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Walter Dean MyersThe Greatest: Muhammad Ali
Nonfiction | Biography | YA | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Walter Dean Myers
Content Warning: This section discusses racism.
Myers was a prolific author whose works were mostly intended for children and young adults. Born in 1937, he left his native West Virginia at the age of two, when his mother died and he was sent to Harlem to be raised by his father’s ex-wife and her husband. His experience of living in an underprivileged, predominantly Black neighborhood informs his exploration of racism in America in his books. In The Greatest, he discusses Ali from the perspective of himself as a teenager and constructs himself as an example of a Black child who benefitted from such a role model.
He was fascinated with books from a young age, but with a great deal of instability in his home, he did not finish high school and joined the army at 17. Following his military service, he became aware of the lack of Black representation in literature for young people and began a 45-year career as a writer, which would ultimately produce over 100 books. Among his most famous works is the graphic novel Monster (1999), which tells the story of a teenage Black boy accused of murder and is largely in the format of an imagined movie screenplay. His books range from fiction, to history, to biography (including biographies of Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, and Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Overture) and also include a memoir of his Harlem childhood (Bad Boy, 2001) and a series of stories about Black soldiers fighting in various American wars (including Fallen Angels in 1988 and Invasion in 2013). Myers received numerous accolades and awards and was named a National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress in 2012. He died in New York City at the age of 76 in 2014.
Muhammad Ali
Ali was one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century. Most famous for winning the world heavyweight championship in boxing three times, he was also a social activist and a massively influential global icon whose celebrity transcended not just his own sport but sports itself. By narrating all sides of Ali’s life, Myers explores The Intersection of Sports and Politics.
Born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., in 1942, he grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, experiencing the cruelties and degradations of the Jim Crow South as well as the early stirrings of resistance that would become the civil rights movement. At the age of 12, he sought out a boxing gym out of a desire to beat up a boy who stole his bicycle. A superb amateur boxing career culminated in his winning a gold medal in the light heavyweight division in the 1960 Rome Olympics. Upon turning professional, he developed a reputation for his colorful trash-talking. In 1964, he won the world heavyweight title in a huge upset of champion Charles “Sonny” Liston, whereupon he announced himself as a member of the Nation of Islam and shortly afterward took the name Muhammad Ali. This is a significant moment of character development in the biography, when Myers highlights the change from Clay, the private figure, to Ali, the public figure.
Ali was a highly controversial figure in his day, and in 1967, he was stripped of his title and boxing license for refusing to register for the draft. He returned to the ring in 1970, losing his first professional match in March 1971 to Joe Frazier, who had won the title in his absence. Ali would have many more memorable fights, including another significant upset against George Foreman in 1974 and a bloody rematch with Frazier in 1975. These fights constitute the climactic moments in the biography, as they underpin Myers’s presentation of Ali as a sporting legend. His boxing career inflicted an enormous physical toll, which may have contributed to his developing Parkinson’s disease later in life, severely restricting his speech and mobility. He remained a beloved public figure through the rest of his life, most notably lighting the torch for the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta. He died in 2016 at his home in Arizona after the biography was published, meaning that his story in the text is incomplete; thus, Myers suggests that Ali reached immortal status during his lifetime.
Joe Frazier
Known as “Smokin’ Joe” for his relentless, come-forward approach in the ring, which some commentators compared to a freight train, Frazier is best known as the most significant rival in Muhammad Ali’s boxing career. He was born Joseph William Frazier outside of Beaufort, South Carolina, the 12th child of sharecroppers (poor, often Black, farmers working on land that they did not own). Myers hence also presents Frazier as a product of a racist society. As a child, Frazier suffered an injury to his left arm in the course of doing farm work that left it in a permanent crook—the same position as the left hook he would later use to devastate so many opponents. He set up a makeshift heavy bag in his family’s yard, and after becoming a father at 16, he moved to Philadelphia to earn money for his young family while pursuing an amateur boxing career, including a job at a slaughterhouse, which would inspire that storyline in the 1976 film Rocky (in which Frazier appears briefly as himself).
Frazier was selected as an alternate for the 1964 Olympic boxing team in Tokyo after the opponent who defeated him, Buster Mathis, suffered an injury. Frazier won gold, overcoming a broken thumb he suffered in the semifinal match. Frazier climbed through the heavyweight ranks and defeated Mathis for a share of the heavyweight title after Ali was stripped of his title. He unified the title in 1970, just in time for Ali’s comeback. Frazier won the fight against Ali in New York City, but his all-offense fighting style exerted a large toll, and he suffered a brutal knockout loss to George Foreman in 1973. His third fight against Ali in Manila sealed his status as a boxing legend but at further cost to his health. He is presented as Ali’s rival, and yet he is a sympathetic figure and not an antagonist in the text as Myers explores the way that Ali taunted him (though in a politically motivated way). After retirement, he trained several Philadelphia fighters (including some of his own children). He died in November 2011 at the age of 67.
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By Walter Dean Myers
