In 1971, when the heavyweight championship of the world could still be described accurately as one of the greatest prizes in sport, Norman Mailer wrote about Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier with a kind of drunken fervour. He suggested that “the closer a heavyweight comes to the championship, the more natural it is for him to be a little more insane, secretly insane, for the heavyweight champion of the world is either the toughest man in the world or he is not, but there is a real possibility that he is. It is like being the big toe of God”.
Mailer, who regarded himself with scant modesty as the most vivid writer and toughest man in American literature, added with absurd grandeur that “when the heavyweights become champions they begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville, or Conrad or Lawrence or Proust”.
