by Jonathan Eig
“We’re finished talkin’,” Ali said, as he turned and went back in the house.
But Ali was only getting started.
33
The Five-Million-Dollar Match
Time magazine put Ali and Frazier on the cover. “The $5,000,000 Fighters” the headline read. Five million dollars for a boxing match. Who could comprehend the enormity of it?
Only in America could such wonders occur. Only in America — where men hit golf balls on the moon, where miraculous little pills permitted women to have sex without fear of pregnancy, where electronic calculators were small enough to hold in one hand, baseball teams played on plastic grass, new cars rolled off assembly lines with built-in pushbutton AM/FM stereo radios with integrated eight-track tape players — only here could the great-grandsons of slaves each earn $2.5 million for a single night of work. That was more than baseball superstar Hank Aaron would earn over his entire twenty-three-year career in the big leagues.
The money alone made the fight something bigger than a fight and sent writers searching for grandiose adjectives and cultural context. It made Ali-Frazier a declaration on the state of the union. Look how far America had come! How racist could a nation be, really, if it offered such opportunity to a couple of black men? Never mind that the astonishing riches were going to black men competing in the animalistic ritual of boxing. Never mind that the black men were, in fact, being wildly underpaid while the white men promoting the fight would capture the really big money.
Never mind all that.
Ali-Frazier became the Fight of the Century because it was the first time two undefeated heavyweight champions had ever met in the ring, and because it spoke somehow to the strength and resilience of America, and because, no matter how you cut it, $5 million qualified as heavy dough. After a decade of rioting and war, it felt good to get worked up about something as red-bloodedly pure and simple as a high-priced boxing match.
Ali and Frazier both said they might retire after the fight, regardless of the outcome. Frazier with dead calm predicted he would win. Ali, in a long, rambling press conference, said he was going to “have a ball,” that there would be no need to dance or even put his hands up in defense against the slow, predictable Frazier. Boxing, he said to the assembled congregation of reporters, “looks frightful to you fellas, you sittin’ with the typewriter, and you drinkin’ every night, and you layin’ up with your girlfriends, and boxing looks rough to you. But this easy when you’re in shape and young and look good like I am. It ain’t hard. It’s easy. Boxin’ is easy.”
If fights were won with rhetoric instead of punches, Ali would have already scored the KO.
“It’s impossible,” he said, “for Frazier to outbox me, outclass me, whip me.”
Ali may have had more on the line than Frazier did. Although Herbert Muhammad was back in his corner, Ali remained under suspension by the Nation of Islam. He continued to await the outcome of his draft case. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear the boxer’s appeal. With jail still a strong possibility, there was no telling when or if Ali would get another chance to reclaim the championship. It was possible that his fight against Frazier would be his last.
He trained in Miami, saying he was trying to lose 10 pounds from his 228-pound frame, but even without his wife and children around, he was easily distracted, surrounded by a traveling circus that included Bundini Brown, Norman Mailer, the actor Burt Lancaster, Cassius Clay Sr., Major Coxson, and Ali’s ever-present brother, Rahaman. There were newspaper and TV reporters too, of course — a seemingly endless stream of them. Although Ali no longer lectured on college campuses or performed work as a Muslim minister, he still jotted homilies on notecards and legal pads and recited them now for journalists as proof that he was more than a mere pugilist.
“Pleasure is the shadow of happiness,” he preached.
“Yeah, man,” answered Rahaman.
“People are unhappy because they are victims of propaganda,” he said.
“Heavy, brother, heavy,” answered Rahaman.
Angelo Dundee wanted Ali to fight two more “warm-ups” before taking on Frazier, but Herbert overruled the trainer. In negotiating the deal for the fight, Herbert told Frazier’s manager, Yank Durham, that he wanted Ali to receive the same pay as Frazier, even though Frazier was champ. Durham agreed. Initially, the fight promoters offered each of the boxers $1.25 million against 35 percent of the gross income, but Durham and Herbert Muhammad held out for a flat $2.5 million each, or about $15 million in today’s dollars. It was by far the largest sum ever guaranteed a boxer for one fight, and by taking a flat fee, the men didn’t have to worry about whether the fight’s promoters supplied an honest accounting of total revenues for the event. Even so, it was probably a miscalculation. Had they taken the first offer — $1.25 million per fighter against 35 percent of the gross — each fighter probably would have earned at least $3.5 million. Instead of becoming partners in the business enterprise, Ali and Frazier were entertainers hired for one night’s work.
