by Jonathan Eig
Ali seemed to make no distinction between a rival and an enemy, and no one would tell Ali to shut up. No one told him he was behaving immaturely. On January 24, 1974, with the fight four days away, Ali and Frazier met at a TV studio in New York, where they had agreed to sit with Howard Cosell, watch a replay of their first fight, and provide commentary on the action. They had promised in advance not to talk about their respective hospital visits. Ali was still sensitive about the damage Frazier had done to his jaw, and Frazier was still angry that Ali had been bragging that his hospitalization after the fight had been briefer than Frazier’s.
For a long time during the broadcast, the men played nice. But as the replay of the fight neared its end and the camera flashed on Ali’s ballooning jaw, Frazier couldn’t resist a potshot: “That’s what he went to the hospital for,” Joe said.
Ali looked at Frazier. “I went to the hospital for ten minutes,” he said. “You went for a month, now be quiet.”
“I was resting,” Frazier said.
“I wasn’t even gonna bring up the hospital . . . that shows how dumb you are,” Ali shot back. “See how ignorant the man is?”
Frazier shot out of his seat, removed his earpiece, and glared down at Ali.
“Boy, how you figure I’m ignorant?” he said.
A mischievous look lit up Ali’s face.
“Sit down, Joe,” he said. “Sit down, Joe.”
Ali’s brother walked on to the set, ready to fight Frazier himself.
“You want to get in on this, too?” Frazier asked Rahaman.
Ali rose and wrapped an arm around Frazier’s neck. Frazier ducked, trying to get away. “Sit down, quick Joe,” Ali said. Frazier lowered his shoulder into Ali’s gut, and then both men were rolling on the floor as members of their respective entourages poured in and tried to break it up. No real punches flew and no one was hurt.
Frazier got up and walked out. Ali straightened his suit and returned to his seat alongside Cosell.
Later, Ali and Frazier were fined five thousand dollars each for conduct that was deemed demeaning to the sport of boxing.
Four days after their televised spat, the real fight took place at Madison Square Garden. In boxing, as in movies, sequels tend to disappoint. In Ali-Frazier II, both men were a little older, a little slower, but their second clash was far from a disappointment.
Ali didn’t clown this time. He danced. He shuffled. He threw jabs and flurries and overwhelmed Frazier in the first round. He dominated again in the second round and had Frazier in trouble, but Frazier caught a break. With ten seconds to go, referee Tony Perez mistakenly thought the round had ended and interrupted a strong Ali finish.
As the fight wore on, Ali avoided toe-to-toe exchanges. He stayed off the ropes. He moved laterally, bouncing, using the entire ring, and he did not rely too heavily on the jab, mixing in plenty of hooks and combinations. When Frazier stepped forward and tried to shovel punches to the abdomen, Ali threw his left arm around Frazier’s neck and his right around Frazier’s left arm. Another referee might have warned Ali to quit grabbing and deducted points for the failure to obey, but Perez let Ali get away with it for the most part.
Although the fight lacked some of the speed and terror of the first encounter, it was more than violent enough. Hundreds of big punches found their marks. After five rounds, Ali slowed a bit and Frazier’s right eye swelled. Frazier landed strong left hooks, especially in the seventh and eighth rounds, but Ali responded time after time by clinching, thwarting the attacks. At the start of round nine, Frazier came out grinning, urging Ali to come and get him, and Ali responded. Even as his nose began to bleed and his face grew puffy, Ali enjoyed his best round of the night, scoring with speedy combinations as the crowd chanted his name.
Over the final three rounds, the fighters maintained a furious pace, trading big punches one after another, holding nothing back. The noise of the crowd at Madison Square Garden rose with the violence of the battle. It was close. The men had landed almost the same number of punches. Frazier’s punches probably hit with more force, but Ali moved more stylishly and appeared to be busier. Frazier wasn’t fast enough or strong enough to keep Ali on the ropes as he had three years prior.
