Who Was Muhammad Ali?

A stolen bike, an Olympic gold medal and a lot of boastful poems all turn up in the life story James Buckley Jr. tells for 8 year olds in Who Was Muhammad Ali?

What happens

It starts in Louisville, Kentucky, with a twelve-year-old called Cassius Clay. Someone pinches his beloved red-and-white bike at a home show. He's in tears and says he'd like to hit whoever took it. The policeman he reports it to just happens to run a boxing class in the basement.

He never gets the bike back. But soon he's training at four in the morning before school, running in heavy boots and drinking water mixed with garlic (it didn't smell good, apparently).

From there the book takes you through the big moments in order. Olympic gold in Rome, even though he was so scared of flying that he bought a parachute to wear on the plane. Beating Sonny Liston when almost nobody thought he could. Becoming Muhammad Ali. Then refusing to go and fight in Vietnam, and losing his title and three years in the ring because of it.

It doesn't pretend everybody loved him. Lots of people were furious with him, and the book says so plainly. It also explains why he did what he did, which makes it much more than a list of fights.

It's very honest about growing up Black in a divided America too. There were pools he couldn't swim in and hotels that wouldn't let him stay. Even with a gold medal round his neck, some people still called him "boy". These bits are told simply, and they're well worth talking about together.

And he's SO much fun to read about. He brags, he makes up rhymes predicting which round he'll win in, and he parks a bus outside his rival's house. (One of his rhymes claims he once put a brick in hospital.)

The later chapters cover the Parkinson's disease that doctors linked to all those punches. The last chapter describes him in the present tense, still living with it, because it was written while he was alive. A child who's never heard of Parkinson's might have a question or two.

What to read next

If your reader wants to know what Ali still means to a sportsman today, Marcus Rashford calls him one of his big heroes in You Are a Champion. He talks about how Ali lost his title twice and kept bouncing back, which is a lovely thing to read straight after this.