Muhammad Ali in the details

Muhammad Ali was conscious about leaving behind a rich legacy and he hoarded memories.

At Home with Muhammad Ali

Yasmeen Hana Ali 

Bantam Press 

480 pages; Rs 699

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr aka Muhammad Ali always had his hands full. He wore boxing gloves almost every day since he was 12, won Olympic gold at the age of 18, went on to become the world heavyweight champion three times. He also married four times and had eight children. Everyone knows of the African-American, Catholic-turned-Muslim boxer because he is arguably the greatest sportsperson of the 20th century. He was the son of a carpenter, dreamt of becoming the greatest and did. But facts tend to elude the personality. And Hana Ali is trying to ensure that it does not happen to her father’s legacy.

“Step back if you would like to see the whole canvas,” Ms Ali writes in her fourth book on her father, “I offer you a glimpse into my father’s heart”. At Home with Muhammad Ali is not the story of the boxer, actor, poet, philosopher and philanthropist’s dramatically eventful life, but how Ali, the father of eight, juggled all of these in one lifetime.

Ms Ali paints a vivid picture of Ali in his office, his atelier, sitting at his desk in a suit, or stretched on the mahogany sofa in his tracks, dialling presidents and celebrities, and even random numbers, to wish people on Thanksgiving. He was the master of theatrics and wordplay. His dramatics filled the papers with almost unprecedented regularity throughout his three-decade-long career. This makes it even more challenging to write — for the fourth time — about one of the most written about men in the world. 

She, like her father, shoots straight from the heart. Taking after Ali, she communicates in short, impactful sentences. In her non-linear storyline that builds on her memories of living with her father at 55, Fermont Place in Los Angeles for the first 10 years of her life, and their closeness thereafter, she talks about Ali’s beliefs and prejudices, successes and crazy ideas, marriages and indiscretions. 

Ali was conscious about leaving behind a rich legacy and he hoarded memories. He recorded everyday conversations and saved scribbled pages. The stack of audio tapes he gifts to his daughter, much later in life, sends her rummaging through memorabilia to piece together the intimate life of Ali. The book prints verbatim conversations that Ali had with his family, friends, journalists and well-wishers, and the letters he wrote to Ms Ali’s mother, Veronica, which she discovered only years after their separation. It also has a collection of rarely seen photographs of Ali’s family, especially one with his eight children together and another with his past, present and future wives in the same frame.

Ms Ali touches upon her father’s broken marriages and their effects on his families. Although the book does help better understand the man behind the legend, it does so in parts within a story that does not travel smoothly between present and past. But it lacks the perspective of Ali’s other children. Ali visited, engaged with and provided for all his families. The book says a lot about what kind of a father he was, at least to one daughter.

It also reveals more about Ali’s showmanship, his love for magic tricks and his improbable humour. Ms Ali records a joke that Ali liked to crack at the White House: 

“What did Abraham Lincoln say after a four-day drunk? 

I freed who!?” 

He was spectacular at making people uncomfortable.

This is not the first book one should read on Muhammad Ali. It should, perhaps, be the last. It is only after you know the legend would you understand a great man through his trivialities. “Love is the net where hearts are caught like fish,” Ali liked to say. And Ms Ali’s love for her old man is so overpowering — and understandably so — that the book becomes a collection of her fond memories of him.

In the 460 pages, she tirelessly details her impressions of everyone around her, including aunts and governesses. There’s little about the time after Ali and Veronica’s separation, or after Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s or how he coped with all of these. But we do know that the man famous for his footwork in the ring, had two left feet in reality. He took dancing lessons from John Travolta for his film Freedom Road.

Ali was a remarkable man who always believed he was the greatest. “Guess what daddy, you are in the newspapers again,” Ms Ali quotes a conversation she had with her father at a hospital a few months before his death on June 3, 2016, “They think you are dying”. To which Ali says, “Did I make the front page?” 

Ali wanted to be remembered. Not just for being a champion, but also for the man he strove to be. He documented his life in great detail and then passed on the notes. His daughter’s book builds on those, to offer a different if partial glimpse of a great man.