Ghosts of Manila (15 page)

To sit and talk with him was a delight, though at times there were colliding emotions; you either wanted to put your arm around him or give him a therapeutic slap in the face. In a moment, you were adrift in the middle of a Russian novel, in a Chekhovian dacha, oppressive heat, the taste of bitter tea, in the middle of souls looking for clarity in a suffusion of grayness. Let’s pass on his childhood, it could make you cry. Leave it with adolescent Floyd slashing an X through his picture and telling his mother: “I don’t like
him.
” Big names, including Frank Sinatra, were drawn to him. Liberals adored him, crowned him a man of brains and race vision. His pluck was inspiring, a fighter, like a skilled repairman trying to build a skyscraper. His instant shame baffled. After a title match, he always had two cars waiting, the victory car pointed to his hotel, the defeat car pointed out of town; he was partial to disguises.

Physically, Floyd, lithe and small, didn’t look like a heavyweight at all. There was no promise of consequence. He fought out of D’Amato’s “peekaboo” style, gloves nearly shielding his eyes, had superb hand speed and cheap crockery for a jaw. He had the eyes of a safecracker with no nerve; quite the contrary, though. He had a stiff billow of kinky hair that seemed pasted down on his forehead. Even after winning, he could be a pointillist of damage done; no bruise, scrape, ache would escape detailed amplification. The press loved him. Floyd might be the lost child of Freud, but he dealt in specifics of the grim trade. Clay was purely thin artifice, a windy fanatic for whom boxing came second, a senseless provocateur. Clay had hand-carried a bag of carrots to Floyd and hanged the tag of “Rabbit” on him. Sinatra called Floyd to his suite. “He told me I could win,” Floyd said, “had to win. The whole country was counting on me.”

Held in Vegas, the title fight would be the most politically exclamatory of Ali’s career. “The kid was never the same after Floyd,” Dundee said, tapping his head. “The pressure got bigger and bigger. The fun was gone.” That night, Clay looked down at the press and said: “Watch closely. I’m gonna show you real punishment.” To show his superiority, Clay did not throw a single punch in the first round. He then picked up the beat, strafing Floyd with straight lefts. He began to taunt: “Come on America, come on white America!” He did what he pleased. Floyd seemed impaired, something was wrong. He was decked in the sixth, got up quickly. After the seventh, his trainer hugged and lifted him to ease the pain in Floyd’s back. He went on gamely, and the fight turned quickly into a spectacle of cruelty, nastiness being applied to an invalid. “Get him out of there!” Dundee screamed, sensing the crowd’s anger. It wasn’t stopped until the twelfth, with Floyd, suffering mightily from the back pain, leaving the ring draped over his seconds.

What the country had seen was a certain kind of bullfight, where
unimaginative passes prolong the ceremony too long and subordinate the kill. Seeing Floyd in pain and outclassed, it wanted a quick, clean finish, not a class in how to pull off a butterfly’s wings. Floyd gimped to Sinatra’s suite the next night to apologize, and bumped into human nature. Frank moved to the far side of the room, away from Floyd, sat down, his back “all the way over there to me. I got the message. I left.” Public outcry was instant. Sensing his embryonic mythos once more in ruins, Clay said to the press: “Okay, what’s the excuse now? Fix? Carrying him? Give it to me! He took my best punches! My hands are swollen.” After what he had done to someone whose only mistake was being an integrator, a Martin Luther King man, he was no longer drawn as an out-of-control kid, a rhetorical belch. He became real as well as an insult to whatever integrity boxing had. He had wanted to feast on acclaim, a tour de force. In the end, he had only underlined a line from the Old West: “The vulture hates nothing more than biting into a glass eye.”

Ali was always an extremely busy fighter. He defended his title five times in 1966, once in this period in back-to-back months, and he would surpass that pace again in 1972. No champion besides Joe Louis had ever worked so often before. That meant that he was in training most of the year, and that’s a lot of gym wear. It also suggests that a fighter needs money, or he believes no one can beat him and there is too much easy prey to pass up. Ali set up shop abroad. He stopped Henry Cooper again in London in the sixth, turning him into a hose that literally squirted blood. He took on Brian London there (“boxers aren’t prawns,” Brian had a habit of saying, meaning pawns) and dropped him in the third. Then, on to Germany for Karl Mildenberger, who said, “blacks do not like left-handers.” No fighters like southpaws. But Ali did not punish him for the remark. Karl confused him; it was a dull affair, almost a slow-motion polka before Ali stopped him in the twelfth round. An understandable schedule; a
man needs a holiday sometime, especially when they weren’t exactly looking for him back in the American office. It was the first of those post-Patterson bouts, against George Chuvalo in Canada, that he saw public sentiment intrude upon his economics.

