by Jonathan Eig
Veronica had noticed for several years that Ali had been slurring his words, but she didn’t give it much thought. She had also noticed Ali’s left thumb “twitched a little,” although in an interview years later she could not precisely recall when it had started. Her husband, she said, almost never complained about physical challenges. Ali’s biggest physical problem in those days was difficulty sleeping. It got bad enough that he consented to see a doctor. Many patients with head injuries suffer from sleep disorders, but the doctor who saw Ali apparently didn’t make that connection. He told the boxer that his difficulty sleeping was probably connected to his frequent traveling.
Odessa and Cash Clay expressed concern for their son and urged him not to fight again. “I thought he wasn’t walking good,” Cash said. “I thought maybe his hip was bothering him. I wasn’t sure about his speech, either, but the way I look at it, that boy has been fighting since he was twelve years old. A man can only take so many licks to the head. With the brain, you know, one lick can be too many. The way he talks, I noticed that at times, it’s not too clear. I told him to retire, not to keep going back constantly. Any more hits to the head, you don’t need that. But he told me he wants to keep fighting.”
Rahaman, too, urged his brother to quit. “He’s only flesh and blood,” he said. “I told him. He didn’t care.”
Rodrigo Sanchez, president of the WBA, warned that boxing authorities would not permit Ali to fight for the championship unless he proved himself fit with a warm-up bout. But that warning proved empty. As Ali and men like Arum and King surely knew, the lure of big money would overwhelm the reticence of Sanchez. It would also overwhelm the warnings of Ferdie Pacheco, who told one journalist: “Ali should not try to come back, absolutely not. At his age, with the wear and tear he’s had as a fighter, even when he’s trying to get back into shape, all the organs that have been abused will have to work harder — his heart, lungs, kidneys, liver. I’ve always had a great deal of trepidation about any boxer who stayed beyond his time . . . but for someone who has been in with such brutal punchers as Joe Frazier and George Foreman, there’s no way for him to escape the attrition that his body has undergone.”
When it became clear that Ali’s opponent in a comeback would likely be Larry Holmes, Holmes, too, cautioned Ali to reconsider: “It’ll be a sad day for boxing,” he said, “because he’s gonna get hurt.”
On March 8, 1980, Ali went back to work at the Fifth Street Gym in Miami. Rather than working the bags and skipping rope to get in shape for the enervating business of punching and taking punches, Ali began sparring right away. In three rounds with a young and unexceptional Argentine fighter named Luis Acosta, Ali looked terrible. Still, immediately after finishing work with Acosta, Ali went eight rounds with a better fighter, an undefeated heavyweight named Jeff Sims, who battered the former champion with lefts and rights to the head until blood began gushing from Ali’s mouth. Ali needed ten stitches. The injury was bad enough to keep Ali out of the ring for a time, and some thought it might crush his comeback plans. But it didn’t.
Soon after the injury, in an interview with fourteen-year-old Michael Morris, a journalist at Booker T. Washington Junior High School in New York, Ali admitted that he had “lost a little of my speed, a little of my determination, a little of my stamina.” And while he confessed that his reflexes had slowed, he said he was nonetheless confident that he was faster and more skilled than “the average younger man.” Morris might have asked if Larry Holmes qualified as an average younger man, but instead he asked an even more challenging question, one that adults out of deference almost never posed to Ali: “How do you feel about physicians saying that you have brain damage?”
“Brain damage,” Ali said, “I think somebody in England said that, or some physician in London heard me talk and saw my movements and the way I walk and he said I have brain damage. Sitting here, do I sound like I have brain damage?”
“No,” Morris said.
“I think I sound more intelligent than anybody who would answer your questions, and I don’t care who you talk to, your boxer, politician, president, mayor, governor; I don’t think nobody on earth could answer questions more better or more precise than me.”
The young journalist asked Ali how he would feel if he lost, if he wound up like all the other champions who “hung around too long and lost the title?”
“I’ll feel terrible,” he said, “oh, man, I’ll feel terrible. For me to go out and lose it after I had won, and for them to say he’s like all the other black fighters, stayed too long and went out losing, that would haunt me for the rest of my life.”
