by Jonathan Eig
Two days before the bout, Ali went out for his usual early morning run. Temperatures at dawn that week in Las Vegas were about seventy degrees — not ideal running weather, but not dreadful either. Still, Ali conked out quickly, unable to run a mile. After one of those morning runs the week of the fight, Ali collapsed on the side of the road. He was taken to a hospital and treated for dehydration, according to Larry Kolb, who was Ali’s friend and advisor.
When Kolb asked Hebert Muhammad what had happened, Herbert told him: “The dumb nigger tripled his doses.” Still, Herbert insisted Ali had to fight Holmes; too much money was on the line to cancel the bout.
On the day of the fight, Tim Witherspoon said he overheard Ali’s boxing and business managers discussing whether it was safe to let Ali step in the ring. He heard them using the words “dehydration” and “thyroid.” Witherspoon had his own strong opinion. He had sparred with Ali for months. He had seen Ali’s condition go from bad to slightly better to worse than ever. He was certain Ali would lose. But he wasn’t worried about Ali losing; he was worried about Ali getting killed.
Moments before the fight, when his boxing trunks were on, his shoes laced, and his hands taped, as members of the entourage stood by nervously, Ali stretched out on a red chaise lounge chair and napped. Soon, he was up and headed toward the ring. The makeshift arena was hot, crowded, and fogged with cigarette smoke. Ali dragged his feet as he walked, shoulders slumped. His was not the body language usually associated with a challenger for boxing’s heavyweight crown. It was certainly not the body language of a man primed to engage in violent, hand-to-hand conflict. Once he was in the ring, under the bright lights, Ali perked up slightly, urging fans to boo his opponent, pretending he wanted to begin the battle right away, before the bell. But the act was hardly convincing. If anything, he looked inebriated.
“I’m your master!” Ali yelled at Holmes.
Holmes stood stiff as a statue, glaring.
For the first minute or two of the fight, Holmes approached cautiously, as if waiting to see Ali’s game plan. But when Ali didn’t reveal one and didn’t attempt to inflict damage, Holmes attacked with that resolute jab. Holmes jabbed and jabbed, and Ali gave no response. It appeared that Ali could not get out of the way, could not fight back. If his brain was telling his body to do either of these things, his body was failing to respond.
After the first round, he slumped on his stool, already exhausted.
“Oh, God,” he thought to himself, as he would say later, “I still have fourteen rounds to go.”
In round two, Ali landed one punch. One feeble punch. Still, he was a legend, so the crowd offered encouragement. “Ali! Ali!” they chanted. Ali responded by blocking more jabs with his face. Unable to fight back, he attempted to display bravado, pointing to his chin and telling Holmes to hit him again. Holmes did. Over and over.
The arena was so steamy even the reporters and fans were perspiring through their shirts. While Holmes’s body glistened, no sweat glistened on Ali’s body. His eyes glazed like a man in a stupor. He blinked as if trying to clear his head.
After three rounds of championship boxing, Ali appeared to be losing by default. He had landed only five punches. Meanwhile, Holmes continued popping that nasty jab. Every time he was hit, Ali appeared surprised, as if wondering where the fist had come from and why he hadn’t tried to get out of its way.
Still, Ali’s fans as well as the assembled journalists waited. They’d seen Ali start slowly before. They’d seen him play tricks with his opponents. They hung on to hope.
In the fifth, finally, Ali came out dancing, moving in circles around the ring. But he threw no punches as he danced, and when the dancing stopped, there was nothing for him to do but absorb more punches. His eyes grew red and puffy as more jabs found his face. In the final seconds of the round, Holmes threw a series of left leads that hurt Ali badly. The punch tally after five rounds was shocking: 141 shots landed for Holmes, 12 for Ali.
“You start punching or I’m going to stop it,” Dundee yelled at his fighter.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Ali said.
The crowd began to boo. Ali had been heckled many times before — taunted for his abrasive personality, for his politics, his religion, his clowning — but never before in more than a quarter century of competitive boxing had he been scorned for sheer lack of ability. Ali had no answer — not for the crowd and not for Holmes. He just leaned against a turnbuckle and barked at Holmes, his mouth the only thing working: “Hit! Hit! Hit!” he said.
