Ghosts of Manila (10 page)

But Bonavena had unlimited stamina and never quit. He was twenty pounds heavier than Joe, and he used it. This was Joe’s first big fight, a Garden affair that was supposed to be an escalator to the marquee. Bonavena dropped him twice in the second round, and shareholders back in Philly were ready to call their brokers. The two early knockdowns prefigured what would be a problem for Joe through his career, extreme vulnerability to punches early on until he could segue into a pulsating rhythm; he needed time, sweat. For a while, it looked as if Oscar were just one big horn flipping, then playing with an object. Joe steadily regained his composure, built up volleys through the fight and dug home the hardest shots, causing Oscar to wince and brake his rushes. Joe survived—that’s all you ever did against Oscar—to take a split decision.

“You did fine,” Yank told him.

“Is that all?” Joe asked.

“What? You want a bonus.”

“I thought I was pretty good.”

“You did good to stay off your ass,” Yank said.

Durham was tickled by his resilience; now the sculpture had a face, a big puncher with a chin. Joe knocked out Doug Jones, retired him, then went on to the Canadian-Croatian George Chuvalo, with a jutting rock of a jaw, a face with heavy bones and a nose that told you what he had been doing too long. Before a larger Garden crowd, George came away with a face split like a cantaloupe that had been too long in the sun. Joe burrowed in and took George apart piece by piece, and what was left of him was stretched on his dressing room table, his chest heaving while blood flowed from the sponge going over him. The doctor worked on a cut, shaped like a scimitar, below his right eye, just a slit ready to burst; later the cheekbone was found
to be fractured and needed surgery. A gash was slashed on his scalp, and another cut was outside his other eye.

“He didn’t take all that much punishment,” his manager Irv Ungerman, said, looking down on him.

“What the hell you call this?” George mumbled.

“George’s gonna be rich,” he said. “A trail horse. Every kid on his way up is gonna want a piece of Georgie boy.”

“Please don’t say that,” George said hoarsely. “I’m not a trail horse. Not for anyone.”

One of the best people in boxing with too much heart and no dimension, Chuvalo had been stopped for the first time in his career. That night, George sat in a darkened hotel room on Eighth Avenue, the shadows of cars from below riding around the walls. “Felt like I was being hit by four hands,” George said. “He looks easy to hit, but he isn’t easy. Everything moves, his head, shoulders, his body and legs, and he keeps punching and putting pressure. He fights six minutes every round. He doesn’t let you live. Whoever get him from here on will catch hell.” Durham had come by the dressing room to see how George was, and returned to Frazier, saying, “What a mess. Go look at him. If you ever stop bringing that smoke, you’ll look like that. A catcher. Damn.”

Why were catchers like Chuvalo such open, gracious men? The glovemen, the dancers who moved like a clarinet glissando, were strung tight, the megaton punchers moody and secretive like big cats. “Maybe catchers ain’t got no sense,” Ali joked once. Balling his fist, he said, “You sayin’ I ain’t gracious.” The old trainer, Freddy Brown, Chuvalo’s this time out, dwelt upon the subject. His face looked like crushed, old peanut shell. “’Cause catchers,” he said, pausing to disclaim being gracious himself, “they get all that hooman meanness punched out of ’em. ’Cause catchers sit in automats over old coffee all alone waitin’ for someone to say hello, ’cause the only people
understand ’em are cut men and their doctors and drunks who know what it is to get worked over and not know it. The one thing a catcher hates is a mirror. Who needs a catcher…they’re a lotta work and messy with all that blood.”

“I want Clay,” Joe said to Yank.

“Clay. What Clay? I don’t see a Clay.”

“Come on, Yank…you know.”

“Clay’s gone. He don’t exist.” He paused and said: “Think he’s gonna be Chuvalo, do ya? Clay
moves.
And your feet don’t. Not the way I want. Fuck Clay. I hope he’s out there and gets the clap.”

But Yank was certain he had the best heavyweight in the business now. To match his optimism, he made a bold move. He stayed out of the WBA heavyweight elimination tournament, an effort to crown its own champion. He threw his lot in with the powerful Madison Square Garden, which wanted its own king. On March 4, 1968, Frazier won the New York heavyweight title by knocking out an old rival, an elusive and timid Buster Mathis, in the eleventh. Jimmy Ellis, Ali’s favorite sparring partner, won the WBA title. He was a natural middleweight, quick and wise, and he had had some wars in that division. But the climb in weight was too much for him, and when it came time to unify the title few thought he could handle Joe, who was now out once more against Bonavena.

