Why focus on these particular years, out of the entire long arc of Ali's career? Because this was the moment when a loudmouthed kid from Jim Crow Kentucky born Cassius Marcellus Clay became Muhammad Ali. This was also a time when the sociopolitical climate in America changed radically, and heavyweight prizefighting was a significant indicator of those changes, especially the shifting attitudes toward race. This was the time of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi; Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery; the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X; the Watts riots; and the first US Marine landing in South Vietnam.

The main body of the book begins and ends with Floyd Patterson, cast in the role of the "Good Negro" in the racial drama of prizefighting. Before his title defense against Sonny Liston in 1962, Patterson was supported by the NAACP and the leaders of the civil rights movement as "a civil rights man, an integrationist, a reform-minded gentleman," while Liston was widely portrayed as a thug who'd been convicted of armed robbery. President Kennedy invited Patterson to the White House to tell him he had to beat Liston because the future of civil rights hung in the balance. When Patterson fought Ali three years later, he said that Ali had "taken the championship...and given it to the Black Muslims, who don't want to be a part of our world," and claimed that beating Ali "would be my contribution to civil rights."

Patterson was "a race man, but one whom enlightened white men could accept, could talk to." The great poet and playwright Amiri Baraka denigrated Patterson at the time as an "honorary" white man and celebrated Liston as a threat, "the big black Negro in every white man's hallway, waiting to do him in, deal him under for all the hurts white men, through their arbitrary order, have been able to inflict on the world." In his 1962 autobiography, Victory over Myself, Patterson said, "I am just part of the social history of our time and our country, and I can't lag behind it--or run too far ahead of it. If you keep walking around with the bitterness in you, sooner or later it's got to turn into a pain that makes you want to strike out at the injustice. I would never want to do that." But much later Patterson would tell Remnick, "I came to love Ali. I came to see that I was a fighter and he was history."

The press generally pitched the Patterson-Liston fight as "the Good Negro versus the Threatening Negro," a scenario that Liston understood perfectly. "A boxing match is like a cowboy movie," he said. "There's got to be good guys and there's got to be bad guys. That's what people pay for--to see the bad guys get beat. So I'm the bad guy. But I change things. I don't get beat."

And he didn't, with a vengeance. It took him only two minutes and six seconds to knock Patterson out in their first fight and two minutes and ten seconds to do it again in the rematch ten months later. Cassius Clay went to where Liston was training for the second Patterson fight to try to bait Liston into a fight. He was successful, and the fight was set for February 25, 1964.

Remnick spends the first quarter of this book describing, in the context of the Patterson-Liston fights, the world of prizefighting, BC: Before Clay. He details the control the Mafia had of every aspect of the fight game then and the reasons this monopoly was beginning to break up just as Clay appeared on the scene. With numerous examples from the boxing press of the time, he vividly evokes the generational conflict that was beginning to arise among sportswriters, presaging the larger generational storm to come.

The extraordinary, irresistibly unlikely story of Muhammad Ali's early life has led many good writers (and a multitude of lesser ones) over the cliffs of hyperbole and bombast. Remnick's no-nonsense approach serves him well here. He often seems to possess the journalistic equivalent of perfect pitch, landing on the right telling detail. In his journalistic evenhandedness, Remnick manages to avoid both hagiography and pathography--the Scylla and Charybdis of the biographer's craft--as he tells the tale of a true American hero, set in the time before hardly anyone (other than Ali himself) recognized him as one. This gives the narrative a pleasurable anthelic charge.

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