But Ali insisted there was no possibility of his losing. If he thought there was even the slightest chance, he said, he wouldn’t fight.
As he told another reporter: “You think I’d come back now and go out a loser? You think I’d be that stupid?”
Larry Holmes was one of twelve children of a Georgia sharecropper who relocated the family to Easton, Pennsylvania, in search of work. Soon after the move, Holmes’s father abandoned his family, leaving Larry’s mother to raise the children in government-subsidized, low-income housing. At thirteen, Holmes quit school and went to work in a carwash and later in a paint factory. He was still holding down the factory job when he became a sparring partner for Ali in Deer Lake. He was young and ebullient and excited to be in Ali’s camp, where he often reminded the older men that if they needed paint he could get it for them at a discount. Everyone liked him.
When he became heavyweight champion, Holmes did not go in for flashy clothes or expensive cars. Even his nickname, “The Easton Assassin,” was hardly a glamorous one. He remained married to the same woman all his adult life and still lived in Easton, where he used his boxing riches to build a $500,000 house. He bragged that he had $3 million in his savings account, more than enough to afford a fancy place in New York or Los Angeles. But he preferred Easton, he said, because he knew his friends would keep him humble and the police would cut him slack if he drove too fast or drank too much. His goal when he retired from boxing, he said, was to have enough money to open a restaurant in Easton and donate generously to the NAACP and the Easton Boys Club.
Holmes spent parts of four years in Muhammad Ali’s employment, working for five hundred dollars a week as a sparring partner. He learned boxing. But that wasn’t all. He also learned that heavyweight champions attract too many “fucking freeloaders,” as he put it. He learned that women could be a terrible distraction to a man who can’t control his sexual urges. But, perhaps more than anything else, he learned that boxers shouldn’t take too many punches, not in sparring sessions and not in bouts. There’s nothing heroic about getting hit in the head, Holmes said, even in victory.
Holmes did his best to avoid punches. He mimicked only Ali’s best habits in the ring. He moved well, and while he didn’t have a devastating knockout punch, he wore fighters out with his jab until they were ready to fall or completely unable to fight back. Holmes had a jab like a defibrillator. It was quick, it was accurate, and it landed harder than a lot of fighter’s hooks. Most fighters used the jab to set up combinations, but Holmes didn’t have to. His jab alone won fights. Ali had a great jab — one of the greatest of all time — and Holmes had an even better one.
Holmes didn’t want to fight Ali, but Don King talked him into it. King, who, as one writer put it, “would pick Joe Louis out of his wheelchair and feed him to Roberto Duran if the money were right,” persuaded Holmes that he would never escape Ali’s shadow if he didn’t fight him.
Soon enough, Holmes sounded like a man who believed it.
“I don’t care if he gets hurt,” he said in reference to Ali. “He been denyin’ me my just dues all this time . . . There’ll be no mercy in there for him. He either gets knocked out or he gets hurt.”
The fight was set for October 2. Don King had talked about staging it in Cairo, Egypt, Taiwan, or Rio de Janeiro. Instead, he settled on a temporary arena constructed in the parking lot of th
e Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Ali would earn $8 million, while Holmes, the champion, would get roughly half that.
To ensure that they felt safe putting a thirty-eight-year-old man into the ring with a younger, fitter opponent, the Nevada State Athletic Commission announced that Ali would be required to undergo a strenuous physical examination, including a brain scan, before the bout.
As Ali prepared to fight Holmes, concern for the older boxer’s health grew. A British doctor had recently told reporters of his fear that Ali had already suffered brain damage from too many blows to the head. Ali dismissed such concerns. “Only Allah knows about my brain,” he said, “so I don’t pay attention to all that.”
Others, however, took the report seriously. Ferdie Pacheco said Ali “used to be an electrifying speaker. Now he has troubles. He says he’s tired. He is tired. He suffers from tiredness of the brain.”
