BUNDINI

Biography of Muhammad Ali’s revered corner man.

By rhetoric and writing professor Snyder’s account, Drew “Bundini” Brown (1928-1987) was less a boxing coach than a hype man, Flavor Flav to Ali’s Chuck D., whose main role was to be a walking pep rally. He was the true author of Ali’s famed line “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”—and without Ali, by some lights, there would have been no hip-hip. “As the rhetorical tradition expanded over the years,” writes Snyder, “the term hype man eventually became synonymous with the concept of a loyal sidekick or trusted companion.” Though Brown wasn’t a boxer himself, writes the author, he was present for three-quarters of Ali’s boxing matches and kept him company for workouts, including those that Ali conducted in a rural retreat that threatened to inflict cabin fever on his urbane, sharp-dressing aide. Brown lived a life of adventure, too, joining the Navy years before he was old enough to do so, traveling the world, frequenting the jazz clubs of Harlem and—daringly for the time—marrying a Russian Jewish woman who, though the union didn’t last, traveled to attend his funeral. “If you can’t seize the title, then win the people,” he counseled Ali, who did just that, though he made an enemy of Joe Frazier by taunting him with the racially laden epithet “gorilla”—one of the rhetorical turns that, Snyder adds, didn’t owe to Brown’s inspiration. The narrative runs long and sometimes uneasily blends the academic with the popular (“Here, I am referencing Sisyphus, the figure in Greek mythology who was punished by Hades”). Though the text is generally accessible, it doesn’t stand up to the standards of Plimpton Liebling.

A well-intentioned, overdue, and overcooked treatment of a complex figure in the boxing world, best suited to completists.