Tickets for the fight, to be held March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden, sold out immediately. Ringside seats were priced at $150 each, but they were soon being flipped on the secondary market for $700 and more. No one in the business could recall such buildup for a fight. The Hollywood talent agent who promoted the event, Jerry Perenchio, said he expected 300 million people in twenty-six countries to see the bout on closed-circuit TV. At the conclusion of the event, Perenchio said, in a comment that struck some as absurd at the time, he intended to take the fighters’ shoes, trunks, robes, and gloves and auction them off to the highest bidders.
“This one transcends boxing — it’s a show business spectacular,” Perenchio said. “You’ve got to throw away the book on this fight. It’s potentially the single greatest grosser in the history of the world.”
Ali, of course, embraced the spectacle. He promised to go back to his old routine of predicting the outcomes of his fights, only this time with a twist. Five minutes before the bout, he said, on live TV he would remove a sheet of paper from a sealed envelope, the paper containing his prediction on when Frazier would fall. If he were to win, it would be a comeback for the ages, a divine destiny, at least in Ali’s own eyes, and one of the greatest storylines the sporting world had ever seen: the martyr returns . . . with vengeance.
But strange things were happening to Ali in his heroic journey. The man who had aligned himself with radical black separatists, who had refused to go to war for a country he called racist, was suddenly and unexpectedly beginning to transcend categories of race and religion and attract a number of fans that had once despised him. Young people in America were seeking their own cultural voice. Like Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Muhammad Ali didn’t have to make perfect sense. All he had to do was stand up against the status quo.
He toned down the vitriol slightly. He seldom referred to whites as devils. He remained devoted to Elijah Muhammad, but he didn’t talk about that devotion quite as much. The change was a subtle one, and it put Ali in a tricky position. He had taunted white America his entire career. But now, as he resumed his career, the white establishment expected him to be a sportsman again, to be thankful, to play the games that public figures are supposed to play. And, to a degree, Ali went along. It’s not easy for a rebel to remain a rebel all his life. It’s exhausting. The world changes and the rebel adapts or falls out of step. The rebel matures and his values change. When a rebel drives a Rolls-Royce, it doesn’t guarantee that he will no longer be a rebel, but it factors into the equation.
“Muhammad Ali had become Lucky Lindy and the Brown Bomber, Bobby Kennedy and Joan Baez, all rolled up into one irrepressible folk hero hailed as our favorite defender of the truth and resister of authority,” Budd Schulberg wrote. But that was a big job, one that made his life a tangle of contradictions. Ali still wanted to be seen as the champion of black America, but he was becoming more of a celebrity-rebel, a winking bomb thrower. Time magazine cited Ali as Exhibit A in
an article entitled “The Athlete as Peacock,” arguing that athletes “answer only to themselves these days.” They dressed like Hollywood stars. They were as comfortable on TV as they were in the weight room. They organized boycotts and strikes. They criticized their coaches. “Nothing is deader than the old locker-room adage that there is no ‘I’ in T . . . E . . . A . . . M, or that coach equates with king,” the magazine complained.
As his popularity grew, Ali found an unfortunate way to assert his claim as a warrior for his people: he did it by attacking Joe Frazier with malice, calling him dumb and ugly, labeling his opponent a spineless Uncle Tom. His statements bordered on the absurd. At one point, Ali said only Alabama sheriffs, rich white men in white suits, Ku Klux Klan members, and possibly Richard Nixon would root for Frazier. If any black man really believed Frazier could win, that black man was a Tom, too. No amount of bile was too much for Ali to heap on Frazier.
