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By Dick Friedman, SI.com

When I was in college, one of my roommates did a dead-on impression of Muhammad Ali. Shadow-boxing and performing a passable version of the "Ali Shuffle," he would bellow, "People like How-ahd Cosell been agitatin' fo' FRAY-zuh!!!"

Everyone was in on the joke. Back then -- the early 1970s -- Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell may have been the most famous comedy team in America. In his new and sensitively written book, Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Frienship (Free Press; 368 pages $27.00), award-winning sportswriter and columnist Dave Kindred, evoking all the hilarity and tumult of those raucous times, describes what it was like when the pair, each with an ego larger than the Grand Canyon, appeared together onscreen. "What television viewers saw," he writes, "was the most famous man on Earth (the pope ran second to Ali in most surveys) talking with the most famous television star in America (or maybe next to Johnny Carson)."

Kindred is perhaps uniquely positioned to examine these two narcissistic, needy souls. As a young reporter for the Courier-Journal in Louisville, he covered that city's rising heavyweight Cassius Clay. Later, Kindred developed enough professional respect for and personal rapport with the loved-and-loathed Cosell that the ABC broadcaster asked him to collaborate on a book. (Kindred declined.) "My ambition," Kindred declares of Sound and Fury, "was to recover Muhammad Ali from mythology and Howard Cosell from caricature. The real stories are better."

Anyway, to embellish would be gilding the lily. Each in his own way personified the anti-establishment. The brash Ali taunted overmatched foes with poetry and enraged much of white America by joining the Black Muslims and refusing to be inducted into the armed forces. The polysyllabic Cosell, fueled by his outsider status as a Brooklyn-bred Jew, took great glee in taking to task the white-bread sports broadcasting jock mouthpieces and pooh-bahs. Kindred uses the men's complicated relationship as a fulcrum. Despite the book's subtitle, "theirs was a partnership more than a friendship," Kindred notes. Cosell even acknowledged the truth of Ali's observation that "you know you need me more than I need you." Kindred also debunks the myth that Cosell stood foursquare behind Ali in the latter's fight to overturn his draft-case conviction. Cosell, says Kindred, "never defended a single Ali position on race, politics or religion. He defended the fighter's rights to hold those positions. That was a good and brave thing to do in a time when many people's rights were taken from them."

The sheer fun of their interactions still resonates. "No heavyweight champion ever expressed self-adoration so openly, and no broadcaster ever so clearly was his subject's accomplice in mischief," says Kindred. Here's a typical exchange. Cosell: "You're being extremely truculent." Ali: "Whatever 'truculent' means, if that's good, I'm that." (As longtime viewers of Monday Night Football know, this would be the template for the banter between Cosell and Dandy Don Meredith.)

Sound and Fury is worth reading alone for Kindred's enthralling retellings of Ali's epic ring battles. Of the depleting Ali-Frazier III, "The Thrilla in Manila," he writes: "Then, from a dark and scary place, Ali borrowed against his future." Perhaps Kindred's most acute and compassionate observations come when he depicts Ali and Cosell in their respective declines. Of Ali, "an old man at 41," Kindred says, "Imagine the silence of retirement.... Only in the ring did he matter." Meanwhile, Cosell, walking forlornly through airports in his 60s, had "become a Willy Loman figure."

Those who have followed in their wake are, for the most part, mere imitations, and often bad ones. Sure, there's plenty of agitatin' going on now. But you can almost hear Cosell's take, delivered (of course) with his trademark mock sotto voce: "To quote the immortal Bard in MacBeth, Act Five, Scene Five, these are tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."