On December 11, 1981, Muhammad Ali slumped on a seat in the cramped, windowless locker space of the municipal football field outside Nassau. A phalanx of sportswriters experienced pushed and shoved their method into this tiny, breeze-blocked space. In this most unlikely of settings, they had arrive to record the last moments of the very most storied of most 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 Crisis in the Bahamas, Dave Hannigan tells the occasionally poignant, often troubling, yet always entertaining story behind Ali’s last bout. Through interviews with a lot of those involved, he discovers exactly how and why, a few weeks lacking his fortieth birthday, a significantly diminished Ali stepped through the ropes once more to get beaten up by Trevor Berbick.