Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  “If the robbers had known who they were robbing,” an Atlanta police detective said after the murders, “they never would’ve robbed ’em.”

  31

  “The World Is Watching You”

  Ali-Frazier was the fight everyone wanted to see next. Ali-Frazier promised the biggest payday in the history of boxing. Ali-Frazier would determine which of the two undefeated heavyweight champions deserved to be called the true champion. But instead of Frazier, a mere forty-two days after the Quarry bout, Ali fought Oscar Bonavena at Madison Square Garden in New York.

  Bonavena was twenty-eight years old, an Argentinian often referred to as Ringo for his long, Beatles-inspired haircut. He was a rough fighter with a record of forty-six wins against six losses and one draw. Although he had lost twice to Joe Frazier, Bonavena had gone the distance in both bouts and hurt Frazier badly, knocking him down twice in the second round of their first contest. He was an awkward boxer, throwing punches from all angles, seemingly with no plan or pattern. For Ali, Bonavena represented another risky choice, and if the Argentine beat the rusty former champ, there would be no Ali-Frazier, no meeting of two undefeated champs, no big payday.

  For the first three rounds against Bonavena, Ali did little dancing. He stood in the middle of the ring, on his toes at times, on his heels at times, trading punches, letting Bonavena hunch his shoulders and bore in, pounding away, making Ali suffer. Gone was the dancer. Gone was the fighter who pulled back his head to let punches whistle by. In the fourth round, Ali tried something even more unusual: He stood still in the middle of the ring, hunched over, and covered his head with his arms — intentionally taking a beating or taking a rest, it was impossible to tell which one. Finally, in the fifth round, he showed flashes of the old footwork, circling the ring and throwing jabs, but not for the whole round, and then he went back to lumbering around and trading punches with Bonavena. As the rounds dragged on, Howard Cosell, broadcasting the fight, complained about the dullness of the action and the disappearance of Ali’s panache.

  At the end of the eighth round, Bonavena stung Ali with a big left. In the ninth, Bonavena sent a wild left hook crashing into Ali’s jaw. Ali went reeling backward, his legs wobbling, eyes open in alarm. He collided with the ropes, bounced back, and grabbed for Bonavena like a drowning man thrusting at a life preserver. Later, Ali would say the punch made him feel “numb all over. . . . Shock and vibrations is all I felt, that’s how I knew I was alive. I mean I was jarred. Even my toes felt the vibrations. Bong!” The only thing he could do, he said, was stall for time until he “could let the daze clear up.”

  One more punch and Bonavena might have ended it. But he didn’t.

  The fight went on, clumsily.

  The crowd booed as Ali failed to deliver the kind of performance fans expected.

  “The world is watching you!” Bundini yelled.

  Even Herbert Muhammad was concerned enough to get out of his seat and climb up onto the ring apron to implore Ali.

  In the fifteenth and final round, with both fighters exhausted, Ali ducked a left, threw a left of his own, and knocked Bonavena to the mat. Bonavena rose and Ali knocked him back down. Bonavena rose yet again and Ali knocked him down yet again, winning by a TKO.

  After the fight, Ali had a cut on his mouth and a bruise on one eye. He was sore. But, again, he was the winner. Cosell climbed in the ring for an interview. He held a telephone with a long cord and handed it to Ali, saying Joe Frazier was on the line.

  “How ya doing, Joe?” Ali said into the phone. “You’re not frightened of me, are you?”

  Ali continued, “Since we can’t get along we’re just gonna have to get it on!”

  He made a few more remarks before Cosell interrupted. Television viewers couldn’t hear Frazier, only Ali.

  “What is Joe saying?” Cosell asked.

  Ali looked down at Cosell and replied without missing a beat: “I haven’t heard Joe.”

  32

  A Different Fighter

  He’s much slower . . .”

  José Torres, the former light-heavyweight champion, offered the diagnosis the way a doctor might: as a statement of fact and a prognosis of danger.

  Angelo Dundee saw it, too. For about one minute of each three-minute round, Dundee said, Ali looked like the Ali of old. For the other two minutes, he was sluggish, easier to hit, vulnerable.

