David Remnick

DATE January 4, 2002 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: David Remnick, author of "King of the World," talks
about the subject of his book, Muhammad Ali
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev.

(Soundbite from 1964 interview)

Unidentified Man #1: Cassius, can I ask you how you're feeling now at this
point ...(unintelligible)?

Mr. CASSIUS CLAY: I'm feeling great. I'm ready to go to war right now.

Unidentified Man #1: Well, when you say you're ready to go to war right
now...

Mr. CLAY: I'll see that boy on the street, I'll beat him before the fight.

Unidentified Man #1: You'd actually take him on before the fight?

Mr. CLAY: Beat him like I'm his daddy.

Unidentified Man #1: I saw Sonny Liston a few days ago, Cassius.

Mr. CLAY: Ain't he ugly? He's too ugly to be the world champ. The world's
champ should be pretty, like me.

Unidentified Man #1: Well, he told me to bet my life that you wouldn't go
three rounds.

Mr. CLAY: Well, if you want to lose your money, you bet on Sonny.

Unidentified Man #1: Well, may I ask you this...

Mr. CLAY: I'll never lose a fight. It's impossible. Tell him, it's
impossible!

Unidentified Man #2: Never lost a fight in your life.

Mr. CLAY: Ask any of my fans, when was the last time they lost? I'm too
fast.

Unidentified Man #2: Champion of the crib.

Mr. CLAY: I'm the king.

Unidentified Man #2: King of the ring.

Mr. CLAY: ...(Unintelligible).

Unidentified Man #2: ...(Unintelligible) champ of the crib.

Unidentified Men: Aaah!

Mr. CLAY: I'm not only vital, I'm a poet, I'm a prophet, I'm the resurrector,
I'm the savior of the boxing world. If it wasn't for me, the game would be
dead.

BOGAEV: That was Cassius Clay in 1964, shortly before he took the world
heavyweight title from Sonny Liston. The day after that fight, Clay took on a
new name: Muhammad Ali.

The new film about Ali, starring Will Smith, begins in 1964 as the fighter is
preparing for his match with Liston, and follows his life through his Rumble
in the Jungle match with George Foreman 10 years later. We'll hear an
interview with Foreman from our archives, later on today's program.

Although his outspokenness initially alienated many Americans in the
mainstream, Ali became a beloved American hero. He became famous not just for
his rhymes and his abilities in the ring, but for his religion and his
politics.

In 1998, Terry Gross spoke with journalist David Remnick about Ali. Remnick
began his career as a sportswriter for The Washington Post. He became The
Post's Russian correspondent and went on to write about Russia and other
subjects for The New Yorker. He's now the editor of that magazine. His book
about Ali is called "King of the World."

TERRY GROSS: You say that Ali entered the world of boxing at a time when the
expectation was that a black fighter would behave with absolute deference to
white sensibilities. Give me an example of what you mean there.

Mr. DAVID REMNICK (Author, "King of the World"): Well, the champion at the
time, when Muhammad Ali, then Cassius Clay, was in the Olympics--he was then a
light heavyweight in the 1960 Rome Olympics--was Floyd Patterson, and Floyd
Patterson was certainly no era-shaking fighter. He was not Joe Louis, by any
stretch of the imagination, but he imitated Joe Louis as a social type for
reasons of being accepted by the white world, by white columnists like Jimmy
Cannon or Red Smith.

And Patterson was champion for a very brief time, before he was utterly
destroyed in the ring, twice, by Sonny Liston, who was another--was a
different type, who was somebody who was a destroyer, who in his time, was a
fighter not unlike Mike Tyson, and a personality not unlike Mike Tyson, a kind
of--an extremely scary figure to everyone. The NAACP endorsed Floyd Patterson
before his fight with Sonny Liston because they were so terrified that Sonny
Liston could come along and occupy this place in American culture, which
really only accepted black men as athletes, and it would be bad for the race,
essentially. But lo and behold, Sonny Liston was the superior fighter and
beat Floyd Patterson twice, both times in the first round.

GROSS: Well, Ali, when you interviewed him, told you that he wanted to be a
new kind of black man when he became famous as a fighter. How do you see him
fitting in as a new kind of black man in the world of boxing?

Mr. REMNICK: Well, he was what's still called a race man, not that Liston or
Patterson weren't, necessarily, but he was in a new and surprising way. He
represented the generational shift that took whites, and middle-class blacks
as well, by surprise. He was the forerunner to the black power movement. He
was the forerunner to the draft-resistance movement. He came along at a time
when these sort of things were unknown to whites.

He grew up in a household in which his father was a fairly humble sign painter
in Louisville, Kentucky, and his father was deeply influenced, as were many
blacks throughout the country in the '20s, '30s and thereafter, by Marcus
Garvey, black nationalism of a kind that whites had no clue about. And by the
time he--even before he was fighting, he was filled with this notion of what a
black man, what a black woman, what anyone in segregated Louisville had to
live through and suffer, and he would have none of it.

GROSS: Well, before he became politicized, and before he joined the Nation of
Islam, he became known for his really flamboyant style of showmanship and
particularly for his great rhyming, and what insights did you get about how he
developed that showmanship and the verbal flamboyance?