Oscar bothered Joe, first because of the first outcome with him, rather ragged, and second because he was certain the Argentine was a racist. Whenever Joe was in the same room with him, Oscar sniffed, acted like he smelled bad air, made a face as if to say, “You niggers all stink.” Frazier controlled him this time in defense of his title, taking a decision in fifteen rounds. “Jesus,” Joe said. “It was like bumpin’ into a refrigerator all night. I was tryin’ to bust that sniffin’ nose of his, it was like poundin’ into concrete.” By February 1970, two months later,
Ellis felt like a feather, and Joe floored him in five; he was the heavyweight champion. Or was he? The press tried to goad him about Ali, his claim to the real title. “Clay ain’t got no title,” Yank cut in. “You talkin’ to the title right here.”

Frazier bought a new house for $125,000, had six cars in the garage and a Harley-Davidson bike that infuriated Durham. He had had it for a while, and twice took bad spills on it, injuring his feet and scraping his arms another time. Durham said to him: “Man, look. You got a Chevy, and you wrecked that, then you knocked a Cadillac to pieces. Now it’s a motorcycle. You’ll get killed. What do I have? Stupid fighters. You as bad as Gypsy. He empties all the distilleries in the state. After the Emile Griffith fight, I go lookin’ for him to give him his money breakdown. I found him. He can’t see. He looked at the sheet and fell asleep. I got stupid fighters.”

“Get me Clay,” Joe said.

“You deaf? Clay can’t get a license.”

“Just this then,” Joe said. “No even split on the money when he does. No way.”

“What’s this now?” Yank asked. “Before, you wanna give him your house.”

“I don’t care. That’s it.”

“No, it ain’t. You got stockholders. You fight, they count.” Yank eyed him closely. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Nothin’,” Joe said. “He’s a bad man.”

“Maybe somebody’ll kill him before he’s back,” Yank cracked. “Save us the trouble.”

“I hope not,” Joe said.

S
hortly after being stripped of the opportunity to fight, Ali made one of the smartest moves of his career by marrying Belinda Boyd on August
17, 1967. The event immediately decreased his exposure to sexual trouble, curbed desires that would have led him into contact with unsavory women, for since Sonji he had become a determined hunter of sexual favor. Sex was never far from his thoughts. The official Muslim doctrine had an austere view of sexual behavior. Through sex, men lost control of their lives; answer to physical needs frequently, and you were answering to the lower beast of self; discipline was elevation. Adultery brought inquisitional techniques like flogging back at the temples.

Abstinence would “mark me as a great man in history,” Ali said in an interview with Alex Haley. He said he had always had two big, pretty women beside him after each fight. The Muslims had saved him from reprobation. Plucking the words right from Elijah’s mouth, he said: “The downfall of so many great men is that they haven’t been able to control their appetite for women.” Of course, Elijah and most of his top lieutenants were energetic seducers of young women for many years preceding this.

“Oh, and you have?” asked Haley.

“We Muslims don’t touch a woman unless we’re married to her,” Ali said curtly.

With a straight face, Haley continued: “Are you saying that you don’t have affairs with women?”

“I don’t even kiss none,” he said, “because you get too close, it’s almost impossible to stop. I’m a young man, you know, in the prime of life.” There was a mildly plaintive tone to his recitation of sexual trials: women—white and black—forever dogging him, knocking at his door in the early morning; others sending him pictures and phone numbers, begging for a call or secretarial work. “I’ve even had girls,” he said, “come up here wearing scarves on their heads, with no makeup and all that, trying to act like young Muslim sisters. But the only catch was that a Muslim sister wouldn’t do that.” It was reverse psychology; he invariably melted at the sight of a smart, wriggling figure. Sonji had released the satyr that
he would come to be. By 1967, there was little left of his comic and innocent rectitude; he was an indiscriminate sexual marksman.

Even though he didn’t drink or keep late hours, a big name like Ali, footloose and adrift from his center, was perfect for victimization, whether through sexual traps or flash violence from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were no more Muslim bodyguards. With the prospect of jail and being all alone—a condition he could never bear with any poise—he needed ballast. By agreeing to marry him, Belinda gave him domestic grounding. He was heavy duty for any woman, let alone a seventeen-year-old, herself in the daily turbulence of change, suddenly thrust in with a wild libido and an atomic ego.

