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17
Friday
It’s very likely that Dave Kindred is the only person on the face of this planet to have seen both Muhammad Ali sans shorts and Howard Cosell in his boxers. The former event took place in 1973, in a Las Vegas hotel, in Ali’s bed. (For the record: Though the Greatest was naked, Kindred had all of his clothes on.) The latter sighting took place at Cosell’s house in Westhampton in ’89. Of course, there’s nothing Brokeback here. Ali, as was his habit, was simply playing around; Cosell was eating breakfast. Still, Kindred got lucky—at least with these stories, which make for the perfect beginning to his latest book, Sound and Fury, a sort of dual bio of Ali and Cosell, set against the symbiosis the two legends shared. “Mostly, Ali and Cosell worked because the men brought to their lives and to their television appearances a fascinating array of dichotomies: love and hate, racism and tolerance, fear and courage, idealism and compromise,” Kindred writes in his prologue. Hear Kindred talk about opposites at 7 p.m. at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 364-1919. (Mike Kanin)