Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  “Huge but compact, clever with his fists,” Epeus so effectively radiates competence that the rest of the Greek army, including many of the Iliad’s most illustrious god-descended heroes, stand around scuffing the dirt in discouraged silence until a minor hero named Euryalos takes them off the hook by accepting the challenge. Naive, dumb, or brave, Euryalos gamely mixes it up with Epeus, who knocks his block off. Although the various translations disagree about the exact nature of the knockout punch—some call it an uppercut and others a hook, while most are content to say in less precise language that Epeus smote the hell out of him—they all agree that Epeus sees an opening in the other man’s guard and ends the fight in a hurry. In my favorite rendering, Euryalos goes down “the way a leaping fish / falls backward in the offshore sea when north wind / ruffles it down a beach littered with seawrack: / black waves hide him.” It is the Iliad, after all, so he can’t just fall over.

  In two recent translations of the Iliad—Martin Hammond’s excellent prose version of 1987 and Robert Fagles’s celebrated “modern English Homer” version of 1990—Epeus in his prefight boast says, “I am the greatest.” Neither translator has him add “of all time,” as Ali usually did, but “I am the greatest” has since the 1960s been one of Ali’s trademarked bits of the English language. (Another is that catamaran of a simile, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” which Homer would have appreciated.) Because Ali repeated his poetic formulas with such Homeric regularity, anyone who has heard Ali say “I am the greatest” often enough—and there was a time when most of the English-speaking world fell into that category—will hear his mildly hysterical but still Kentucky-soft voice coming from the mouth of Epeus.

  It may be startling to notice that Homer has been made to execute a flawless Ali Shuffle in the midst of his own poetic footwork, but bear in mind that the original footwork resembles Ali’s in the first place. Fagles described it as an “ideal coincidence of popular usage and Homer’s language.” He told me, “I wouldn’t have done it if I had to drag the phrase in by the hind legs, but ‘I am the greatest’ comes so close to the Greek.” The effect, he concluded, was only to add resonance and depth to the original.

  “I am the greatest” does not turn up in translations of the Iliad done prior to the rise of Ali in the 1960s. In George Chapman’s seventeenth-century translation, Epeus delivers a lilting “at cuffes I bost me best.” Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century version has Epeus saying, “th’ undoubted victor I.” In William Cullen Bryant’s American Iliad of the nineteenth century, Epeus is matter-of-fact: “In combat with the cestus . . . I claim to be the best man here.” Robert Fitzgerald’s often colloquial translation of 1974, done well into the age of Ali, does not use the phrase either—his folksy Epeus weighs in with “I’m best, I don’t mind saying”—so we must conclude that Ali’s effect on Homer has been uneven at best.

  It is an uneven effect but a measurable one, so that we are obliged to ask what it might mean that Epeus—a character in a book—has fallen under Ali’s influence in recent years. When we call the Iliad a classic, we mean, among other things, that it is living literature constantly given new resonances by the succession of historical moments in which it is read. It makes sense that Ali, who rose to worldwide prominence as television sports and news came into their own, has inflected our retelling of Homer’s boxing match. And the next line of Epeus’s speech—“I am the greatest . . . So what if I’m not a world-class man of war?”—now raises echoes of Ali’s famous refusal to be drafted during the Vietnam War.

  An expert punch, like a well-turned phrase, can take on a life of its own. Ali has given us plenty of both: punches like the near-invisible “anchor punch” that ended the second Liston fight so abruptly, or the series of punches that started Foreman on his long trip to the canvas in Kinshasa, his armor clashing around him; phrases like “I am the greatest,” “Float like a butterfly . . . ,” and “I got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” They come down the years to us and with us, kept fresh in popular memory, on videotape, in common speech and the talk of aficionados, and, strangely enough, in book 23 of the Iliad. The punches and phrases will outlive their author; they already have outlived his youth and vigor. As Muhammad Ali’s mouth and hands, once so insistently eloquent, slow down and eventually fall silent in the public forum, we are left to conjure with his handiwork and his words. They, and therefore Ali himself, enjoy the second life in popular memory that the Greek heroes held so dear.

  * * *

  Original publication: Book, October/November 1998.

