The Stolen Bicycle

Three autobiographies, an FBI file released only after his death, and the long lawyering of the Clay v. United States defense team: those are the records behind this book. Devon Marable works them with procedural rigour, in the dark and sensational register the subject calls for.

Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. came out of Louisville, Kentucky, born there on January 17, 1942. He learned to box at twelve, after his bicycle was stolen, from a white Louisville police officer named Joe Martin who ran a youth gym. Light-heavyweight gold followed at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Sonny Liston went down for the heavyweight title on February 25, 1964. Three weeks later he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name.

Then the refusal. He declined induction into the Vietnam-era draft on April 28, 1967, and was stripped of his title for it. The Supreme Court decided Clay v. United States in his favour on June 28, 1971. The fights people still argue about came after: Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden in March 1971, the Fight of the Century; George Foreman in Zaire on October 30, 1974, beaten with the rope-a-dope; Frazier a third time in Manila in 1975. He retired in 1981.

What the book assembles is one man holding two positions at once, heavyweight champion of the world and the principled draft-refuser of his generation, and then a third, in Atlanta in 1996, when he lit the Olympic torch with the tremor of his Parkinson's, a tremor that had been thirty years coming. He died in Phoenix on June 3, 2016, and the Louisville Lip is in the record three times over in his own words.