by Jonathan Eig
The Bronx could be dangerous any night of the week, but it was especially dangerous on the night of the fight as off-duty police officers, agitated by new work schedules and deferred pay raises, protested outside Yankee Stadium, blocking traffic, encouraging young men without tickets to crash the gates and sneak into the fight, and more or less advertising that no one was going to get arrested. Limousines were looted. People were mugged. Red Smith of the New York Times got his pocket picked. Still, Odessa Clay made it to the fight. She wore a long black evening gown and sat apart from her husband. The motorcycle stunt rider Evel Knievel was there, wearing diamond rings and cowboy boots made from the skins of boa constrictors. Also in attendance were the painter LeRoy Neiman, actor Telly Savalas, tennis star Jimmy Connors, Caroline Kennedy, and Joe Louis. The fight was delayed slightly because even the fighters had trouble reaching the stadium.
When the action finally began, Ali looked for an early knockout. He fought now as if he were Sonny Liston, a heavy hitter who liked to finish his work quickly. But Ali didn’t have the knockout power of Liston, and when he stood flat-footed in the center of ring and swung away, Norton blocked most of the punches or evaded them. As the fight went on, Norton was never seriously hurt. Neither was Ali, for that matter, but Norton was doing most of the punching. He was the busier fighter, the more aggressive fighter, the more artful fighter. Ali employed many of his now-familiar tricks, shaking his ass, winding up his arms as if loading springs before punches, and fighting harder in the final seconds of many rounds to leave good lasting impressions in the minds of the judges. He did an especially good job in the final minute of the fight of loading up and throwing a lot of punches, while Norton fought the final round as if he were confident of victory and no longer needed to take chances.
Ali’s jabs landed softly. He never shook Norton, never cut him, never slowed him. Through fifteen unexciting rounds, Norton landed 286 punches to Ali’s 199, including 192 power punches to Ali’s 128. Numbers don’t measure pain. They don’t measure damage. But in this case, the numbers told the story pretty well. Norton was the better fighter and the stronger fighter. He landed more punches, a higher percentage of punches, and harder punches.
When the final bell rang, Norton barked at Ali: “I beat you!”
Ali, having no answer, turned and walked to his corner, head down, shoulders slumped.
But Norton was wrong. He didn’t beat Ali — at least not according to the judges scoring the fight. In one of the most controversial decisions in boxing history, Ali was declared the winner.
“I was robbed,” Norton said, sobbing, as he left the ring.
Later, in his dressing room, Ali admitted that he probably won on style points. “The judges always like dancing,” he said. “I switched ’cause the flatfooted fighting wasn’t going like I thought it would.” Far from declaring himself the Greatest, Ali said he had triumphed thanks to diminished expectations. “I tell you,” he said, “for my age and all I been through . . . it was a perfect performance tonight.”
If that was Ali’s idea of a perfect performance, his standards were too low for his own good. After the fight, reporter Paul Zimmerman of the New York Post asked his fellow scribes who they thought had won. Seventeen out of twenty-one picked Norton. As did Joe Frazier: “You think they’re going to give Ken the decision,” Frazier asked, “as much money as Ali makes for people?”
A black reporter asked Ali, “How much longer can you fight with your mouth?”
“You’re an Uncle Tom nigger to ask me something like that,” Ali shot back.
“I’m asking you,” the brave reporter repeated, “how much longer can you fight with your mouth?”
“Long enough to whup your black ass,” Ali answered, not smiling.
Ali had fought four times in 1976 (not including his farcical exhibition with Inoki), and if not for the generosity of judges, he probably would have lost two of the four. Even his admirers in the press were beginning to describe him as washed up. “There is no question now,” wrote Mark Kram in Sports Illustrated, “that Ali is through as a fighter. The hard work, the life and death of Manila, the endless parade of women provided by the fools close to him, have cut him down.”
