The Fight (11 page)

Yet his present condition was so full of exhaustion. As if anxiety about the fight stirred in the hour before dawn, a litany began. It was the same speech he had made a day and a half ago to the press, the speech in which he listed each of Foreman’s opponents and counted the number who were nobodies and the inability of Foreman to knock his opponents out cold. Patterson and Bingham nodded in the sad patience of men who worked for him and loved him and put up with this phase of his conditioning while Ali gave the speech the way a patient with a threatening heart will take a nitroglycerin pill. And Norman, with his food still undigested and his bowels hard packed from the shock
of the jogging, was blank himself when he tried to think of amusing conversation to divert Ali’s mood. It proved up to Ali to change the tone and by the dawn he did. After showering and dressing he showed a magic trick and then another, long cylinders popping out of his hands to become handkerchiefs, and, indeed, next day at training, still haranguing the press, Ali ended by saying, “Foreman will never catch me. When I meet George Foreman, I’ll be free as a bird,” and he held up his hand and opened it. A bird flew out. To the vast delight of the press. Ali was writing the last line of their daily piece from Kinshasa today. Nor did it take them long to discover the source. Bundini had captured the bird earlier in the day and slipped it to Ali when the time came. Invaluable Bundini, improvisatory Bundini.

Still, as Norman drove home to the Inter-Continental and breakfast, he measured Ali’s run. He had finished by the Chinese pagoda. That was two and a half miles, not three! Ali had run very slowly for the first mile and a half. With an empty stomach and the fair condition of the summer in Maine, he thought he could probably have kept up with Ali until the sprint at the end. It was no way for a man fighting for a Heavyweight title to do roadwork. Norman did not see how Ali could win. Defeat was in the air Ali alone seemed to refuse to breathe.

N
EXT DAY
, while watching Foreman at Ping-Pong, he had cause to wonder whether he was too pessimistic. The Heavyweight Champion of the World had been playing every day, but he was no phenomenon. He held his racket in a penholder grip and it was awkward to his purposes; he did not have a driving game, and the penholder is best for its facility in backhand slams. Foreman was certainly not experienced enough to put up more than a steady defense against Archie Moore, and that was hardly enough. Moore invariably won. Old competitive Archie, never an athlete to overlook an advantage, brought his special paddle to the fray, and it was as thick in foam rubber as the rear seat of a Cadillac. The sauciest tongue in London could not have given more English to the ball. A professional game hunter once remarked that the most dangerous animal he ever faced in Africa was a charging leopard. He thought his eyes were playing tricks for the cat moved like jump cuts in a movie film. That was how Archie’s serve worked. He did not have much of a game beyond that, just lots of foam
rubber, but he hardly needed more. The serve was formidably cockeyed. He would invariably beat George.

Foreman was good-natured about it. Dressed in one of his twenty sets of bib overalls, his biceps gleamed with his sweat, and his face grinned with the happy if unsuccessful effort to keep up with Archie’s bouncing ball. When he would miss, and try to catch the ball on the ground before it reached the pool, the Champion would look like a big dog putting an uncertain paw on a mouse, somewhat bemused by the trickiness of it all. The thought occurred that Ali would play Ping-Pong better. With his intricate quickness of hand and eye, how could he not?

Every fighter had a part of the body you remembered. With Joe Frazier, it was the legs. They were not even like tree trunks, more like truncated gorillas pushing forward, working uphill, pushing forward. Foreman had something like Samson’s arms — he could pull down the pillars of the temple. And Ali? He had a face, and arms to punish anyone who came near that face. He had fast feet. He would play Ping-Pong better. His wrists would be ready for every trick of Archie. Each unexpected bounce would speed his reflex. Whereas Foreman would find zephyrs, feathers and Ping-Pong balls alien to him.

Of course, George’s strength would not be here. His leverage came from confrontation. The air of Foreman’s camp was that George could afford to be seen playing games at which he was not adept. Let the world see his lack of lightning reflexes at the Ping-Pong table. It did not matter. The fight was a conclusion that could not be altered. If Ali entered the ring with fear, there would be a
scandalously quick end. If Ali came in bravely, well, said the mood that came off everyone near Foreman, it would then be a more interesting fight, and Ali could even win a round or two, reflex would steal its points from confrontation, but it could not go on. Ali did not have the stamina to go fifteen rounds at top speed. As Foreman’s people saw it, Ali’s chances depended on speed, then more speed, then startling spurts of speed. Everybody repeated Henry Clark’s remark, “One round with Foreman is like ten with another fighter.” Yes, it would be equal to avoiding a keyed-up lion in a cage — not for one minute but for forty-five minutes.