Mr. REMNICK: It began at the beginning. He had his first fight when he was
12 years old. Another kid had stolen his bicycle, and little Cassius Clay was
very angry. And he went down to a basement gym run by a cop in town named Joe
Martin, and Joe Martin said, `Stop being so angry and stop threatening to beat
everybody up, and why don't you learn how to fight?' And so Cassius Clay
learned how to fight, and put on gigantic gloves--he's a little skinny
kid--and he fought one of those sort of church basement-type fights, and he
won a split decision, 12 years old, 98 pounds. And his reaction afterward was
`I am the greatest. I will be champion of the world. I am the greatest.'
The rhetoric that you would hear years and years later, and you would think he
invented it last week; it came out of his mouth after a split decision against
another 12-year-old.

GROSS: What was Sonny Liston's reaction to Ali's kind of playful, but also
aggressive, verbal showmanship before their first championship bout together?

Mr. REMNICK: Fury and confusion. Sonny Liston was a very simple man,
intellectually limited, emotionally limited, and this drove him crazy. He was
a great and powerful fighter. He thought he would have no trouble with this
guy who fought like Sugar Ray Robinson. He danced around the ring, which, you
know, was a bit fey for a heavyweight after all. And Cassius Clay, who was
fearful of Sonny Liston in his heart, because he knew how powerful he was--he
had seen what he had done to Floyd Patterson--wanted to find a way to get to
his mind, to unnerve him, to scare him, to make him second-guess, to think,
really, that he was crazy, because the one thing that Sonny Liston couldn't
deal with was somebody who was nuts. Always in prison, where Sonny Liston had
spent some time, the person you never dealt with, the person you always
avoided, was the crazy man. That's what you avoided. And Cassius Clay knew
that--start calling him Clay now, because that's who he was at the time.

And Clay did things like, you know, drive his bus to Sonny Liston's house in
the middle of the night, at 3:00 in the morning, run up to the door and start
pounding on the door, screaming and yelling and acting like an insane person.
And Sonny Liston would come out on the lawn in his shortie bathrobe, not
knowing what to make of this guy, and it really unnerved him. And Clay, and
then Ali, did it over and over and over again. And the one thing Sonny Liston
couldn't deal with was a madman.

GROSS: Of course...

Mr. REMNICK: But for Clay, of course, it was all by design. And the most
famous instance of it was the weigh-in before the first fight, the
weigh-in--Cassius Clay comes in and starts screaming and yelling. Usually,
these are routine performances in which you really don't do anything other
than get weighed and flex your muscles and get the hell out of there. Well,
he's screaming and yelling, `I'm going to destroy him,' and he's jumping at
Liston, and his pulse rate is up to--God knows what it was--hundreds and
hundreds above what it should have been. And then an hour later, after it was
over, he was absolutely normal. He took a nap. It was the most amazing
performance. And Sonny Liston went into that ring thinking he was dealing
with a nut.

GROSS: It's a very wrestling kind of attitude to have, that type of
showmanship.

Mr. REMNICK: Well, it's funny you should say that. One of the influences on
his showmanship was Gorgeous George, who was the Hulk Hogan of his time.
Gorgeous George, a professional wrestler who wore his long blond tresses down
past his shoulder blades, who sprayed himself with eau de cologne before going
in the ring, who caused everyone to hate him, also knew how to fill an arena.
And before one of his minor fights, before the championship fights, Clay went
and saw Gorgeous George. He was on a radio show with him, and he learned from
Gorgeous George. Now he didn't imitate Gorgeous George. He got all this
rhetoric from playing the dozens on the street, from his father, who was a
braggart, from Marcus Garvey, from the air, from God knows what. But he had
an amazing ability, Muhammad Ali did, of assimilating influences that were in
the air and making them his own.

BOGAEV: David Remnick, speaking with Terry Gross. We'll hear more of their
conversation after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BOGAEV: Let's back to our interview with David Remnick. His book about
Muhammad Ali is called "King of the World."

GROSS: How was Ali introduced to Islam?

Mr. REMNICK: It's strange. We think he was influenced when he first went
down to Miami and basically met some street guys who were selling, you know,
Nation of Islam newspapers. Not so. When he was an amateur fighter, still in
high school, he would go in a station wagon with some other amateurs from
Louisville and fight in regional fights. And one time he was up in Chicago.
At that time, the Nation of Islam was completely centered in Chicago--Elijah
Muhammad lived there. And as a kid, he was wandering around on the street,
and he was given a copy of Muhammad Speaks, and he also bought a record album
of Elijah Muhammad's rhetoric, his sermons, essentially. And he brought these
home, and he was completely taken up by it. Clearly this was a searching kid,
not an intellectual powerhouse, not a, you know, master of his schoolwork, but
a searching mind, someone deeply troubled by the segregated place where he
grew up, deeply troubled by the fact that his father was a sign painter who
really believed he should have been an artist and was held down. And these
things influenced him.

And for his senior paper--in his senior year of high school he wanted to write
a paper on the Nation of Islam. Well, no one had hardly heard of the Nation
of Islam in Louisville. And the teacher said no, you can't write about this
strange and ultimately threatening thing. So there was the seed of it. And
then, of course, it blossomed when he became a professional fighter after the
Olympics, and started meeting with Muslims and Muslim teachers in Miami.

