The Fight (24 page)

Ali would laugh next day and offer to take credit for holding back the rain.

O
N THAT NEXT DAY
(which is the same day just after sleeping from nine to noon) Norman had lunch and decided to go out to Nsele one last time and say good-bye to Ali. On the way, he was thinking of a conversation he might like to have with the fighter, and wondered if it wouldn’t be easy when all was said to explain to Ali how the fight was not only a revolution in boxing (with which Ali would certainly agree) but had a counterpart in modern chess.

Since Norman was always too ready to serve as matrimonial agent to the mating of large ideas, and prone to offer weighty metaphors without constructing a seat, he tried these days to be careful. A writer does well to work on his vice. Still, he liked the new idea. In chess, no concept had once been more firmly established than control of the center, and for much the same reason as boxing — it gave mobility for attack to the left or the right. Later, a revolution came to chess, and new masters argued that if one occupied the center too early, weaknesses were created as well as strengths. It was better to invade the center after
the opponent was committed. Of course with such a strategy you had to be resourceful in a cramped space. Tactical brilliance was essential at every step. Was that not exactly what Ali had accomplished? It was doubtful, however, if many a chess game had been played which equaled in timing Ali’s climactic occupation of the center of the ring.

Having been overpowered in his youth by the works of Karl Marx and Oswald Spengler, Norman used to love Germanic formulation. Years ago, he could have written, “There are profound historic relations between the relinquishment of the center by Nimzovitch and Réti (with their subsequent inspiration upon the schools of Hypermodern and Dynamic chess) and the boxing techniques of the American Heavyweight Muhammad Ali who has introduced to pugilism the modal transposition from Active to Passive demanded by the techno-revolutionary
geist
of the last decades of the Twentieth Century so essential to the liberation of the woman, a reversal of polarity in established structures of power which becomes the technological and/or the mystical signature of the century,” yes, his style has improved a little, but we can tell by his love of African philosophy that Norman still believes history is an organism, and reveals a sense of style, a divine stroke of the pen to every era. It is not even hard to describe, but it is difficult to say without being guillotined by the critics (who as a body of clerks seem never to have advanced beyond the simple life-giving love of reason — and taste for fresh blood — of the French Revolution).

Enough! Let us look for Ali. Norman, of course, does not have a conversation about chess with him. They are hardly
to be alone. If they were, Ali would have small interest. His mind is attached to his own ideas.

Out there, the new Champion is giving a press conference to a hundred African reporters and media men who gather around him with the solemnity and respect they might once have offered to Gandhi. It is three in the afternoon, not ten hours since he won, and he has probably not slept for half of that time — nonetheless his tongue is unflagging and he must talk on fifty subjects, telling the Third World press in just the short time Norman is there how “the long dresses of your women impress me more than your jet planes and your Lumumba monument.” A little later he compliments them on changing their names to African. “On the occasion of his investiture,” writes Father Tempels, the chief “receives a (new) name.… His former name may be no longer uttered, lest by so doing his new vital force may be harmed.” Muhammad Ali, né Cassius Clay, knew whereof he spoke, and talked of the emergence of peoples and the disciplines of victory and the need for goals outside the vanity of the self. “These things George Foreman did not recognize,” he intoned. “But I know that beating George Foreman and conquering the world with my fists does not bring freedom to my people. I am well aware that I must go beyond all this and prepare myself for more. I know,” said Muhammad Ali, “that I enter a new arena.”

My God! All of it! He was going after all of it. And why not, given the rate of increase at which he mastered the whole of whatever he was given. Norman was thinking of the first time he met him, there at a crap table in The Dunes, Cassius Clay in Vegas in the summer of 1963, a
tall skinny nervous young fighter with an undefeated record and a mortal fear of Sonny Liston, whom soon he was going to meet. The boy was unhappy with the half-recognition of the name. “Norm Mailer, I heard of you. You’re in the movies or something” — the boy did not like to be unsure — and later throwing the dice, so ignorant of craps he hardly knew when he won yet still lucky as the vein of his ongoing fortune, Cassius complained when they passed him casino counters after a winning roll. “What are these things?” he cried.

