Authors: Mark Kram
Once more he didn’t disappoint. Arrogant and contemptuous of Joe’s worth, he planned as in their first fight to run the table early. And again for the first three rounds, Joe sought no cover, again too straight in the air, plagued by that old cussed cold motor, and he stayed in the mouth of streaming leather that had the sound of Buddy Rich on drums. Joe’s legs buckled a couple of times in the first and looked unstabilized at periods of the second. “He won’t call you Clay anymore!” Bundini boomed. With his head jerking up, Joe was
seeing more of the arena rafters than Ali. He was being tagged by back-to-back lead right hands, a sin of damnation in the moldy papyrus of the ring. I surveyed the Marcoses to see if they were pleased at getting their money’s worth. The little pocket gun seemed dour; Imelda, with a languid wave of her fan to keep the mascara stiff, was as cool as if she were taking tea on the palace balcony. In front, Herbert released a cocky laugh and stayed on the mineral water; some people never learned a thing about Frazier.
A departure in tone showed up in the fourth. Joe’s motor was moving him into new terrain. Ali drew blood from Frazier’s mouth with another lead right, and Joe tossed his head like a balky horse as he kept snorting and rolling in closer, ever so closer. Joe Flaherty, not far from me and noting the blood, said: “To the lions, the sticky stuff is nectar.” Ali sensed a change, and at the end of the round he was miffed. “What you got in that niggah head?” he asked, slapping a glove angrily to his chest. “Fuckin’ rock!” He never liked rounds, when he was humming, to be in doubt; an Inca in charge of human sacrifice, upset at bungling the flow of the ritual. In the fifth, no longer tapping dangerously at the surfaces of his game, Joe began to find Ali consistently. The champ, who knew every hatch of escape, couldn’t get free of his own corner, had become a bug that couldn’t lift up out of the honey jar. Angelo’s inkspot eyes were bright with the flicker of concern. “Get back to the center of the ring!” he yelled. “That’s where you gotta live!”
Came the sixth, and here it was, that chilling moment that you always looked for when Joe Frazier was in a fight. Most of his fights had it written large: You can go just so far into that desolate, dark place where his heart pounds, you can waste his perimeters, see his head hanging in the public square, then suddenly there he is, a somber cloud mass blotting out the sun. He stayed on Ali’s chest, the blood from his mouth sticking to the champ’s light crop of pectoral
hair. Joe shoveled into his kidneys, his liver, into his heart region, where fighters have observed the pain is excruciating. With nonstop digging, a wild boar going for a truffle, Joe jerked up out of the pit and sent out—Splat! Splat!—two evil left hooks to Ali’s head. Dundee said those hooks were the hardest he had ever seen thrown, and after them, Ali was fighting for his life. Ali’s legs searched for the floor, his body fast becoming one of Baudelaire’s lost balloons. Crying, Bundini embraced him before he got back to the corner. Herbert broke into the gin.
After much of the same in the seventh and eighth, Ali came out for the ninth with some dance, then his body sighed back to the ropes. “The center of the ring!” Dundee screamed. It takes legs and strength to keep the shop open in the middle. He had no taste or vitality for center work. Plopping on the ropes, Ali was panicked and confused, unable to time the velocity of Joe’s punches; one half of you expected Joe to request a scalpel. Between the heat and Frazier, Ali was ready for the launch pad. By the end of the round, Georgie Benton, an assistant trainer, and one of my quislings in the corner, would report later that Joe couldn’t believe his eyes, saying: “What
is
holdin’ this mothafuckin’ fool up!” The assault continued through the tenth. After the round, Ali sat on his stool, head bowed, nearly doubled up, his eyes rolling with exhaustion. Tears streamed down Bundini’s face as he begged: “Go down to the well once more! The world needs ya, champ!” Ali would later say he almost didn’t make it out for the eleventh, it was the “closest thing to dyin’ I know.” While he sat there, his face a forlorn long shot of Death Valley at the end of an Antonioni lens, Herbert tried to struggle up to the corner, shouting: “You a niggah like him! You gonna quit. Get your ass out there! You hear me?”
