About the Author

Mark Kram, Jr. is the author of Like Any Normal Day: A Story of Devotion, which was awarded the 2013 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. Kram's work has appeared in The Best American Sports Writing and he received the 2011 Sigma Delta Chi Award for feature writing. He is a former senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, and he has also worked at the Detroit Free Press, Baltimore News American, Philadelphia Magazine, and contributed to The New York Times. He is the son of the late Mark Kram, a highly regarded writer for Sports Illustrated and the author of a controversial book on the rivalry between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, Ghosts of Manila.

Reviews

'The best boxing book I've ever read' Tony Parsons 'A marvellous revisionist tale of the Ali legend' Sunday Times

Kram, a former Sports Illustrated writer whose account of the 1975 Ali-Frazier "Thrilla in Manila" is acknowledged as the finest deadline boxing piece ever turned in, has watched Muhammad Ali's painful deterioration and sanctification by the press ever since. The book is built around the celebrated Ali-Frazier rivalry and its costs to both men. Kram's accounts of their three great battles are terrific literary set pieces that call on all his old skills. In between, though, Ali fans must wade through one ugly anecdote after another specifically selected to counter Ali "hagiography" and David Remnick's 1999 portrait of him as a kind of Civil Rights figure. Kram's Ali a racial ideologue, Muslim dupe, and chronic philanderer is not a guy you'd have light the Olympic Torch, and however true the book's simple thesis decent country boy Frazier scarred by the manipulative, cruel, name-calling Champ it was already advanced in Frazier's autobiography. Kram's book is alternately elegiac about the contests themselves and sourly dismissive of the surrounding goofy pageant of 1970s America. When Kram is not trading in dark gossip but reporting first-hand on their youthful ring clashes or his conflicted visits with the fighters since, his joy in writing resurfaces and his accumulated baggage is safely stowed away. For Frazier fans and all sports collections. Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.