Ali’s nose bled and his eyes puffed. Frazier’s face looked like an old aluminum garbage can, only roughly retaining its original shape. In the twelfth round, Ali shuffled and threw lightning-quick combinations, but Frazier answered with several shots to Ali’s head. “You gotta stop him to win!” Dundee yelled as Ali chased Frazier around the ring and the clock wound down. Dundee may have been inciting his fighter, or he may have genuinely believed the scoring favored Frazier.
When the final bell rang, Ali went to his corner. A strange mix of men gathered there: Ali rocking from one foot to another, Bundini frowning, Kilroy patrolling the perimeter, Rahaman and Angelo Dundee looking as helpless and anxious as soon-to-be fathers in the lobby of a maternity ward. The ring filled with photographers, reporters, and fans pretending to belong. Everyone waited.
Red Smith of the New York Times, always tough on Ali, believed Frazier had won, that Joe’s aggressive, thudding punches had done more damage than Ali’s flicking, backpedaling jabs. It may have been true. It also may have been true, as Smith suggested, that Ali won rounds because he was Muhammad Ali, the biggest star in boxing’s firmament. That doesn’t necessarily mean the judges leaned his way because they liked him or wanted to see him win for the financial benefit of all those involved in the sport. The bias may have stemmed from something simpler and subtler. Ali simply commanded more attention than other fighters. He fought with so much flair that it was difficult to take one’s eyes off him.
Whether the judges were biased or not, they came to a unanimous decision: Ali was the winner.
Later, in his dressing room, Ali licked an ice cream pop through puffed lips. He gave Frazier credit, saying, “He had me out on my feet twice.” But Ali had survived, he added, “because I’m skillful enough to get out of trouble.”
Ali had beaten Frazier because he had trained hard, fought cleverly, gotten away with holding Frazier, and displayed a stunning capacity for remaining upright while being pummeled by punches that would have floored almost any other human being.
Later, someone asked Ali how it felt to get punched by Frazier: “Take a stiff tree branch in your hand and hit it against the floor and you’ll feel your hand go boingggggg,” he said. “Well, getting tagged is the same kind of jar on your whole body, and you need at least ten or twenty seconds to make that go away. You get hit again before that, you got another boingggggg . . . You’re just numb and you don’t know where you’re at. There’s no pain, just that jarring feeling. But I automatically know what to do when that happens to me, sort of like a sprinkler system going off when a fire starts up. When I get stunned, I’m not really conscious of exactly where I’m at or what’s happening, but I always tell myself that I’m to dance, run, tie my man up, or hold my head way down. I tell myself all that when I’m conscious, and when I get tagged, I automatically do it.”
In the weeks and months after the fight, reporters and boxing fans argued angrily over whether the judges had made the right call, but those were just the usual paroxysms that follow close-fought sporting contests. Ali had won, and two facts were beyond dispute: first, that Ali and Frazier were great warriors despite their diminished skills, and, second, that there was already an outcry for the men to fight again.
38
Heart of Darkness
It was Valentine’s Day, 1974, and George Foreman was walking in circles around the parking lot of a motel in Dublin, California, thirty-five miles east of San Francisco. Don King matched him step for step.
Foreman was heavyweight champion of the world, yet he wasn’t happy. His marriage had collapsed. He lacked faith in his business managers. He viewed warily the celebrities and financial schemers who acted as if they were all his new best friends. He missed his mother, too. To Ali, the heavyweight championship had be
en a magic carpet ride, all thrills and fast turns and journeys to exotic destinations. To Foreman, it was the cause of sadness. It had created in him a “terrible emptiness.” He said he was growing “meaner by the day.”
Big George was preparing to fight Ken Norton, and the financial schemers were already pressing him to look ahead and make a deal to face Ali, saying it would be the biggest and best payday in the history of all sport. Foreman didn’t know whom to trust. Now it was Don King’s turn to woo the champion. As Foreman circled the parking lot, King kept pace, talking nonstop and waving sheets of white paper.
From one of the rooms in the motel, King’s business partner, Hank Schwartz, looked out the window, watching the two big men make their loops. This was exactly why Schwartz had hired King to work for his closed-circuit broadcast company, Video Techniques; he needed someone who could relate to the fighters and gain their trust. But now he wondered: What was King saying? Why was it taking so long? What were the papers in King’s hand?