A few days after the fight, Ali flew to Turkey with Wallace Muhammad to meet with Muslim leaders. In an interview at the airport in Istanbul, he said he would probably retire after one more fight with George Foreman. Ali and Wallace, along with Turkey’s deputy premier Necmettin Erbakan, attended a noon prayer service at Istanbul’s celebrated Sultan Ahmet Mosque (also known as the Blue Mosque). When it was over, Ali made a big announcement: “At the urging of my leader, Wallace Muhammad, I declare that I am quitting fighting as of now and from now on I will join the struggle of the Islamic cause.”
“It has been my lifetime dream to be champion and retire from the ring and then use my influence and fame in the work of Islam and Allah,” he said. “I have many people advising me to retire and many people advising me to fight just a few more times. I do not want to lose a fight, and if I keep boxing I may lose. I may gain much money, but the love of the Muslims and the hearts of my people are more valuable than personal gain. So I am going to stop while everyone is happy and I am still winning. This is my leader,” he said, gesturing to Wallace Muhammad, “this is my spiritual teacher in Islam, and I want to retire anyway. Now he has advised me it will be wise. I have no confusion in my mind.”
Under the tutelage of Wallace, Ali was learning more about orthodox Islam. He bowed to say his prayers every day, and he often invited his non-Muslim friends to pray with him. He enjoyed explaining what the prayers meant and why they mattered. The word “Islam” means submission, or surrender, Ali said, and every Muslim knew that it was essential to submit humbly to God’s will if one wished live in peace. The daily prayers were meant to help strengthen his bond with Allah, to remind him over and over that Allah was all knowing, merciful, and eternal. Ali had never been much good at submitting to the will of his fellow man, a characteristic that had helped make him great. But it was one thing to question the authority of a government and another to question the authority of God. He found comfort in the words of the Koran. The prayers, he told friends, gave him a sense that there was order to the universe.
But even so, Ali was not sure he was ready to give up boxing. As he and Wallace Muhammad flew home from Turkey, the boxer began to waffle. He told Wallace he had already spent most of his income from the Norton fight and knew he would face considerable pressure to continue boxing, especially when he started speaking to people like Bob Arum, Don King, and Herbert Muhammad.
Back in the United States, Wallace praised the boxer’s decision to retire from boxing in a speech to his followers in Chicago. He said he understood that Ali might have trouble adjusting to life without boxing and might face financial pressures. “If he should lose his wealth because of his changing life,” Wallace said, “I would give him all the wealth that I have.” But Ali’s religious instructor expressed confidence, saying he was proud that the boxer would henceforth fight for God instead of money.
“Muhammad Ali,” he said, “congratulations for taking that stand whether you keep it or not.”
47
“Do You Remember Muhammad Ali?”
Movie star!” Ali screamed. “I’m a mooooooo-veeeeeee starrrr!”
One month into his retirement, he was in Miami, filming the story of his own life and talking about his future as a Hollywood star.
“This face is worth billions,” Ali said. “My roles have always got to be Number One. I can’t be the boy in the kitchen. Some big football star plays the waiter in the movie while some homosexual gets the lead role. I got to be the hero. Like Charlton Heston, he’s got a serious image. Moses. In ‘Airport’ he was the captain, a real man. Always distinguished, always high class.” And there would be no sex scenes. “Kissinger wouldn’t do that,” he said, referring to the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, “and I’m bigger than Kissinger.”
Prettier, too, though that went without saying.
Two weeks later, while filming a scene in Houston, Ali told reporters he was ready to end his retirement from boxing.
“I want Foreman,” he said. “I will destroy Foreman.”
But he was in no hurry for Foreman, who was clearly the most dangerous opponent out there. First, Ali said, he would probably fight Duane Bobick or Earnie Shavers. Then he’d take on Foreman. Then, most likely, he’d retire.
Meanwhile, Ali continued to shell out money as if it were the equivalent of his own opinions and he would always have an endless supply. One winter day in Chicago, he told his friend Tim Shanahan he needed to buy a birthday present for Veronica. He had just been paid for the Norton fight, and he was thinking about getting Veronica a Mercedes. Ali and Shanahan drove in one of Ali’s Cadillacs to go choose a Mercedes. On the way, Shanahan suggested that Ali buy something for himself, too.
Ali liked that idea, and said, “Let’s a get a Rolls!”