  Years later, a statistical analysis of Ali’s career compiled by CompuBox, Inc., would confirm what Torres and Dundee detected: beginning in 1970, Ali was a different fighter. CompuBox analyzed sixteen Ali fights from 1960 to 1967 — the sixteen fights in which complete films have survived — and counted every punch. In those sixteen fights, Ali was at his best, landing 2,245 punches while getting hit by his opponents only 1,414 times. Put another way, he did 61.4 percent of the hitting.

  Over the course of the rest of his career, however, Ali took as much punishment if not more than he gave. He hit opponents 5,706 times and got hit 5,596 times. In other words, the man often regarded as the greatest heavyweight of all time was being struck almost as often he was striking his opponents. Even the 50–50 ratio wasn’t as good as it seemed, because the overwhelming majority of Ali’s punches were jabs, while his opponents employed more hooks and uppercuts, which tend to do greater damage.

  CompuBox assesses fighters based on the percentage of punches landed compared to the percentage of punches landed by their opponents. Boxing aficionados are generally wary of statistics, and it’s fair to say numbers alone can never tell a fight’s story or measure a fighter’s skill. Still, this is the most telling of all boxing statistics. The welterweight Floyd Mayweather Jr. ranked best of all modern boxers in this category, having landed 44 percent of all his punches while his opponents hit him with an astonishingly low 18.8 percent of theirs. That gave Mayweather an overall plus/minus rating of plus-25.2 percent (44 minus 18.8). Ali’s contemporary, Joe Frazier, a brutally efficient puncher, would finish his career with an excellent rating of plus-18.9 percent. Ali’s ranking, on the other hand, was negative-1.7 percent over the course of his full career. Even when CompuBox added other factors to its statistical analysis, including total punches thrown, total punches landed, power punches landed, and jabs landed, Ali failed to rank among history’s top heavyweights.

  Numbers don’t reveal a fighter’s style, or his strengths and weaknesses, and they don’t help describe the back and forth of hand-to-hand combat. But these statistics nevertheless raise questions about Ali. Did judges award him rounds that he didn’t deserve because he possessed a flashy style and seemed never to be hurt by his opponents’ punches? Was he winning rounds because he was the great Muhammad Ali?

  Ali posted weak numbers in part because he used his jab as a defensive weapon, throwing it to keep his opponents away, which meant he didn’t connect as often as other fighters. At the same time, beginning with his return to boxing in 1970, he began to pay a price for his relatively weak grasp of boxing fundamentals. He had never learned to properly block or duck punches because he hadn’t needed to. As a result, as he slowed, he absorbed more punishment, curling up against the ropes and trying to absorb or deflect their blows instead of dodging them. Ali let some of the strongest men in the world punch, punch, punch, until their arms grew weary and their breath grew short — and then he would fight back. That strategy would come to be called the “rope-a-dope,” a name that suggested Ali’s opponents were falling into a clever trap. In the last stage of his career, as he relied increasingly on “rope-a-dope,” Ali would compile a rating of minus-9.8 percent. In his final nine fights, Ali would end up absorbing 2,197 punches while landing only 1,349. More telling: Ali would be out-hit with power shots in those last nine fights by a count of 1,565 to 833. In his two final fights, opponents would land 371 power punches to Ali’s 51.

  By all these statistical measures, the man who called himself “The Greatest” was below average for much of his career.

  Although the numbers would not become clear
until many years later, Torres and Dundee were not the only ones who noticed dramatic changes upon Ali’s return from his exile. Ferdie Pacheco, who called himself “The Fight Doctor,” said that in 1970 Ali began complaining of soreness in his hands. That’s when Pacheco began numbing the boxer’s fists before fights with cortisone and an anesthetic called Xylazine, two shots in each hand. “Ali’s hands were so shot he couldn’t hit a pillow,” Gene Kilroy said. The drugs gave Ali the confidence he needed to punch hard, but there was risk involved. If Ali couldn’t feel the pain, he was exposing the structure of his hands to more damage. It was a risk he deemed worth taking, considering that his livelihood was on the line. Later, Kilroy introduced Ali to an orthopedic surgeon who recommended the boxer soak his hands in paraffin wax, which helped ease the pain. But nothing could be done about the fighter’s legs.

