The Fight (16 page)

“Yes, that’s what I thought,” said George. His face, however, pinched just perceptibly, a Yankee pinch, that subtle tightening of expression when getting ready to put out a candle with one’s fingers. Norman thought he knew what it was. The story could look distasteful in print. They would appear silly if Ali lost, and a hint vainglorious if he won. Besides, Plimpton might wonder how Norman Mailer would handle George Plimpton in the writing.

“On second thought,” said George in his fine voice, so reminiscent of the restrained taste for zany leaps and happy improprieties that we used to hear in the voice of Cary Grant, “on second thought, maybe we just ought to ask the
féticheur
to work his magic for a good fight.”

“I guess that’s reasonable,” Mailer said reluctantly.

“I think it is,” George said.

But now, sitting in the café, he reported a lack of success. The
féticheur
had wanted too much money. “I think what drove the price up,” Plimpton confessed, “was his consternation at the demand not to curse one fighter, but give uplift to both. It would have used too much of his stuff.”

Later that night, their tickets having put them down side by side in the same press row, Mailer nudged Plimpton right after the huge excitement of the first round. “If we had bought a good fight,” he said, “we’d be taking credit now.”

That was later. In the beer garden, they had begun to fill in one another on a few stories. There was a studied economy among journalists. To near or equal colleagues, they were willing to give up some large part of their material. If two reporters had the same deadline, they might offer each other nothing (unless it was a question of one losing a job, and even then!) but magazine writers had more time, and ways to live with the same story in separate styles. Often they would give just about all of a good observation away on the knowledge they would get another back. No one was more scrupulous in this regard than Plimpton, and he never failed to provide verbal accounting of an event in his best narrative style so that the work of literature was performed — the story existed for you as he spoke. You could almost live with it as your own perception. And when he did not have a story to offer in return, he might come up with an inspiration to adjust the balance, as he would for instance propose tonight that they travel out together to Nsele and visit Ali just before the fight, an outing which
would yet bring them both into Muhammad’s dressing room in the thirty minutes before Ali put on his robe and went out to the ring.

On the other hand, you had to give George as much as he gave you. If the account did not run hour to hour, it certainly was kept up more or less day to day. So Mailer, probably feeling himself in arrears by the time they were drinking their beer, went out of his way to give a full account of Foreman’s press conference at Nsele the day before. He was, he confessed, getting to like Foreman surprisingly well.

Of course, to speak of liking Foreman was to return to Ogotemmêli’s theory of two souls in one body, because Foreman in the ring, working as an executioner, was simply not likable. He might inspire awe at his open desire to demolish an opponent, his sullen reluctance to cease beating on a man once the fight was stopped (so that even the most authoritative referee had to choose a safe moment to come in on Foreman and wave him off) but he would probably win no mass popularity for continuing to hit opponents who were falling to the floor. Nor would anyone forget Foreman’s roundhouse shot to the back of Frazier’s head as Joe, totally dazed, was staggering away. (It had to be the worst punch seen in a Heavyweight Championship since Ingemar Johansson dropped one of his boulders on the back of Floyd Patterson’s neck.) No, Foreman was not likable in the heat of a fight.

In press conferences, however, he was developing considerable charm. He gave them seldom, but he gave them well, and on Monday afternoon after his last workout he
talked to the press in his dressing room and was never better. Maybe it was the workout that had put him in so good a mood. It only consisted of a few light rounds with Elmo Henderson but they were conducted in a mood so silent and tender one could have been watching Marcel Marceau. As if to celebrate the intelligence that had gone into his training, Foreman concentrated this last afternoon on the central theme of his work — cut off the ring on Ali, drive him to the ropes, force him to the corner, extinguish him. Elmo was in there playing the part of the flea who went in three, Muhammad Ali, a long thin dying clown, tragic was the face Elmo loaned to Ali in his last extremity, a mournful contemplation of the length of that road which had brought Muhammad here, a sorrow at the depths of his own destruction, yes, Elmo gave a moving imitation of how Ali would seek to employ every feint and guile as he danced around Foreman, but George, faster and faster, happier and happier, would be the master of the ballet. A sweet three rounds. The two men sparred with no heavy punches, just taps of the gloves, and small snaps, scoring on each other to show no more than what they could have done, and Foreman was delighted with Elmo. Both men boxed in the silence of asylum walls, the lack of sound in Henderson’s movements as full of presence as the sudden clangor of any
oyé
he would cry on other hours, and Foreman was steeped in the silence, resonant within it. He had never looked more like a boxer.