GROSS: You say that when he became a member of the Nation of Islam, that
Elijah Muhammad was ambivalent about Cassius Clay and ambivalent about boxing
in general. What was that ambivalence about?

Mr. REMNICK: He was ambivalent about boxing because he thought, not
unreasonably, that the history of boxing in the United States especially is
rooted in slavery. It's rooted in the spectacle of strong black men made to
fight each other for the amusement of whites. And Elijah Muhammad was, for
obvious reasons, all against that. On the other hand, although he saw Elijah
Muhammad as the spiritual father of the movement, the person he was closest to
was Malcolm X.

Malcolm X was not bothered much by boxing. In fact Malcolm X was a pretty
good athlete growing up. He liked these things. And so he was able to sort
of dance the dance for a while. And Malcolm X was extremely close with Clay,
and was down in Miami with him, leading up to that first dramatic fight with
Liston. They both stayed at the Hampton Court Hotel, and Malcolm was there as
Clay's guest, with his wife, and they became extremely close. It was the
formative relationship where politics and where religion was concerned, prior
to Cassius Clay becoming Muhammad Ali. Then the story turns.

GROSS: Yeah, where Ali kind of got in the middle of the dispute between
Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.

Mr. REMNICK: Exactly, and Malcolm X's dispute with Elijah Muhammad had to do
with a number of things, including the fact that Elijah Muhammad had fathered
children outside of his marriage, which Malcolm X objected to, financial
irregularities; the fact that Malcolm X thought that Elijah Muhammad was
putting himself far to forward, despite his leadership of the movement. And
they split in the most dramatic way possible, just before this fight. And
Malcolm X went down to Miami as much for a vacation, a psychic vacation for
himself.

Until then, by the way, no one really knew that Cassius Clay was, in effect, a
member of the Nation of Islam. He knew very well, was very sophisticated
about this, that if he announced that he was an adherent to the Nation of
Islam before the title fight, the fight would never happen. And in fact, the
promoter of the fight, Bill MacDonald, did find out, because there were some
press leaks. And he threatened to call the whole fight off, and Clay refused
to renounce anything. And they came to a compromise, and the compromise; he
would wait till after the fight to announce this.

So in the course of 24 hours, in February, 1964, Cassius Clay became
heavyweight champion of the world, to the shock of the entire sporting world.
And the next morning, announced, to the shock of everyone, that he was a new
and different man, a member of the Nation of Islam.

GROSS: Ali told you, when you were talking with him, that one of his greatest
regrets was basically having abandoned Malcolm in favor of Elijah Muhammad.

Mr. REMNICK: When I went up to visit Muhammad Ali in Berrien Springs,
Michigan, where he lives on a farm, one of the first things he did was take an
8-by-10 glossy out of his briefcase, and show it to me, rather silently,
because he doesn't speak that much now, for obvious reasons. And it was a way
of showing me that `Here I am with Malcolm X'--the picture was of him and
Malcolm X. And it was a very moving way of showing me--you know, he wasn't
taking a picture out of Elijah Muhammad or some other fight.

It was this relationship that he was deeply proud of, and I think in some
ways, sorry about, because as you know, after he became champion, Malcolm X
went up to New York with Clay, soon to become Ali. They were great friends.
They went to the UN. They hung out at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem and all the
rest. But then Elijah Muhammad put his foot down and demanded that he choose,
the fighter choose, between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. And he did. He
chose. And rejected Malcolm X severely and immediately and completely, so
much so that on a subsequent trip to Africa some weeks later, they
literally--Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali--bumped into each other in a hotel
lobby. Malcolm X tried to approach him in the friendliest way possible, and
Muhammad Ali simply mocked him, made fun of him, and that was the end of it.
And of course, a year later, Malcolm X was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom
uptown in Manhattan.

GROSS: Ali's showmanship certainly helped sell tickets for his fights. What
about his membership in the Nation of Islam? A lot of white people saw the
nation as being an anti-white group, and were very alienated by Ali's
conversion. How did that affect who showed up at his fights?

Mr. REMNICK: Well, at first it was a great threat, and as you know, in the
second Liston fight--first of all, they could barely get a venue. They could
barely find a place to fight. There was the threat of the mob. There was
also the specter of the Nation of Islam. And a championship fight was held in
a small town in Maine, in front of just a few thousand people--3,000, 4,000
people. I mean, this is unimaginable. This is when boxing, by the way, was
still big. In 1998, perhaps you could believe it, when boxing has kind of
faded and become almost vestigial, with the exception of certain
fighters--Tyson, Holyfield, Oscar de la Hoya--and you can be sure that had its
effect. And certainly when he refused the draft, this sense of alienation,
sense of division between Ali and his public, only deepened. And he
certainly...

GROSS: Well, for some people it deepened...

Mr. REMNICK: Yeah.

GROSS: ...and for others, like for you, for instance, it kind of strengthened
the connections you had...

Mr. REMNICK: Later.

GROSS: ...because there were so many young people...

Mr. REMNICK: Later.

GROSS: ...who were alienated by...

Mr. REMNICK: Later.

GROSS: That's true, that's true, right. This is pretty early.

Mr. REMNICK: But remember, this is us thinking backward. Also, I was a kid
at the time.

GROSS: Right. Right.

