Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest (3 page)

Ali’s triumph over Cleveland Williams was followed by victories over Ernie Terrell and Zora Folley. Then, after refusing induction into the United States Army, he was stripped of his title and forced out of boxing. “If I never fight again, this is the last of the champions,” Ali said of his, and boxing’s, plight. “The next title is a political belt, a racial belt, an organization belt. There’s no more real world champion until I’m physically beat.”

In October 1970, Ali was allowed to return to boxing, but his skills were no longer the same. The legs that had allowed him to “dance” for fifteen rounds without stopping no longer carried him as surely around the ring. His reflexes, while still superb, were no longer lightning-fast. Ali prevailed in his first two comeback fights, against Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena. Then he challenged Joe Frazier, who was the “organization” champion by virtue of victories over Buster Mathis and Jimmy Ellis.

“Champion of the world? Ain’t but one champion,” Ali said before his first bout against Frazier. “How you gonna have two champions of the world? He’s an alternate champion. The real champion is back now.” But Frazier thought otherwise. And on March 8, 1971, he bested Ali over fifteen brutal rounds.

“He’s not a great boxer,” Ali said afterward. “But he’s a great slugger, a great street fighter, a bull fighter. He takes a lot of punches, his eyes close, and he just keeps coming. I figured he could take the punches. But one thing surprised me in this fight, and that’s that he landed his left hook as regular as he did. Usually, I don’t get hit over and over with the same punch, and he hit me solid a lot of times.”

Some fighters can’t handle defeat. They fly so high when they’re on top, that a loss brings them irrevocably crashing down. “What was interesting to me after the loss to Frazier,” says Ferdie Pacheco, “was we’d seen this undefeatable guy. Now how was he going to handle defeat? Was he going to be a cry-baby? Was he going to be crushed? Well, what we found out was, this guy takes defeat like he takes victory. All he said was, ‘I’ll beat him next time.’”

What Ali said was plain and simple: “I got to whup Joe Frazier because he beat me. Anybody would like to say, ‘I retired undefeated.’ I can’t say that no more. But if I could say, ‘I got beat, but I came back and beat him,’ I’d feel better.”

Following his loss to Frazier, Ali won ten fights in a row; eight of them against world-class opponents. Then, in March 1973, he stumbled when a little-known fighter named Ken Norton broke his jaw in the second round en route to a twelve-round upset decision.

“I knew something was strange,” Ali said after the bout, “because, if a bone is broken, the whole internalness in your body, everything, is nauseating. I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel my teeth moving around, and I had to hold my teeth extra tight to keep the bottom from moving. My trainers wanted me to stop. But I was thinking about those nineteen thousand people in the arena and
Wide World of Sports
, millions of people at home watching in sixty-two countries. So what I had to do was put up a good fight; go the distance and not get hit on the jaw again.”

Now Ali had a new target; a priority ahead of even Joe Frazier. “After Ali got his jaw broke, he wanted Norton bad,” recalls Lloyd Wells, a longtime Ali confidante. “Herbert Muhammad [Ali’s manager] was trying to put him in another fight, and Ali kept saying, ‘No, get me Norton. I want Norton.’ Herbert was saying, but we got a big purse; we got this, and we got that. And Ali was saying, ‘No, just get me Norton. I don’t want nobody but Norton.’”

Ali got Norton—and beat him. Then, after an interim bout against Rudi Lubbers, he got Joe Frazier again—and beat him too. From a technical point of view, the second Ali-Frazier bout was probably Ali’s best performance after his exile from boxing. He did what he wanted to do, showing flashes of what he’d once been as a fighter but never would be again. Then Ali journeyed to Zaire to challenge George Foreman, who had dethroned Frazier to become heavyweight champion of the world.

“Foreman can punch but he can’t fight,” Ali said of his next foe. But most observors thought that Foreman could do both. As was the case when Ali fought Sonny Liston, he entered the ring a heavy underdog. Still, studying his opponent’s armor, Ali thought he detected a flaw. Foreman’s punching power was awesome, but his stamina and will were suspect. Thus, the “rope-a-dope” was born.

“The strategy on Ali’s part was to cover up, because George was like a tornado,” former boxing great Archie Moore, who was one of Foreman’s cornermen that night, recalls. “And when you see a tornado coming, you run into the house and you cover up. You go into the basement and get out of the way of that strong wind, because you know that otherwise it’s going to blow you away. That’s what Ali did. He covered up and the storm was raging. But after a while, the storm blew itself out.”

