Ghosts of Manila (17 page)

But Yank Durham thought of Frazier as his own. So what if Cloverlay had his contract, merely a matter then of insufficient funds. He had been there through his ring infancy, he had his heart and mind, had hacked his way through all the nonbelievers. He and his trainer, Eddie Futch, had gone first class with the fighter, did things the right way, produced a machine as carefully as he used one of his old welding torches. Yank had got his chance, too, and proved
he was more than just an amateur who specialized in turning street layabouts into prelim boys. He was a cagey old schemer, but not like most of the pickpockets on their way out; he had a trust and, though soaring in a fantasy present, the future intruded on the edge of consciousness. If Joe won, then, maybe, there was a fight or two left in him. If he lost, he’d have to set him down, close him out; it wouldn’t be easy. Fighters like Joe climbed to the top out of breathtaking will, got there inch by inch, leaving mounting pain on each rung. He’d have enough money to quit. Yank didn’t want him hurt, he was not a fighter of longevity. He knew Ali was going to be a mean night. Too mean, the kind of fight that might cut Joe to a scrap, and he’d have to shut him down. His nerves, he said, jumped at the sad prospect.

W
hen Frazier broke camp five detectives rode shotgun with him to New York, underlining how serious they had taken the many threats to the fighter’s life. Joe didn’t say much, said one, and “he looked so distant we joked that he was sitting there waiting for us to give him the menu for his last meal.” Not unusual for a fighter; muteness is helpful when reels are turning so fast in the mind, though some become unusually garrulous, making one wonder what visions they are trying to muffle. The group rolled out of the Holland Tunnel and were joined by a small fleet of New York police for escort into Manhattan. Durham and Joe checked into the City Squire on Seventh Avenue, then suddenly left when the hotel fielded a bomb threat. To protect himself from the crushing mob on the streets, Ali put up at the Garden. On the night before the fight, Joe was now at the Pierre Hotel, and Joe says in his book Ali called him.

“Joe Frazier, you ready?” Ali asked.

“I’m ready,” Joe said.

“I’m ready, too, Joe Frazier. And you can’t beat me.”

“You know what?” Joe said. “You preach that you’re one of God’s men. Well, we’ll see.”

“You sure you’re not scared, Joe Frazier?”

“Scared of what I’m going to do to you?”

“Ain’t nothing you
can
do,” Ali said. “See you.”

“I’ll be there,” Joe said. “Don’t be late.”

With his entourage streaming out before him, Ali went down and settled into his dressing room, a place that he could turn on the quickest whim into dramaturgy. He’d rouse Bundini to the point of crying, jump on one of his comments and purposely misinterpret it. He’d taunt other members, calling up a bungled chore. He’d joke with Pat Patterson, who had his water bottle under lock and key, and try to guess on what part of the body the inventive bodyguard was packing his iron. You never knew if he was going to show up hysterical or with a calm that nearly rocked everyone else to sleep. Now, he just watched Angelo Dundee float in the room as if he were a priest arranging details for a high mass. They never talked over plans; Ali never worked from notes. He lay on the table and drifted into a half-sleep under Luis Sarria’s hands, the buzz of Bundini far off: “Oh, mercy, we gotta big one tonight.” “Shut that nigger up,” Ali mumbled. Butch Lewis, from Joe’s camp, came in to watch the taping of Ali’s hands. He then shot up from the table, started to pirouette through the room with volleys of punches. He shouted to Lewis: “Take this back to your dumb chump!”

There were only a handful of people in Frazier’s room, Durham, Futch, an assistant, Les Peleman, and a Philly cop-bodyguard. Joe was gloved and ready. Durham took him to the far corner of the room, put his hands on his shoulders, looked him straight in the eye and in his signature voice said: “Well, we’re here. I want you to know what you’ve done, boy. There will never be another Joe Frazier. They all laughed. You got us here. There’s not another human who ever lived
I’d want to send out there, not even Joe Louis. Win tonight, and the road will be paved in gold. Think of those mammy-suckin’ white people and the hot fields soaking up the sweat and hope of your parents. You were made for this moment. Take it, cocksucker.” They hugged and laughed. Joe then lay on the table, a dark bomb ready to be rolled into a hangar. “Five minutes!” someone shouted. Joe got up, loosened up with some body rolls and punches. He then knelt in the center of the room and prayed aloud: “God, let me survive this night. God protect my family. God grant me strength. And God…allow me to kick the shit out of this mothafucker!”

