But now he focussed on another sort of paradise. The Liston fight began. In black-and-white, Cassius Clay came bounding out of his corner and right away started circling the square, dancing, moving around and around the ring, moving in and out, his head twitching from side to side, as if freeing himself from a neck crick early in the morning, easy and fluid—and then Liston, a great bull whose shoulders seemed to cut off access to half the ring, lunged with a left jab. Liston missed by two feet. At that moment, Clay hinted not only at what was to come that night in Miami Beach but at what he was about to introduce to boxing and to sports in general—the marriage of mass and velocity. A big man no longer had to lumber along and slug: he could punch like a heavyweight and move like Ray Robinson.

“It’s sweet, isn’t it?” Ali smiled. With great effort, he smiled. Parkinson’s is a disease of the nervous system which stiffens the muscles and freezes the face into a stolid mask. Motor control degenerates. Speech degenerates. Some people hallucinate or suffer nightmares. As the disease progresses, even swallowing can become a terrible trial. Parkinson’s comes on the victim erratically. Ali still walked well. He was still powerful in the arms and across the chest; it was obvious, just from shaking his hand, that he still possessed a knockout punch. For him the special torture was speech and expression, as if the disease had intentionally struck first at what had once pleased him—and had pleased (or annoyed) the world—most. He hated the effort that speech now cost him. (“Sometimes you won’t understand me,” he said when we first met. “But that’s O.K. I’ll say it again.”)

Ali was smiling now as his younger self, Cassius Clay, flicked a nasty left jab into Liston’s brow.

“You watchin’ this?” he said. “So-o-o fast! So-o-o pretty!”

No matter how ruinous boxing is to boxers, there’s no doubt that part of Ali’s appeal derived from boxing, from going into a ring, stripped to the waist, a beautiful man, alone, in combat. It is perfectly plausible that as a basketball player or even as a swaddled halfback he would have been no less famous and quicksilver. But the boxer represents a more immediate form of dynamism, even supermasculinity, no matter how retrograde. For all his verbal gifts, Ali was first a supreme physical performer and sexual presence. “Ain’t I pretty?” he would ask over and over again, and, of course, he was. If he’d had the face of Sonny Liston, he would have lost much of his appeal.

Even as a schoolkid, Clay had a sense of glamour and performance. At Central High School, in Louisville, he paraded up and down the hallways shadowboxing and crying out his candidacy for the heavyweight crown—all in a style so over the top that he undercut the arrogance with laughter. He was probably our first rapper and our best. At the 1960 Summer Olympics, in Rome, when he was just eighteen, he wandered through the Olympic Village meeting people from all over the world and charming them with predictions about his great future. Clay was so much at ease that he became known as the Mayor of the Olympic Village. His experience in the ring in Rome was no less blissful. As a light heavyweight, he marched easily through his first three bouts, and then, in the finals, against a stubby coffeehouse manager from Poland named Zbigniew Pietrzykowski, he came back from a clumsy first round to win a unanimous decision and the gold medal. By the end of the bout, the Pole was bleeding all over Clay’s white satin shorts.

In Rome, Clay had fulfilled his mission, but he had done it in a style that offended the sensibilities of some of the older writers. Big men were supposed to fight like Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano: they were supposed to wade in and flatten their opponent. A. J. Liebling wrote in The New Yorker that Clay, though amusing to watch, lacked the requisite menace of a true big man. Liebling was not offended by Clay’s poetic pretensions: he was quick to remind his readers of Bob Gregson, the Lancashire Giant, who used to write such fistic couplets as “The British lads that’s here / Quite strangers are to fear.” It was Clay’s boxing manner that left Liebling in doubt. “I had watched Clay’s performance in Rome and had considered it attractive but not probative,” he wrote. “Clay had a skittering style, like a pebble scaled over water. He was good to watch, but he seemed to make only glancing contact. . . . A boxer who uses his legs as much as Clay used his in Rome risks deceleration in a longer bout.”

Whatever Liebling’s reservations, Clay was awarded his medal, with the word “pugilato” emblazoned across it. “I can still see him strutting around the Olympic Village with his gold medal on,” the late Wilma Rudolph, a great Olympic sprinter, once said. “He slept with it. He went to the cafeteria with it. He never took it off. No one else cherished it the way he did.”

After the awards ceremonies, a reporter from the Soviet Union asked Clay, in essence, how it felt to win glory for a country that did not give him the right to eat at Woolworth’s in Louisville.

“Tell your readers we’ve got qualified people working on that problem, and I’m not worried about the outcome,” Clay said. “To me, the U.S.A. is still the best country in the world, counting yours. It may be hard to get something to eat sometimes, but anyhow I ain’t fighting alligators and living in a mud hut.” That remark was printed in dozens of American papers as evidence of Clay’s good citizenship, his allegiance to the model fighters (and black men) who had come before him. Clay, it appeared, was ready to submit.

Boxing has never been a sport of the middle class. It is a game for the poor, the lottery player, the all-or-nothing-at-all young men who risk their health for the infinitesimally small chance of riches and glory. All Clay’s most prominent opponents—Liston, Patterson, Joe Frazier, George Foreman—were born poor, and more often than not into large families, often with fathers who were either out of work or out of sight. As boys, they were part of what sociologists and headline writers would later call the underclass. Cassius Clay, though, was a child of the black middle class—“but black middle class, black Southern middle class, which is not white middle class at all,” says Toni Morrison, who, as a young editor, worked on Ali’s autobiography. True enough, but still Clay was born to better circumstances than his eventual rivals. One of the less entertaining components of the Ali act was the way he tried to “out-black” someone like Frazier, calling him an Uncle Tom, an “honorary white,” when in fact Frazier had grown up dirt poor in South Carolina. If Ali was joking, Frazier never found it funny.

Clay’s mother, Odessa, was a sweet, light-skinned woman who took her sons to church every Sunday and kept after them to keep clean, to work hard, to respect their elders. Cassius Clay, Sr., who earned his livelihood as a sign painter, was a braggart, a charmer, a performer, a man full of fantastic tales and hundred-proof blather. To all who would listen, including reporters who trooped off to Louisville in later years, the senior Clay talked of having been an Arabian sheikh and a Hindu noble. Like Ralph Kramden, Jackie Gleason’s bus driver with dreams, the senior Clay talked up his schemes for the big hit, the marketing of this idea or that gadget which would vault the Clays, once and for all, out of Louisville and into some suburban nirvana. Cassius, Sr., always worked, but he had a weakness for the bottle, and when he drank he often became violent. The Louisville police records show that he was arrested four times for reckless driving, twice for disorderly conduct, and twice for assault and battery, and that on three occasions Odessa called the police complaining that her husband was beating her. “I like a few drinks now and then,” the senior Clay said. He often spent his nights moving from one bar to the next, picking up women whenever possible. (Many years later, Odessa finally grew so tired of her husband’s womanizing that she insisted on a period of separation.) John (Junior Pal) Powell, who owned a liquor store in the West End, once told a reporter for Sports Illustrated about a night when the old man came stumbling into his apartment, his shirt covered with blood. Some woman had stabbed him in the chest. When Powell offered to take him to the hospital, Clay refused, saying, “Hey, Junior Pal, the best thing you can do for me is do what the cowboys do. You know, give me a little drink and pour a little bit on my chest, and I’ll be all right.”