“Ali’s story is the reason I don’t go to fights any more. … Why should I be part of this game that has done this to this man, this great beautiful man?” – Dave Kindred, author of “Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship,” speaking about Muhammad Ali.

Remember that great line in “Citizen Kane,” in which Kane’s aged business manager notes that he was with Kane before the beginning and after the end?

Dave Kindred is like that about boxer Muhammad Ali and broadcaster Howard Cosell. A former reporter for the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ali’s hometown, Kindred – author of “Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship,” later worked for the Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

He covered Ali, first as an unconventionally brilliant boxer, then an objector to the Vietnam War and finally as an aging athlete struggling to make ever more difficult comebacks – slower, thicker-tongued, but still with the inimitable Ali beauty, even when he was painstakingly lighting the Olympic torch in 1996, the year after Cosell died. Kindred watched Cosell evolve from an upstart broadcaster into one of the most famous Americans of his era (that part about hosting the “Battle of the Network Stars” being an unfortunate, and jiggly, footnote).

And Kindred pondered the evolving Ali and Cosell relationship, a pairing of two egos that carried both men to even greater notoriety. Cosell made Ali look more playful and witty; Ali endowed Cosell with the sheen of sports legitimacy that Cosell coveted.

But while Cosell was the keener intellect – a lawyer, he was almost alone among Americans in grasping why Ali was being shafted by the American legal system because of his refusal to fight in Vietnam – Ali was the consummate entertainer.

At a 1977 dinner honoring the six Outstanding

From the first cry of “I’m a bad man!” after defeating Sonny Liston in 1964, Ali seemed never to run out of ways to keep the American public quoting his words and then battling over their meaning – a kind of deconstructionist sports idol. Ultimately, Ali reminded us that even our most controversial icons outlive their abilities. Ali lost his physical prowess first, and then the verbal braggadocio that carried him even when his boxing skills faltered.

In an interview, Kindred notes that Ali was a careless money manager: “Ali never cared about money, he doesn’t care about money today.”

Ali’s greatest flaw, in Kindred’s analysis, was that while he was one of the most influential Americans of his generation, “He was a follower and not a leader. … He didn’t have an original thought in his life.”

Kindred points out that Ali had little to do with the civil rights struggle and “no part in Vietnam … other than to say, ‘I don’t want to go.”‘

Luckily for Ali’s legacy, that was enough.

“At the same time, the great thing that he did … was give African-Americans more hope and greater pride than anybody had ever done,” Kindred says. “He was standing up to the establishment, saying, ‘I am the greatest.’ It gave African-Americans a great sense of who they were and a great sense of pride.”

But Ali these days is more symbol than active presence in the sporting world. Whether his malady is Parkinson’s disease or a condition that mimics Parkinson’s or the result of taking too many slams to the fragile tissue of his brain, Ali is not the boxing sprite we remember. Says Kindred: “He took a lot of punishment and he’s paying a terrible price for it.”

But the memory of the Ali-Cosell partnership endures.

“They had an act, they knew it, they knew it worked … and they knew it was good for both of them,” he said. “The Ali relationship was important to Cosell because of the reflected glory (of) the most famous man in the world.”

Still, even to Kindred, Ali remains a cipher.

“One of my theories is, we can layer any meaning on him that we want,” he said. “Ali was simply the greatest athlete I’ve ever seen, the greatest athlete I ever will see.”