Mr. REMNICK: Certainly, if you were 19 years old, and against the war, you
thought this was a pretty amazing thing; that this fighter would step away
from the heavyweight championship, quite likely never to fight again, to give
up probably tens of millions of dollars, giving up the one thing he could do,
fight--because it's not as if he's then going to go off to law school--and you
saw this as enormous bravery at a time when the anti-war movement was still in
its infancy. Remember, this is early 1967. The level of avoiding the draft
was nothing like it would be two years later.

GROSS: You know, I think early on, when Ali became a member of the Nation of
Islam and then became anti-war, I think some people just saw that as a sign of
his eccentricity, as opposed to as a sign of his deep commitment to certain
beliefs.

Mr. REMNICK: You know, what always saved Ali, what always saved him from
becoming alienated from certain publics, whether it was the bragging, or the
politics or the religion, anything, there was always a sense of humor about
him. He was always funny, hilarious, and finally, with time, he won over
almost everybody. I mean, a few racists here and there, a few people who
really felt that his stand on Vietnam was deeply, deeply wrong, a few people
that, you know, still yearned for Joe Louis' model of behavior, fine. But for
the most part, he won over the world so that at the 1996 Olympics, he gets up
and lights this torch in the most unexpected, dramatic and moving and
beautiful way, and no one's presence on this globe doing that would have moved
us more.

BOGAEV: David Remnick, speaking with Terry Gross. His book about Muhammad
Ali in the '60s is called "King of the World." It's now out in paper. He'll
be back in the second half of the show. I'm Barbara Bogaev, and this is FRESH
AIR.

Mr. CLAY: For those of you who won't be able to see the Clay-Liston fight,
here's the eighth round, exactly as it will happen: Clay comes out to meet
Liston, and Liston starts to retreat. If Liston goes back any farther, he'll
end up in a ringside seat. Clay swings with his left. Clay swings with his
right. Look at young Cassius carry the fight! Liston keeps backing, but
there's not enough room. It's a matter of time, airplane ...(unintelligible)
boom. Now Liston gets a personal view, the crowd is getting frantic, but our
radar stations have picked him up. He is somewhere over the Atlantic.

(Soundbite of music)

BOGAEV: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev, sitting in for Terry Gross.

Let's continue Terry's interview with David Remnick. His book "King of the
World" tells the story of Muhammad Ali in the '60s, when he became famous for
his rhymes, won the world heavyweight title, joined the Nation of Islam and
changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali.

GROSS: Let's get to his actual championship fights with Sonny Liston, and you
keep coming back to this through the book. Ali almost ended the first
championship fight with Liston because his eyes were burning so much he
couldn't even see. And I guess there's always been the rumor that Sonny
Liston may have juiced his gloves, meaning put some kind of substance on his
gloves, that would have ended up in Ali's eyes, a chemical of some sort that
would...

Mr. REMNICK: My reporting tells me that's beyond rumor; that that really was
the case.

GROSS: That it really was the case.

Mr. REMNICK: What had happened was he got into the ring--Sonny Liston got
into this ring having trained for no more than a five-round fight. He really
thought, in the way Mike Tyson dealing with Michael Spinks or some inferior
fighter, that he would dispatch with this loudmouth kid very quickly and go
out to dinner.

First round happens, and this kid is faster than Sugar Ray Robinson, and he's
sticking a jab in his face and welts are coming up, and he cannot touch him.
Liston cannot touch him. He's missing by not three inches, but by two feet.
Round two, same thing. And on and on it goes. And all that is left to Sonny
Liston, as he gets more and more tired, as his hands begin to sink to his
side--boxing is an extraordinarily exhausting process, especially if you
haven't trained--that he decides to cheat. And with the help of one of his
corner men, he puts some substance on his gloves.

Now do we have this from Sonny Liston? No, Sonny's dead. We don't have it
from the corner man, Joe Pollino who's dead. But we have it from a very,
very close friend of both Liston and Joe Pollino, Jack McKinney, a reporter
for the Philadelphia Daily News at the time and a close friend of both, that
he put some substances, whether it was Munsell solution or some sort of
liniment, on the gloves--something he had done before, by the way--and he gets
it in Clay's eyes. And Clay sits down in the corner and he tells Angelo
Dundee, `Cut off the gloves. I can't see. I'm blind. Cut them off.' He
wants to quit. It's the one thing that he didn't know how to deal with, was
being blind. I mean, he knew he was beating Sonny Liston to the punch every
single step of the way.

And Angelo Dundee quickly gets as much water into his eyes as possible, into
his fighter's eyes, and tells him, `Baby, you ain't quitting. This is for the
big one. This for the title. No quitting now. Just go out, dance, yardstick
him,' which means keep your left out as far as you can, keep your distance.
You have a slight reach thing. You've got the speed, and wait till it flushes
out. Meanwhile, in the corner, the black Muslims are sitting there screaming
and yelling that Angelo Dundee is a member of the mob, and he's juiced the
gloves; that it's Angelo Dundee who's responsible for this, because after all,
he has an Italian name, and the mob is still all over boxing at the time. The
mob controlled Sonny Liston.

So this is the drama going on in this space of 60 seconds. Angelo Dundee
somehow convinces the referee not to come over to the corner and end the whole
thing. Ali goes back out. Eventually the stuff washes out of his eyes and he
finishes the job. He continues to frustrate Liston. And Liston finally just
will not get off his stool to come out and fight the seventh round. End of
story.

