A Mixed Bag, March 29, 2010

By 

Cwn_Annwn (Copenhagen, Denmark) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Muhammad Ali: Ringside (Hardcover)

I would consider this a coffeetable book more than anything. The boxing photography in this is great. The writing is a mixed bag. Its mainly overblown hero worship of Ali from various celebrities and liberal media establishment journalists/writers. The two things I found interesting was an excerpt from an interview with Ali shortly after the first Liston fight where he step by step, round by round goes through what he did and what was going through his head during his first encounter with Liston. Surprisingly (because I normally don't like Mailer) I also thought Norman Mailers descriptive round by round recount of the Ali-Foreman fight was good. Besides those two excerpts and the photography this books not worth your time.