Joe trapped him in a corner in the eleventh, and blow after blow carpeted Ali’s face, sending spit popping out of his mouth. “Lawd
have mercy!” Bundini shrieked. I had the fight 6-4-1, Frazier. Futch thought it was close, but figured the body attack had been so devastating, the best he had ever seen a heavyweight deliver, that he, too, found himself gasping. No words, he said, could describe the sound of the flamenco on Ali’s body. Agreed; the aural effect was horrendous. Everything had worked for Eddie, from the tightened ropes to the Filipino referee, Carlos Padilla, a brisk workman who whipped the pace to the acceleration of fatality, quickly moving Ali off every time he tried to hold and gulp for air. Going into the twelfth, for Ali the scant chips remaining would have to be shoved to the center of the table like never before. Did he even have any chips? I didn’t think so, not this time, so barren was the visual above me.
When thinking of that precise moment, it’s a sharp reminder never ever to leap to a conclusion too far out in front of the evidence. For in the twelfth (Great Scott! By George! Great Balls of Fire! Whatever you need to register the incredible), Ali started to part the Red Sea of Frazier’s face, adding a third and fourth wind to William James’s famous psychological theory of second wind in humans. He was back in the center of the apron, sluggish but effective, and determined to win or lose it all in his favorite clime. Ali was stopping Joe with those long lead rights again, not giving him a chance to get off his shots. Now, Joe’s face began to lose definition and, like emerging islands from the sea, massive bumps rose up around his eyes, especially the left. At the end of that round, Joe said in his corner: “I can’t pick up his right.” Was it the result of that blind left eye that he claimed only gave him half a ring his whole career? Who knows?
In the thirteenth, Frazier began to flinch and wince from Ali’s one-note slugging. Joe’s punches seemed to have a gravity drag, and when they did land they brushed lazily against Ali. The champ sent Frazier’s bloody mouthpiece flying seven rows into the audience, and nearly pulled the light switch on him with one chopping shot. “My
God!” Angelo screamed, not sure if his eyes were betraying him. “He ain’t got no power.”
The fourteenth was the most savage round of the forty-one Ali and Frazier fought. It brought out guilt (not felt since Joe wrecked the face of Chuvalo) that made one want to seek out the nearest confessional for the expiation of voyeuristic lust. Nine straight right hands smashed into Joe’s left eye, thirty or so in all during the round. When Joe’s left side capsized to the right from the barrage, Ali moved it back into range for his eviscerating right with crisp left hooks, and at the round’s end the referee guided Joe back to his corner. Eddie Futch was a man in thought. “Never fade a guy who’s sneaked his own dice into the game,” Yank liked to say. But…he remembered their fifteenth round in the Garden; did Ali have another round in him? If not Joe might win it. He looked at the swollen, purple slit of Frazier’s eye. In the old days, trainers—not Eddie—would use a razor blade to pop the balloon and release the pressure. Not with this eye; it was beyond help. He remembered, too, the several fighters he had seen killed in the ring. There was a sudden commotion in Joe’s corner. The lover of the Lake Poets was signaling to stop the fight.
“No, no, no!” Joe kept shouting. “You can’t do that to me!”
“Sit down, son,” Eddie said. “It’s over. No one will forget what you did here today.”
With the only strength they had left, both fighters stumbled toward their dressing rooms to a continuous roar. When Ali hit the passage leading toward his room, he was draped around the shoulders of his handlers, his feet dragging, his face one of terminal exhaustion. The first thing they saw in the room was a dead man, part of his head blown away. The cop on duty there had been twirling and fanning his gun in front of a mirror, accidentally offed himself, and now he was in a heap below the mirror, with a Jackson Pollock scatter of blood
on it. “Is he dead?” Ali asked, barely able to speak. “A dead man. Get me outta here.” An omen! His handlers moved him to a sofa in another room.