Afterward in the dressing room, as if in measure to the end of confinement, his good spirits rose. His training was done. He had no more to think about than the fight tomorrow.
Never had a fighter looked more relaxed and confident on the day before a fight. As he sat on a rubbing table in the small bare dressing room, he seemed not at all bothered by the twenty-five or thirty reporters who closed around him.

“Are you concerned,” one of them asked, “that Ali might be faster than you?”

“It’s all a matter of what you call fast,” Foreman said. “I don’t run ’cause I don’t have to. I can hit a man on the jaw fast enough.” He relaxed a little more on the laugh that came up on this, and was patient with the next question, which he had heard many times: What did he think of fighting at four in the morning?

This time he gave a different answer. “When I was growing up in Houston, I had a lot of fights at three and four in the morning.”

“Were your opponents tough?”

“Right!” He laughed. “I wasn’t undefeated then,” he said in his mild voice. He shook his head. “I’ve come a long way from standing on the corner of Lyons Avenue ready to get into something with anybody’d come along. I’d hit ’em and take their cigarettes. That’s a long way off from fighting in Kinshasa, Africa” — he corrected himself — “Zaïre, for five million dollars.”

“Do you think it’ll be a good fight?”

He thought for a while, as if bringing up to date his latest assessment of Ali. “I think it’ll be a rightful fight,” he replied at last with dignity in his soft voice.

“George, you seem relaxed,” a reporter said.

Now he was actually merry. The admiration of the men
questioning him must have been palpable to his flesh. He looked near to sensuous in his calm. “You guys relax me,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you love me,” he said (He could sure hit a reporter on the jaw fast enough).

The next question had the harsh and inimitable sense of transition reserved to British reporters. “Of course, Ali doesn’t love you,” said an English voice. “What do you think of his comment that he’s going to tell you something just before the fight begins which is going to affect your mind?”

Foreman shrugged. “I guess he’ll have to say it.”

“Do you like to speak during a fight?”

“I never do get a chance to talk much in the ring. By the time I begin to know a fellow,” George remarked, “it’s all over.”

That was the interview, short, tasty, no heavy punches, full of confidence. It ended a few minutes later with a conversation on dreams. Already, it has been recorded (by Plimpton in fact) that Foreman recalled a rather complicated dream in which he was teaching a dog how to ice-skate. That dream was a month old and a reporter asked for a new one. Foreman allowed that he sometimes dreamed of eating ice cream cones and woke up with a stomachache. On reflection, one could wonder if that had anything to say about a fear of the world’s riches. When it came to emoluments, George had been a modest champion. On the night he defeated Norton, he had been so modest as to get a friend to invite a number of girls up to his suite for a party,
and yet he soon retired to another room, where he went to sleep by himself. So it had been reported.

But talk of dreams seemed to irritate Dick Sadler. Near to forty years of managing fighters told him there was nothing good about eating ice cream cones and waking up sick. So he terminated the interview. “George,” he said, “I didn’t know how big a man you was until they started to ask about your dreams.”

Never had the confidence of Foreman’s camp seemed stronger than on Monday night. Jim Brown, scheduled to do some of the TV commentary, had arrived in town, Jim Brown the sternest living legend of professional football and he looked like what he had been, a professional gladiator. On this night, thirty hours before the fight, Jim Brown was all out for Foreman’s chances, all man about it and no charm. Hard, implacable, and humorless as he described the oncoming fight — correction: possessed of a hard close-out humor. “If Ali wins the fight,” he whispers in your ear, “it’s been fixed.”

For any supporter of Ali, Brown was hard to be with. Yet like all heroes he was magnetic and you hung in to hear his words. Out of his dark steely presence came one full clean force, the clear force of his own knowledge — what Brown knew, he knew. No one else had been able to acquire that knowledge in the way he had, and so one was obliged to listen and weigh his confidence, and try to discount it with the thought that Jim Brown could be in the direct grip of jealousy. If not for Ali, Jim had to be the most important Black athlete in America.