Later, King recalled his conversation with Foreman.
“George,” he said, “I know people been screwin’ you. But I tell you this. I’m going to give you a chance to make $5 million. Don’t lose this chance.”
Foreman didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe Ali would fight him.
“I can deliver him,” King said. “I have his word.”
In fact, King had already met with Ali and Herbert Muhammad, urging Ali to reject a deal from Bob Arum that would have had Ali fighting a rematch with Jerry Quarry. King argued that Arum failed to understand Ali’s blackness, failed to appreciate how much it would mean to people of color all over the world for Ali to regain the championship that America’s racist white government had stolen from him. “This isn’t just another fight,” King had told Ali. “Freedom. Justice. That’s what you’ll be gainin’ for your people by gettin’ back the title.” Then he got down to business, saying he would agree to pay Ali and Foreman each $5 million — an almost ridiculous sum, double what Ali and Frazier had been paid for their record-setting bout in 1971. To prove he was serious, King said he would give Ali an advance of $100,000 for signing a contract on February 15, another $100,000 on February 25, a $2.3 million letter of credit on March 15, and a letter of credit for the remaining $2.5 million ninety days before the fight. If King missed any of the payment deadlines, Ali could keep the money he had already been paid and walk away from the fight. If King failed to reach a similar agreement with Foreman, the deal would be voided and Ali would keep the initial $100,000 payment.
That’s how King found himself in front of Foreman’s motel, pleading his case. King was telling the truth when he said Ali had agreed to the fight. King didn’t know how he was going to get the money to pay the fighters — he and Schwartz didn’t even have enough to make the first payment of $100,000 to each fighter. But that was a concern for another day.
“This is my promotion,” King told Foreman. He stopped walking and Foreman did, too. King pointed to the skin on his arm. “And I’m black. Here is a chance, a big chance to show all blacks that black men together can succeed like no one has ever believed we could.”
King thrust papers in front of Foreman. Finally, after two hours of circling the parking lot, Foreman signed.
Later that day, King found Schwartz at the motel bar and showed him the papers. The pages were entirely blank except for Foreman’s signatures. One was signed a third of the way down the page, one was signed in the middle, and one was signed at the bottom. King had told Foreman that he would fill in the blank pages with all the necessary details and show them to Foreman’s lawyer. They would decide which one of Foreman’s signatures to use based on the length of the contract.
In the end, King promised, Foreman would wind up getting $200,000 more than Ali. He had told Ali the opposite, that Ali would get $200,000 more than Foreman.
Ali versus Foreman would not, despite Don King’s ministrations, deliver freedom and justice to black Americans. But it still qualified as a big deal. After three and a half years out of boxing, Ali had fought his way back, beaten the only two professional fighters who had ever beaten him, and earned the chance to compete for the world’s heavyweight championship, the highest individual honor in all of sports, the title he had taken from Sonny Liston and the title the U.S. government had taken from him, the one he had dreamed of holding ever since he was Cassius Clay Jr., a skinny little boy training with a white police officer in the basement of the Columbia Auditorium in the segregated city of Louisville, Kentucky.
Ali was thirty-two. For years he had been calling himself “The Greatest of All Times,” stretching the last two syllables for dramatic purposes and adding an “s” to the end as if to suggest that one eternity wasn’t enough. “The Greatest of Aaaaaaall Tiiiiiimes!”
Now he would have another chance to prove it.
It had been twenty years since he’d first laced on a pair of boxing gloves under the eye of Joe Martin and ten years since he’d beaten Liston and announced his membership in the Nation of Islam. In the span of that decade, he had gone from hero to villain and back to hero again. He’d fought the law, fought racism, fought white authority figures who’d said a black athlete should ply his trade and keep his mouth shut. He had always been fighting something, even if, to the casual observer, he had seemed to be making it up as he went along, settling on his religious and political views as capriciously as a bird might settle on a telephone wire. He had a straightforward manner and an enthusiasm that made people want to believe in him no matter what he said. The artist Andy Warhol, who knew better than most about imagery and popular icons, had this to say after meeting Ali in the early 1970s: “He just repeats the same simplicity over and over and then it drums on people’s ears. But he can say the things that he can because he’s so good-looking.”
