Drama in the Bahamas: Muhammad Ali's Last Fight

Written by Dave Hannigan

Narrated by J.D Jackson

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 theater 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Aug 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781515980124

Dave Hannigan

Dave Hannigan is a professor of history at Suffolk County Community College in New York, a weekly columnist with The Irish Times, and author of several non-fiction books, including The Big Fight: When Ali Conquered Ireland, and Muhammad Ali: Fifteen Rounds in the Wilderness. A native of Cork, Dave currently lives in East Setauket, Long Island, with his sons Abe, Charlie and Finn.

[writemoves · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I think many boxing fans associate Ali's fight with Larry Holmes as his last one. If you saw the fight, you would agree it should have been his last one. However Ali was coaxed and convinced that he had more boxing left in him. This book covers Ali's last fight. It covers his license battles with the various states to allow him to box. The seamy side and corrupt characters around the fight are also on display. Ali had nothing left in the tank. He tired quickly in his training and it showed in the fight. Very good book about boxing. Excellent story about the tragedy of Ali's downfall as a fighter. He fought 2-3 fights too long.