Tears trickled down Joe’s face in the other room. He was being embraced by Eddie when Bob Goodman, the press liaison, entered, asking: “Joe, can you talk to the press?” Joe agreed, and Goodman went to Ali and asked: “Champ, you up to the press?” Bundini went ballistic: “You insane? Look at him!” Ali was a clump on the sofa, his skin a gray color. “Joe’s out there,” Goodman said. With that, Ali raised his head and asked, as if incredulous: “He is?” He added: “Get me my comb.” Ali would be a long time coming out.
After the press conference, Joe retired to a private villa for rest. He had been sleeping for a couple of hours when Georgie Benton entered with a visitor. The room was dark. “Who is it?” Joe asked, lifting his head. “I can’t see. Can’t see. Turn the lights on.” A light was turned on, and he still could not see. Like Ali, he lay there with his veins empty, crushed by a will that had carried him so far and now surely too far. His eyes were iron gates torn up by an explosive. “Man, I hit him with punches that bring down the walls of a city. What held him up?” He lowered his head for some abstract forgiveness. “Goddamn it, when somebody going to understand? It wasn’t
just
a fight. It was me and him. Not a fight.” He dropped his head back to the pillow, wincing, and soon there was only the heavy breathing of a deep sleep slapping off the shoreline of his consciousness. He was correct. No mere fight, whatever the talent, could reach such carnal roots and produce such full-bodied greatness, the kind that Ali would maintain long years later had carried him to parts unknown in himself and had had no portfolio equal. Thoreau said: “Know your own bone.” They did—and then some.
That night Ali was led by Imelda Marcos up the winding, red-carpeted staircase as the guest of honor at Malacanang Palace. Soft
music drifted in from the terrace. She led him after a while to the buffet table, flared by huge candelabra that threw an eerie light across his face and a body that had survived the ultimate inquisition. The two whispered as she filled his plate. Never before had he seemed so pitiably unmajestic. He lifted the food slowly up to his bottom lip, scraped raw and pink. His right eye was half closed, purple going to black. His skin was dull and blotched. He chewed his food painfully, then suddenly moved away from the spray of light as if he had become aware of the mask he was wearing, as if an inner voice were laughing. He shrugged, and the moment was gone.
If ever there was going to be an epiphanous moment in his life, his body might now be the profound courier. It was evening, the next day, in his Hilton suite, his body bent and listing to the right, so badly had his organs been seared; he had been urinating blood since the fight. “Everything in me is on flame,” he said. “He stood there gazing at the sun bleeding a dark, tragic red (no sun so fits a land, its dramatic sunsets unrivaled), eased down over the brown water of Manila Bay. His right hand hurt and was swollen, his eyewhites streaked with blood. He looked at his right hand, tried to make a fist but couldn’t. “What this man do to me?” he asked with a rasp as he guided my hand over a ridge of bumps on his forehead. “Why I do this?” He searched the horizon as if looking for an answer. “It was insane in there,” he said. “Couple of times like I was leaving my body. The animal could’ve killed me. That man weren’t human in there. I must be crazy. For what?” He took in the sunset again, then said: “This is it for me. It’s over.” Had the body, at long last, trounced the ego?
S
ix years earlier, in 1983, when that chicken leg jiggled like a baton in his hand, it was still possible to exclude him from brain damage. No one knew for sure, and those from the old entourage loudly brushed off his condition (as if they could not face that they had been so close to an interstate pileup) as a thyroid problem or hypoglycemia. Now, in 1989, there was no turning away from it, though his current doctor was trying. There was the feel of a damp offshore mist to the hospital room, a life-is-a-bitch feel, made sharp by the hostile ganglia of medical technology, plasma bags dripping, vile tubing snaking in and out of the body, blinking monitors leveling illusion, muffling existence down to a sort of digital bingo. Propped up slightly, Ali lay there with a skim of sweat above his lip and on his forehead, with a tremor to his arms and head; one of his metaphorical, helpless flies caught on a melting sugar cube.
