Approaching Ali: A Reclamation in Three Acts

by Davis Miller

Overview

The single most intimate look at Muhammad Ali’s retirement, told through the story of an unexpected, powerful and life-changing friendship

In 1988, then struggling writer and video store worker Davis Miller drove to Muhammad Ali’s mother’s modest Louisville house, knocked on the door, and introduced himself to his childhood idol. Now, all these years later, the two friends have an uncommon bond, the sort that can be fashioned only in serendipitous ways and fortified through shared experiences. Miller draws from his remarkable moments with The Champ to give us a beautifully written portrait of a great man physically devastated but spiritually young—playing mischievous tricks on unsuspecting guests, performing sleight of hand for any willing audience, and walking ten miles each way to grab an ice cream sundae. Informed by great literary journalists such as Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese, but in a timeless style that is distinctly his own, Miller gives us a series of extraordinary stories that coalesce into an unprecedentedly humanizing, intimate, and tenderly observed portrait of one of the world’s most loved men.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631492235
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	11/29/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Davis Miller's award-winning stories have been published in many of the leading national magazines—Men’s Journal, GQ, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Rolling Stone, among others. He is the internationally best-selling author of two previous books, including The Tao of Bruce Lee, and is co-librettist of the acclaimed chamber opera Approaching Ali, which is based on his classic story, "My Dinner with Ali."

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Act 1 Waking

My Dinner with Ali 3

A Boyhood Dream 30

Easter Sunday 32

Interlude: Kuwait 34

Mouse Meets Muhammad Ali 35

Wings 55

Act 2 All Things Vibrate

Last Apple 59

Ali Offers Vocational Advice 71

The Zen of Muhammad Ali: Part One 91

Interlude: Desert Storm 110

The Zen of Muhammad Ali: Part Two 111

Interlude: Jann Wenner 130

Tokyo 133

Columbus, Ohio 137

The Reverend Doesn't Play Fair … 139

And Neither Does His God 141

A Mid afternoon Dream 142

All Things Vibrate 144

Of All Times 153

Manila 156

Twenty-Dollar Bills 160

Eleven Ghosts 164

Interlude: Marrakcch 179

Act 3 A Hymn for Agnostics

There Is Nothing in the Universe That You Are Not 185

Tonight's Dream 191

Our Dinner with All 196

Sam and Isaac 202

Lonnie 209

Children 210

Birthday 211

Charlie 212

Great Heart 215

Illumination 216

Everywhere That There Are People 217

From Adam Until Now 218

Acknowledgments 221

Editorial Reviews

"Nobody has ever written so purely about Ali before."

|Los Angeles Times

"There have been many books about Muhammad Ali, and there will be more, but…nobody is more qualified to write about Ali’s post-boxing life than Miller."

Only a Game, NPR - Bill Littlefield

Nobody has ever written so purely about Ali before.

Los Angeles Times

11/02/2015
Journalist Miller (The Tao of Bruce Lee) here explores his long fascination with boxing icon Muhammad Ali and their eventual friendship. As a sickly, undersized teenager in North Carolina in the 1960s, Miller clung to the exploits of Ali as an escape from the loss of his mother and the bullying he suffered. Throughout various reinventions—competitive kickboxer, journalist, editor, father—Miller never lost his focus on Ali and eventually became enough of an intimate to serve as the Boswell of the champ’s post-boxing life, which was increasingly affected by Parkinson’s syndrome. Hero worship provides the impetus for the memoir, but Miller doesn’t ignore Ali’s philandering and his abuse of Joe Frazier, or the mounting damage wrought by Parkinson’s. In clear, observant prose, Miller details how the most outspoken and graceful heavyweight of all time now struggles to knot a tie or make himself understood. Yet in the wreck of “the black Superman,” Miller discovers and celebrates a spiritual Ali, a bodhisattva molded by the unlikely path of boxing and the Nation of Islam. Miller writes affectingly of his own life as well, a tactic that deepens the impressionistic swirl of his meetings with Ali. Readers may not share Miller’s adulation, but his engagement and journalistic integrity provide a unique perspective on a man he portrays as a hero for the world. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Ali, now 74 and courageously battling Parkinson’s disease, remains one of the great figures of 20th-century sports, and this profile finds the boxer’s playful good nature and magnanimous personal spirit intact."

