How a Boxing Biography Opened Up a Quiet Man

There is a kind of man who has stopped telling his own stories. My father-in-law, Arthur, was one of those men. Thirty-eight years at a machine shop had built him a fine, quiet shell, and behind it he kept a whole life that nobody in the family had ever heard. Then I wrapped Thomas Hauser's Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times for him one Christmas, and it turned out to be the key that fit the lock.

Arthur grew up in Louisville, which means he grew up in the hometown of a kid named Cassius Clay. He was twelve when Clay came home from the Rome Olympics wearing gold in 1960, and seventeen when the same kid took the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston in 1964 and announced to the world that he was the greatest. Arthur watched those fights on a rented television with his brothers, then went back to the shop on Monday and never mentioned them again. For the fifteen years I had known him, the past was a drawer he kept closed.

Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times is not a typical biography, and that is exactly why it reached him. Thomas Hauser spent years collecting the testimony of more than two hundred people who stood close to Ali, then built the story out of their voices. Ali's mother speaks in it. Angelo Dundee, his trainer, speaks. The men he fought speak, the sportswriters who covered him speak, and Ali himself speaks in his own unmistakable rhythm, filling the gaps with his own recollections. It reads less like one author's verdict and more like a room full of people remembering the same man, which means it never feels like a lecture.

I chose it for a practical reason. Arthur does not trust slick modern writing, but he trusts witnesses, men who were there. A book stitched together from real testimony seemed like the one book he would actually sit still for. I wrapped it in brown paper with a card that said only, keep the stories for us, and I hoped.

What happened next is the reason I am writing this at all. Christmas came, he opened the package, and for a long minute he just held the book and turned it over in his hands. Then he said, quietly, 'Hauser did this one properly,' and I knew the gift had already landed.

By the second chapter he was reading passages aloud to my mother-in-law, and I understood that a gift had done what twenty years of family dinners could not.

He started it Christmas night, a few pages at a time in the quiet of the house. By the second chapter he was reading passages aloud to my mother-in-law, and I understood that a gift had done what twenty years of family dinners could not. He reads slowly, the way men of his generation read, a few pages a night under the lamp in his chair, and none of that mattered because the book does not hurry either.

And then he talked. He reached the years when Ali refused the draft and lost his license to fight, and Arthur stopped. 'They took three years from him,' he said, 'and he never bent.' I had not heard him raise his voice about anything in a long time. That night he told me about watching Frazier and Ali in Manila with his brothers, and about a cousin who did not speak to him for a year over the draft decision. The book had become the door to his own history.

He finished it in February and started again that spring. My mother-in-law called me, which she almost never does. 'He is telling me about the fights,' she said. 'He told me about the night his brother shipped out. He has not talked this much in thirty years.' I could hear that she was crying a little.

I have bought four more copies since. One for my older brother, who still swears Sonny Liston's shoulder was really hurt, one for a neighbor who collects old fight films, and two to keep on my own shelf, because a book you can hand to a person is the kind of gift that does not end at the wrapping.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

Here is what I have learned from all of it. You do not reach a quiet man by starting with the sport. You reach him by starting with a man he already admires, and by handing him a book full of other voices, because a book full of voices gives him permission to add his own. Thomas Hauser's Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times is not really a boxing book. It is a book about a generation, told by the people who lived it. If you have an Arthur in your life, the paperback is a modest gift at today's price, and I can tell you from the far side of it that the return is conversation. That is a return worth more than any wrapper.