Or phrased differently, “Yeah; Ali let Foreman punch himself out,” says Jerry Izenberg. “But the rope-a-dope wouldn’t have worked against Foreman for anyone in the world except Ali, because on top of everything else, Ali was tougher than everyone else. No one in the world except Ali could have taken George Foreman’s punches.”

Ali stopped Foreman in the eighth round to regain the heavyweight championship. Then, over the next thirty months at the peak of his popularity as champion, he fought nine times. Those bouts showed Ali to be a courageous fighter, but a fighter on the decline.

Like most aging combatants, Ali did his best to put a positive spin on things. But viewed in realistic terms, “I’m more experienced” translated into “I’m getting older.” “I’m stronger at this weight” meant “I should lose a few pounds.” “I’m more patient now” was a cover for “I’m slower.”

Eight of Ali’s first nine fights during his second reign as champion did little to enhance his legacy. But sandwiched in between matches against the likes of Jean-Pierre Coopman and Richard Dunn and mediocre showings against more legitimate adversaries, Ali won what might have been the greatest fight of all time.

On October 1, 1975, Ali and Joe Frazier met in the Philippines, six miles outside of Manila, to do battle for the third time.

“You have to understand the premise behind that fight,” Ferdie Pacheco recalls. “The first fight was life and death, and Frazier won. Second fight; Ali figures him out; no problem, relatively easy victory for Ali. Then Ali beats Foreman, and Frazier’s sun sets. And I don’t care what anyone says now; all of us thought that Joe Frazier was shot. We all thought that this was going to be an easy fight. Ali comes out, dances around, and knocks him out in eight or nine rounds. That’s what we figured. And you know what happened in that fight. Ali took a beating like you’d never believe anyone could take. When he said afterward that it was the closest thing he’d ever known to death—let me tell you something; if dying is that hard, I’d hate to see it coming. But Frazier took the same beating. And in the fourteenth round, Ali just about took his head off. I was cringing. The heat was awesome. Both men were dehydrated. The place was like a time-bomb. I thought we were close to a fatality. It was a terrible moment, and then Joe Frazier’s corner stopped it.”

“Ali-Frazier III was Ali-Frazier III,” says Jerry Izenberg. “There’s nothing to compare it with. I’ve never witnessed anything like it. And I’ll tell you something else. Both fighters won that night, and both fighters lost.”

Boxing is a tough business. The nature of the game is that fighters get hit. Ali himself inflicted a lot of damage on ring opponents during the course of his career. And in return: “I’ve been hit a lot,” he acknowledged, one month before the third Frazier fight. “I take punishment every day in training. I take punishment in my fights. I take a lot of punishment; I just don’t show it.”

Still, as Ferdie Pacheco notes, “The human brain wasn’t meant to get hit by a heavyweight punch. And the older you get, the more susceptible you are to damage. When are you best? Between fifteen and thirty. At that age, you’re growing, you’re strong, you’re developing. You can take punches and come back. But inevitably, if you keep fighting, you reach an age when every punch can cause damage. Nature begins giving you little bills and the amount keeps escalating, like when you owe money to the IRS and the government keeps adding and compounding the damage.”

In Manila, Joe Frazier landed 440 punches, many of them to Ali’s head. After Manila would have been a good time for Ali to stop boxing, but too many people had a vested interest in his continuing to fight. Harold Conrad served for years as a publicist for Ali’s bouts. “You get a valuable piece of property like Ali,” Conrad said shortly before his death. “How are you going to put it out of business? It’s like shutting down a factory or closing down a big successful corporation. The people who are making money off the workers just don’t want to do it.”

Thus, Ali fought on.

In 1977, he was hurt badly but came back to win a close decision over Earnie Shavers. “In the second round, I had him in trouble,” Shavers remembers. “I threw a right hand over Ali’s jab, and I hurt him. He kind of wobbled. But Ali was so cunning, I didn’t know if he was hurt or playing fox. I found out later that he was hurt. But he waved me in, so I took my time to be careful. I didn’t want to go for the kill and get killed. And Ali was the kind of guy who, when you thought you had him hurt, he always seemed to come back. The guy seemed to pull off a miracle each time. I hit him a couple of good shots, but he recovered better than any other fighter I’ve known.”