He explained why he did it. “When he gets to ringside, Frazier will feel like a traitor, though he’s not,” Ali said. “When he sees those women and those men aren’t for him, he’ll feel a little weakening. He’ll have a funny feeling, an angry feeling. Fear is going to come over him. He will realize Muhammad Ali is the real champ. And he’ll feel he’s the underdog with the people. And he’ll lose a little pride. The pressure will be so great that he’ll feel it. Just gettin’ in the ring alone with thousands and millions of eyes lookin’ at you in those big arenas, and those hot lights . . . It’s going to be real frightful when he goes to his corner. He doesn’t have nothing. But me . . . I have a cause.”
Ali didn’t care if Frazier’s feelings were hurt or if Frazier’s son Marvis faced taunting at school from classmates who thought Joe Frazier was the white man’s lackey because Ali had called Frazier an Uncle Tom.
Frazier’s approach, in contrast, seemed far more humane: He said he intended to hammer Ali’s gut until his kidneys popped out.
On the night of January 5, 1971, at about 8:30, Geraldine Liston returned home from a weeklong trip and found her husband lying down, stiff and bloated, on an upholstered bench at the end of their bed. His feet were on the floor, next to his socks and shoes. He had a holstered .38 revolver on his dresser, a quarter ounce of heroin in the kitchen, a bag of reefer in a pocket of the trousers draped over a bedroom chair, and a week of newspapers stacked outside his front door. The coroner said Liston died of natural causes. Later, some would speculate that a drug overdose had done him in. Others would say it was the mafia.
Liston was forty years old, give or take.
When Ali got the news, he expressed admiration for his former opponent, saying, “He was an awful nice fellow and I liked him a lot.” Then, for old time’s sake, he threw one more jab at Liston, and a nonsensical one at that, saying, “But just like any fighter who gets old, he had begun to show signs of age.”
Less than two weeks later, Ali turned twenty-nine. He celebrated with a giant birthday cake with two chocolate boxing gloves made of icing on top. When he dove into his second big slice, he drew a warning from Jack Kent Cooke, the big investor behind Ali’s upcoming fight.
“Will you stop eating that?” Cooke said, in mock horror.
Ali brushed it off, saying, “I don’t have to train too hard for Frazier.” Frazier’s only chance, Ali said, was to score a knockout. But, he added, “I don’t get knocked out or even hit a lot. To knock me out, he will have to come in to me and when he does, he’ll get hit ten or fifteen times. It’ll be easy to see that Frazier is an amateur compared to me.”
The fight was seven weeks away. Ali said he would begin training in a few days. In the meantime, he offered a new poem:
Frazier will catch hell
From the start of the bell,
Then I’ll jump out
With Howard Cosell.
Ali was becoming wiser with age, or so he claimed in interviews. “I don’t like fighting,” he told one reporter. “Nobody human could enjoy beating up somebody.” After Frazier, he said, he would have enough money to last the rest of his life. He promised he would retire to a ranch somewhere in the Southwest with his wife and children.
Ali gave another interview while driving with a reporter in Los Angeles, saying that he had been getting instruction from Herbert Muhammad on how to control his emotions and moderate his public pronouncements, “because the results from a lot of my wild statements in the past, of not thinkin’ and mixin’ sport with religion and religion with sport, wasn’t wise.” But where Joe Frazier was concerned, Ali still found it impossible to modulate. “I’m going to WHUP Joe Frazier and OUTCLASS him and make him look like a AMATEUR,” he said. “He don’t stand a chance. It will be a mismatch. And people will be saying, ‘How could we be so wrong?’ ”
Don Newcombe, the former Dodger pitcher, was in the car during the interview. After listening a while to Ali’s bragging, Newcombe asked Ali if he had ever tried self-hypnosis “to make yourself believe something?”
“I guess that’s what I do automatically and I don’t know I’m doin’,” Ali said.
It was true. Ali was the kind of person who could argue for the fun of it but with absolute conviction that his ice cube was colder than yours. Wasn’t all that bragging a kind of self-hypnosis? But getting to the matter at hand, Ali insisted that his mind wasn’t playing tricks when it came to his upcoming fight: “I honestly believe I can whup Joe Frazier.”