GROSS: So he becomes the heavyweight champion there. And then there's a
rematch. And the rematch is extraordinary because Ali knocks him out so
quickly.

Mr. REMNICK: Well, it's a bizarre fight. It's held in Lewiston, Maine,
which is, you know, a textile town, a tiny town with, you know, one strip
joint and two restaurants and a hotel in Poland Springs. And all the
sportswriters are whining, and `Why are we here?' and all the rest. And at
first it was scheduled for Boston, and Ali had some health problems and it was
delayed.

They go into the ring, and the atmosphere--everybody's fearing that the
Muslims are going to shoot somebody, and that the mob is there and that the
fix is in and so on and so forth. They come out, Ali does his thing. He's
dancing around that ring, dancing around the ring. Liston is struggling to
keep up. All of a sudden, Ali turns, pivots, hits Liston with the fastest
punch that slow motion has ever recorded. Down goes Liston.

The timekeeper loses all sense of how to do his job. The referee is Jersey
Joe Walcott, who really--fine fighter, bad referee--confusion. You know, it
was a disaster in terms of organization. End of fight. Probably the most
ambiguous and strange heavyweight title fight of all time...

GROSS: There were...

Mr. REMNICK: ...ever since the long count of Dempsey long ago.

GROSS: There were rumors that Liston was actually pressured to fall, you
know; that he was pressured to...

Mr. REMNICK: To take a dive.

GROSS: To take a dive, yeah. Any truth in that, do you think?

Mr. REMNICK: I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it...

GROSS: You watched this in slow motion, and several times.

Mr. REMNICK: I've probably watched it as many times as I've seen "The
Godfather," which is an embarrassing number as well. I've probably watched
that fight 50 times, because it doesn't take too long--it takes an hour to
watch it 50 times--and he hit him. He hit him with a perfectly timed short
overhand right that hit him perfectly on, you know, the side of the
head--kaboom. And it's also in the first round when the fighters are cold.
That punch probably would not have knocked him out in the seventh round, but
in the first round, when two fighters are cold, the likelihood is far greater
that it can. And you know, my feeling is about Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali,
if they fought 10 times, Muhammad would win nine, at least. He beat him.

GROSS: You wonder if Ali maybe already had Parkinson's very early, a mild
form of it, before his last fight, and that might have affected him in the
ring.

Mr. REMNICK: It's unclear. I'm not a doctor. Ferdie Pacheco, who is a
doctor and was in his corner, left his corner because he was deeply concerned
that certainly by the time he got to the Larry Holmes fight, something was
deeply wrong. It's quite clear that in the best of all possible worlds, at
the very latest, Muhammad Ali should have quit the ring after his third fight,
the so-called `thriller in Manila,' with Joe Frazier, in 1975, and he went on
too long.

And Ferdie Pacheco very wisely said that Muhammad Ali was `El Unico,' the
unique one, except in the way--and that he was not about boxing. He was about
other things. Boxing almost happened to be a component of him. But what was
not unique about Muhammad Ali is the arc of his story was like so many great
fighters: He went on way too long in an extremely dangerous, morally dubious,
probably, enterprise.

And the great curse of Muhammad Ali's later career is that he discovered that
he could take a punch. When he came back from exile, he realized that he
couldn't dance away from everything the way he could as a kid, and so he
learned a new way to fight. And part of it was absorbing punishment,
absorbing punishment in the gym, absorbing punishment in the real fight
itself. And so while Muhammad may have won most of these fights in his second
career, in almost all of them he absorbed enormous punishment, and from
terrific fighters: Ernie Shavers, George Foreman, Joe Frazier three times,
Jimmy Young, Larry Holmes, and then from second-rate fighters who began to hit
him as well. And this took its enormous toll. And no one can finally decide
whether punching or the genetics of neurology conspired in what proportion to
lead to the condition he's in now, but clearly fighting had its toll.

BOGAEV: David Remnick, speaking with Terry Gross in 1998. Remnick is now the
editor of The New Yorker. His book about Muhammad Ali, "King of the World,"
is available in paperback.

Coming up, the Rumble in the Jungle, an interview with heavyweight champ
George Foreman. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: George Foreman talks about his boxing career,
including the Rumble in the Jungle, his fight with Muhammad Ali
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

In 1974, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali met in Zaire for a heavyweight
championship bout. The Rumble in the Jungle was the only fight Foreman ever
lost by a knockout. Foreman retired from boxing in '77, had a religious
experience and took up preaching. He was ordained in 1978 and soon after
started his own church and youth center in Houston. But nine years later,
Foreman staged a comeback. To the amazement and pleasure of many middle-aged
people, Foreman regained the title in 1994 when he was 45 years old. He
eventually relinquished the title for refusing to fight a challenger, and
finally retired from the ring in 1997. Terry Gross spoke with Foreman in
1995. He still held the title then, and had just written his autobiography,
"By George."

TERRY GROSS: You started off as a street fighter. How did that affect your
approach to boxing when you started to box?

