Читать книгу Sporting Blood. Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing онлайн

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To make matters even more perplexing for some liberals, Ali was a Republican in the 1980s, supporting Ronald Reagan, Orrin Hatch, and George H. Bush, among others. But Ali, more than anyone, understood the complexities and contradictions of his own myth. This was made clear by the publication of Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser in 1991. Oral biographies had been in the air at the time—Jackson Pollack by Jeffrey Potterton, Truman Capote by George Plimpton, and Edie Sedgwick by Jean Stein, for example—but these were all written after their subjects had died. Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times was unique in that it was an authorized work and, in that, its subject had few qualms, if any, with negative testimony about his life and actions. What were his personal sins, whatever they were, compared to a life lived at public white heat for over twenty years?

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“I've made my share of mistakes along the way but if I have changed even one life for the better, I haven't lived in vain.”