Next stop: a Rolls-Royce dealership in suburban Lake Forest, where Ali picked out a two-tone kelly-green Corniche, which sold for about $88,000, as Shanahan recalled. In 1976, the average new house in America cost about half that much. Ali drove the car off the lot without paying for it, telling the salesman to call his lawyer to arrange the financial transaction. As they were leaving, though, Shanahan reminded Ali that they were supposed to be buying a gift for Veronica.
Ali turned around and went back into the dealership.
“Do you have any cute lady cars?” he asked.
The salesman showed him a silver convertible Alfa Romeo and offered a discount on the price. When Ali got home and presented his gift, Veronica climbed in, looked at Ali, and said, “I can’t drive a stick shift.”
Ali gave Shanahan the Alfa and went back out and bought a Mercedes for Veronica.
Ali had been promised $6 million for the Norton fight, but he received a fraction of that. Herbert Muhammad received between 30 and 40 percent of Ali’s gross income — and not just his boxing income. Herbert joked that if someone approached the boxer on the street and offered him five bucks to urinate in a cup, he’d better remember to pay off his manager. Of the $6 million earned from the Norton fight, $2 million went directly to Herbert, and $2 million was put aside for the IRS. Ali also had to allocate funds for alimony, child support, property taxes, and the salaries for his drivers, security guards, and others.
It’s never the money; it’s always the money. And so, nearly eight months after fighting Norton and announcing his retirement, Ali was back in the ring, this time against the less-than-terrifying Alfredo Evangelista, “the Lynx of Montevideo,” who had never fought before in the United States, who had had only sixteen professional fights, and who had recently been defeated by a no-name named Lorenzo Zanon. Even veteran boxing people knew little about Evangelista. “You know what the big story of this fight is?” Don King bragged. “It’s that I got $2.7 million for Ali to fight a name in a book.” Even Ali couldn’t dream up a way to hype this contest. After watching film of Evangelista, he told reporters: “He doesn’t look like he can hit too hard.”
Evangelista didn’t hit too hard. But neither did Ali. Evangelista lasted a long, dull fifteen rounds against Ali at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland. Ali won a unanimous decision, but he hardly won over the fans paying up to $150 each for tickets. He did a little dancing. He did a little shuffling. He did a little rope-a-dope. He did a little punching. But, for the most part, he looked like a man who knew exactly what was required to earn his paycheck and didn’t wish to do more. Customers in the arena booed the action. After a few rounds, newspaper reporters stopped taking notes. For those watching at home, at least Howard Cosell’s commentary offered a modicum of entertainment. “It’s been a vaudeville act,” Cosell said when it was still the first round.
“I suppose this entertains the crowd,” he said later. “I can’t say it’s that amusing to me.”
When the boxers moved around for long periods without punching, Cosell commented, drolly, “Well, I always thought the best pair of dancers I ever saw were the Nicholas Brothers a number of years back.”
When Ali went to the corner, dropped his gloves, and beckoned for Evangelista to hit his chin, Cosell said, “I don’t like this and, frankly, I’m sorry that it’s on the air.”
In the seventh, when Ali failed to land a punch, Cosell said, “You have to begin to wonder how much if anything Ali can do anymore, because, at this point in time, as a matter of self-respect, you would have expected him to do something. Look at this. It all speaks for itself.”
“You don’t like to beat an old horse,” he said at the start of the eleventh, “but this has been dreadful.”
“You have to suspect,” he continued, “that there is little if anything left in the great fighter we once knew. Look at him miss. Look at him miss. Do you remember Muhammad Ali?”
Finally, he declared the entire fight “an exercise in torpor not to be believed.”
When it was over, in an interview with Cosell from the center of the ring, Ali’s words came out in a slurry of soft consonants and vowels as he plugged his upcoming movie, praised Wallace Muhammad, and tried to thank someone whose name he couldn’t remember.
Once again, even in a lousy show, even in a fight about nothing but money, Ali had been forced to resort to the rope-a-dope, forced to fight fifteen rounds, and forced to take 141 punches from a big, strong, young man. He won in a unanimous decision, but he lost in so many other ways.
