Authors: Mark Kram
“You can get a trainer,” the kid said.
“How many fights you have?” Ali asked.
“Twenty fights.”
“What? What you need me for?”
“I need your learnin’. Your name.”
Ali moved in front of the kid, took his hands and examined them. “They ain’t twenty-fight hands. Your hands too small, too.” Ali then held his own hands up, palms facing. “Show me somethin’.”
The kid flicked several untutored combinations to Ali’s palms, and Ali turned, saying, “That’s enough. How many fights?”
“Twenty,” the kid said with less conviction. Ali just stayed silent. The kid said, looking at the floor, “I don’t have any fights. I gotta start somewhere. Even you started somewhere, right? Can you help me?”
“I’m gonna help,” Ali said. He reached into his pocket, rummaged through some bills, and stuck them into the kid’s hand. “Get the bus back to Nawwlins.”
The kid said, “I ain’t goin’ back. I’m stayin’ in L.A. I gotta dig in somewhere. I don’t want your money.”
“You wanna be diggin’ a grave?” Ali asked, then added, “You got eatin’ money?”
“For a week. I’m stayin’ with a stepbrother.”
“You keep my money, then. Eat for another week. But if you smart, you go home to your mama.” The kid turned away angrily, and Abdel showed him to the door.
“I know how he feel,” Ali said. “He gonna hate me. Tell everybody he meet Ali, and I ain’t the champ he thought, that I’m a bad man, with no helpin’ hand. One day he’ll understand, when he a ’lectrician or somethin’, doin’ good, raisin’ kids.”
As the January light slipped into evening, Ali drew up to eat in
a soft chair by the fire. He had picked up considerable weight, yet still seemed hollowed out, like a big fruit shorn of its ripe interior. He labored with a chicken leg that kept quivering in his hand, and finally dropped it in disgust. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, and slipped deep into the chair. To distract him, a hypothetical was put to him. Suppose he were a manager, with all he knew and had done, and that kid from New Orleans was Joe Frazier, much older than the kid, small for a heavyweight, with hands that clunked and deadweight legs. “He be on the bus, too,” Ali said. He paused, then added, “I don’t know anything about fightin’, really. Only about
me
fightin’. I couldn’t stand lookin’ at that kind of style in a gym every day, no matter what the money. I’d see what I could do to him, wanna jump in and whup the sucker.” There was an edge to his voice.
It was suggested that it might be interesting to look at the Thrilla in Manila on tape, only his good rounds if he wished. “What good rounds?” he asked. His eyes became unengaged, as if he’d much prefer to pull the ace of diamonds out of his ear. Even sly persistence could not bring him around. He said he’d show the various agonies of Floyd Patterson, or the ignominy of the overvalued George Foreman in Zaire. “I never think twice about George,” he said. “He so slow that I eat dinner between his punches.” No Thrilla, though, he added, saying, “It was the greatest fight of my life, and it wasn’t about style, it was where I had to go for it, a place where you drop through a trapdoor.” Why not, then, look at the Thrilla? “I don’t wanna look at hell again.”
It was not that he didn’t want to cooperate on some contrarian whim. The mention of Frazier and Manila seemed to run into a room in his mind that he wanted to keep bare, a steamy couple of hours that took him to the center of himself as a champion and a man. What did he, eight years later, still dread about that fight? Had it not been a masterpiece, a kind of primitive art? A firestorm of passion, of promises
kept and value given, of dramatic passage with an honorable end? But there was no end, and that, it seemed, was what Ali could not bear to see, the blinking exit sign for a wondrous career—through which he could not bring himself to step. He added, “Without me, Joe’s nothin’. He should stop usin’ me, them fights for his fame. It’s all over. Look at me, I’m not right, sick. He should be sick, too, all them punches I lay on his dumb head.” He stopped, then said with resignation, “Nothin’ lasts. We just flies, ain’t we?”
N
earing the end of the century, Muhammad Ali still swam inside of Joe Frazier like a determined bacillus. Despite the advice of a few friends and some of his children, Frazier was still keeping an obsessional hold on Ali, sometimes with a freefall into the void between regret and revenge; at other times his contempt just lay there hissing. Much time had passed since my visit with Ali, and if he had been a sonata of sometimes bewildered withdraw, Frazier was a brass section insistent on sending out a triumphal arch of sound not consonant with his early self. The usually remote Frazier had taken on, ironically, the attitude and coloration of the Ali that had once stuck words on him as if he were a store window dummy.