In the seventh, Ali tried again. He danced a little. He attempted the jab, once his most effective punch, but found it no longer traveled quickly enough to reach its intended target. After a minute and fifteen seconds of dancing and punching at air, he wore himself out. It was as close as he would come all night to looking like a boxer, and it wasn’t close enough. It was if he were putting on for audiences around the world a demonstration of the effects of aging — or, worse, boxing-related brain damage.
After the eighth round, Ali sat on his stool, his face swollen, both eyes blackened with bruises. Bundini Brown leaned in, tapping Ali’s shoulder, trying to do the thing he’d always done best, getting Ali’s attention, riling him, sparking him, finding words that would inspire. Ali stared ahead in silence, breathing hard through his open mouth. He gave no response. In the opposite corner, Holmes asked his trainer for advice, but not the kind fighters usually seek in the chaos of battle. He was hitting Ali at will. It was too easy. He was afraid he might seriously hurt his opponent. Now he asked his corner men if he should back off.
His trainer told him to fight harder, to fight so hard the referee would have no choice but to end it.
As the ninth round began, Ali appeared to be completely defenseless. Holmes threw a big right that dented Ali’s jaw, followed by an uppercut. The uppercut was followed by something almost unheard of in the sport of boxing, something that shocked even the grizzled sportswriters who had watched countless hundreds of men struck by countless thousands of punches. But there it was: a scream. The great Muhammad Ali screamed — whether in pain or fear or shock, who knows? But he screamed. He screamed, and he tried to curl his body like a knuckle, shrinking to hide himself from Holmes, looking like a mugging victim who had no defense except to cover up and hope that his attacker would take whatever he wanted and leave him alone. Long after the fight, it was the scream that the men in his corner and the men in the press box would remember.
Meanwhile, Holmes kept punching.
After the ninth, Angelo Dundee threatened once again to stop the fight. Ali offered no protest, but he rose at the bell and went out to meet Holmes. Holmes came at him fast and hard: jab, jab, jab, jab, right, right, jab, jab, a hook to the kidneys, a combination, and then a flurry of punches that seemed to blur, with no beginning and no end, leaving Ali helpless but still standing.
Throughout most of the fight, Herbert Muhammad had sat at ringside with his head down, unable to watch and yet unwilling to stop it, as Holmes landed 340 punches to Ali’s 42. After the tenth round, finally, Herbert looked up, made eye contact with Dundee, and nodded. Dundee told the referee he was calling it.
No more.
Ali sat on his stool, eyes closed, mouth open, shoulders slumped. He neither spoke nor moved.
Holmes was crying when he reached Ali’s corner. “I love you,” he told the defeated fighter. “I really respect you. I hope we’ll always be friends.”
Ali went back to his hotel room, where Gene Kilroy asked him if he wanted to undress and take a shower.
“No,” Ali said. “I think I just want to lie down and rest for a little while.”
Half an hour later, Holmes and his brother Jake knocked on Ali’s door.
“Are you OK, champ?” Holmes asked. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Then why did you?” Ali asked, with a soft laugh.
“Now I want you to promise me one thing,” Holmes said, “that you will never fight again.”
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br /> Ali began to chant: “I want Holmes. I want Holmes. I want Holmes.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Holmes, laughing.
A few hours later, Ali returned to the empty arena where he had fought the night prior and sat for a live television interview.
His face was a lumpy mask. He had two black eyes but wore sunglasses to hide them. He lowered his head and gently rubbed his brow.
He was asked, of course, if he intended to fight again.
“I may return,” he said. “I want to think about it, but we might go back and try again . . . Wait about a month, go back in the gym, see how I feel.”
52
The Last Hurrah
Two weeks after the fight, the Nevada Athletic Commission reported that Ali had failed his post-fight drug test. A urine sample revealed codeine and phenothiazines — painkillers and antidepressants — in Ali’s body.