BookPage - Martin Brady

"Each of Mr. Miller's Muhammad Ali tales is lyrical, important, and rigorously humanizing. There is music and truth in each sentence he writes. I can think of no higher praise for a writer or his work."

Maya Angelou

"Magnificent. Unlike anything else that's been written. The writing is astounding, the best ever about Ali."

Leon Gast

"In Approaching Ali: A Reclamation in Three Acts (Liveright), Miller weaves vignettes drawn from his time with the Champ—updates of published work combined with new recollections—to tell a deeply personal story of Ali’s post-career life. From Ali’s take on historic fights to his struggles with Parkinson’s to unguarded moments, as when the boxer performs magic tricks for kids on a South Carolina beach, Miller celebrates the one-two combo of charisma and power that made Ali both his lifelong muse and the most famous athlete on the planet."

Garden & Gun - C.J. Lotz

"Not like anything else that I have read. What a strange encounter between this extraordinary man and his gifted troubadour. One has the feeling of absolute and radiant verisimilitude, which is exactly what one requires."

Donald Hall

"I don't know of a better or more human biography of an iconic American than Davis Miller's magnificent portrait of Muhammad Ali. Approaching Ali is the best book about friendship I've read in years. Every sentence in the book is, in one way or another, revelatory, profound, sublime, graceful, naked, true, tender, and uncompromising. Davis is a genuinely great writer."

Howard Frank Mosher

"From Norman Mailer to George Plimpton to Hunter S. Thompson to Tom Wolfe, Muhammad Ali has inspired some of the best work by America’s best writers. But no one has written about him as well as Davis Miller. Approaching Ali is a book for the ages, a book to be treasured."

Matthew Polly

11/01/2015
Muhammad Ali (b. 1942) is one of the most fascinating and famous individuals in the past century. In his latest work, Miller (The Tao of Muhammad Ali) brings together for the first time many of his individual essays and longer pieces on Ali into one coherent tale. Miller first meets the star by simply driving to his mother's house in Louisville (as Ali says it, "Loovul") in the late 1980s. The author befriends Ali, but he isn't trying to use him; he just wants to get to know his childhood hero. The short tale, "My Dinner with Ali," was published in the Louisville Courier-Journal Magazine shortly afterward and became a critical success for Miller. (The title of this book also lent itself to the creation of an opera by composer D.J. Sparr for the Washington National Opera.) VERDICT Most surprisingly, from 1994 until 2014, Miller and Ali did not speak or see each other. Rabid fans of Muhammad Ali will want to read this but may be disappointed by the lack of information on the past 20 years of their idol's life.—Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI

Library Journal

2015-09-01
A journalist's obsession with his subject is renewed. As a scrawny runt who suffered bullying, Miller (The Tao of Bruce Lee: A Martial Arts Memoir, 2000, etc.) took inspiration from his idol, Muhammad Ali, to gain the confidence to defend himself, and he maintains that "my admiration for him saved my life." As a writer, he not only found in Ali his "muse and mentor," but he also discovered the subject that would continue as his obsession for his professional life: in books, newspaper and magazine articles, as the boxing editor for Sport magazine, and in presentations he would give as someone who had become unusually close to Ali and stayed close during his ongoing battle with Parkinson's and his spiritual journey. One of his main revelations—voiced twice in the book in exactly the same words—is "how the young Ali's seemingly endless energy had promised that he would never get old, and how in many ways he is now older than just about everyone his age." Readers see both sides in descriptions of famous fights and in intimate visits after Ali's retirement, when he remained more playful and engaged than accounts that would reduce him to his disease might suggest. The author wants to set the record straight about his hero, but he reveals more about himself than about his subject—and about the hero worship that is practically a religion with him, as Ali is depicted as rarely less than a saint and more like a god. "Ali has been the most reliably large planet in my solar system, the astronomical constant," writes Miller, who recognizes the fortuity of his relationship with the Champ but who insists that Ali treats everyone the same. Hagiographic pieces that never quite coalesce into a book that matches the author's ambitions.

Kirkus Reviews