Bob Arum agreed. “Just about everyone who is close to Ali has remarked on the way he has been slurring his words and talking slower,” Arum said in June 1980. “I just talked to Ali Monday by phone, and my impression is that he isn’t as articulate as he used to be. And he doesn’t pronounce his words as well. It may very well be that he’s become a product of being in the ring too long. After all, the guy has been fighting for twenty-six years, and has taken some real good shots from Norton, Shavers, and Spinks in his most recent bouts. He should undergo a thorough examination prior to his next fight.”
In July, Ali did undergo a thorough examination. It took place over the course of three days at the Mayo Clinic. Two reports emerged from the Mayo Clinic, one from Dr. John Mitchell in the department of nephrology and internal medicine, which read, “Preliminary examinations would indicate that the patient is in excellent general medical health with no evidence of renal impairment or chronic or acute medical illness.” The other came from Dr. Frank Howard of the Department of Neurology, who wrote that he had asked Ali about his slurred speech. The fighter responded, according to Dr. Howard’s memo, that his slow speech was the result of fatigue, “and that he has always had some mild slurring of his speech for the past ten to twelve years.” The report continued, “He stated that he was tired on the day of the examination here and that he had gotten little sleep. He denied any problems in coordination as far as running, sparring, or skipping rope. He also says that his memory is excellent and that he can deliver five forty-five minute lectures without notes . . . Other than occasional tingling of the hands in the morning when he awakens which clears promptly with movement of the hands, he denied any other neurological symptoms. On neurological examination, he seems to have a mild ataxic dysarthia (difficulty speaking). The remainder of his exam is normal except that he does not quite hop with the agility one might anticipate and on finger to nose testing there is a slight degree of missing the target. Both of these tests could be significantly influenced by fatigue.
“A CT scan of the head was performed and showed only a congenital variation in the form of a small cavum septum pellucidum. The remainder of the examination was normal, and the above mentioned structure is a congenital abnormality and not related in any way to any head trauma. On extensive psychometric testing, he showed a minimal decrease in memory that was more pronounced when he was fatigued, but all other intellectual functions appeared to be intact.
“In summary, there is no specific finding that would prohibit him from engaging in further prize fights. There is minimal evidence of some difficulty with his speech and memory and perhaps to a very slight degree with his coordination. All of these are more noticeable when he is fatigued.”
The Mayo report raised questions. How much speech and memory loss did a boxer have to suffer before his condition prohibited him from engaging in more fights? How much loss of coordination was too much? And how did the doctors know that Ali’s cavum septum pellucidum — a fluid-filled space in the brain — wasn’t caused by brain trauma? This last question was the most perplexing, given that scientists had been saying for decades that cavum septum pellucidim frequently occurred among punch-drunk boxers.
Despite the questions, the Nevada State Athletic Commission granted Ali a license to fight.
With a month to go before the fight, Ali told reporters his weight was down to “about 226,” from a peak of about 250. Even at 226, he looked flabby. He had grown a bushy mustache — perhaps to disguise a cut suffered in a sparring session — and had begun dyeing the gray out of his hair. He continued sparring, often with large crowds of fans watching him. But for Ali, sparring consisted mostly of leaning back and absorbing the blows of his sparring partners. He worked with younger, smaller, faster fighters. He worked with bigger, stronger punchers. But his approach seldom varied. He let them fire away.
Tim Witherspoon was twenty-two years old, a solid puncher with good boxing technique, when Ali hired him as a sparring partner in advance of the Holmes bout. Witherspoon was excited to step in the ring with his idol. The first time the men sparred, however, Witherspoon was shocked. “I noticed he wasn’t that strong,” he said. “His movement wasn’t like I used to see on television.” Ali’s longtime associates reassured Witherspoon: Give it another week or two, you’ll see. They don’t call him the Greatest for nothing. Watch! Witherspoon watched, but he didn’t see improvement.
To Witherspoon, it was as if a shabby impostor had taken his hero’s place. But it was worse than that. It was frightening. “When we were in the ring sparring, he was constantly telling me to give him head shots. I was giving him head shots, but it was too easy and I noticed he wasn’t getting any better, so I wouldn’t really hit him with a full fist. I would hit him with like a slap. But he would get pissed at me if I didn’t hit in the head. It went on and on. It was easier and easier to hit him. And he wasn’t getting any stronger . . . I felt something was wrong with him.”