Images and echoes filled the room, diffuse and speeding, shot through with ineluctable light and the mythopoeic for so long that
no one (enemy or friend) could have guessed on the dizzying arc of the ride that he would land here in a little hospital on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Sonny Liston once said, while gnawing on some ribs, “He way up there now. Like an eagle. Where he gonna land, how he gonna land?” Leave it to Sonny to insinuate, in his own way, the law of probability to Ali’s streaming contrail. He was, after all the social fuss, a fighter, not stone shaped by a Medici court sculptor. Keep your eye on the wear and tear, Sonny was saying, not the ancient poets singing Greek verse to him. Ali knew the margins of dominance had compressed perilously. But his talent was so persuasive, his ring wisdom so minutely cataloged. As he often said, all he would ever do is grow old. What was he doing here? After so many realities, it was not easy to inhabit this final one, this blinking out of neurons so precious that they were called the “butterflies of the soul” in early brain science.
The fights with Frazier had done true damage to Ali, and Manila had been the last life-altering choice of his long, long trip in a game where longevity is a killer. Every organ, every centimeter of bone in his body wanted mercy. Looking at him on the hospital bed, I was reminded of his face during the latter rounds in Manila, his eyes closed with the pain of exhaustion, his whole frame coming down like one of those old buildings erased by implosions. No one will ever know how he was able to revivify himself; he didn’t even know. William James’s second wind, though valid, won’t do for that kind of effort. A guess: somewhere in the twelfth round, not expecting it, by now barely capable of noticing it, he must have picked up a faint signal from Frazier, maybe a sudden and dramatic give to Joe’s body that had not been there before, that startled him into a semblance of freshness and urged him to shoot the moon with his last fragments of resolution.
“If you wanna know,” Frazier would say, “who won the three
fights, well, just look at him now.” Joe, no doubt, was the major figure in the evidence of how he came to be here at Hilton Head, yet there was more, a career-long miscalculation of odds. In one way, he was superbly prepared for fights most of the time, working on his body like Duke Ellington, filling in holes and spaces, hooking his rhythm section together. In another, he was incorrigibly self-destructive, chose to ignore the physics of the brain. Gym work puts a lot of wear on a body, especially for Ali. For a show of invincibility, tossing meat into his maw of an ego, he’d hang on the ropes and let huge men have their way with him; protective headgear, when it comes to the brain, is no protection. Why did he spend round after gym round on the ropes? For the public show, yes, but he had become cavalier, bored, and his rope habit expressed a growing laziness. And, too, in the second half of his career, sexual hedonism was militating constantly against the anchorite in him.
The number of punches he took in the gym (needless) and live bouts (especially in the second half) are incalculable, but were far too many for a fighter with his style, though the volume from Frazier would have been unavoidable even by an early Ali. Above all, Ali knew the fatal extraction so common to the ring. The images never left him. Why did he have a love-ridicule feeling about Joe Louis? He flinched from Louis’s condition, his presence a too sharp reminder of the danger, a mirror of what could be. He had other examples every day in his camp at Deer Lake. Hardly a day passed without a small procession (to whom he gave a meal and money) of the ring indigent, old and broken, like medieval supplicants from a ghostly past. Never far from him were Johnny Juliano, an obscure fighter who did odd jobs, and his brother Rahman. He’d look at Johnny and see his wasted brain, and say: “I’m not gonna be Johnny Juliano. No way.” He’d look at Rahman, with his peculiar habits, and say: “My brother hardly fought at all. And not even he’s right in the head.”
Howard Bingham, his closest friend and a non-Muslim, was in the hospital room, his eyes fixed on Ali tethered to the bed, a scene as incomprehensible to him as it would seem to others who followed the champ’s radiated glow, such was the prognosis of his life after the ring. Ali had known the road away from this, the “road out” that Archie Moore had preached. He knew what the currency of earthly immortality was: get out in time on your own terms, which added an uplifting, stirring Homeric touch. If the fall was too messy, the national psyche, so hooked on the bread-and culture circus of film stars and athletes, would rush to the collision of the gifted and fate and then recoil; there was no suspense, no shot in the arm in the mundane. There was a reason why Rocky Marciano, who left undefeated, was so cherished; he was the model American winner who took it all and beat the system, and so by a curious social osmosis, those who loved him were one with him—winners all.
