America's Finest On America's Greatest

• Date: 07.12.2007
• Book: Fight (Penguin Modern Classics)
• Author: TCRH

Review

You don’t need to like boxing to like this book. But liking Norman – which, after much soul searching, he decides to call himself – is probably an advantage.

Does Norman know much about boxing? How much do most fans know about the sport they love? It doesn’t really matter because Mailer captures the build up to the fight and its aftermath spectacularly well. Granted an insider’s view Mailer seizes the opportunity and takes the reader into the very heart of the “Rumble in the Jungle.”

The chapters dealing with the fight may lack the expert’s technical analysis but as a fight fans response to Ali out thinking and then out boxing the champion and favourite George Foreman this is the definitive account of boxing’s defining moment.

You can feel the tension in Ali’s dressing room before the bout: only Ali and Norman, half blinded by the devotion of the true fan, rate the veteran’s chances. Foreman has trained better, is fitter, younger, stronger. But Norman in those final few minutes sees Ali’s hunger, his need to grab redemption, to show the world they were wrong. No other writer could capture that the way Mailer does.

To see Ali up close through Norman’s eyes is to see greatness as even more beautiful, interesting and conflicting than his public image suggested. The hulking, scary, decent Foreman was cast in Ali’s shadow but Mailer allows him to step out to become a fully rounded and admirable man.

Mailer imbues the fight, and Ali especially, with a significance beyond that of a championship bout. He is right to predict that this one night in the jungle would rumble through the years. But what did he make of a ravaged Ali becoming a cheerleader for a white President’s war or a happy-go-lucky Foreman touting grilling machines?

These questions are our luxury of course because we have witnessed the damage and strains of the years as they have hacked away at Ali and seen Foreman reborn three or four times. But as an immediate history of Ali’s – and by extension boxing’s – greatest night this book is a masterpiece.