“After all this is over,” he complained, “I’m lucky if I clear two thousand.” It was far too little for a long night. Ali had hardly anything to say about George, amiable, instinctively civilized, a good candidate for butler school. He was looked upon as a dumb fighter. Do you berate a busboy for his failure to prepare haute cuisine? He just had no ring syllabus, or grasp of anatomy; a kneecap is not a belly, and your right hand is not your head. “If I hurt him, he’ll quit,” George said. Good to the body, bad to the head, Chuvalo stayed on him the whole fifteen. Afterward, Ali was left with one hand in a bucket of ice, the other holding his side, and to make a point he held up his red genital cup cratered with dents. “For this kind of money?” he said. “I’m as dumb as he is.” Not dumb, George. If anyone was looking, George had shown the map to beating Ali—come for long work, stay on top of him, suck the air right out of him.

When he engaged Cleveland Williams on November 14, 1966, Ali was a celebrity and a polemicist more than a fighter. Called “The Big Cat,” Williams had once had a punch equal to Liston until he was shot by a state trooper and lost a kidney. If ever the Muslims had an example of what happened to passive blacks, it was Williams. You could smell the desolation and sweat of his life, feel the hot sun and the deadened clank of hope in him. Hugh Benbow, his manager, abused him verbally in his auctioneer’s voice; he, as well as his name, was right out of William Faulkner. He said of Clay: “They oughta shoot him at dawn. Title don’t belong to no coward. Cleve, you take this gater-mouth nigger out, and I’m gonna own all of Texas.” Cleve turned, and Benbow said: “You, too, Cleve.” Ali seemed bemused by Benbow.

Broken in spirit and body, Williams was an open firing zone. Ali was technically of a piece. Cleve stood there like a man wishing for a bus to hit him, and it did again and again. Down three times in the second, he struggled to his feet for a final time in the third, with Ali standing over him and letting you choose whether he was transmitting compassion or his own final perfectibility. The press gave him high marks for his work and silence, and wrote about the Ali Shuffle, a scissoring leg dance that he had unveiled for the first time. Legend has it that this was his greatest fight, a look at the real Ali and what he was robbed of when he was exiled. Little was mentioned of Cleve being barely ambulatory, or how he lived in squalid quarters. A masterpiece? If you enjoy watching a game of solitaire.

Signing to fight Ernie Terrell in Houston early in 1967, he quickly reverted to Clay the impaler. Terrell was a laid-back, six-six guitar player, a friend and former sparring mate in the early days. Ernie innocently called him Clay at the signing; that’s what he had always called him. “My name’s Muhammad Ali!” Ali shot back. From then on, he lost touch with normalcy. Ernie was lower than swine, a racial insult. Never letting up, he poured out the very soul of the Muslim program; an unambiguous renunciation of integration. It was overkill against a man who couldn’t care if Ali had antennae for ears. “I’m going to give him the Patterson treatment,” Ali said. “Only it’s gonna be worse. I’m gonna make him suffer, make him call me by my name.”

Ordinarily quite passive, Ernie finally summed him up: “He starts a fight early. Tries to get under your skin. Maybe that’s his best talent. I got nothing against him, or his religion. But he’s an extremist, and they all twist things. He’s always been a liar. He’s just a punk, can’t think for himself, and he’ll always be a punk. He’s not a complete fighter, never was when I worked with him. He doesn’t want a glove near his face. He lives in fear of that face. We’ll see.”

Terrell was defensively sharp, expertly fielding Ali’s punches early
with his gloves. Ali smartly chose a new line, punching openings through Terrell’s gloves with left and right uppercuts, the textbook choice of parry against a tall man. Ernie tried to keep him on the ropes; and something key happened in one exchange there. By the fifth, Ali dropped his speed gear and planted for punching. He opened a gash over Ernie’s right eye. It was his fight from then on; when would it end? Not for ten more rounds, chorused by his brother Rudy: “Make him say your name!” Dundee told him to shut up. Ali to Dundee: “
You
shut up!” Ali added: “He’s gonna suffer.” How far could he go with the meanness, with the crowd screaming for the ref (deaf and blind) to stop it, and Ernie a gory sight? In the thirteenth, it so happened, a black man tried to get to Ali’s corner and got clubbed by an Ali aide as he shouted: “You rotten scum.”

