There are also the usual speculations, predictably fruitless, that Ali was on his way to South Africa. In August, matchmaker Reg Haswell was trying to set up a title fight with South African champ Jimmy Richards. Haswell pointed out that the country was on the verge of launching a national television service with the facilities for broadcasting around the world. He also mentioned a signed contract to bring Ali to South Africa for three exhibition bouts, this tour to be handled by the black company Reliable Promotions. Ali was expected later in the year once everything has quitened [sic] down.
But everything did not quieten down. When the SABC was launched in 1976, one of the first big news stories it carried – and also suppressed – was the Soweto student uprising of 16 June, which disturbed the South African peace once and for all.
Branko
When we were small boys, still at primary school, we tried to build a tree house in the Knowleses’ yard. We had some nails and a few planks to make a ladder and a floor, and we had a picture in our heads from Dennis the Menace of how the thing should be. Although we were barely strong enough to swing a hammer, we might have knocked a perch together. But the tree let us down. It was an old bluegum with a smooth trunk that took two of us holding hands to circle. The first branch was way above our heads. We finally got a few struts pinned to the trunk, but it was hopeless. We had the wrong tree! I feel like that now, trying to build a lookout for myself in the story Joe left me.
Ordering and typing up my brother’s drafts gives me the impression that I’m doing something. Why did he insist on writing in pencil? In interviews he said it made things easier to erase. Perverse. Working through the scenes from his childhood and schooldays, the territory I’m supposed to make my own, it finally strikes me how seldom I appear. Blink and you’ll miss me.
Watching ‘Overkill’ was good for me: it sent me back to the real world and the edit suite. I’m mixing a three-part doccie on hominins – not hominids, mind you, which is something else – and the pilot of a cop series for the Mzansi channel. In the evenings I go on typing.
Joe’s publisher calls. She’s back from Grahamstown and wants to know what’s happened to the book.
Which book?
The Muhammad Ali book, she says. She knows all about it.
Oh that one, I say. I’m working on it.
You’re working on it?
That’s right. It’s nearly finished.
The next day I send her an SMS: Btw the book is not actually about Ali.
Among the discards, I stumble on Joe’s notes about the Butterfly and Bee Bed and Breakfast, which now occupies the training camp at Deer Lake where Ali lived in the seventies. The guest book is full of household names: the Jackson Five, Tom Jones, Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer. In the opening pages of The Fight Mailer mentions the sparring sessions at Deer Lake before the Rumble, when the gym was packed with tourists who’d paid a dollar to get in. Elvis came out there a few years before he died, according to Ali, to get some peace and quiet. It looks like Joe was planning a visit because he jotted down precise directions to the place from Philadelphia. I could follow in his footsteps if I wanted to write one of those travel books disguised as a biography. Why go to the trouble though when there’s a mock-up of the training camp at the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville? I should go there instead and do some research at the same time. They’ve got boxing machines. You can learn to hit a speed ball, feel the power of an Ali punch on the heavy bag, even shadow-box with the champ.
Who am I kidding? That’s a job for a pro. An amateur like me must stick to the writing manual. I’m going with a multivocal text, or rather a bivocal one, if the term exists. I’ve kept Joe’s parts in the past tense, because he’s no longer with us; and I’ve done mine in the present, because I’m still here, at the time of writing, as they say. It’s harder than you think. Sometimes I try to sound like him, I can’t help it, I’ll work in a metaphor or an excessive, unwarranted list. He was partial to those. And sometimes I snaffle his notes. You can probably tell. That stuff about language, the leaves and the roots, all that crap about marbles, or that line about Georgie Baker and the beetles coming out of Joe’s mouth, I could never make up something like that.
Mainly I try to sound more like myself. It’s important to sustain the narrative voice, says the manual, and the reader should be able to tell us apart most of the time. I wouldn’t want to let my brother down, nor do I need to beat him at his own game. I haven’t forgotten what Em said when she gave me his papers: he wanted you to have this stuff because he knew he could trust you. You always had his back.
