No words for Muhammad Ali

“His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see—
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee—
Rumble, young man, rumble!”

When Frank Sinatra died, I was working as front-of-the-book columnist at Phoenix New Times. In Seamus McCaffrey’s Irish Pub I ran into Michael Lacey, the then-owner of the newspaper. I told him I had just seen When We Were Kings, the documentary about the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, and Lacey remarked that Ali was to his generation what Si...