Toward the end of his career, Archie Moore used to go fifteen rounds when he was hardly in condition to walk a mile. He had acquired the skill to avoid a murderous punch by a languid tilt of his chin. Why rush to move six inches when half an inch would provide? So Moore knew how long a trip you could get out of the oldest body. Leisure in the ring and absolute cool, no unnecessary movements, feel no fear and show a few tricks — that was the last substitute for condition. It would work until pressure was on. No one knew better than Moore. Ali had exposed him over the four rounds of their fight because Ali kept the pressure on. Now, in his turn, Foreman would eat up the best of Ali’s condition, consume his stamina, use up his surprises. Then it would be Ali on the ropes and Foreman working on the heavy bag.

“Sadler, Moore, and Saddler,” wrote Archie Moore for
Sports Illustrated
, “are devising new approaches to force; to coerce, fool and browbeat the sensitive Ali into a close
confrontation with Foreman, who not only has TNT in his mitts but
nuclearology
as well.…” That was the confidence in Foreman’s camp at the Inter-Continental, he had nuclearology in his fists. The scene at the Ping-Pong table and the pool, the scene under every umbrella and before every sunbather, the mood in the lobby and on the elevator was the rich even luxuriant power of Foreman’s fist. He did not just hit hard, he hit in such a way that the nucleus of his opponent’s will was reached. Fission began. Consciousness exploded. The head smote the spine with a lightning bolt and the legs came apart like falling walls. On the night Foreman took his championship, who could forget the film of Frazier’s urgent legs staggering around the ring, looking for their lost leader?

At the Inter-Continental, there was a prevailing mood then of benign, romantic, even imperial confidence in the power and menace of Foreman. Everybody in his camp was happy. Dick Sadler played with children and flirted with the best-looking women, flirted with droll mastery, never empty of an expression that teased, “Nobody knows the evil you will see.” Archie Moore, being introduced to the wife of the American Ambassador in Zaïre, took her immediately by the hand and said, “Come, dear, I want you to meet my wife,” and led her to Mrs. Moore. Sandy Saddler, the wise and vicious equal of the great Willie Pep, Sandy still as slim as when he used to fight, would stand to one corner, his small head supporting his large horn-rimmed glasses, looking for all the world like the bitter shrunken proprietor of a pharmacy, and say, “I’m concerned for Ali. I’m afraid he’s going to get hurt.”

Foreman had a sparring partner named Elmo Henderson, once Heavyweight Champion of Texas. Elmo was tall and thin and did not look like a fighter nearly so much as like some kind of lean wanderer in motley — the long stride of a medieval jester was in his step, and he would walk through the lobby and the patio and around the pool of the Inter-Continental with his eyes in the air as if he sought a vanishing point six feet above the horizon. It gave an envelope to his presence, even a suggestion of silence but this was paradoxical, for Elmo Henderson never stopped talking. It was as if Elmo were Foreman’s unheard voice, and the voice was loud. Elmo had learned a Franco-African word,
oyé
(from the French
oyez
— “now hear this”) and at whatever hour of the day he went through the lobby or encountered you at Nsele, he was passing through the midst of a continuing inner vision. The voice he heard came from far off and out of a deep source of power — Elmo vibrated to the hum of that distant dynamo.
“Oyé,”
he cried to the world at large in an unbelievably loud and booming voice.
“Oyé … oyé …,”
each cry coming in its interval, sometimes so far apart as every ten or fifteen seconds, but penetrating as a dinner gong. Up in the corridors, and on the elevator, out on the taxi entrance of the Inter-Continental and back at the pool, through the buffet tables of the open-air restaurant and all night at the bar, Henderson’s cry would come, sometimes in one’s ear, sometimes across a floor,
“oyé …”
He would stop now and again, as if the signal he transmitted had failed to reach him, then, sudden as the resumption of the chorus of a field of crickets, his voice would twang through the halls.
“Oyé … Foreman
boma yé …”
Hear this … Foreman will kill him.
“Oyé … Foreman boma yé.”
If an expropriation of
Ali boma yé
it was no longer a cry to destroy Sisley High; rather, a call to a crusade. Every time Elmo picked up that chant again, one felt a measure of Foreman’s blood beating through the day, pounding through the night in rhythm with the violence that waits through the loneliness of every psychotic aisle. Henderson walked past children and old men, moved by African princes and the officers of corporations here for copper, diamonds, cobalt; his voice took into itself the force of every impulse he passed. Wealth and violence and irritation and innocence were in his voice and to it he added the intensity of his own force until the sound twanged in one’s ear like the boom of a cricket grown large as an elephant.
“Oyé … Foreman boma yé.…”
and Foreman, whether near Henderson or a hundred yards away, seemed confirmed in his serenity by the power of Elmo’s throat, as if the sparring partner were the night guard making his rounds, and all was well precisely because all was unwell.