But Belinda was not an ordinary young girl. For one thing, it was hard to imagine her ever having yanked the string on a Barbie doll, black or white, and hearing: “What should I wear to the prom tonight?” Where she went to school there were no such dances, and such a doll, hardly permitted, would not have matched her exterior—tall, attractively handsome, and distant, silent eyes that measured and probed. She was the acme of Ali’s then perfect woman: a sturdy Muslim sister of lineage, a pureblood in Ali’s eyes, one who knew her place, would fetch for him and bear his children steadily with robotic precision; in sum, a woman without temperament or complaint. But Belinda had a tone of demand, a flicker of independence to her voice. Seeing his autograph, she told him to “learn to write and read properly.”

Belinda recounted how Ali pressed her hard for premarital sex, even bringing the equal of Vatican authority to the problem. The son of Elijah, his own manager, Herbert Muhammad himself, “said it was okay.” He’d have done better introducing the name of someone who ran an escort service. Herbert! Never mind whether or not old Elijah fiddled in the mansion, and Herbert wafted through the streets like an unchained sexual melody, Belinda Boyd would not defy her
Muslim teachings; besides, her parents would turn her into one of whitey’s Boston cream pies if they ever found out. Ali would have to take a cold shower. If she had been suspicious of Herbert, an old family friend, she would now not trust him at all.

The couple settled in a small South Chicago house. Belinda was real bunker material. She was not afraid of hardship. She sewed her own clothes, cooked, and each morning Ali drove her to school. Later she would become proficient in karate—regrettably, for Ali—and study photography. Right now, she was learning to type so she could answer his letters. In ankle-length Muslim dress around the house, she was of impenetrable visage, polite and careful to his each stage mark for a Muslim wife when around reporters. “Belinda doesn’t talk much,” it was pointed out to him. He answered rather proudly: “That’s ’cause she ain’t got nothin’ to say. I do the talkin’.” What was his view of women—outside of a four-poster bed? “Our women,” he said, “should be honored, but they should understand their inferiority. Man gotta look down on women, and women up to men whether they standin’ up or layin’ down. I don’t take any sass.” He called out for his food: “Belinda! What you doin’ with that meal?” Soon eating, he called out again.

“Belinda, bring me a diet Coke!”

“Belinda, bring the steak!”

“Belinda, bring the brown sugar!”

Requests granted, he said: “The okra’s too runny. The steak’s too tough. Bring me the chicken.”

“It’s cold,” she said.

“Bring it anyway.”

In company, she never sat at the table, and when he drove her to school, if there was a visitor, he ordered her into the backseat; forget about opening the door for her as she left. By every action, she seemed intent on showing the Muslim husband as disciplinarian, as the center of unrelieved attention. In the sixties, her kind of marital
comportment attracted a blizzard of thrown bras. But a Muslim marriage, for a wife, was a delicate transaction: public servitude for private rule. Behind closed doors, he listened, she talked, much more as she got older, and her influence would not go unnoticed by Herbert Muhammad.

Belinda was the easy part of the show, sincere and natural in her role. The trouble was that Ali could never find his character, or kept blurring the lines. What did he want the world to believe during this period of stress and trial, for he always wanted it to believe something. Like when he used to take a limo and chauffeur up to Harlem, stop it suddenly, go into a small joint and order a $1.50 hamburger, and then leave behind the desired effect:
Yeah, brother, you got the machine, you got the steam, but you know where you come from.
Politicians and evangelists have been working this corn forever. Anyway, for now, what he wanted to illustrate were a number of things: his true Muslim marriage; his self-reliance; the wall of Muslim caring and protectiveness around him; his supreme indifference to money and boxing, “a white European sport invented by lowdown animals.”

And the press, he figured, would corroborate all of the above. If he held an impromptu press conference, he’d count heads: “Is the AP here? I see. The UPI? Good. Anybody from
Time
? No.
Newsweek
? No again. Guess they can’t make any money since I’m gone. Television? Where you from? Local or network?” The fare was standard—jokes, Muslim harangue—but sometimes he seemed to be trying out new material for maybe some college-speaking work. Intermarriage: “You want a kid with kinky hair? No, you don’t. And I don’t want any green-eyed blond kid, either. That’s why I got a wife looks like me, so I have a kid looks like me.” Hate: “I ain’t got no hate. People that take my title, they the only ones got hate. People been lynchin’ us for a hundred years, they got the hate.” Hardship: “You see me starvin’? They ain’t gonna starve me out. Allah will provide. I give my wife
money for us to eat that you all spend just for snacks in a week. We can eat on three dollars a day, she such a good cook.”