“Didja bring any money?” were his first words; these were also on the lips of all who worked around him. Did he ask me for money when he had had a half dozen fights and moved over the ring like a confused animal with a trap on its leg? “Well, for old times’ sake,” he relented. He growled about what he thought to be a lack of exposure, the neglect of the public, how his own greatness was being forgotten and how Ali was being made into a god. “A tin one,” he added. “I made him what he is.” Including his current state of health? “I made him what he is,” Joe said. “Take it any way you want.” He threw up his hands and said: “Look at him, can’t even talk
and he makin’ money hand and fist.” Was he, Frazier, secure financially? “I got more money than him,” he said.
“Joe is for Joe,” said Burt Watson, a former business manager. “Everyone becomes former around Joe. He’s not a bad guy. Getting past his kids and to him without jingle ain’t gonna happen. They look for a dollar in the fog. He’s in the Joe Frazier business. Nobody mentions Ali round him. And the only picture of Ali around is Ali on his ass on the gym wall.”
A flattened Ali, caught just at the end of gravity pull, took up nearly the whole wall of an outer office, and there was more of the same down in the gym. On a bad ego day, Frazier could not turn few directions without an instant pick-me-up. Right now, he was getting a boost of another kind from a jug of rock candy, lemon and brandy; he was not an attack drinker, but a measured one who saw periodic belts as an elixir, a protection against bodily invasions. For all those pictures of a wounded Ali and his own steady assertions of singularity, Frazier was not a natural or even a self-made egotist. As a fighter, he had always had a cheerful pride and put high value on proper behavior; he was a rule-follower and, from the signs plastered on the gym walls, now a diligent rule-maker of gym etiquette and moral code. “I’m the boss here,” he said, visiting the jug again with a lighter gulp. “Act right, or you’re gone. Act like a real fighter.” His standard of dereliction of conduct was Ali. “He’s out there,” Joe said, pointing. “On his tail wonderin’ what hit him.”
Frazier was fifty-five, and he sat in a dark little room, just off the main office, a bit frazzled, wearing a black feathered Borsalino hat, an insistent tie on a purple shirt against a well-worn, pinstripe gray suit, indicating that he was not getting ready to climb into the ring down below and demonstrate the virtues and intricacies of the left hook. He looked like someone who was on his way out the door to check on his stable of working women, but far from it: he and God
had always been bosom-close, and he always believed that he had been selected by Him to knock the anti-Christ, Ali, down several pegs. Joe saw himself as the special issue of the Almighty; the Muslims were infidels and Ali was their serpent. “A man can’t think he’s God,” Frazier said, “and He put me on earth for one reason, made me a fighter, for when the day come I go and slay a false god.” Unlike Ali, Frazier had been a muted religionist; now he was in fervent lockstep with the rage of righteous public witness in sports.
Before 1985, it was rare to hear or see the Deity singled out, or vulgar displays (perhaps a vagrant sign of the cross, warranted if you were risking your brain), let alone attended by pious soliloquies with every fat purse, touchdown, or home run. God has become a good luck charm, a mental amulet, armor against the unforeseen, or foundering talent and the thunderbolt of injury. A divinely ignored soul in India might see it as obscenely self-centered, even amusing if he or she could laugh. God preoccupied Frazier in our chat until the subject of his health came up. “I got sugar diabetes. I got hypertension. I got headaches. Pain just about everywhere. What else you want me to have?” Scattered vials of pills suggested a longer list. It was no secret that a medical specialist friend had made at least four impromptu visits to the gym over the years, and each time personally whisked Frazier off to the hospital for convalescence. “I’ll outlive him, count on it,” Joe said. By now,
him
needed no further identification.
Frazier, divorced, was more pleased to report that his sexual virility was levels above merely operative. Having had eleven children, all of them grown now, he was (with his son Marvis, his constant shadow) a visible figure on the club circuit—and apparently not a bystander. His financial picture was easier to gauge, if only for the location of his gym, near an ever-expanding university that will need the land. The gym, with his name embossed with a Roman look above the front, was a well-known center in a gunned-out area. His aim was
to keep it as a place of work and instruction, not to let it become a pit stop for drugs; he was vigilant for gossip, or any furtive transaction. He lived upstairs in a vast, somber loft, a tidy and favorable place for the chewing of unlimited angst.