“Oyé … Foreman boma yé,”
Henderson would cry on his tour through the hotel, and once in a while, his face lighting up, as if he had just encountered a variation of the most liberating and prophetic value, he would add, “The flea goes in three, Muhammad Ali,” and he would stick three fingers in the air.
“Oyé,”
shouted Henderson one morning in the back of Bill Caplan’s ear, and the publicity man for Foreman’s camp replied sadly, “Oy vay! Oy vay!” Once Elmo spoke a full sentence. “We’re going to get Ali,” he said to the lobby at large, “like a Rolls-Royce when we job it up.
Oyé … Foreman boma yé.
”

Yes, madness in Africa was fertile, and in this madness of Africa, two fighters would each receive five million dollars while one thousand miles away on the edge of the world-famine Blacks would die of starvation, two fighters each to make more than $100,000 a minute if the fight went the full forty-five minutes and more per minute if it went less. Natural to the madness that one of the fighters was a revolutionary and a conservative, which is to say a Black Muslim, whose ultimate aim was the cession by the United States of a large piece of the United States for the formation of a Black nation, and was, this wealthy revolutionary conservative (a marbles champion at the age of ten) fighting a defender of the capitalist system whose mother had been a cook and a barber and head of a family of seven until she collapsed into a mental hospital and the son confessed at “drunkenness, truancy, vandalism, strong-arm robbery,” became a purse-snatcher, and at that — quote Leonard Gardner — “was a total failure; undone by his victims’ cries for God’s assistance, he was compelled to run back and return all the purses.” That was at fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. We know the rest of the story. Foreman joins the Job Corps, and wins the Heavyweight title in the Olympics before he is twenty-one. He dances around the ring with a little flag. “Don’t talk down the American system to me,” he says in full investiture of that flag, “its rewards can be there for anybody if he will make up his mind, bend his back, lean hard into his chores and refuse to allow anything to defeat him. I’ll wave that flag in every public place I can,” to which Ali would shout at a boxing writers’ dinner six years later, “I’m going to beat your Christian ass, you white flag-waving bitch, you.” They had grappled on
the stage and Ali pulled out Foreman’s shirt, left him a man without a shirt wearing a tuxedo. Foreman in return ripped Ali’s jacket down the back. There were apologies next day and Ali claimed he would “never insult anyone’s religion,” but the psychological results were as inconclusive as
Ali boma yé
and
Foreman boma yé
; there was certainly no clear-cut parallel to the afternoon on TV when Ali kept telling Joe Frazier he was ignorant until Frazier attacked him physically. That was just a few days before their second bout, and Ali’s insults helped to decide the fight in his favor for Frazier had Ali in trouble through the middle rounds, and looked ready to knock him out by the beginning of the ninth, indeed Ali had just been able to last through a formidable few minutes in the eighth. So sure was Frazier by the beginning of the ninth that he rushed to the middle of the ring before the bell — ignorant, am I? The referee was pushing him back as the bell rang. It gave Ali fifteen extra seconds of rest just when he needed them most. On came the full storm of Frazier’s last big attack — ignorant, am I? — but Ali came off the ropes before the end of the ninth to turn the fight — yes, you are ignorant! — and win by a close decision. Ali had been a dean of psychology for that fight. But now such acumen had to be applied to the logic of psychotic guilt, “The flea in three, Muhammad Ali,” now the tricks would have to reach into the long vault of the asylum mind,
“oyé, oyé,”
and pick up on the two hundred windows in Houston that Foreman broke because he liked the sound. Was the echo of breaking glass in Foreman’s discipline, in the investments of his serenity, yes, estimation was equal to madness, and could
Ali mobilize the two and a half million theater seats in America where followers cheering for him would have to send their cheer up the electronic route in reverse, even as time might yet travel from the future to the past? Ali, grand vizier, now had to mobilize the nation of Zaïre, inchoate nation large as Alaska, Colorado and Texas put together, crazy Kinshasa with its 280,000 eggs, 75,000 pats of butter and 115,000 lumps of sugar all moldering over the thousands of tourists who did not come to the black drum-beating “rumble in the jungle,” no sir, no tourist lays out $2000 and more for the chance of getting boiled in a pot in a country where the Belgians left in such haste in 1961 that a
Time
correspondent, Lee Grimes, a man with a genteel, trustworthy face, was given the keys to a house and a car by a man he never saw before and told to live in them and use them as the last words spoken by the Belgian before jumping on the ferry that would buck the clumps of hyacinth to cross the Congo to Brazzaville, safe Brazzaville, safe for this day, and Lee Grimes lived in the Belgian’s house, and drove the Belgian’s VW until there were sixty-four bullet holes in its skin and the VW would drive no more. Grimes would get past Black sentries in checkpoints on the road by waving his plastic credit cards, Zaïre! a country yet equal in size to all of Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, East Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and West Germany, two hundred groups of languages — two hundred
groups!
— and a literacy rate of thirty-five percent, some said less, a country large as the U.S. east of the Mississippi and with a river now twenty-nine hundred miles long coming down from the most impenetrable
mountains and jungle to the sea at Matadi, the Kungo, called the Congo — “Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost/ Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host” — the Congo, now the Zaïre. Vachel Lindsay would have wept at the harsh sounds of the vowels in Zye-ear: