Friday, January 21, 2011

That's What Sheed Said


There was a report on NPR this week saying that writer Wilfrid Sheed has died, and it took me a second to connect the name to the first boxing book I ever bought. I got Muhammad Ali: A Portrait in Words and Photographs probably a year or so after it came out in 1975, because I remember I used to stretch my teenage budget by shopping for big, glossy books about movies and sports at the discount table, where a lot of good ones eventually landed.

Of course I was drawn to the book by the awesome Neil Leifer photos. Ali looked great. He was cool. So were Frazier and Foreman and Liston. I tore out some of the 9-by-11 photo pages for my wall. I can't say I read the book cover-to-cover. I always figured Sheed was a grizzled sportswriter along with all the other guys I was reading then -- Dick Schaap, Stan Fischler, Ray Fitzgerald at the Boston Globe, Pat Putnam in Sports Ilustrated. The obits say Sheed was a satirical British essayist and novelist. His two biography subjects were Ali and Claire Boothe Luce. But looking back -- I still have my tattered copy of the book -- this is good stuff:
The face has been flattened ever so slightly by the hammers of Mars, and there is some reluctant scar tissue around the eyes. Yet he looks the better for it. Narcissus probably had a dull face without all those ripples on it -- a few rounds with Frazier would have helped him too. Ali's eyes themselves are deadly weapons, black as carbon and jabbing in every direction, from impassive surroundings.

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