Next up for Ali was Leon Spinks, a novice with an Olympic gold medal but only seven professional fights.

“Spinks was in awe of Ali,” Ron Borges of the
Boston Globe
recalls. “The day before their first fight, I was having lunch in the coffee shop at Caesar’s Palace with Leon and [his trainer] Sam Solomon. No one knew who Leon was. Then Ali walked in, and everyone went crazy. ‘Look; there’s Ali! Omigod; it’s him!’ And Leon was like everybody else. He got all excited. He was shouting, ‘Look; there he is! There’s Ali!’ In twenty-four hours, they’d be fighting each other, but right then, Leon was ready to carry Ali around the room on his shoulders.”

The next night, Spinks captured Ali’s title with a relentless fifteen-round assault. Seven months later, Ali returned the favor, regaining the championship with a fifteen-round victory of his own. Then he retired from boxing, but two years later made an ill-advised comeback against Larry Holmes.

“Before the Holmes fight, you could clearly see the beginnings of Ali’s physical deterioration,” remembers Barry Frank, who was representing Ali in various commercial endeavors on behalf of IMG. “The huskiness had already come into his voice and he had a little bit of a balance problem. Sometimes he’d get up off a chair and, not stagger, but maybe take a half step to get his balance.”

Realistically speaking, it was obvious that Ali had no chance of beating Holmes. But there was always that kernel of doubt. Would beating Holmes be any more extraordinary than knocking out Sonny Liston and George Foreman? Ali himself fanned the flames. “I’m so happy going into this fight,” he said shortly before the bout. “I’m dedicating this fight to all the people who’ve been told, you can’t do it. People who drop out of school because they’re told they’re dumb. People who go to crime because they don’t think they can find jobs. I’m dedicating this fight to all of you people who have a Larry Holmes in your life. I’m gonna whup my Holmes, and I want you to whup your Holmes.”

But Holmes put it more succinctly. “Ali is thirty-eight years old. His mind is making a date that his body can’t keep.”

Holmes was right. It was a horrible night. Old and seriously debilitated from the effects of an improperly prescribed drug called Thyrolar, Ali was a shell of his former self. He had no reflexes, no legs, no punch. Nothing, except his pride and the crowd chanting, “Ali! Ali!”

“I really thought something bad might happen that night,” Jerry Izenberg recalls. “And I was praying that it wouldn’t be the something that we dread most in boxing. I’ve been at three fights where fighters died, and it sort of found a home in the back of my mind. I was saying, I don’t want this man to get hurt. Whoever won the fight was irrelevant to me.”

It wasn’t an athletic contest; just a brutal beating that went on and on. Later, some observers claimed that Holmes lay back because of his fondness for Ali. But Holmes was being cautious, not compassionate. “I love the man,” he later acknowledged. “But when the bell rang, I didn’t even know his name.”

“By the ninth round, Ali had stopped fighting altogether,” Lloyd Wells remembers. “He was just defending himself, and not doing a good job of that. Then, in the ninth round, Holmes hit him with a punch to the body, and Ali screamed. I never will forget that as long as I live. Ali screamed.”

The fight was stopped after eleven rounds. An era in boxing—and an entire historical era—was over. Now, years later, in addition to his more important social significance, Ali is widely recognized as the greatest fighter of all time. He was graced with almost unearthly physical skills and did everything that his body allowed him to do. In a sport that is often brutal and violent, he cast a long and graceful shadow.

How good was Ali?

“In the early days,” Ferdie Pacheco recalls, “he fought as though he had a glass jaw and was afraid to get hit. He had the hyper reflexes of a frightened man. He was so fast that you had the feeling, ‘This guy is scared to death; he can’t be that fast normally.’ Well, he wasn’t scared. He was fast beyond belief and smart. Then he went into exile; and when he came back, he couldn’t move like lightning anymore. Everyone wondered, ‘What happens now when he gets hit?’ That’s when we learned something else about him. That sissy-looking, soft-looking, beautiful-looking, child-man was one of the toughest guys who ever lived.”

Ali didn’t have one-punch knockout power. His most potent offensive weapon was speed; the speed of his jab and straight right hand. But when he sat down on his punches, as he did against Joe Frazier in Manila, he hit harder than most heavyweights. And in addition to his other assets, he had superb footwork, the ability to take a punch, and all of the intangibles that go into making a great fighter.