  “Ali came back and his legs weren’t like they’d been before,” Pacheco told writer Thomas Hauser. “And when he lost his legs, he lost his first line of defense. That was when he discovered something which was both very good and very bad . . . He discovered he could take a punch. Before the layoff, he wouldn’t let anyone touch him in the gym. Workouts consisted of Ali running and saying, ‘This guy can’t hit me.’ But afterward, when he couldn’t run that way anymore, he found he could dog it. He could run for a round and rest for a round, and let himself get punched against the ropes . . . And when he started to get lazy in the gym, which came before his greatest glories, that was the beginning of the end.”

  When Pacheco was asked years later why he helped Ali continue fighting despite the boxer’s diminished skills, he responded angrily, rising from his chair as he spoke: “You’re in the corner to keep them fighting,” he said, “not to tell them not to fight. If you didn’t tell them to fight, you were fired immediately.”

  Ali and Oscar Bonavena had fought more or less to a draw statistically. Ali had landed 191 punches compared to Bonavena’s 186, while Bonavena had landed more power punches, 152 to 97. In his locker room after the fight, Ali was modest and thoughtful. He said he hadn’t trained as hard as he should have. He wondered aloud if his reflexes had slowed. But Ali was still the heavyweight champion of cockiness, and his swagger quickly returned. “Tonight I did what Frazier wasn’t able to do in twenty-five rounds,” he said. “People said I couldn’t take a punch and I took everything he threw, and he hits hard . . . People said I had to cut a man to stop him, and I took him out with a left hook, a fighter who fought the best and was never knocked out in his life before.”

  After Bonavena, Ali might have been wise to schedule another fight or two against soft competition while working to get back shape, but that wasn’t his plan. Instead, he intended to fight the man who had taken possession of his championship title, the man who would become his greatest rival. He explained his plan in verse:

  Maybe this will shock and amaze ya

  But I’m gonna retire Joe Frazier.

  Ernest Hemingway once said, “If you fight a great left-hooker, sooner or later he will knock you on your deletion. He will get the left out where you can’t see it, and in it comes like a brick. Life is the greatest left-hooker so far, although many say it was Charley White of Chicago.”

  Life is indeed a great left-hooker. Charley White was, too. But ask a boxing fan of the late twentieth century, and he’ll likely tell you that Smokin’ Joe Frazier was the greatest of all.

  Joseph Frazier was born January 12, 1944, in Beaufort, South Carolina. He was the son of farmhands and the second youngest of ten children, a position that may have inclined him toward a career in fighting. If nothing else, it toughened him. At fifteen, Frazier quit school and moved to New York City to make money. When jobs proved difficult to find, he stole cars instead. He moved to Philadelphia, where he went to work in a slaughterhouse and where he pretended to be Joe Louis, hitting the heavy bag as he punched sides of beef in a refrigerated meat locker. In 1961, at the relatively late age of seventeen, he learned boxing under the trainer Yancey “Yank” Durham, a light-skinned black man with gray hair and a gray mustache, who knew as well as any trainer in the world how to take a tough kid off the street and make him a professional pugilist. Frazier’s belief in Durham was total. When they traveled, Durham made his fighters double up in hotel rooms and he made them keep the bathroom doors open so no one could masturbate, his theory being that even the slightest bit of sexual activity would sap a fighter’s vital energies. Three years after meeting Durham, Frazier won the Olympic gold medal. By 1968, he was heavyweight champion.

  Frazier surprised. He looked too small at five-foot-eleven to be a heavyweight champion. Some said he was blind or nearly blind in his left eye. But he had a crooked left arm perfect for hooking, and he used that left hook to keep his wary opponents moving to his right, where he could see them better. He also had a good chin, rock-hard concentration, and a relentless style that made it all but impossible for opponents to mount a prolonged attack or a reliable defense. Frazier was a raging, bobbing, battering puncher who moved relentlessly in on his opponent’s gut, crouching, slamming, pummeling, until he was ready to deliver that deadly hook. “Frazier was the human equivalent of a war machine,” Norman Mailer wrote.