Ali never looked for long back on Manila, or much else, neither the deadly repetitiveness of his kind of training nor the draining frequency of his fights. The temptation is to put his carelessness into the column of commonplace greed, yet it’s not that simple. Ali had always collected people and things that seemed to reinforce his state of mind of the moment, but he dispensed much more than he gave to himself; he was not a flighty, addicted acquisitor. With money, there was something much deeper. He now had a vague fear of being broke, and a growing concern, having been so loose with his treasure, that he might not be able to provide for the well-being of his children. The other piece to his seeking life extension in the ring was his attraction to power and celebration. He had fun with his chamber fools, but beyond that was the world that adored him. He had, on the interior, become inseparable from his persona, infatuated with the thrall he could elicit, the range of his cultural reach.
With only the conviction of his vanity and a shave of what he
once was as a fighter, he pressed on, fighting four times in 1976 against mostly deficient tradesmen, and on occasion was aided by the generosity of awed scoring; officials only seemed to watch what he did, not his opponents’ work. Ken Norton could have received the decision against him late that year in Yankee Stadium and not caused a riot. He fought twice in 1977, was severely punished by Earnie Shavers. In 1978, he lost and regained the title against an ordinary Leon Spinks. Who was going to intervene, end the self-abuse? Murmurs in his camp, behind cupped hands, suggested guilt and worry. Ali had no Yank Durham or Eddie Futch. Where was Herbert, working on his Swiss bank inventory? For years, those in close knew Ali followed Herbert, acted on his every word. Herbert, in turn, always denied he held such control, said Ali only listened to Ali; it is remarkable what a man can come to believe when his end of the take is a hundred percent. Allowing for a laggard or stunted conscience, it was patently obscene to send Ali up against Larry Holmes in 1980, his former stablemate, young with a deadeye aim, who would go 48–0 before losing. Ali was supposed to earn $8 million, but reportedly received only $4 million. What mattered was that Herbert took the fight while knowing that Ali would be sorely tempted and could not afford to pass it up.
Ali had retired in 1979, worried about his condition. He had been in the ring twenty years, and had fought roughly 15,000 rounds, live and in the gym. The average fighter’s career is less than three years, and even with success rarely does it go beyond six. Seven months into retirement, his mystery woman got a call from him. He was married to Veronica and living at Hancock Park in Los Angeles. He said he had bills of thirty to thirty-five thousand a month. “I gotta fight again,” he told her. She said: “Please don’t. You’re going to get hurt.” He knew it had been over since Manila, and he’d been caught in what Hegel called the “bad infinite” of his ring life, of repeated
diminishing cycles, the torture of losing weight, the hard, hard oiling of mushy reflexes. Greatness hadn’t trickled out of that splendid caramel mold of a body, it had poured out and along with it some of his image. Worse, he had begun to slur his words, sometimes had trouble speaking. “I’m gonna fight Holmes,” he said. “No, Muhammad, don’t,” she said. He was, she worried, on the edge of debilitating injury
Fighters know how to suffer. They demagnify pain and seldom talk about it. Though some fighters have been called “bow-wows” within the sport, thresholds of pain are hard to detect in fighters. Being called a dog, while not good for business, seems a bit much, like libeling the courage of the water boy at the Charge of the Light Brigade; after all, he did show up. I have often suspected that the best fighters are sadomasochists who abjure pain in their words while they secretly warm to it. Old trainers used to tell me that they had known fighters who got hit so much that it became pleasurable, that they even ejaculated; no empirical evidence, for certain, but the history of orgasm pursuit, through Krafft-Ebing, suggests that no stone has ever been unturned.