It’s nearly three years since Joe was murdered. Even when I put the book out of my mind, I can’t stop thinking of Ali. There’s always something in the news to remind me. Everyone’s waiting for him to die, the obituaries are already written, and that will just be the start. As Rita once warned me, every second-rater who came within twenty paces of him will write a memoir about it. Meanwhile the news mills turn. Some people in England have launched a campaign to give him a knighthood. Sir Muhammad Ali. I say, chaps, would you like some tea?
One night I’m flipping through the channels and here’s Laila Ali facing the judges on Chopped. Whose dish is on the chopping block? It’s hers. She developed some good flavours, but this judge missed a bit of crunch, that one thought the chicken was overcooked, these are some of the reasons why they had to chop her. Her head falls. Disbelieving, she sighs into her tunic: Not the Champ!
I should chop myself. Throw the book in the recycling and go away empty-handed. It’s been a good experience, the learning curve was steep, failure will only make me a better person. Fuck that. I should go weeping with relief. But my brother’s outline, patched together like a crucial piece of evidence and pinned to the noticeboard beside my computer, reminds me how little choice I have in the matter. I’ve got to press on to the end.
Joe
In the fading years of Ali’s career every fight was one too many. I’d put away the scissors and tape by then, but I remember when he was beaten by Leon Spinks, the gap-toothed no-hoper, in just his eighth professional fight. And when he won the return, becoming the first heavyweight boxer ever to hold the WBA title three times. I remember the fight against Larry Holmes, which took place in October 1980 after a layoff of two years. It’s not unusual for boxers to cry when they’re beaten; Holmes famously cried when he won this fight. More than a year later Ali fought Trevor Berbick in Nassau and lost again. It was the last fight of his career. I don’t remember it, which is a good thing. But like everyone else, I remember when he lit the Olympic flame in Atlanta in 1996. By then the effects of his Parkinson’s were visible. For me, as for many other fans, I suppose, the shaky middle-aged man was less substantial than the shadow of the young boxer floating around him.
In 1993 the papers reported that Ali was coming to South Africa, and he actually came. As history would have it, he arrived on the day Chris Hani was assassinated. Over the following fortnight, as the country teetered on the brink of civil war, he travelled to Durban and Cape Town, visiting mosques, meeting big shots, sports celebrities and fans. In Cape Town, he met with Archbishop Tutu and visited Robben Island, where he surprised reporters by lying down on the bed in Mandela’s cell. Later he went for a sunset drive on Chapman’s Peak. On 19 April, the day of Hani’s funeral at the FNB Stadium, he was back in Joburg. He met with Mandela, their second meeting, the first having taken place at Mandela’s request when he visited the United States after his release from prison. In the hopeful years after the advent of democracy, a long line of celebrities wanted to meet the world’s greatest living statesman and be photographed with him. You could fill a gallery with their portraits.
Mandela had boxed to keep fit when he was young. One of the best-known portraits of him from the 1950s shows him in a sweatsuit and boots squaring up to lightweight Jerry Moloi on the roof of the South African Associated Newspapers building in downtown Johannesbur
g. Among the records of the meeting between Mandela and Ali in 1993 is a mock-blow portrait in which the Great Statesman lands a linger-on left on the Champ’s jaw, while he winces under a shifty-looking moustache.
In my youth I would have gone to the airport or one of his public appearances to catch a glimpse of my hero. Now I was prompted only to take down the Pres Les box and page through the scrapbooks, where the world I grew up in had begun to look like history. Ancient history, people say, originating in the distant past, as if there’s any other kind.
Branko
Chris Lessing was a Johannesburg advocate who collected boxing memorabilia. South Africa’s ‘Mr Boxing’, as he liked to be known, owned one of the world’s most valuable collections of fistiana. In 1972, he travelled to the US to meet some of the legends of the ring and collect items for his museum.