  Frazier earned the nickname Smoke, or Smokin’ Joe, because, like smoke, he seemed to be everywhere at one time, shapeless, immovable, rolling, smothering. Getting hit by Joe Frazier, one of his sparring partners said, was like getting run over by a bus — except a bus only hit you once.

  Frazier was suited perfectly to serve as Ali’s foil. While Ali danced, Frazier barreled. While Ali relied on the jab, Frazier’s best punch was the left hook, the punch that had given Ali trouble ever since he first stepped into a boxing ring. While Ali had taken up boxing with dreams of becoming the greatest of all time, Frazier had done so hoping to lose weight. While Ali was the “black Adonis on parade,” as Time called him, Frazier was “awkward and introspective, given to sullen moods he called ‘the slouchies.’ ” While Ali rhymed and bragged, Frazier spoke in the plainest terms and made little effort to charm the public. “I like it, fighting,” he once said. “There’s a man out there trying to take what you got. You’re supposed to destroy him. He’s trying to do the same to you. Why should you have pity on him?”

  In the summer before his comeback, Ali had challenged Frazier to fight in Frazier’s gym, and later in a public park, in their street clothes, before a crowd that had gathered spontaneously. Frazier had refused to take the bait. After Frazier had decimated Jimmy Ellis, one of Ali’s former sparring partners, Ali made this appraisal of the man who had taken his championship title: “Frazier ain’t got no rhythm,” he said. “He just keeps coming, punching from his knees up. Ducks and keeps coming, trying to get you on the ropes and hold you like some old robot. There wasn’t no boxing in that fight with Ellis. When I was fighting, I boxed. You remember? Pop, pop, pop, pop — dance around — pip, pip, pip, real fast — dancing and faking — WHAARUP! — back off and circle — pop, pop, rat-a-ta-rata-ta-ta like a typewriter — POW! That’s championship fighting. Frazier can’t do things like that. He’s an old plowhorse . . . But against Ellis he was pretty good for his kind of fighter. He wasn’t afraid of nothing Ellis threw, he just kept on coming. And he had a tricky, fast left jab that surprised me.”

  Frazier liked Ali. He thought they’d established a real friendship. But one day in the autumn of 1969, when Frazier was in the gym with his friend Gypsy Joe Harris, he heard Ali’s voice over the radio. Ali was doing an interview with WHAT-AM in Philadelphia, and he was calling Frazier a coward; a classless, clumsy fighter; an Uncle Tom. Frazier got so mad he crushed the radio with his foot, as Gypsy Joe Harris recalled in an interview with journalist Mark Kram. Over the radio, Ali challenged Frazier to meet him at a nearby gym to fight, immediately, for no money, to prove who was the better man. Frazier showed up at the gym but refused to fight, even as Ali once again called him names. After yet another similar incident, Frazier got so angry he drove to Ali’s house to de
mand an apology.

  Ali came to the door with some of his Muslim friends by his side. He told Frazier it was all in fun, that he was merely trying to promote their rivalry. Frazier said he didn’t think it was fun, and he didn’t like having his manhood or his blackness questioned. Ali had no right, he said. Ali had never plowed a field or worked ankle-deep in cow blood. Ali was the one with a white trainer in his corner, the one who’d been bankrolled by a bunch of wealthy white Kentuckians, the one with white lawyers keeping him out of jail, the one who clowned with Howard Cosell like they were vaudeville partners. Who was he to call Frazier a Tom?

  “Coward? Uncle Tom?” Frazier said. “Only one I’ve been Tommin’ for is you!” he said, according to Gypsy Joe, who was at Frazier’s side. “Those sorry-ass Muslims leadin’ you on me. It gonna stop right here.”

  “Don’t talk about my religion,” Ali said. “I can’t let ya do that. Go home and cool down.”

  “Ain’t ever gonna be coolin’ down now,” Frazier said. “Fuck your religion. We’re talking about me. Who I am.” Joe extended a hand. “This is black. You can’t take who I am. You turn on a friend for what? So you impress those Muslim fools, so you be the big man?”