I HAVE JUST FINISHED reading two recently released books, each one about a famous African-American living sports legend written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
David Remnick's "King of the World" and David Halberstam's "Playing for Keeps" were not released as a package set, and even if they do have the same publisher, Random House, they could not have been intended to be read back-to-back, the way I read them.Indeed, it would be better for Halberstam if they were not. For while his exhaustive 428-page treatment of Michael Jordan's career and odyssey is as well-written and researched as you'd expect from someone who has a Pulitzer Prize for literature resting on his mantel, it is still nothing much beyond a Chip Hilton story that has the added benefit of being true, and with more syllables.
Nothing shores up this notion more than curling up with Remnick's 310-page treatment of the launching of Muhammad Ali's equally true saga.
It, too, is well-written and researched -- Remnick has his own mantel and his own Pulitzer -- but beyond that, "King of the World" is what "Playing for Keeps" isn't -- a separate, compelling, fenced-in story. One told with an expert story-teller's pace. Like it's just you, Remnick, and the campfire. A better sports book may have never been written.
MAYBE YOU'RE LIKE ME. You'd like to read more, but who has the time? Maybe it takes a long flight across the Atlantic Ocean to get you to the first page.
Then you finish, bonk yourself on the head and think, why don't I always do this?
Remnick's book was that good and Halberstam's had its moments, although they tended to get bogged down amid all the hero worship.
What Remnick seemed to grasp, and Halberstam never did, is that a good story tells itself.
THERE'S ALSO the matter of that most essential ingredient -- conflict..
All good books have conflict. The Bible is nothing but conflict.
Jordan's story is light on conflict. His obstacles tended to take the forms of the Duke Blue Devils, bus rides in double-A ball, or the likes of Shawn Kemp, Charles Barkley and Karl Malone.
Hardly a match, any of them, for Charles "Sonny" Liston.
By comparison, Liston, the late and notorious ex-heavyweight champion, makes Kemp, Barkley and Malone look like the junior section of a Sunday School choir.
He couldn't read or write, busted heads for a living all his life -- only a part of that in the ring -- and died in a narcotic stupor probably force-fed by the mob.
He was also big as a bear, but meaner, and it was him and his hamhock shoulders that stood filling the doorway leading to the very universe that Ali, played in the early years as young Cassius Clay, aspired to conquer and rule.
Also significant is the fact that Ali -- not 20 years older than Jordan -- dealt with racial conflicts Jordan's era would barely brush, much less understand.
You can also throw in the Vietnam War and Kennedy and Malcolm X assassinations as backdrops.
ALI AND JORDAN. Two of history's three most recognizable sports names. (Pele is the other.) No wonder they attracted Pulitzer Prize winners to write about them.
A permanently punch-drunk Ali gave Remnick his time and his blessings for "King of the World," but Jordan, as Halberstam recounts in an Author's Note, declined cooperation on "Playing for Keeps." Halberstam went ahead anyway.
So it is true, even Pulitzer Prize winners can turn to sleaze.
The irony is that Ali -- who used to have his cornermen read articles to him even back in the days when he had all his faculties -- can't possibly read Remnick's literary treasure about him; as for Jordan, he could certainly read all the glowing superlatives Halberstam bestows on him, but because of the exploitation he probably won't.
A little late, but finally, some conflict.
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