French workers have an observation when a coworker shows signs of wear: “The trade is entering his body.” With Joe, as with Ali, it was long past entry, it had taken up firm residence. No other sport expresses its cost so starkly as boxing does. Each face and brain is a map of risky travel, revealing the length of the trip and all the bad roads. Frazier had been worn away like an old rock, helped along by a rapidly graying beard. He tried to summon up his old carefree cool, but there was a gauntness around lightless eyes, the effect being of an abstract presence. His vocal cords, commanded by the left frontal lobe of the brain, had been blasted into strands, leaving him with a voice that seemed to struggle for audibility. His words jumped here and there like balls in a lottery machine, its line of emphasis too quickly toppling into dissonance. His motor skills did not seem impaired, though you wondered how he would fare in a rudimentary clinical test of them. No dragging of a leg, either, a large feature in Dr. Harrison Martland’s old and classic analysis of the punch-soaked fighter. Physically, he had a few scuffs here and there, but I wondered: How were his eyes?
It was not idle curiosity, for there was much rumor that he was going blind. Most startling, by his own confession, he had said he had fought his whole career, from the Olympics on, blind in his left eye, and it was presumed that the other was fading too. He said that during prefight physicals he had memorized the charts, or used his good eye. His manager, Yank Durham, was the only one who knew, yet it seems hard to imagine his longtime trainer, Eddie Futch, was kept from the secret. How could Futch, an honest man with a subtle antenna for defects and tactics in the game, not know? Was he reliev
ing himself of responsibility, not his usual way, long after the fact, or was he as genuinely baffled as he said? “The claim beats me,” he said not long ago. “Hard to believe.” The revelation had come in his autobiography and received no attention whatsover from a media that can spend days reporting and analyzing the dimmest of banana-peel slips.
Yet, if it was true that Frazier had done it all with one eye, what an extraordinary achievement of will and tactical cunning. Close your left eye, and you instantly understand how you would be dangerously at a loss: the left side of the ring suddenly becomes a netherland, your bearings unbalanced. Working with only half a ring—if that was indeed true—Frazier became the most skillful, devastating inside puncher in boxing history, so effective that he has to be ranked in the lower tier of the top five heavyweights of the century. How did he manage it? It required a true belly for fire, a good chin, a diamond-hard concentration, no panic, and a subtle choreography of feet to keep the opponent from taking him to the dark side where he was open to being destroyed. He could never relax and had to retain his rhythm of attack-manipulation, simultaneous and relentless. Against an Ali, say, he had to keep him flowing to his own right side, away from his bad eye. Only one punch could do this, and it had to be punishing and steady: a left hook, to the body and to the head. “When I looked up to the lights,” Frazier said now, “all I ever saw was milky glare. I had to get in on his chest, follow his breath, damn near his heartbeat.”
“How is your eye now?” he was asked. “Or eyes?”
“In good shape.”
“Show me.”
“Put up some fingers,” he said. He looked, looked again, then laughed, saying, “Which hand?” When he stopped laughing, he said, “That’s four on your left hand…one on the right…five on the
right. See. I got an operation some years ago. See good now.”
“Suppose I move across the room?”
“Don’t have to do that,” he said, quite annoyed. “I can see.”
Suspicion still lingered over whether his vision had been totally corrected; he had diabetes. Frazier stood up from his chair, half bent, and bumped into furniture, yelling out for someone to help him find “my pain pills.” Otherwise, he walked well enough through the gym. Who knows? Of his claim to a one-eyed career, there is a solid inclination to believe him. Philadelphia fighters and managers knew all the tricks in prefight physicals, and were helped by a supple, if not duplicitous Boxing Commission; out-of-town bodies were no less so. And, too, Philly gyms were notorious rendering plants that left few fighters intact. The wars there, amid shafts of dusty sunlight, were better than most main bouts. “We trim the fat to the heart down here,” Yank Durham used to say. “In a serious way.”
Like Frazier a showstopper in the gyms, Gypsy Joe Harris was also a star of those exchanges. A stablemate and good friend of Frazier’s, Gypsy was a scuffed marble of a welterweight, five five with a shaved head, and close to a title shot. The crowds loved him. No fighter, including Ali, had his speed, agility, and creativity; not a puncher, he was a point-building, skittering electron that released a volume of leather from any angle. Under Durham he, too, had reached the top with only one eye. Trouble was that Gypsy saw life as having no more distance than that from his nose to the end of a pool stick. He carried a knife almost as long as he was, and once asked to describe it he called it “sixty year in jail.” Often, Frazier said, it was mighty hard “keepin’ Gyp alive.” Gypsy was a determined profligate, a gym truant, and not pleased with the close attention that Durham always paid Frazier. He felt he was not getting the respect due a risin’ man. When he flirted with better treatment from a millionaire dilettante (while still with Durham), he answered a sudden request for an ophthalmo-
logical exam by the Commission. Out of nowhere, the most popular fighter in Philly and his one eye were set down for life.