Mr. GEORGE FOREMAN (Heavyweight Boxer): Devastating, because I met Doug
Broadus, my first boxing coach, in '66 in the Job Corps center. I said, `Hey,
I want to be a boxer.' He said, `OK, you're big enough. You're ugly enough.
Come on down to the gym.' I remember going down to the gym and he put me in
the ring with a little guy, little skinny guy, no muscles; you could see his
ribs. I said,`Boy!' I invited all my friends to watch my boxing match.
Thought it was going to be just like on the streets. Jumped into the ring. I
never was able to land one blow. The guy would move out of the way and hit me
with this thing called a jab, and I'd charge him and try to grab him, and the
referee said, `You can't wrestle.' So it was a hard thing to abandon my
street-fighting tactics and move into another thing where I had to learn how
to box. I head to learn a new style, a whole new existence of fighting.

GROSS: What was the hardest thing to give up from your street fighting style?

Mr. FOREMAN: Grabbing. In the streets, I'd hit you and hit you. If you
moved out of the way, I would grab you and get you. In the ring, you could
only use your fists. You can't open your hand and grab anyone. Plus, I
wanted to bite, too, but you had a mouthpiece.

GROSS: Now what about the kind of finesse that your trainer was trying to
teach you?

Mr. FOREMAN: Yeah, it was along time before I could really comprehend what
he was saying. `George, you're not going to be able to just knock everybody
out and run over everybody. You've got to learn the sport.' And it took a
few defeats before I decided I had to dedicate my life to learning more than
just being powerful and strong. I had to learn this as a sport, jabbing and
finesse, as you call it.

GROSS: Did you used to psyche yourself up before you entered the ring, to get
yourself to be really angry, or to really hate your opponent?

Mr. FOREMAN: Yeah. Dick Sadler, my first trainer--manager, in '69, I told
him I wanted to be a boxer. He said he would teach me how to be a boxer, and
I'd move in the ring, and practice every day, styles, dancing, prancing, and I
really wanted to be the next Muhammad Ali--that kind of stuff. So my first
boxing match in Madison Square Garden, 1969, Donald Waldheim. Dick Sadler
gets me into the dressing room, he rubs me down, he takes water away from me
for two days, then he starts cussing. `This blankety-blank is trying to stop
your life. You go out there, and, I mean, you knock him out. You hit him
here. If he hides, you hit him behind'--and he cusses and cusses and cusses.
`You hear me? Push him, like this.' And he asks me to push him, pushes him.
By the time I get into that ring, I'm like a wind-up killer. And I thought,
`I thought he was going to let me be a boxer.' From that point on, he'd wind
me up like a doll, every time. It was not about my psyching myself up, he
would engineer this creature.

GROSS: Now was that effect...

Mr. FOREMAN: He engineered it.

GROSS: Was that effective for you?

Mr. FOREMAN: Oh, yes. When I got into that ring, sorry for a guy who didn't
know how to protect himself. I remember boxing a guy, I think maybe in
Seattle, Washington. Can't remember his name. We're a match, and I jumped
out on this kid and I tried to hit him, and I missed him. And I tried to hit
him again, and I missed him. I'd hit him in the back. Finally I'd barely
missed him, and he hit the floor. People threw candy wrappers, cigarette
butts. They tried to--they were booing. I said, `Get up, man, get up! Don't
do this.' And later on after the fight, he walked up to me and he saw I was
really feeling down about what happened. You know, they counted him out, but
he wasn't out. He looked me in the eye--he said, `You know, you really want
to kill someone, don't you?' He said, `That's what you wanted, you wanted to
kill me.' He said, `I wasn't going get up for you to kill me.'

GROSS: Huh.

Mr. FOREMAN: You understand? So I had this killing instinct, and it
wasn't--and the sad thing, I'm upset with a guy because he wouldn't get up and
let me kill him. And for the first time, I realized that the best thing he
could have done was just stay down there.

GROSS: Now, so you got really psyched up with this killing instinct to get
into the ring. Could you turn that off when a match was over?

Mr. FOREMAN: You know, it's strange, because you think you can turn it off,
but later on, you're fighting once, twice, sometimes three times in a month,
you go home and you say to yourself, `It's over now. I'm going to go back.'
Finally this stuff follows you around all the time, and if you're not careful,
people see the best side of you in the ring. The awful side of you is outside
of the ring. As you get closer--I'm having knockout after knockout. Starting
to look at myself in the mirror, I see this body, I see this face, I see this
man who's going to be heavyweight champ of the world--he is the king of men.
He can beat anybody in the room. And you get into a room with guys, and you
start thinking, `Nobody can whip me.' So it wasn't something you could turn on
and off. It was something that stayed with you all the time, as a matter of
fact.

I remember winning the championship of the world. I defeated Joe Frazier.
And I remember thinking, `I can beat anybody in the world, anybody,' and it
followed me around--from restaurant--everywhere I would go.

GROSS: Did that get in the way of things?

Mr. FOREMAN: It got in the way of my life, because I no longer had a life.
I mean, I wouldn't meet a friend. I was like meeting people that I could
whip, you know.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. FOREMAN: Size you up, you know. `You know you can't whip me, don't you.
Hi. You know you can't whip me.' So you know, you lose a life, because 24
hours a day, you are the heavyweight champ of the world in your mind.

GROSS: How did that affect your relationship with women.