By 1973, American and Vietnamese leaders had agreed to end their war. The civil rights struggle had moved largely out of the streets and into the courts and state and federal legislatures. Time after time, on issue after issue, Ali looked like a winner, like a man who had been on the right side of every important social question.
Even in his relationship with the Nation of Islam, Ali’s instincts and good fortune served him well. When the boxer had first announced his commitment to the religious group, it had cost him popularity and endorsements. It had forced him to make a painful choice between his friend Malcolm X and his mentor Elijah Muhammad. It had made him an outcast from the mainstream civil rights movement. But, at the same time, the Nation had given him discipline and focus, it had given him codes by which to live, it had granted him a sense of purpose and community. “If it wasn’t for the Nation of Islam,” Gene Kilroy said, “he could have been cleaning bus stations in Louisville.”
Even Ali’s suspension from the Nation of Islam had worked out advantageously. The Nation was losing sway in American culture and beginning to unravel in the early 1970s. An investigation by the New York Times found that the organization was running out of money and that some members had turned to burglary, extortion, and robbery. To refill the organization’s coffers, Muhammad Ali had been dispatched to Libya, where he met with Libyan president Muammar el-Qaddafi and Ugandan dictator Idi Amin to ask for loans and donations. In Uganda, Idi Amin wanted to fight Ali and offered him $500,000 in cash for the privilege. When Ali hesitated, Amin pointed a gun: “Now what do you say, Muhammad Ali?” Ali said it was time to get out of Uganda. Qaddafi was friendlier and came through with $3 million. But the Nation still had problems. Elijah Muhammad was suffering from senility, according to the Times, and had lost control of the organization. Working in his place, John Ali, the organization’s national secretary, was seeking more funding from Middle East leaders and promising that the Nation of Islam would relax its strict antiwhite doctrines and move toward traditional Islam. As Muhammad Ali fought his way back to a shot at the heavyweight championship and his popularity rose, it was no coincidence that he had also stopped talking about spaceships that would arrive
to wipe out the white race, stopped demanding that white America turn over vast amounts of real estate to create an independent black nation, stopped referring to white people as blue-eyed devils, stopped praising segregationists like George Wallace, and stopped appearing in his bowtie and fez at Muslim rallies. If not for the prayer rug in the trunk of his car and the occasional cries of “draft-dodging nigger” shouted in his direction, he was not so different from a lot of other American sports heroes. In the 1970s, it was not unusual to walk into the bedroom of a twelve-year-old suburban white boy and see posters on the walls depicting Ali along with Mark Spitz, Walt Frazier, Pete Rose, or Franco Harris.
Not everyone loved the new, 1970s edition of Muhammad Ali. “When Ali came back from exile,” Jim Brown said, “he became the darling of America, which was good for America because it brought black and white together. But the Ali that America ended up loving was not the Ali I loved most. I didn’t feel the same way about him anymore, because the warrior I loved was gone. In a way, he became part of the establishment.” Brown was also troubled by Ali’s use of the Uncle Tom label to slander Joe Frazier and other black fighters, describing it as “hitting a little bit below the belt.”
Brown was right. Ali had moved toward the American mainstream, and the American mainstream had moved toward Ali. Proof came in 1974, two nights after Ali and Frazier had battled in Madison Square Garden, when Bob Dylan performed in the same arena. Ali had been denounced in the 1960s as unpatriotic, Dylan as a hippie folksinger. They’d each held their ground, but, still, there was sadness for some in seeing them now, seemingly hanging on in a decade to which neither truly belonged. The 1960s were over, and for all the noise and strong points protesters had made during that extraordinary decade, the sense remained that an opportunity to forge fundamental change had been missed, that the American government was as unresponsive and autocratic as ever, that America remained divided as ever by inequalities of race and class. The great rebellion had fallen short. The hippies were moving on, taking jobs, and moving to the suburbs. They would pull out their dirty old T-shirts and bell-bottomed jeans to attend Dylan concerts, but the next morning they would dress again in suits and ties and head to their office jobs downtown. Their strident songs and stances hadn’t quite done the job.