How do you describe a roar? Like a cataract, maybe if you had ever looked down on Niagara Falls. Otherwise, a roar is a roar, it goes no place in the mind. It is an empty word in text, it is a sensory word, it has to be heard to be given features. As soon as the fighters began their parade to the ring, there was this sonic blast of sound that seemed to bend the plinth of yellow light over them, and it would seldom drop in decibel. If the guy next to you in the press row spoke, you couldn’t hear him. The wall of sound sent a current up the back and made palms moist. The whirlpool of race politics that had for weeks spread to so much passionate exchange, the cross section of accusatory idiocy, eddied out of sight. There was just
The Fight
now, the pure and inescapable sorting out, and there was a twinge of sympathy for their stark aloneness and the immensity of performance, of expectations they faced. Burt Lancaster was doing the color for 340 closed-circuit outlets, Don Dunphy, graceful and spare, had the blow-by-blow, and Sinatra was shooting pictures for
Life.
The place was filled with the aristocracy of fame: Elvis, the Beatles, Salvador Dalí, just about everyone, all of them presumably dispatched from the limos that strung around the Garden two-deep like black pearls.

Like certain soufflés, heavyweight title fights disappoint more than satisfy. If it ends quickly, it’s a fix (an artifact from film noir and
vagrant, inglorious incidents stuck too much in the lexicon of fans and press). Go the distance, and you’re a bum with no punch, or you carried him. But a fight has its own reality (similars in style equal a negative), full of snares, letdowns, inertia, and flashing drama when all the parts locked in right—just like life. It wasn’t a film with Martin Scorcese on a skateboard with a hand-held camera, with Robert De Niro being pumped like a fountain of blood, his face dissolving into a hurt built by a makeup man. No wonder the
Rocky
series, which pulverized every cliché in the game, has turned boxing into distorting cartoon, heightened the prospectus, the coming visuals to a level unattainable. Rarely, if ever, do two fighters with opposing styles, the long blade and the shattering rock pick, conjoin, and rarely does a fight evoke such pressing magnitude, void of the relentless smear of hype; this one had no forced marketing blare, none of the verbal offal that passes for coverage today; the Garden was sold out five weeks before the event. Scalpers were getting seven hundred dollars a pop on the sidewalk.

Ali was the first in the ring, in a red velvet robe with matching trunks, and white shoes with red tassels. He glided in a circle to a crush of sound, a strand of blown grass. Whatever you might have thought of him then, you were forced to look at him with honest, lingering eyes, for there might never be his like again. Assessed by ring demands—punch, size, speed, intelligence, command, and imagination—he was an action poet, the equal of the best painting you could find, or a Mozart who failed to die too early. If that is overstatement, disfiguring the finer arts by association with a brute game, consider the mudslide of purple that attaches to his creative lessers in other fields, past and present; Ali was physical art, belonged alone in a museum of his own. I was extremely fond of him, of his work, of the decent side of his nature, and jaundiced on his cultish servility, his thermopolitical combustions that tried to twist adversaries into
grotesque shapes. It never worked, except perhaps on Liston, who came to think he was clinically insane. It did work on himself, shaped the fear for his face and general well-being into a positive force, a psychological war dance that blew up the dam and released his flood of talent. The trouble was that, like Kandinsky’s double-sided painting of chaos and calm, it became increasingly difficult for him to find his way back from one side to the other.

In a green and gold brocade robe with matching trunks, Joe Frazier almost seemed insectile next to Ali in the ring, and he was made more so as Ali waltzed by him, bumped him and said: “Chump!” Far from that slur, Joe was a gladiator right smack to the root conjurings of the title, to the clank of armor he seemed to emit. Work within his perimeter, and you courted what fighters used to call “the black spot,” the flash knockout. He was a fighter that could be hit with abandon, but if you didn’t get him out of there his drilling aggression, his marked taste for pursuit and threshing-blade punches could overwhelm you; as one military enthusiast in his camp said, “like the
Wehrmacht
crossing into Russia.” I was drawn to the honesty of his work, the joy he derived from inexorable assault, yet had a cool neutrality to his presence. In truth, with a jewel in each hand, I didn’t want to part with either of them, thus making me pitifully objective, a capital sinner in the most subjective and impressionistic of all athletic conflicts.