There were other voices to hear that night in the lobby of the Inter-Continental, Marcellus Clay for one, Muhammad’s father, but indeed by his features he could have been as easily the father of Jim Brown for he looked to have Indian blood, and took to drink like firewater. One quality the son shared however with the father — nobody was going to lick them — Clay, Senior, ready to drink with anybody, there to curse and bet, wink at anybody — better be female — was popular with the press, although it was hard to capture his dialogue for he had a fast Louisville patter full of slurred sounds and intricate pieces of
talk
, steeped was he in a Southern Black culture of sign painters, barbers, bootblacks, short-order cooks. The press nonetheless loved what they could catch of his sardonic, whining, leaping, snuffling, feisty, rumbling, stumbling, salty, in-and-out whiskey talk. “They’s more good-looking womens in Louisville than’s showing forth here.” Clay, Senior, existed long before Cassius Clay, a classic father of a pugilist — maybe the son can’t fight, but the old man sure can!

At the other end of the lobby was Mrs. Clay, who had given Muhammad her good looks, and she was chatting now with Dick Sadler, the two engaged in the most enjoyable conversation and who could guess what it was about? It took all of the good manners one had left to fight down the journalistic lust to eavesdrop on Mrs. Clay and Dick Sadler.

Joe Frazier in an elevator taking notes with Big Black on the problem of getting a good fit for the shoulders when buying a jacket. Frazier is all-out for Foreman. It is possible Joe Frazier will never forgive Muhammad Ali for calling him ignorant.

John Daly: In the lobby, Daly, who brought the first big money to Don King’s promotion, $2,000,000 from Helmdale Leisure Corporation. He is a young man, with a bright and happy London face, small, rugged and good-looking, as cheerful as a happy jockey or successful soccer player, and his father is visiting the Inter-Continental now, Tom Daly, a
veteran
British boxer was something like three hundred fights to his record, a small intelligent man who presents a nose with a number of hammered angles and a little damage to his ears, but nothing to his mind, a fine gentleman, Tom Daly, who speaks with respect of Muhammad Ali although he shakes his head, “Does everything wrong and gets away with it.” Tom Daly runs a boxing school in London and speaks of fighters as craftsmen or laborers, and lets you in on the rueful situation that all his young hopefuls try to imitate Ali. “Can’t be done,” he exclaims, “they don’t even have the fundamentals.”

Bundini: He is telling the crowd, “Today I went to the Black House. Today I met the man and kissed him on the cheek. You got the White House, but I got the Black House.”

At dinner: After all this mirth in the lobby, Clarence Jones, a bright well-equipped Black lawyer from New York, is full of the horrendous news that Leroy Jackson, Foreman’s lawyer, is now in London attempting to get an extra $500,000 for the fight, and claims Foreman will not appear in the ring until he is given the bonus. It seems much of his $5,000,000 is already attached — he feels there is nothing left for himself. If Foreman fails to appear in the ring, boxing is not going to recover in a hurry.

“Do you think he’ll get it?”

“I’ll never speak to John Daly again if he gives another dollar to him,” Clarence Jones says in pain. “Foreman is the Champ. He shouldn’t act that way.”

Now on the following night, after the fight tickets have been safely acquired, Plimpton and Mailer are still talking about the incredible and ugly timing of Foreman’s demands. The conversation takes up a good part of the long drive to Nsele, a long forty miles after the number of times they have driven it. The lights of the stadium are lit, however, as they pass; the fight night is here. They ruminate on the peculiarity of Foreman’s good mood at his press conference the afternoon before. Were those good spirits rising at the thought of a half-million-dollar gouge? Plimpton talks of how Daly is reputed to be handling it. “I gather he’s talking of contracts for future fights. Before long, it’ll be time to go into the ring, and too late for Foreman. They say Daly is a master at that.” Yet what a peculiar tension for a fighter to put on himself the night of a big bout. Can it do Foreman any good to wonder whether his demand is only a bluff that will be called minute by minute as he gets ready for the ring? It is not only an ugly maneuver, but a foolish one, and makes one begin to wonder at Foreman’s confidence. Why would a man who expects to be Champion after this fight look for such an advantage? Yes, there must be two souls in Foreman’s body and one of them is not so visible in press conferences. They drive in the African night on the long deserted four-lane road to Nsele — a night of history for Zaïre — but the road is as empty as one’s sense of how the fight is going to turn out.