Eyes, nose, ears, larynx, kidneys, they all take horrific beatings. But their faces tell where fighters have been, the potholes over which they had to rattle, from the small arenas with the single light bulb and a backed-up toilet in the dressing rooms to the flooding light of the big time. Or, at least, that was the route for years until the species became gunned out, and now big money is instantly at hand for the kid of reasonable talent who can be hyped into the cosmos until the cable wires sing. I have seen lips nearly sheared off, eyes so closed they would resist a pneumatic drill. But the face that truly captivated belonged to Chuck Wepner, who went fifteen sluggish rounds with Ali; it was a face embroidered by a tipsy church lady. There were rivers of scar tissue. When he fought Sonny Liston and took too many
stitches to count, the press asked Liston if he had ever seen anyone braver than Chuck. Sonny replied, “Yeah, his manager.” Who could blame Wepner’s wife for threatening to leave him if he didn’t take his picture down from behind the bed?
The Victorians, of all people, can be thanked for the concentration on the head in boxing, namely the Marquis of Queensbury. The Marquis, preoccupied with all questions of manhood, got Oscar Wilde sent up for a homosexual fling with his son, and on the side invented the padded glove for boxing. The days of the bare-knuckle fighter were over. They fought a lot of rounds in those days (seventy-five sometimes) but had long rests at their whim and did far less damage than today. Queensbury thought gloves would spare knuckles, quicken the pace of fights, often marred by grappling. With the easily damaged pterodactyl wires of the hand given a cushion, the gloves put all the focus on the head as a target and elevated sharpshooting, though the Gothic buttresses, Doric columns, and Baroque portals of the skeleton would remain under siege. If you think of the body as a Renaissance cathedral, then its cupola is the brain, where the simple art of touching your nose is a complicated process.
What happens to the brain when foot-pound pressure descends on it? Neurons are little batteries that conduct billions of electrical transactions, essential to thinking, remembering, walking, all motor skills. It used to be thought of, the brain, as a dull meat machine, now it is seen by brain science as a magnificent computer that is the frontier of everything, this being far from what the Egyptians saw; in mummification, they scooped it out, thought it was worthless; the heart was the center of magic. The brain floats in a cerebrospinal fluid. When the head is hit, the brain oscillates, wearing down much in its path, twisting the brain stem and swiping out neurons. A deft brain science writer, David Noonan, once queried an annoyed Larry Holmes on the subject. Holmes said, “Call a doctor. Anything can happen in life.”
Holmes did not want to fight Ali. He had nothing to gain from the bout, except widespread censure for cutting down a legend; his large end of the purse forced him to it. Time after time, members of Ali’s entourage would corner him in a restaurant or in an elevator, and the deep-felt request was always the same: “Don’t hurt him, Larry.” Holmes had no belly for the job, promised he would try his best, and you can almost see him, a great precision puncher, pondering his tray of scalpels for the one that would get the job done and allow him to remain a humanitarian. Ali seemed stuck to the ropes, where, with his creaky reflexes, he could get hurt bad. Below him, looking up, was Joe Louis in a wheelchair, drawn and weak and soon to die. Returning to his corner, Holmes complained: “What’s wrong with him? He’s like he’s doped. He won’t fall. I’m hitting him with everything and he won’t fall.” And he never did; Ali could not answer the bell for the eleventh, just sat there exhausted, his head dangling like the broken head of a child’s action figure.
One year later, December of 1981, just when you believed sanity had claimed all parties for good, Ali came back once more for a small-change bout against Trevor Berbick, an earnest plug, in the Bahamas. By now, there was a distinct tremor to Ali’s hands; it had begun after the Holmes fight. He stepped into the ring, goaded by ego or money, who knows, fat jellied on his middle, his hand speed sighing and wheezing like a busted old fan; tropic rot on the trade winds, and the knell for ten rounds came from the counterfeit sound of a cowbell. As Dave Anderson of the
Times
wrote: “He needed a trip to Nassau to learn that he was forty.” The end result reminded of the discovery by a young scholar early in the century of an Etruscan warrior. When he opened the sarcophagus, he did not see a skeleton, rather a body with all its limbs in place as if freshly buried. In a moment it dissolved. The helmet rolled to the side, the breastplate collapsed. The body had lain inviolate for centuries, and now, with air
contact, all was gone, and only a golden plume of dust hovered near the torches.