  Champion at Twilight

  THE MAIN EVENT HAD gone the distance. Afterward, there was a press conference at which the loser had half-graciously accepted defeat and the winner had managed to half-insult the loser every time he tried to say something nice about him. The combatants and their supporters then repaired to a nearby nightclub for the postfight party.

  Upstairs at the club, big, once-famous middle-aged men in suits gathered at a table. Earlier they had been lined up at ringside like decommissioned battleships in port: the former heavyweight champions Joe Frazier and Leon Spinks; Earnie Shavers and Gerry Cooney, booming punchers who had both challenged for the title and lost; the former Dallas Cowboys lineman Ed “Too Tall” Jones, who had dabbled in pugilism; and Darryl Dawkins, the former Philadelphia 76er, who never boxed but who once dunked a basketball so hard that he shattered the backboard and (he half-believes) the life of the man he dunked on, who later killed himself.

  These dreadnoughts of the 1970s and 1980s were appropriate semi-celebrities for a nontitle bout with mostly nostalgic and novelty appeal. There had been no currently hot stars at ringside, no big-time rappers or supermodels, no Sopranos. But the bruisers in suits were an accomplished and physically impressive crew, all the more so for their advanced ages and filled-out frames. They had all been famous for beating other good big men—for pushing around and knocking down guys who were used to pushing around and knocking down other people.

  When Larry Holmes, the former heavyweight champion, appeared at their table in casual street clothes and with a long-neck beer bottle in hand, he instantly became the center of attention. The other big men called out his name, gestured for his attention, and raised their drinks to toast him. He had beaten Spinks, Cooney, and Shavers (twice). He had held his own as a novice when he sparred with Frazier in his prime, and he had destroyed Frazier’s son Marvis in less than one round in 1983. Holmes had never had the chance to beat up Jones and Dawkins, both of whom were much bigger than he, but next to him the two giants looked harmless. Holmes looked eminently capable of doing harm, as always. Hardhanded, resilient, solid through the body but light on his feet, he looked good for a 52-year-old man with 75 professional fights to his credit—even better when one considered that he had fought the 75th that very evening, the ten-round main event that went the distance.

  The other veterans had retired long ago. Shavers, who had moved to England, worked the after-dinner speaking circuit. Cooney hawked memorabilia and was trying to start up a fund for former boxers on the skids. Spinks, who never recovered from winning the heavyweight title in his eighth professional bout and losing it in his ninth, had spent most of the evening cadging drinks. Frazier, who was there because his 40-year-old daughter had fought on the undercard, had politely asked the fellow next to him at ringside what town he was in. They were all done. It could be that Holmes, too, was finally done now.

  Holmes’s opponent, a strong fat man named Eric “Butterbean” Esch, never made it upstairs at the club. He was waylaid near the foot of the stairs by an excited, good-looking, overweight couple who repeatedly assured him that he was the man. While they were talking, more flushed, soft-bodied people collected around them, drinks in hand, until Butterbean stood with his broad back to the wall at the center of a crowd. There were fresh cuts and livid red marks around his left eye. Women kept trying to hug him, and everybody kept telling him how great he was. He was one of them, a regular guy with outsize dr
eams, and they were proud of him. That was not some bum he had just fought; that was Larry Holmes.

  A week or so earlier, during the last phases of the buildup to the fight, Holmes and Butterbean were busy expressing personal dislike for each other in interviews. The promoter’s tagline for the event was “Respect: One will give it, one will get it,” and he hoped to present their encounter as a grudge match, rather than, say, a fight between an old guy and a fat guy. On the phone with me from his office in Easton, Pennsylvania, Holmes tried to do his part to keep up prefight appearances. “He wants to be the man,” he said of Butterbean. “He wants to run the show, and make out like I’m the punk kid. I’m a long way from being a punk kid. I beat guys he can’t even dream of getting to know, let alone fight.”

  Holmes had been the best heavyweight in the world in his prime. He had come up through the ranks as a sparring partner for Frazier, Shavers, and Muhammad Ali, then he had beaten most of his former employers and a whole generation of promising contenders. Having held the title for seven years (1978–1985) and twenty successful defenses, a reign second only to that of Joe Louis, Holmes ranked high on all-time lists of heavyweight champions. He kept company in these rankings with Rocky Marciano, Jack Dempsey, Jack Johnson—the big boys. His exact place depended on the subjective judgment of the list maker, but only Ali and Louis were unfailingly rated above him.

