A FEW ROUNDS WITH HEAVYWEIGHT WRITING; `MUHAMMAD ALI READER' HITS ITS JOURNALISTIC MARK.

Byline: Allen Barra Special to the Daily News

``The Muhammad Ali Reader''

edited by Gerald Early 

(289 pages, Ecco Press; $26)

Our rating: Four Stars

Several years ago it was remarked that ``The Guinness Book of World Records'' called Muhammad Ali ``the most written about human being who ever lived,'' having surpassed, in order, Lincoln, Christ and Napoleon. (Of course, this was before People and Entertainment Weekly discovered Leonardo DiCaprio.) For all those oceans of ink, though, it's remarkable how little of genuine and lasting interest on Ali has been preserved between covers.

The supposedly definitive 1991 Ali biography by Thomas Hauser was pompous and stilted, a testimonial not at all in the spirit of Ali. In truth, even Ali's autobiography, ``The Greatest,'' wasn't in the spirit of Ali. Ali the subject was too big for Ali the writer (and his ghost). Only the text for Wilfrid Sheed's ``Muhammad Ali - A Portrait in Words'' (1975), basically a fleshed-out photo book, combined information and real insight, but it only followed Ali up to the Foreman fight - sort of like a biography of Napoleon that ends with Austerlitz.

The scope of Ali

The truth is that Muhammad Ali is simply too big a subject for a single writer, or, perhaps stated another way, he has meant too many things to too many people for one writer to reflect them all. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that now, as Ali settles into an early Parkinson's-induced senility, we have the best book ever about him, ``The Muhammad Ali Reader,'' and it's written by several people: A.J. Liebling, Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton, Jackie Robinson, Murray Kempton, Jimmy Cannon, Norman Mailer, Roger Kahn, Garry Wills, Hunter S. Thompson, Ishmael Reed and the Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka, to name just a few.

``The Muhammad Ali Reader'' has a writing sensibility in Gerald Early, the journalist and culture critic who made the selection of pieces and seems to have missed almost nothing about Ali that is of interest (though Wilfrid Sheed is conspicuously absent from the mix) and even a few things that aren't.

Oddly, the bad stuff, too, is interesting, if only to illustrate the range of responses Ali was capable of generating. Actually, ``The Muhammad Ali Reader'' has two writing sensibilities, the second being the champ himself. It's amazing how often, even when filtered through someone else's personality, Ali's own still dominates. This is largely because Early arranges the pieces chronologically, so we can see Ali taking shape over the years.

Punching it up

The first major magazine piece on Cassius Marcellus Clay was written by the greatest of all boxing writers, A.J. Liebling, in a 1962 issue of the New Yorker. (It was also Liebling's last story, and, subsequently, wasn't included in his classic ``The Sweet Science.'' Liebling had the spectacular good fortune to see the young boxer-poet get dumped on his seat by a tough journeyman named Sonny Banks. Clay was raw and unorthodox, but, as Liebling wrote, ``Honest effort and sterling character backed by solid instruction will carry a man a good way, but unearned natural ability has a lot to be said for it.'' Clay got up and began throwing combinations; Banks looked like ``a man trying to fight off wasps with a shovel.''

In the end, Liebling estimates, Clay ``was the kind of hero likely to be around for a long while.'' Liebling was wrong. Not too long after the Banks fight, Clay won the heavyweight title by dominating the terrifying Sonny Liston in so easy a fashion that writers like Vanity Fair's Nick Tosches are still writing conspiracy theories about it. Almost instantly he became Muhammad Ali, Black Muslim and anti-war activist. ``By the end of the sixties, wrote Garry Wills, ``Ali was the intellectual's catnip.''

Ali not only inspired great writing, he inspired great overwriting, the best, of course, coming from Norman Mailer. ``He is fascinating,'' wrote Mailer in ``King of the Hill,'' his great essay on the first Ali-Joe Frazier fight, ``... so he is obsessive. The more we don't want to think about him, the more we are obliged to ... He is America's Greatest ego. He is also ... the swiftest embodiment of human intelligence we have had yet, he is the very spirit of the twentieth century.''

Ready to wince?

The downside is that Ali, filtered through Mailer, also inspired so much bad writing, and Early must be obliged to include some of it. ``In the sixties,'' wrote Pete Hamill after Ali lost to Frazier in 1971, ``we still believed in princes, and for a few brief years, one of the gaudiest of American princes of all was a heavyweight prizefighter who called himself Muhammad Ali.'' One of the gaudiest? And most of us would argue that Ali didn't really become a great fighter till after he lost to Frazier.

But the Ali-inspired diarrhea-of-the-pen award must go to Joyce Carol Oates: ``When in feckless youth Ali was a dazzling figure combining, say, the brashness of Hotspur and the insouciance of Lear's Fool ...'' Well, let's cut to the chase: ``These somber and terrifying boxing matches (of Ali's late career) make us weep for their very futility; we seem to be in the presence of human experience too profound to be named ...'' Or in a writer too full of soup to write about boxing as boxing.

Wills, summing up the literary world's fixation on Ali, notes that ``For some reason, people don't want fighters just to be fighters.'' He's right. And yet, no matter how much we tell ourselves otherwise, for some reason we don't want Muhammad Ali just to be a fighter. Perhaps Wole Soyinka said it best in a poem:!``A pestle! A Warrior who said, I will not fight, Yet proved a prophet's call-to-arms against a war.''

Or perhaps Ali said it best himself when the Emperor told the King, ``Elvis, you have to keep singin' or die to stay big. I'm gonna be big forever.'' Which means with luck, in the future, we'll have updated, expanded editions of ``The Muhammad Ali Reader.''

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Photo: Muhammad Ali has enchanted writers for decades, and Gerald Early has collected some of the best works in a new book.