The power of a bullet is unpredictable.
Cassius Clay, a 19-year-old boy whose fame as a boxer was rising steadily, had gone that December afternoon in 1961 to skate with some friends at the Broadway Roller Ink, an all-black establishment in Louisville.
As he left, he saw a group of people.
Clay approached with the illusion of finding "a pretty girl to say something to" and found a man in a dark suit who preached the word of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam.
The man gave him a copy of the newspaper of the religious and socio-political organization.
A drawing on page 32 caught his eye: a cartoon about the first slaves to come to America, being forced, whip in hand, to pray to Jesus.
That vignette led to the reading of the articles,
and in them -with references to discipline and personal improvement, to the black people as God's chosen or to the racism that prevailed in society- Clay found a story.
A sense for someone who already referred to himself as "the greatest of all time."
Life of Ali (Captain Swing) is a biography of the storied boxer.
Written by the American journalist Jonathan Eig, it offers a complete human, sports, social and political profile of Muhammad Ali, drawn from more than 600 interviews with more than 200 people.
A magnetic character - "a force of gravity that drags people into its orbit in the blink of an eye" - handsome, witty, powerful, excessive, controversial.
A man who learned not to show his fear, who won and lost the heavyweight champion title three times, who became Muhammad Ali, who went from hate to adoration, who said no to war, who received more of 200,000 strokes in his career, who fluttered like a butterfly, who stung like a bee,
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