“Chips.”

“Don’t gimme none of that stuff,” he bawled. “Gimme some more of those silver dollars!” Just another mad-hat lout from Louisville. Now he was entering a new arena. “He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life,” he told the representatives of the Black media. “That is why I love and respect Africa. It is the land of risks and” — he looked for the word — “endeavor. The people have respect, yet they are brave to new notions. They are the force of the future.” With what an immensity of anxiety must Ali live at the size of his world role and his intimate knowledge of his own ignorance.

Later, he and Budd Schulberg were alone with Ali for a few minutes, and started to have a good talk about the fight. Ali was getting ready to expatiate. He was in the full enjoyment of analyzing his own fight. “George, you see,” he said, “has got a breathing problem.” But they were interrupted. John Daly and a group of his friends had come to visit the villa. Ali, with the happiest spirit, was soon charming the ladies. “Oh,” he said in response to a query, “my
mother never worries. I could be getting killed in the ring, but she wouldn’t worry. ‘My baby’s all right,’ she’d be saying.” And he winked at Tom Daly, John Daly’s father, with his three hundred fights, to whom he had just been introduced. The phone rang. It was a reporter in New York, and Ali talked to him, and made faces with his guests. “Yes, I will rest a few months and let you look at me as the Champ and him as the tramp.” Laughter from the people near him. “No, I have no plans. They’re talking of giving me ten million dollars” — a straight look at John Daly — “but that’s ahead. No, I have no plans to visit the White House. I’m going to visit the Black House right here, and see the president of Zaïre again and get my pet gorilla, and take my little Joe Frazier home.” He waited for the laughter and the next question. “You’re asking if I was happy to get the title back in Africa, which is the home of my ancestors? Yes, I was happy, a good feeling, but it don’t mean too much. I’d rather have done it in Madison Square Garden because that’s where the real nonbelievers are, that’s the real fight crowd.”

Later, after company left, and evening was falling on the Congo, Ali went out for a short walk, but was followed by so many Black people waiting outside the villa for a look at him that he soon came back. The red bruise on his cheek had subsided and his face was unmarked. The only sign he had been in a fight is that he moved with an extra subtlety of anticipation like a man who has been in a wreck and does not know where pains will yet disclose themselves. He has taken a pounding to the side of his body and the top of his kidneys. In the privacy of his bathroom, doubtless he
will wince and piss blood. That is the price after many a fight.

It was his pride of course to show none of this. Feeling good, it was his happiness not to fail to offer happiness. So he paused at the door to his villa as if he wanted to give the Africans waiting outside more adequate recompense for the time they had devoted, and he roared, “I can lick anybody you got. Give me your best. I will fight your best fighter.”

The thin Blacks giggled. Those who understood a little English giggled immediately, and the others took it up in ripples of laughter as his words were translated.

“Don’t give me nothing but your best,” said Ali.

A twelve-year-old boy came out and started shadowboxing the air five feet in front of him. “You think you got a chance, huh?” said Ali. “You’re in trouble. You’re in a lot of trouble.” He began to spar with the twelve-year-old, who was fast and knew a little about boxing, and Ali slowly sank to his knees and cried out, “I’m the one in trouble. He’s too much for me.”

Everybody roared. Ali got up and said to the boy, “You whupped me today, but watch out. I’m going to go home and practice, and then I’ll come back and whip you.” He saluted the crowd and returned inside.

Once more it was time to leave and say good-bye and get ready to leave Africa. Norman made his farewells to Ali and Belinda, and had a last look of Ali stretched out on the green velveteen Borox sofa, his bare feet up on the coffee table, while Belinda sitting across from him was now in her turn giggling and tickling the bare soles of his famous
flying feet with a small ivory back scratcher. Farewell to Ali.

Driving on the road back to the hotel for the last time, Norman kept passing groups of young boys jogging on the shoulder. He did not know if it was a brand-new phenomenon, but squad after squad of young adolescents were out there on the dark roads, and once he almost hit a few they came up so suddenly in the lights. On the night he jogged with Ali — was it five nights ago? — Ali said afterward, “It’ll be a great experience for you remembering that you ran with the Champion just a few days before the fight,” and he thought it a peculiarly heavy remark at the time, but had the recognition now that it was just possible Ali was going to be right once more — already Norman was beginning to think of it fondly.