A month after defeating Evangelista, on June 19, 1977, Ali married Veronica Porche in a civil ceremony at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. The bride-to-be informed reporters that she had already become a Muslim. Ali wore white tails, white gloves, a white ruffled shirt, and white shoes. Veronica wore a white gown with a long white train. The couple stood under a metal canopy decorated with white carnations. There were two white birdcages, each one holding two white doves. They honeymooned in Hawaii. But Ali was not the sort to sit on the beach. He preferred to sign autographs and shadowbox with strangers he met on sidewalks and in hotel lobbies, so Ali brought Howard Bingham along on the honeymoon for company. The honeymoon lasted only a few days. Afterward, Ali returned to the gym to prepare for his next opponent: Earnie Shavers.
Shavers had been twenty-two years old and working on an automobile assembly line in Youngstown, Ohio, when he’d visited a boxing gym and tried on a pair of boxing gloves for the first time. He’d climbed in the ring with a young man who knew all the moves, who knew how to bob and weave, to keep his hands high, to poke fluid jabs, and fire rapid combinations. Shavers had thrown one punch and knocked him out cold.
Between 1969 and 1977, Shavers won fifty-four professional bouts, all but two of them by knockout. “Me and George Foreman,” he said years later, “were maybe the greatest punchers ever.” They were certainly among the greatest. Shavers was not a polished fighter. He did not throw sharp combinations. His jab inspired little fear. He moved with no special grace. But he didn’t have to because he hit like a tire iron. He hit so hard, as one opponent said, “he can make July into June.” He hit so hard that Joe Frazier and George Foreman wouldn’t fight him.
Which raises the obvious question: why would Ali?
“God didn’t make the chin to be punched,” the trainer Ray Arcel once said. Ali knew his chin wasn’t made to be punched, but he also knew his chin could be punched, and that he would very likely manage to keep his legs under him and his head relatively clear. That confidence carried him far. But Ali was taking a terrible risk in challenging Earnie Shavers. And Herbert Muhammad and the others who encouraged Ali to take the fight were doing him a grave disservice. Ferdie Pacheco called it “an act of criminal negligence.”
They met on September 29, 1977, at Madison Square Garden, with about 70 million people watching the fight live on NBC-TV. An estimated 54.4 percent of all televisions in America were tuned to the fight. Normally, Shavers was the kind of boxer
who expected to win quickly. But he knew, as everyone did, that Ali was not an easy man to knock out, so he conditioned himself in anticipation of a long fight. In the second round, it looked as if Shavers would not need endurance. Ali was standing toe to toe with this dangerous puncher, not dancing, not ducking. If he had trained seriously for this fight, Ali might have defeated Shavers the way he’d defeated George Foreman: by moving around the ring for a few rounds, letting his man tire, and then knocking him out. But Ali wasn’t in top shape and wasn’t moving well this time, and, as a result, he wound up trading punches with one of the most dangerous punchers of all time. Shavers uncoiled a right so strong it knocked Ali back three or four feet. Ali looked like a 225-pound beanbag as his body bounced off the ropes. His knees buckled, but, as his body flew forward, he regained his balance. He grabbed Shavers for support, and while he was leaning on his opponent, Ali clowned for the audience. He opened his mouth and eyes wide, as if to say, Wow, that hurt! Of course, by clowning, he was really trying to convey to the crowd that it hadn’t hurt at all. After the fight, the New York Times compared him to an opera singer who fakes the high notes, a man getting by on fearlessness while bluffing to compensate for his diminished skills.
Shavers backed off a little to assess the man facing him. “Is this guy faking or is he really hurt?” he asked himself. With a minute left in the round, Shavers crowbarred Ali with another right. Again, Ali rocked backward, reached with one hand for the rope to balance, and then waved at Shavers to come on, to give him more of the same. Ali’s eyes were glassy. There could be no mistake he was hurt. Shavers belted him. Ali waggled his rear end, clowning, pretending this was fun. Shavers landed another mighty blow. Ali backed up, shook his head, and waggled his ass once again.