  Butterbean was a novelty act. At 35, he stood 5-foot-11 and usually weighed between 310 and 350 pale, hairless, near-neckless, jiggle-breasted, spherically distributed pounds. He once weighed in at 373 pounds for a fight. He came up in the early 1990s via Toughman competitions, messy affairs resembling reality TV as much as boxing, in which brawlers off the street exchange roundhouses like drunks in an alley. Butterbean eventually graduated to real boxing, although of a bottom-feeding variety. For most of the past decade, he campaigned as the King of the Four-Rounders, beating butchers, stiffs, and outright patsies in brief dust-ups. The appeal of these spectacles resided mostly in Butterbean’s girth and potency. People enjoyed watching him club down an opponent with crude blows after walking unhurt through the other man’s punches, like a monster in an old movie advancing upon a disbelieving victim who fires until his gun is empty, looks wildly at the useless weapon, and then throws it at the monster in a final act of desperation before being devoured.

  One principal mission of the buildup to the Holmes-Butterbean bout was to present the combatants as evenly matched, a grand old man against a young lion. On the phone, Holmes tried to say the right things about his opponent—“Never take anybody lightly,” and “They say he’s tough and he hits so hard”—but his heart wasn’t in it. “Look, I won’t lie to you,” he said, interrupting this train of promotional sweet nothings. “He ain’t somebody I should be afraid of. I can’t see that man getting inside on me. Maybe he lands a lucky punch, but I don’t believe in luck. Not that kind.” Now that Holmes was speaking his mind, a passionate note entered his voice. “Look, man, he cain’t fight and I’m a kick his ass.” So much for marketing double talk.

  When I called Butterbean at his prefight hideaway, a casino on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, he pushed the personal grievance line with greater conviction. “I don’t like the man,” he said of Holmes in his high, energetic, Alabama-accented voice. “He runs his mouth.” This was in part a reaction to a crack Holmes made in his autobiography to the effect that Butterbean was a “circus attraction” and “a fat slob impersonating a fighter.” Holmes claimed that his collaborator, a sportswriter, had put the words in his mouth, but he wasn’t taking them back, either.

  Asked to explain why he was fighting Holmes, Butterbean said, “One, I don’t like him, and two, it’s the fights after this one, after I beat Holmes, that matter. There’s not a lot of money in a Holmes fight”—although Butterbean would make about $100,000, his biggest payday ever—“but people are already calling about the next one.” He saw Holmes as a gatekeeper blocking his path not only to big-money fights, but also to legitimacy. Hidden somewhere in the breast of every good-natured buffoon is an aspiration to be taken seriously, and Butterbean, having reached his midthirties, was no longer satisfied to be a novelty act.

  As a novelty act, though, Butterbean was gradually attaining the kind of celebrity for which most legitimate boxers, even distinguished champions, can only wish. He had already had a triumphant cameo in a WrestleMania broadcast, and an adept agent should have no trouble working him into the TV mainstream with appearances on talk shows, reality shows, advertisements, perhaps an animated Saturday morning show. Butterbean vs. Mr. T? It could happen. He’s a natural for sitcoms, too. The King of the Four-Rounders clocks the King of Queens—ha ha. An overprotective dad meets his daughter’s new boyfriend, and it’s Butterbean—hee hee. Butterbean might spend many years in that kind of limelight, and he was already well on his way to entering it, but now he wanted to be accepted by fight people as a real boxer, too. He could begin to win their acceptance by flattening Holmes.

  The fight was held on July 27 in Norfolk, a Navy town that has seen more prosperous days and hopes to see them again in the near future. Some elements of a downtown revitalization are already in place. The USS Wisconsin, a decommissioned battleship, has been converted into a museum. There’s a semi-high-end mall named for Douglas MacArthur at the lower end of Granby Street, the old central shopping artery. Farther up Granby, the desolate serenity of a supplanted downtown is relieved by the presence of a couple of places to eat and drink and dance. The Scope, the arena where the fight would take place, is just off Granby, closer to the bus station than to MacArthur Center.