T
HERE WAS TROUBLE
getting home. It would come at Dakar, where a mob, convinced Muhammad Ali was on board, would tear over the runways of the airport and surround the plane. There was, however, no sense of this on departure from Kinshasa. Rather there was relief. Rumors had been passing that Ali and his camp would commandeer the flight. It was nice to find out at the airline desk that one’s First Class seat was still intact. No small boon. To be trapped in the middle of three seats in Economy on the nineteen-hour flight from Kinshasa to New York with stops at Lagos, Accra, Monrovia and Dakar had to be one of the intimate clues life offered of suffering after death. It was one of the longest flights left in the world, and sometimes one of the worst. Still, Norman liked it. A share of the action of Africa, legal and illegal, seemed to get on and off the plane: hunters and smugglers, engineers and tribal chiefs, Black babies, and a mysterious white man in a black suit, white shirt, black tie who traveled First Class with a black leather satchel in the empty seat next to him. The
seat had been purchased for the satchel and it was the only empty seat in the compartment. Who in First Class could take his eyes off the black bag? It would later develop the owner was a King’s Messenger, and when a British official met him to give escort off the plane, the man in the black suit exclaimed in a fine high-service English voice, “Thank God, you’re here on time.” Were the contents fissionable material or secrets of state? Were they crooks in costume and the real crop prove to be diamonds? It was the only flight Norman knew which on any routine night could offer the visual impact of a Hitchcock film.

Besides, there was time to think. Hours to think and hours to read. The boredom of a long flight could turn inside out again, and boredom give way to epiphany. He had a few on the trip back. Events of the week enlarged the space he had prepared for them in his brain, but Norman’s thoughts were too general and he was full of champagne, misery, pleasurable recollections and lack of sleep. He slept. His dreams he did not remember. When he awoke, it was to the my-plane-is-sure-my-turf Southern tone of the pilot saying through the public address system that he wished to assure his Pan-American passengers there would not be any trouble at Dakar, but just in case, “ ’cause folks, I don’t know where they got the idea, it was just a rumor at Kinshasa, but the good people of Dakar are convinced that the Heavyweight Champion is on the plane, and they want to see Muhammad Ali in person so a couple of thousand of them are out at the airport now. It’s one in the morning in Dakar but out there on the runway they are sure he’s here on board. We’re going to come in on one of the back runways and then maybe we can discharge
our outgoing and take on our incoming passengers via the airport bus. In any case, we’re sorry for the delay.”

But when they landed in that far-off secret place at the end of the airport, the secret had been discovered. Even as they taxied, there was the sight of hundreds of people running toward them. The pilot cut his lights, gunned his motors and the plane trundled across the airport to another runway. Other people came running toward them. The pilot cut the motors. “Folks,” he said, “we’ve been instructed to sit tight for a while. If we keep taxiing, somebody out there might get hurt. So we’ll just remain here for a spell. Everything will be all right.”

In no time the plane was surrounded. It was the most peculiar situation. Police cars with red flashers on top and police cars with blue flashers kept driving slowly into the crowd, and patterns of revolving red and blue light flared in S-turns and spirals beneath the wings, and fire trucks drove up and hosed the crowd. And the plane got wet as well. Drops ran down the windows. Sitting on the ground, all doors closed, the cabin was getting hot. The police cars had given up. The plane stood at the end of a runway surrounded by near to a thousand people and every spotlight in the airport was beamed upon them. Now the plane could not start its motors without incinerating a part of the population of Dakar.

More people kept flowing out of the terminal building toward the plane, streaming across the endless asphalt acres of the airport. Cars with loudspeakers drove up to address them and then drove away. Now a passenger bus arrived and parked and waited. Outside, the crowd shifted with
rumors. Individuals broke off and ran when police cruisers would start their motors. Sometimes, like an elephant thrashing in its sleep, the crowd would shift a few feet in one direction or another, as if one of the rumors had moved through their legs.