The newspaper reporter turned to a member of Ali’s entourage: “Does this go on all day?”
“Yeah,” he said. “And every day it gets better.”
34
Ali v. Frazier
Imagine 10 million people, Ali said. Imagine if there were one stadium capable of holding 10 million people, a stadium so large that you could fly an airplane over the crowd and soar for an hour before you reached the end of all the people. That’s how many people would be watching him fight Joe Frazier. And those who couldn’t watch, those in remote towns and villages on every continent, would be waiting anxiously to hear if he won.
“It’s the greatest event in the history of the world,” he said.
At last, Ali was getting the kind of attention he had always craved. If anything, he had underestimated the magnitude of his fame. About 300 million people across the globe, not 10 million, would watch him fight Joe Frazier on March 8, 1971. If it wasn’t the greatest event in history, it was certainly one of the most widely viewed.
Before the big bout, George Plimpton threw a party at Elaine’s, where Norman Mailer, Pete Hamill, and Bruce Jay Friedman, among others, held court. The writers and intellectuals talked about boxing’s deeper meanings. They talked about Ali and how, somewhat irrationally, he had become a superhero to Muslims, poor black people, white liberals, hippies, draft dodgers, and just about anyone who believed the cards were stacked in favor of the establishment. At Jack Kent Cooke’s party, millionaires mingled with Hollywood stars including Elia Kazan, Lorne Green, and Peter Falk. Frank Sinatra and his Las Vegas pals had a boozy celebration of their own, of course. President Nixon had a special line installed at the White House so he could watch the bout everyone in America was talking about.
On the day of the fight, Ali, who feared isolation far more than he feared Joe Frazier, invited a small group of reporters to his room at the New Yorker Hotel. They watched TV.
Later the same day, Belinda dropped by the room, looking for her husband. He wasn’t there, and no one seemed to know where he’d gone. She became suspicious, then angry. When she phoned the room of one of the members of Ali’s entourage, a woman answered. When the woman spoke, Belinda heard a man’s voice in the background.
“Who’s on the phone?” she heard the man say.
“Is that my husband?” Belinda shouted into the receiver. “Is that Muhammad Ali?”
“Yeah,” the woman said.
“Put him on the phone. That’s who I’m looking for.”
Ali got on the phone. “What you want?” he asked, as Belinda recalled years later
in an interview.
She had been complaining to Ali for weeks that he hadn’t trained hard enough. Now, her anger boiled over. “Why you in there?” she asked. “This is what I’m talking about, Ali! This is just what I’m talking about! I’m gonna come up there and knock the hell out you!”
She hung up and went to the room and tried to kick the door in, but it wouldn’t give. She banged until Ali opened the door. He was naked. Belinda stepped inside and found a woman hiding in the shower, also naked.
“It’s not what you think!” the woman yelled.
“You know what,” Belinda shouted, “I don’t even see what I’m seeing right now. This is not what I see. I’m gonna need to kill both y’all up in here.” She picked up a steak knife.
“I was just on the street!” the girl screamed. “He gave me forty dollars! I didn’t mean it!”
In that moment, Belinda couldn’t sort out what made her angriest: her husband’s infidelity, his casual approach to the fight hours away, the fact that Ali would sleep with a whore in the same hotel where his wife and children were staying, or the fact that the whore was ugly.
“And I cried,” she said. “And then, when I said, ‘Look. Ali . . . none of this happened. I’m just dreamin’ this, alright? Because if you mention this to me, I’m gonna slap the hell outta you. I will swing and knock your head off. If you mention this to me again! Ever!’ He said, ‘Alright. Alright. Alright. Alright.’ So I left. And I was so upset. I might have been bold when I was in there, but when I got out, I cried like a baby. And I sat down in one of the hassocks in the hallway near the window of the hotel and just cried. And I got myself together, cleaned my face off, and went back down to the room with the babies. And then just shook my head. I said, ‘Lord, have mercy. What have I gotten myself into?’ I said, ‘This is not gonna last. This is not gonna last.’ ”