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Review by Peter Ward
Even though his last bout took place 15 years ago, Muhammad Ali endures. Thousands cheered last summer as Ali, suffering from Parkinson's syndrome, appeared from the shadows atop Olympic Stadium, hands trembling, and lit the Olympic flame during the opening ceremony in Atlanta. Davis Miller, however, is more than just an Ali fan, and The Tao of Muhammad Ali is more than just another profile of the former heavyweight champion.
As a child, crushed by the sudden death of his mother, Miller was inspired to study the martial arts after watching Ali, then Cassius Clay, win the heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston in 1964. As the author grew up, the outspoken fighter served as a kind of role model; but by the time Miller married and established a career, Ali's influence had gradually diminished. Until, after moving to Louisville, Kentucky, Ali's birthplace, Miller found himself driving past his idol's boyhood home. Stopping one day after spotting Ali's motor home parked outside, he worked up enough courage to knock on the door. Ali himself answered the door and eventually asked Miller to stay for dinner, to the author's great joy and astonishment. "Champ, you changed my life," Miller tells him. "When I was a kid, I was messed up. . . . You made me believe I could do anything." That meeting and the others that followed established a friendship with Ali that inspired Miller to quit his job and become a writer, the aftermath of which makes up a major portion of Miller's narrative.
The Ali that Miller comes to know and portrays in The Tao of Muhammad Ali is more sagacious than pugnacious, more spiritual than physical. Bout-by-bout recaps and psycho-biographical perspectives like those offered by other Ali biographers won't be found here. Instead, Miller presents Ali -- as well as himself -- as a sojourner searching for life's eternal truths and gives little space to the details of Ali's ring career. "Most of the writing (and the talk) about Ali," Miller maintains, "not only now (about his health) but over the decades, has served to inaccurately limit him, to minimize him and his existence." As Miller, a white man and a student of Zen, struggles to come to grips with the purpose of his own life, it is Ali, a Black Muslim, reconciled to his own condition, who again and again provides a spiritual point of reference for him.
Not the final word on boxing's greatest legend, but an intensely personal profile of Ali, as well as a sensitive description of the author's spiritual growth as a result of their friendship.
Peter Ward is a freelance reviewer specializing in sports books.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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