Mr. FOREMAN: Oh, same way, same way. `Hey, you're with the best man.
You're with the men of men. You're with the best man. You're with the
strongest, toughest, mightiest man in the world.' And you felt like that.
That's why it was so crumbling when I was defeated by Muhammad Ali. I was
knocked out in '74. I'd never lost a boxing match as a professional. Counted
out. It was like, `Man, I'm ashamed to go into a room with people now.
They're going to know I'm not the best.' You get in the room with a woman,
(whispers) and `She knows, she knows that I'm not the best. Maybe I should
keep my clothes on.' You know, this not only beats you, it's like you're
stripped of your manhood.

GROSS: Because all you were was the best, right?

Mr. FOREMAN: All I was was the heavyweight, the best, and now there's
someone better, and they all know. You figure, `I'm going to keep my clothes
on. I'm going to put on some dark glasses so they won't know who I am, so
they can't say, "You know, there's one better than you."' Like the old saying
`Mirror, mirror on the wall.' And the mirror speaks back, `Oh, there's someone
else.' I had to live through that, and it devastated my life. I felt like
I--you know, it was the most devastating thing that ever happened to me,
because when I lost the title to Muhammad Ali, I felt like I lost my manhood,
what I considered manhood.

GROSS: Now would you feel that way if you lost a bout now?

Mr. FOREMAN: Oh, no. I fought Ronnie Lyle back in '76 after losing the
title, because I told people, I could have gotten up in the ring in Africa. I
could have done this. I could have won. You look for every excuse. There I
am in Caesar's Palace with Ronnie Lyle, a big, strong guy, knocked me down.
I'm bleeding on the canvas. I jump up. He knocks me down again. Then I
knock him down. He has me on the floor, bleeding. Finally, after beating the
count two or three times, I knock him out. I felt restored again, like, `Oh,
I'm a man again.' It wasn't Muhammad Ali, but I had my manhood again. I
believed in myself a little bit, and I thought that people said, `Oh, George
is tough now.'

So I got it back. Eventually, I lost to Jimmy Young in '77, and I found
something even greater than manhood. I found God, you see, and he gave me
something. I was able to admit I lost a boxing match, and found a little
peace within myself, and it has nothing to do with winning a boxing match or
losing anything. It's peace of mind.

GROSS: Now you said that when you lost to Ali in '74, that you weren't
knocked out, you were just staying down to the count of eight. But when you
got up, the referee...

Mr. FOREMAN: See, we were told as a fighter--Archie Moore, was one of my
trainers, and Dick Sadler was his previous trainer and corner man. If you're
knocked down, there wasn't any mandatory eight count as there is now. No
matter if you're knocked down, you get up, you still have to be counted eight
to clear your head up. This time in Africa they tell me, `When you're knocked
down, always look to your corner. Don't listen to the referee. Let your
corner count. Get your head clear, and when the corner tells you to get up,
get up.' So I was knocked down and I looked around and found my corner.
He told me to stay down, which is what they're supposed to do. Then when they
told me to jump up, I jumped up, the fight was over. But I was never out,
never.

I started thinking, `All night I pursued Muhammad Ali. He covered up with the
rope-a-dope. He wouldn't mix it up. I could knock him out if he only mixes
it up.' And I'm on the floor thinking, `Now he's going to come out for the
kill and try to finish me off. I'm going to knock him out now.' That's what I
was waiting to do. When I jumped up, they said it was over. The referee
counted quick.

GROSS: So were you angry?

Mr. FOREMAN: Oh, I was devastated. I'd wake up in the night, sweating,
thinking, `Why didn't I just get up? Why did I trust my corner?'

GROSS: What did you say to the people in your corner?

Mr. FOREMAN: Hm?

GROSS: What did you say to the people in your corner?

Mr. FOREMAN: I fired them. I never worked with them again.

GROSS: Now one last question. Is it true that all of your sons are named
George?

Mr. FOREMAN: Well, four boys, all named George Edward Foreman. I'm number
one, of course.

GROSS: Why did you name them all George?

Mr. FOREMAN: Well, it's a pretty good name.

GROSS: OK.

Mr. FOREMAN: You trying to talk about my name? Take that! Take that! No,
but literally, I didn't find out who my biological father was until after I
had lost the title of the world. I already had tasted devastation, then one
sister came up to me and said, `You know, Daddy is not your daddy.' I said,
`What do you mean? You want to fight?' She said, `Nope.' And I had to search
and find this guy, and only became friends with him--we were friends maybe, I
don't know, two years, and he was dead. I didn't know anything about that
man, and I figured I'd better do something. All my boys--I'm not going one
Junior and another--I'm going to name them all George Foreman. They're going
to have to sort it out and understand more about it as they get older. But I
had to--when you can't find roots, well, that's something, and George is a
good root.

BOGAEV: George Foreman from a 1995 interview with Terry Gross.

Coming up, critic David Bianculli says he can't get enough of cable TV. This
is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Commentary: Cable networks better than broadcast channels for
cutting-edge programming
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

The December holiday season is over, the calendar is turned and TV is getting
ready to get back to business. TV critic David Bianculli says that even this
early in the game, cable seems to be beating the broadcast networks to the
punch.

DAVID BIANCULLI (TV Critic): If it seems like a long time since TV's been
worth watching, that's because it has been. But check out what's in store
this Sunday. On HBO, the season premieres of "Oz" and "Sex and the City." On
Showtime, the season premieres of "The Chris Isaac Show" and "Queer as
Folk"--all of them on cable, all of them about to roll out new episodes every
week without interruption, and all of them, except for "Queer as Folk,"
absolutely excellent.

