This book, written by a light-heavyweight world champion about "The Greatest", is I believe unique. I don't know how much help Jose got his friend, Norman Mailer, but the result was a book I have reread, and there's only one other boxing book that I have reread.
Torres, writing in 1971 says that he looked at Ali as a possible opponent, and that is responsible for a good deal of the book's depth. I don't think you can look at the fight game adequately without having read this book. ( )

This is quite simply the best book about boxing I have ever read, and one of the few I kept when I gave the others away. It concerns the life and times of Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali from boyhood to the Fight of the Century with Joe Frazier in 1971.

Inbetween, Torres tells the tale of Ali's incredible life during the 1960s: an Olympic gold medal in Rome, winning the world heavyweight title, his conversion to Islam, and being stripped of the title because of his stance on Vietnam.

All well-documented stuff, of course; but the insight that Torres (a former world light-heavyweight champion himself) is able to give to the psychology of boxers - whether they are afraid; the sub-conscious excuses they make for a poor performance, even during a fight; the 'second wind' and the difference between tiredness and discouragement - puts this book head and shoulders above the rest. Torres's analyses of Ali's comeback fights against Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena make the bouts seem as if they are unfolding before your eyes, and his description of the Ali-Frazier contest, the climax of the book, is as fascinating and thrilling as it was when I first read it, nearly forty years ago.

A must. ( )