  Larry Holmes’s locker room in the Scope was big and stark: white tile floor, white cinder-block walls, buzzing fluorescent lights set into the low off-white ceiling, a row of mirrors framed by naked incandescent bulbs. Holmes, big and stark himself in white boxer-briefs and a red polo shirt, sat in a folding chair an hour before fight time. A half-dozen seconds and close associates were in the room with him, most of them wearing matching red-and-white athletic suits of a stiff synthetic fabric that whisked and crackled whenever they moved.

  The state boxing commission’s doctor came in to take Holmes’s blood pressure and to ask ritual questions while Holmes put on socks and laced up and tied his white boots. Any cuts or knockdowns suffered in the gym? No. Any recent operations? No. Any eye operations, in particular? No. There was an ugly mouse under Holmes’s right eye, which has given him serious trouble for years, but he didn’t intend to let Butterbean hit him in the eye anyway. The doctor chose not to press the matter. On his way out, the doctor passed the referee coming in to go over the rules. Holmes, who has been boxing since the late 1960s, knows the rules.

  When the referee left, Cliff Ransom from Holmes’s corner started working on his boss’s right hand. First he rubbed it thoroughly, working it into suppleness, then he wrapped it in gauze and fitted cotton pads over the punching surface of the knuckles. Next came the bandage-like wrap, over and around and over and around, then a cocoon of tape. Holmes helped him by flexing the hand and making a fist, testing the job at each stage. When Ransom was finished, Holmes smacked the newly wrapped hand into his left palm a few times to test it. One of his cornermen called out, “Big Jack!”—an old nickname for Holmes—“Knock ‘em out so they don’t come back.”

  Ransom started on the left hand, which required special attention because Holmes lands ten times as many punches with it as he does with the right. While Ransom worked, Holmes said, “He said he takes a good punch. We’ll find out how good.” When it was all done, Holmes didn’t like the way it felt, so Ransom cut the entire wrap job off with scissors and started from scratch. The second time felt better. Holmes held his hands out to a representative from Butterbean’s corner who had come in to observe the wrapping, as mandated by the rules of boxing. The representative nodded, then a neutral party, a fellow who worked for the arena, signed both wrap jobs with a black marker. Holmes got up and began stretching and shadowboxing. After a
while, he sat down again and watched the undercard fights on a muted television monitor. He sang snatches of songs, lustily if not well. First, “Thin Line Between Love and Hate,” then “Stand by Me,” then “You Send Me,” to which he improvised a new set of bawdy lyrics.

  All this time, his cornermen were mostly standing around and watching him. This is what cornermen do, an ancient routine enacted under buzzing fluorescents in cinder-block rooms all over the world. They have duties to perform during training, and there are times during a fight when they must perform decisively under pressure to close a cut, propose a tactical adjustment, or save their fighter from serious harm, but mostly they watch and wait and offer their warm, breathing presence. An old pro like Holmes no longer needs or asks for much advice, so his cornermen didn’t even get to take pleasure in passing on their hard-won experience. There was an easy, sprung rhythm to their routine. At any given moment, most of them would be still, but one or two would be in motion—pacing, or triple-checking a detail like the supply of bottled water and Vaseline. When one stopped, another would start. Every once in a while, somebody would call out something encouraging—“Undisputed champion of the world!” “Seven years!” “Big Jack!”—and the others would nod and murmur. Then the round of movement and stillness would start up again.

  “Old” and “fat” are not the disqualifying absolutes for professional athletes that they might seem to be. Watching a cleanly contested tank-town bout between an old guy and a fat guy can turn out to be a lot more interesting than watching two muscleheads clinch and roll around in a marquee title fight. And by any reasonable standard, both Holmes and Butterbean were in good shape, despite the failure of their bodies to conform with the ripped-and-cut conventions currently in vogue. Holmes was nowhere near as quick as he had been in his prime, but he was still very quick for a big man, and he made up in experience some of what he had lost in reflexes. Speed is power, as fight people say, and knowing from long practice when to throw a punch or block one is a form of speed. For his part, Butterbean was not fast but he was strong. Most of that strength was locked up inside him in raw form, inexpressible because he did not have the technical ability to put it to work as leverage, but he was still hard to move, hard to hurt, hard to stop.