Lessing was mightily disillusioned with every boxer he met. Jack Dempsey was brimful of false bonhomie – ‘How are you, pal?’ and ‘Nice to meet you, pal’ platitudes. Then again, as the owner of a famous restaurant Dempsey was obliged to be nice to people, Lessing conceded.
If Dempsey was over-friendly, Gene Tunney was too remote. He had an office in New York but the nameplate on the door belonged to someone else and his telephone number was known only to a handful of friends. You couldn’t just drop in to say hello.
Muhammad Ali was the biggest disappointment of all. Like countless scribes with a weakness for puns, Lessing discovered that the champ had feet of clay. Ali – or rather Clay – was a nasty bit of work, Lessing told Norman Canale. He is not a very tolerant kind of person. He’s objectionable, childish and vain…He’s washed up as a boxer. His speed and reflexes have left him, and he seems to treat boxing like professional wrestling – all face pulling and talking.
Lessing describes a scene he witnessed where Clay snubbed a well-dressed elderly White woman who wanted to shake his hand. Four strikes and you’re out. It can’t get worse, you think, but it does: he wears a bored, stiff expression when you are introduced to him. The comma in this sentence is faint (these were the days of mechanical typesetting) and it’s possible that Ali’s expression, as Lessing reported it, was ‘bored stiff’ rather than bored and stiff. Either way, he was not overly impressed with Mr Boxing.
How much there is of the scribes in Joe’s archive and how little of him. In these hundreds of pages of newsprint, dutifully cut and collated, there is hardly a line in my brother’s voice. To be precise, there is one. Before I seal the Pres Les box and pack it away at the back of a cupboard, I page through ALI II. Here it is. Canale’s ill-tempered article has the headline: ‘Clay is no great.’ In the white space below, in boyish ballpoint print that bears no resemblance to the familiar pencil scrawl, is my brother’s affronted retort: Speak for yourself!
15
Death
‘More lights for V’Burg’
VERWOERDBURG will spend R60 000 on the second stage of its street-lighting programme in the coming year.
– Pretoria News, October 1975
Branko
It starts with a late-night flash on CNN that Muhammad Ali has been hospitalized in Phoenix, Arizona, with ‘a respiratory issue’. The phrase comes back to me the next morning when the percolator starts to wheeze like an old man on a ventilator. The room smells of coffee; the winter sun slanting through the blinds lies in pale slices on the kitchen counter. As I take two mugs from the drying rack, I think: Ali is dead. I turn on the radio and it’s true.
I carry my muesli to the lounge and switch on the TV. ‘Boxing legend Muhammad Ali dead at 74.’ Rita finds me there when she comes through for breakfast. She sits down beside me on the sofa and says, Oh shit. Bang goes the book. And I mean bang.
I can’t speak. There’s an echo in my chest as if a small organ has collapsed and left a void.
The news of Ali’s death sweeps everything else aside, the weather, the financial indicators, the French Open, the Oscar Pistorius trial, the rescued circus lions, service-delivery protests, corruption scandals, the Zuma Must Fall campaign, the war in Syria, even the buildup to the US election. For the first day there is live reporting from outside the hospital and expert commentary over stock footage with subtitles. ‘Ali converted to Islam in 1964…Ali was convicted in 1967 for refusing induction into the US military…He mesmerized opponents with poetic jabs and lightning-quick footwork.’ This gives way to interviews with old rivals and tributes by young admirers. George Foreman: ‘A part of me is gone.’ Mike Tyson: ‘God came for his champion.’ The politicians arrive. Jesse Jackson: ‘A social transformer and an anti-war activist.’ The focus shifts from the hospital in Phoenix to the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville. Reporters are on the ground and in the air. Researchers trawl the archives to keep the newsfeeds fed. The twitter tape of celebrity comment speeds up just as the old news footage flickers into view. Don King: ‘It’s a sad day for life.’ I catch glimpses of Ali in TV studios and on stages. Here he is in a big afro and some sort of kaftan. It’s the Broadway musical Buck White which I’ve read about in Joe’s words but never seen. Now he’s talking to camera. The sound is turned down but you need no expertise in lip-reading to follow: ‘I am the Greatest!’ And now he shoots out a straight right and all four Beatles go down in a row with dopey expressions on their faces. The fans have their say. Men with white stubble on their cheeks laugh, weep, hold up photos of their grandchildren. Citizen journalists supply visuals of the mortuary van. Flowers are laid against walls and fences, candles are lit, balloons are tethered. In the small hours a toppled candle sets fire to a kindergarten condolence card in the shape of a boxing glove.
