(''That wasn't the guy I was supposed to fight,'' Liston said afterward.

No one gave him even Tweetybird's chance against the sledgehammer that was Liston.īut astonishingly, he won in six rounds, with Liston refusing to come out of his corner for the seventh. As a braggart who wrote poetry predicting the rounds his opponents would be knocked out in, he was seen as a frivolous showman. As a heavyweight who danced on his toes and carried his fists at his waist, his style was considered self-destructively unconventional. As the child of modestly better-off people, he felt relatively unoppressed. Remnick depicts as being outside any conventional categories. Then along came Cassius Clay, a man whom Mr. Remnick quotes on the subject of Liston, ''He will help us grow up further if he destroys the illusion that a man whose trade it is to beat another man senseless for money represents an image which at all costs must be kept pure for American youth.'' One exception was the newspaper columnist Murray Kempton, whom Mr. The second player was Floyd Patterson, seen for his polite, nervous manner as ''the Good Negro,'' whom Liston thrashed twice in contests that many in the sports establishment said ought not to have been permitted to take place because of Liston's unsavory background. Remnick calls ''the Threatening Negro,'' a perception based on his brutal demeanor, his criminal record and his known connection to the mob element in boxing. One was Liston, who was perceived in the racially tense atmosphere of the 1960's as what Mr. First, he makes of the fight the climax of a morality play starring not two but three principal actors. Remnick, the recently appointed editor of The New Yorker, accomplishes this feat in two complementary ways. These days, as David Remnick rightly points out in his penetrating book ''King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero,'' ''boxing has become a marginal event in American life.'' The wonder, then, is that he has managed to re-evoke the heart-pounding emotion of that evening nearly 35 years ago, when Clay against all odds and expectations decisively outfought the man who was predicted to be his destroyer. Not that this fight was so outstanding as far as the skills on display were concerned, but the tension and hype building up to it were something else again. Unquestionably the most exciting boxing match this reviewer ever saw was the one between Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Marcellus Clay) and Charles (Sonny) Liston on Feb. Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero

King of the World by David Remnick