Apologists for Ali ignored his performance, refused to critique his malice, or see it as a serious character flaw; potential martyrs have no flaws. Ernie would claim he had double vision, that Ali had scraped his eye along the rope and had thumbed him three times, forcing Ernie’s left eye into the bone. The bone was smashed, and the eye muscles hooked on it. Like many fighters, Ali could be adept with his thumbs. The press was foaming once again. Wrote Jimmy Cannon: “It seemed right that Cassius Clay had a good time beating up another Negro. This was fun, like chasing them down with dogs and knocking them down with streams of water. What kind of clergyman is he? The heavyweight champion is a vicious propagandist for a spiteful mob that works the religious underworld.”

O
n March 8, 1971, according to Muhammad Ali, the planet would stumble in its axis, billions would hold their breaths, including every last ice-covered Sherpa and sand-swept Bedouin, an ecumenical constituency that he claimed as his alone, in contrast to Joe Frazier, “a lit
tle old nigger boy who ain’t been anywhere ’cept Philly, never done anything for nobody ’cept rich people that back him and politician crooks, never had a thought in his dumb head ’cept for himself.” Frazier was up North, yet his shadow rolled heavily over the sun-streaked walls of the Fifth Street Gym in Miami. Celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr. and Elvis Presley, to the sound of whirring cameras, moved in and out of his glow as if seeking reaffirmation of their own rank. “You cool, brother?” Elvis asked, embracing him. “Cool as you.” Ali smiled. “And gittin’ cooler.”

Frazier was training up in the frigid Catskills at the Concord Hotel, sterile and with an emptiness swept by constant wind that bothered him; he could never get warm, loose. He got some bad news from Dr. Finton Speller, the family physician. He had been feeling tired and losing energy. Speller told him he was suffering from high blood pressure, the condition evolving from the anticipation of the fight with Ali and the dogged training. He began to feel better after daily vitamin E and C shots, and then moved the camp back to Philly. Once, according to Ali, he showed up at the Broad Street Gym in disguise to watch Joe work and left unimpressed. “What disguise?” Joe said. “He turn white or somethin’? Wouldn’t be hard for him. Hey, who’s gonna miss Clay, even if he’s dressed like Moses?”

But there was an exchange between the two at Broad Street. The Garden sent George Kalinsky, their photographer, to get some shots that would simulate them in the ring. Ali clowned, Joe kept a fixed stare. When Ali had been in early exile, he had always engaged in sham battle with open hands, and Joe had come to believe that he was trying to measure Joe’s strength and reflexes. The adrenaline had pumped at the Fairmount Park incident; this time Joe aimed to transmit a signal. In the ring, with Kalinsky nervous, Joe said: “Let’s go at it.” Ali was confused, and Joe banged him harder. Ali returned with a shot, and Joe dug a left hook to his belly. “That’s it,” Ali said, nearly
pulling his trunks up to his chin. “Son of a bitch can really hit,” Ali announced. After Ali left, Joe said to Kalinsky: “You see his face when I buried that hook in his belly?”

Hecklers piled into Frazier’s gym, and Yank Durham, reasoning that Philly wasn’t known for generosity to its local names, told one crowd: “You’re all welcome. I hear anything I don’t like, and you’re out the door.” A big young guy called him on it: “You too old to throw anybody out a door.” Durham said: “I can start with you. If you don’t shut up.” One afternoon Durham heard the shout of “Uncle Tom.” He went over to the guy, grabbed him by his neck, and threw him out to the sidewalk. On some days there was a picket line outside, placed there by black groups who resented that the fight had been given to white promoters. How was the community going to benefit? Durham engaged them: “Blacks never give us a dime when Joe was comin’ up. They ridiculed him. I worked all my life. No white give me a thing, no black either. So we’re keepin’ every dime. Go picket Clay. He’ll give you some of his money, I’m sure.” A standard inquiry was: “Why you call him Clay? You got no respect for his religion.” Durham would shoot back: “See that telephone pole? I don’t care if he prays to a telephone pole.”

The Uncle Tom epithet tripped so incessantly from Ali’s lips, and now from the crowd around the gym, that Joe might as well have been wearing a sign. His son, Marvis, had to defend himself and his father in school. The phone calls came day and night, some calling him a tommin’ dog, others vowing that he would never see another day if he beat Ali. The label hadn’t stuck with Patterson and Terrell, but it was isolating him to a speck of a man, right in his own town, in his own gym, except for one brave soul who showed up each day with Joe’s name tattooed on his back. Frazier had police guarding him around the clock, and it seemed remarkable that he did not teeter into disorientation, that the job ahead stayed fixed in his mind.
It got to Durham finally. One day, without warning, the gym almost empty, Yank picked up a water pail and slammed it repeatedly against a ring post. “It’s a damn shame what Clay’s doin’ to my boy,” he said, then kicked the smashed pail with full force up over the ropes.