Jordan calls. What’s going to happen to the book, Dad? Do you still plan to finish it? The sound of his voice makes my heart ache. He’s been in London for eighteen months. He says there’s a book of condolence at the O2 arena and he might go down there and sign it for Uncle Joe.
The call leaves me in a sweat of anxiety and remorse. The warnings have been sounding for years: the man is mortal. He hasn’t been well for decades.
Rita is brutal. Ali has left the building. No one will be interested in your brother’s stupid book now. You may as well put it through the shredder.
A 24-hour channel devoted to Ali pops up on DSTV. The Ali Tribute Channel shows the fights, the signings and weigh-ins, the press conferences, the talk-show appearances, the documentaries and the biopics in relay, intercut with news as it breaks and commentary to order. The rich and famous troop in and out of frame. Here’s Bill Clinton: ‘Goodbye my friend, you were great.’ Here’s Hillary Clinton: ‘The Greatest – unmatched not just in power and skill, but also in courage and conscience.’ Bernie Sanders: ‘What a hero, what a great man.’ Donald Trump: ‘A truly great champion and a wonderful guy. He will be missed by all!’ Ferdinand Marcos – but he’s been dead for years. It’s 1975 and Ali’s in Manila thanking the President and the First Lady for taking time out of their busy schedules to receive him.
George Foreman: ‘You saw him on television: there was no one more beautiful. You saw him walking down the street: he was a beautiful thing to see.’
The passing hours confirm what I’ve always suspected: everyone knows what my brother knows. There’s hardly anything new to be said about Ali and the chances of finding it diminish with every teary reminiscence. The book is shrinking in me. I turn off the TV. All I can do now is defend my ignorance.
Coward that I am, I hedge my bets. I hit the record button on the PVR for the entire channel. In the end, once the book is finished, I’ll have six days of footage to go through.
The funeral is in Louisville on 10 June and I watch bits and pieces of it from the exercise bike, drifting from the procession to the tributes to the memorial service. Perhaps I’m in no position to judge, but there are signs of funeral fatigue. Just six weeks ago Prince died, three months before that David Bowie, and the big televisual death ceremonies have taken their toll. They
were pop stars, though, while Ali was a boxer and that makes a difference. Among the young sportsmen saying how he inspired them, the politicians looking for a platform, the biographers and experts supplying sound bites, among all of them the poor relations, the old survivors of the fistic scene, scrappers and scribes alike, with their battered heads and badly cut suits, are a breath of stale air. Joe would have loved them.
On the stroke of midnight the pop-up channel pops down. The news about Ali drains away and the buildup to the US election surges back up the tubes like acid reflux.
The matron calls from Silver Oaks. The place is in an uproar. Rita’s mother is offering to whack Donald Trump. Whack? Another Elmore Leonard fan. I’ve had a good life, she says, I might as well do something useful with what’s left of it. Who’ll suspect a little old lady with a walker? They catch me, what’s the worst they can do? Put me to sleep? Please.
I can see Gracie assembling a rifle from the parts of her walker like the assassin in The Day of the Jackal.
Joe and I didn’t live in one another’s pockets, but we laughed about the same things. A few days ago there was an American comedian on TV talking about the three indigenous American art forms: hip hop, R&B and stand-up. I wish I could share that with him. Also the report that on the wall of his office Obama had the photograph of Ali standing over Liston. Get up and fight, you bum!
I miss my brother. I wonder if he’d still be an American now, if he’d quote Baudrillard at me the way he used to.
The Distance Page 22