Cable networks like HBO and Showtime used to be in the pay movie business.
That's why people subscribe to them and watch them and talk about them. You
could watch movies at home without commercials or editing, and that was enough
to keep subscribers coming. Then came the VCR and the home video market, and
eventually, the DVD. Now cable figures the best way to keep viewers tuned in
is to create and present programs they can't see anywhere else, programs that
for the most part that can't be shown on network TV, either because of raw
content or out-of-the-mainstream subject matter.

"The Larry Sanders Show," Garry Shandling's fabulous send-up of talk shows and
celebrity culture, was an early HBO triumph. "Dream On," a sexy comedy about
a divorced man in New York, was another. And now we have on cable the
brilliance of "The Sopranos," the boldness of "Six Feet Under," and all the
shows that are returning this Sunday. "Oz" and "Sex and the City" deserve
special mention for completely different reasons.

"Oz" deserves praise because it predated "Sopranos," has been just as daring
and even more consistent, and is the exact kind of show, a drama set in a
maximum security prison, that seems unthinkable on broadcast television. And
"Sex and the City," which also predated "Sopranos," gets credit for improving
greatly since it began. In the show's first two seasons, the women on the
show, portrayed so confidently and playfully by Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim
Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cyntha Nixon seemed endless, rootless and
unchanging. Men came and went, and commitments were rare and fleeting.

But that all changed more recently, as the characters allowed love and other
complications into their lives. As we begin this new mini-season, Parker's
Carrie has invited her new boyfriend to move in. Cattrall's Samantha has
become strongly attached to a man who's as casual about sex as she is. Davis'
Charlotte is trying to save her new marriage. And Nixon's Miranda, who has no
plans for marriage, is having a baby. So when these ladies meet these days
for lunch, a constant staple of "Sex and the City," the discussions are less
about sex than before. In fact, for unusually large chunks, their
conversations can even be played on the radio.

(Soundbite from "Sex and the City")

Ms. SARAH JESSICA PARKER (As Carrie): A plant. The man brought a living
thing into my apartment. I don't do plants. I kill everything I bring in
there.

Unidentified Woman #1: You said yes to moving in, the guy moved in.

Ms. PARKER: But he's taken over whole areas.

Unidentified Woman #2: This is why I've never lived with a man, this and the
fact that I want them out an hour after I climax.

Unidentified Woman #3: You let them stay a whole hour?

Unidentified Woman #2: You'd be surprised how many are ready to go again
after a quick catnap.

Ms. PARKER: And there's no walls, you know. There's nowhere to hide. As
soon as I walk in the door, he's all up in my face with `Who'd you see?
Where'd you go? Who'd you meet? What do you know?' What I know is I need
time to decompress, just be alone.

Unidentified Woman #1: But Carrie, there are going to have to be some
adjustments. Relationships are hard.

Ms. PARKER: You guys, I miss walking into my apartment with no one there,
and it's all quiet, and I can do that stuff you do when you're totally alone,
things you would never want your boyfriend to see you do.

Unidentified Woman #2: Like masturbate?

Ms. PARKER: My SSB, my secret single behavior. Like I like to make a stack
of saltines. I put grape jelly on them. I eat them standing up in the
kitchen, reading fashion magazines.

Unidentified Woman #1: Why standing up?

Ms. PARKER: It's weird, but it just feels great.

Unidentified Woman #3: I like to put Vaseline on my hands and put them in
those bourgeoisie conditioning gloves while watching infomercials.

Unidentified Woman #1: Before I was married, I used to study my pores in a
magnifying mirror for an hour each night. I'm afraid Trey will just think
it's weird.

Ms. PARKER: Well, he would. You can't do that stuff in front of men. What
about you, Lolita? Anything you do you wouldn't want a man to see?

Unidentified Woman #3: No.

Unidentified Woman #1: You know, I believe her.

BIANCULLI: The series is facing new issues, too, and none of these
relationsihps is taken lightly or resolved easily. By the end of this new
group of shows, "Sex and the City" presents its best and most dramatic
episodes yet, and ought to help keep HBO subscribers happy.

On broadcast TV, meanwhile, they're taking at least a few lessons from cable.
On Fox, the exciting, different series "Twenty-Four" is being shown twice
weekly in prime time. That's a programming move stolen from cable, and one
that nets a few million extra viewers a week without costing any more money.
And on all the networks, quirky entertaining new shows, such as "Undeclared,"
"Scrubs," "Alias" and "Smallville" are succeeding by thinking more like cable.
Instead of trying to program shows that will appeal to everyone, the networks
are presenting well-made series that are more likely to please some of the
people some of the time. And in this new century, in this era of narrow
casting and a fragmented TV universe, that's really the best way to succeed.

BOGAEV: David Bianculli is TV critic for the New York Daily News.

We'll close today's show with music from jazz pianist Ralph Sutton, who died
earlier this week at the age of 79. Sutton was one of the most eminent stride
pianists, playing in the tradition of Harlem piano players James P. Johnson
and Fats Waller.

For Terry Gross, I'm Barbara Bogaev.

(Soundbite of piano music by Ralph qutton)
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