A low restless hum, a crepelike hush, and finally the releasing bell. Four inches taller, nine and a half pounds heavier, and with prehensile arms compared to Joe’s uncommonly short pistons, Ali disabused the crowd of any idea for a judicious, point-building first act. He wanted to shoot the lights out early, stop him with a cut or turn him into a groggy drifter, or at the very least discourage the jungle beat of that left hook. It surprised but made eminent sense once you saw him unfurl his plan. He couldn’t risk trying to dance Joe into
dawn. His body was not built for that approach anymore. He was a blend of hitter, when legs were planted, and flyer—but for fifteen rounds? He had to conserve and blast. Time after time, Ali set and laid out an enfilade of shots, a singing sound of leather with a frequency that jolted you forward in your seat. He was working in time chunks, a miser one minute and all leg, buying the bar drinks in the next, and in one furious spree he sent a shower of spray from Joe’s face into a silvery dance up in the lights, causing Durham to bolt upward, screaming: “Goddamnit, roll that head!”

Cold and too exploratory, too tentative, but ever shoveling forward, Joe was up too straight. Durham and Futch wanted him down, gloves rotating at eye level in front of a bobbing head and a swaying torso. They had worked on it in the gym when Futch stretched a line of rope from corner to corner, an effort to force his body down and his head mobile. Over and under, over and under the rope, he swayed and popped at a quick tempo; he must have done this repetition two thousand times. They also concentrated on three areas they thought could put them over: the kind of conditioning that Ali had never seen before; a steady hammering of Ali’s deltoid high on the left arm that would ultimately drop his jab to half-mast; and a body attack where “I pull his kidneys out, make that pretty head fall into his lap,” Joe said. None of it was working. At the end of the third, Yank told him: “You gonna get us both killed the way you going.” Ali, up 3–0, returned to his corner and just stood there, declining a seat.

Frazier picked up the pace in the fourth, fifth, and sixth, down low and slinging, and he began to look like the fighter whose punches could mount to fifty-six a round. He was almost dismissive of Ali’s razoring jab, which, if you can get under it, was an invitation to a left hook, his money shot. He tagged him in the fourth with that hook, saw Ali’s eyes grow big. Ali was still getting off—but not with abandon; Joe was making him pay with an entrance fee. By the fifth and
sixth, Ali was down off his toes completely as Frazier continually boxed him on the ropes and snatched at his organs, and he could feel, as he would say later, “the flower wilt” and seep its bold color. It was here that Ali tacked to a new slant. He knew his own body in a fight, knew that if he kept trying to break Frazier’s will, trade with him recklessly, he’d be bankrupt; he’d have to try to bag him in a sly game of points.

In the seventh and eighth, part defensive, part theatrical, Ali went after Joe’s spirit and the favor of the crowd and the millions watching, and tried to deactivate the ticking bomb of the fight. He wanted Joe to know that he could do nothing to hurt him, wanted him to know frustration, wanted to seize control by stealth. To that end, he became lost in comic theatrics while Frazier blasted him on the ropes. He wanted the crowd to know that the ropes were cozy to him, and Joe wasn’t delivering hurt. He’d roll off the ropes and go into mime. Noooooo contest. He’d flick disparaging waves at Joe, the king playing with his fool, especially when he’d tap, tap, tap jabs lightly to the head as if testing for termites, sign language that he could do what he wanted. Frazier kept coming. “Don’t you know I’m God!” Ali shouted at him. Ali returned to his corner, sitting for the first time, and behind 5–3. “Stop playin’,” Dundee shouted over the din in his corner. Frazier asked Yank: “What’s holdin’ him up?”

With the ninth, Ali fought one of the best rounds in history and brought the crowd to its feet with a shock and to such a roar that you couldn’t hear the bell. Joe’s head seemed stuck to Ali’s gloves as rights and lefts, cringing rounds of volley, caromed off Frazier’s head, then uppercuts, often used against low fighters, that jerked his head up as if it were being snapped up by rope. His face was melting into ruin, his eyes closing like shades being drawn ever so slowly. Joe wasn’t just being hit, he was taking beast licks. Just past the middle of the round, Ali nailed up a picture for the ages. In the center of the ring, with Joe
rolling in like an angry wave, Ali got off a design of punches that can only be called incomparable, took the breath away from any student of the game. While backpedaling, the worst, most ineffectual punching position, he loosed a quartet of flush hooks like perfectly timed and blurring explosions, the kind of fire patterns talked about but never before seen; these weren’t just punches; it was dark, magnetic Goya. Joe was stopped dead in his tracks, just stood there straight up, absolutely stunned and fogged by what he had just felt and seen.