Witherspoon wasn’t the only one who saw it.
Newspapers in the summer of 1980 carried headlines like this one, from the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin: “Ali Showing Some Signs of Brain Damage.”
“He’s just a shell,” said Billy Prezant, a veteran trainer, after watching Ali work out.
“You can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again,” said Teddy Brenner of Madison Square Garden.
“He’s getting hit too much,” said Bundini Brown.
“You shouldn’t get hit that much by anybody,” said Dundee.
“He was lonely,” said Veronica. “He needed a challenge.”
One sparring partner opened a cut on the bridge of Ali’s nose. After rounds in which he did nothing but stand still and take punches, Ali gasped for breath. He wasn’t moving his head. He wasn’t throwing combinations. He wasn’t dancing. He was just standing there and taking shots. It got so bad that Dundee began to cheat, shouting “time!” before the sparring-session rounds were over.
Ali was losing weight but perhaps not enough. About three weeks before the fight, while training in Las Vegas, he was visited by Dr. Charles Williams, who had been the personal physician to Elijah Muhammad and remained the physician of Herbert Muhammad. Williams had examined Ali once before — when Ali was preparing for his second fight against Leon Spinks — and had concluded that Ali was feeling sluggish as a result of hypothyroidism, according to an interview Williams gave to the writer Thomas Hauser. “I corrected it,” Williams told Hauser. “I won’t say how. I only had a day or two to correct it. Let’s just say I corrected it and Ali whupped Leon Spinks.” This time, as Ali prepared to fight Holmes, Dr. Williams gave Ali a thyroid drug and a weight-loss drug. The weight-loss drug, Didrex, was similar to an amphetamine and was often prescribed for obesity. Regardless of medical advice, Ali began popping them like they were mints, happy that the pills seemed to melt away fat and boost his energy.
On the morning of September 15, journalist Pete Dexter was in Ali’s Las Vegas hotel room. Ali took a break from watching a Holmes fight on Betamax tape to get up and go to his closet, where he kept a scale and a tray filled with thirty different kinds of pill
s.
Ali picked out eight or ten pills to take with his breakfast, then peeked out the window, where a crowd stood waiting to see a young man named Gary Wells attempt to jump the water fountain at Caesars on a motorcycle, the same jump that had almost killed stunt rider Evel Knievel. Ali turned away.
“I don’t want to see nobody get his head ripped off,” he said. “They encourage him, but I know what people want to see when they watch something like that.”
Ali gazed at himself in the mirror. He lay down on his bed and his rubdown man, Luis Sarria, closed the curtains.
“As sure as you hear my voice,” he said, to whom it was not clear, “you and I will both die.”
An hour later, the young man on the motorcycle missed his landing ramp and nearly killed himself crashing into a brick wall at eighty-five miles an hour.
By the week of the fight, Ali had shed his gut. But he had also shed much of the muscle mass in his thighs, shoulders, and arms. Still, with his hair dyed black and his mustache shaved, he gave the appearance of a more youthful man. He looked good enough, in fact, that some of the skeptics on press row wondered if they’d been wrong to dismiss him as over the hill. “He’s 29 again,” crowed Pat Putnam in Sports Illustrated, as if Ali in his sixtieth professional fight and after a layoff of two years might really have one more trick for his fans, one last way to shock the world.
“Now that I got my weight down and I’m in shape, I know I can do it,” Ali said. “Man, I got confidence.”
But anyone watching Ali train knew the weight loss was an illusion. He struggled even hitting the heavy bag. Sparring partners barreled across the ring like there was no one there to stop them.
“He couldn’t run,” said Gene Dibble, a longtime Ali friend. “Hell, he could hardly stay awake.”
A month or so before the fight, Veronica Ali had felt confident her husband would beat Holmes. She was impressed with his conditioning, with his physique, with his attitude. But after Dr. Williams gave him drugs, Veronica said, Ali lost too much weight and lost it too fast. “Bingham and I both thought it was done purposely,” Veronica said years later. “Maybe someone bet against him and wanted to make sure he lost . . . We think that somebody sabotaged that fight.”