Drama in the Bahamas: Muhammad Ali's Last Fight

by Dave Hannigan

Overview

On December 11, 1981, Muhammad Ali slumped on a chair in the cramped, windowless locker room of a municipal baseball field outside Nassau. A phalanx of sportswriters had pushed and shoved their way into this tiny, breeze-blocked space. In this most unlikely of settings, they had come to record the last moments of the most storied of all boxing careers. They had come to intrude upon the grief.

“It’s over,” mumbled Ali. “It’s over.”

The show that had entertained and wowed from Zaire to Dublin, from Hamburg to Manila, finally ended its twenty-one-year run, the last performance not so much off-Broadway, more amateur theatre in the boondocks.

In Drama in the Bahamas, Dave Hannigan tells the occasionally poignant, often troubling, yet always entertaining story behind Ali’s last bout. Through interviews with many of those involved, he discovers exactly how and why, a few weeks short of his fortieth birthday, a seriously diminished Ali stepped through the ropes one more time to get beaten up by Trevor Berbick.

“Two billion people will be conscious of my fight,” said Ali, trotting out the old braggadocio about an event so lacking in luster that a cow bell was pressed in to service to signal the start and end of each round. How had it come to this? Why was he still boxing? Hannigan answers those questions and many more, offering a unique and telling glimpse into the most fascinating sportsman of the twentieth century in the last, strange days of his fistic life.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613218983
Publisher:	Sports Publishing LLC
Publication date:	08/02/2016
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	792,482
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Dave Hannigan is columnist with the Irish Times (Dublin), the Evening Echo (Cork) and the Irish Echo (New York). He's a professor of history at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island, and resides in Setauket, New York. This is his ninth book.

Table of Contents

Prologue vii

1 What Happens in Vegas 1

2 The Sweet Science of Fraud 16

3 The Boy Who Learned to Fight at Gitmo 32

4 The Talk of Tinseltown 46

5 Searching for the Fountain of Youth 60

6 Doctors Differ, Patient Continues to Fight 73

7 If You Build It… 87

8 Trouble in Paradise Island 99

9 The Financial Make Weight 115

10 For Whom the Cowbell Tolls 129

11 Separating the Dancer from the Dance 143

12 Farewell to the King 160

13 Of Gods and Monsters 173

Epilogue 188

Sources 190

Editorial Reviews

"Who killed Davey Moore?" Bob Dylan asks of a dead fighter. The song points to the guilt of all involved, and so does Hannigan, who sketches the enabling of the incompetently crooked promoter James Cornelius; the ineffable Don King; a doctor named Harry Demopoulos, who reported that "Muhammad's blood vessels were those of a young man"; Ali's colorful cornerman Bundini Brown; John Travolta; and of course Ali's backers in the press. But Dylan doesn't directly address the second question articulated in his song's chorus—"Who killed Davey Moore? Why and what's the reason for?" Hannigan's book excels here with well-chosen quotations painting the unique status, even among athletes, of the boxer.

The New York Times Book Review - Marc Tracy

"Hannigan’s book excels here with well-chosen quotations painting the unique status, even among athletes, of the boxer." —The New York Times Book Review

“It’s a brilliant piece of reportage, full of quirks and factoids from an almost unrecognisable time and place. If it was fiction, it would be thoroughly enjoyable. The fact that it’s all appallingly true makes it too grim for that.” —The Irish Times

“Released shortly after the death of ‘The Greatest,’ this requiem for a heavyweight should enjoy a wide readership among boxing fans and a general audience.” —Library Journal, starred review

“Boxing is not like baseball. A ballplayer who comes back for one too many seasons risks embarrassment. A boxer faces far worse dangers. After his October 1980 beating at the hands of Larry Holmes, Muhammad Ali should have exited the sport. But he didn’t. He needed one more fight, one final sad exhibition of courage before calling it quits. Dave Hannigan traces the reasons why, and the men who allowed it to happen. Drama in the Bahamas reads like a train wreck, making one want to turn away and not watch. But it details a reality in the sport.” —Randy Roberts, author of Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X and Joe Louis: Hard Times Man

"Hannigan’s book excels here with well-chosen quotations painting the unique status, even among athletes, of the boxer." —The New York Times Book Review

“It’s a brilliant piece of reportage, full of quirks and factoids from an almost unrecognisable time and place. If it was fiction, it would be thoroughly enjoyable. The fact that it’s all appallingly true makes it too grim for that.” —The Irish Times

“Released shortly after the death of ‘The Greatest,’ this requiem for a heavyweight should enjoy a wide readership among boxing fans and a general audience.” —Library Journal, starred review

“Boxing is not like baseball. A ballplayer who comes back for one too many seasons risks embarrassment. A boxer faces far worse dangers. After his October 1980 beating at the hands of Larry Holmes, Muhammad Ali should have exited the sport. But he didn’t. He needed one more fight, one final sad exhibition of courage before calling it quits. Dave Hannigan traces the reasons why, and the men who allowed it to happen. Drama in the Bahamas reads like a train wreck, making one want to turn away and not watch. But it details a reality in the sport.” —Randy Roberts, author of Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X and Joe Louis: Hard Times Man

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2016
Relatives at the bedside of the dying Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) reported that his heart continued to beat for 30 minutes after massive organ failure, and it was this heart that kept him upright through his last bout in the boxing ring in Nassau, the Bahamas. Sadly, Ali's performance only echoed the general ineptitude that surrounded the event. Arranged by a neophyte promoter under investigation by the FBI and held in a dilapidated baseball stadium, this December 1981 fight matched Ali with Trevor Berbick, a relatively unknown Jamaican competitor. Boxers on the undercard resorted to physical threats against the promoter in order to be paid and were forced to share gloves because new ones hadn't arrived. Berbick was over a decade younger than Ali, cannon fodder for the former champion in his prime. Thus, the drama centered first on whether the fight would actually materialize, and then on whether Ali would escape intact. Hannigan (history, Suffolk Cty. Community Coll.; The Big Fight) examines both the backstory and the fight itself. VERDICT Released shortly after the death of "The Greatest," this requiem for a heavyweight should enjoy a wide readership among boxing fans and a general audience.—Jim Burns, formerly with Jacksonville P.L., FL

Library Journal