The boxer claimed that he had taken the drugs immediately after his loss to Larry Holmes, to speed his recovery. Even if that were true, however, it would have been a violation of the commission’s rules, as Ali and his team no doubt knew.
On December 29, 1980, the Nevada commission began a hearing on whether to strip Ali’s boxing license. Ali appeared at the hearing, but before it began, he voluntarily gave up his license. By doing so, his lawyers argued, Ali was no longer subject to Nevada’s rules and could not be punished. Ali promised he would never again apply for a license in Nevada, and the commission, in return, promised to close its hearing and drop additional questions about Ali’s admitted use of thyroid drugs before the fight.
If Ali had been forced by Nevada to retire, other state commissions might have followed in withdrawing his license. “It would have been an awful precedent,” attorney Michael Phenner told reporters.
In hindsight, Ali never should have been allowed to fight Holmes, said Sig Rogich, who was chairman of the Nevada Athletic Commission at the time. “We rushed it,” Rogich said years later in an interview. “It was such a big event . . . It was such a huge sellout. I always tried to be objective. I thought part of our job was to promote our town, and we wanted to show we were the perfect town for these events.”
Television networks didn’t cover the news of Ali’s failed drug test. Newspapers, for the most part, printed small stories deep inside their sports sections. Still, it was humiliating for Ali. And the humiliations kept coming. Like the punches of Larry Holmes, Ali could see them, but he couldn’t stop them.
Ali’s contract said he was entitled to $8 million dollars for fighting Holmes, but Don King paid him only $6.83 million, insisting that Ali had agreed in a conversation prior to the fight to amend the deal. In truth, King had asked Ali to formally amend the contract, but Michael Phenner had refused. King insisted, however, that Ali had given his word.
Phenner filed a lawsuit against King, demanding that he pay Ali the additional $1.2 million. King had already earned millions from a fight that never should have happened, a fight in which Ali had risked his life. Although King must have known he would lose if Phenner’s case went to court, he wasn’t prepared to give up. “Cash is king, and King is cash,” the promoter always said. With that in mind, the promoter put fifty thousand dollars in a briefcase and instructed Jeremiah Shabazz to deliver it to Ali. King told Shabazz to turn over the cash only after Ali signed a letter releasing King “from any and all monies due to me, or for which I may have been entitled under the said Bout Agreement.”
Shabazz brought a notary public with him when he went to see Ali in Los Angeles. The notary read Ali the letter from King and asked Ali if he understood what he was signing. Ali said yes. He took the cash and signed the letter, which not only allowed King to keep almost $1.2 million to which the promoter was not entitled but also gave King the right to promote Ali’s next fight, should he decide to box again.
When Ali phoned Phenner to tell him what had happened, Phenner cried.
Was this how it ended for Muhammad Ali?
Writers compared his plight to that of Joe Louis, a great champion who’d fought too long, who’d wound up broke and looking a decade or two older than his age, but Ali’s performance against Holmes had been far feebler than anything Louis had done in the ring. After the fight, newspapers and magazines around the world printed pictures of Ali seated woozily on his stool, his eyes blackened and half closed, his face swollen, his arms draped on the ropes. But even as he approached his thirty-ninth birthday, he couldn’t bring himself to say it was over. He made excuses. All those pills had sapped his strength, he said. His old friend the mirror had let him down. The mirror had said he was in good shape. The mirror had told him he was young and strong again. Next time, he said, he wouldn’t be fooled. Next time he would worry more about his strength and stamina than his weight. Next time . . .
“In two or three years,” Ferdie Pacheco warned, “we’ll see what the Holmes fight did to his brain and kidneys. That’s when all the scar tissue in his brain will further erode his speech and balance . . . He was a damaged fighter before the fight, and now he’s going to be damaged even more . . . For him to get up at a press conference the day after the fight and say he might fight Weaver is crazy. It’s not publicity, it’s part of the illness. He just can’t think straight. The people around him need to make him think straight. That’s where the responsibility lies.”
But most of the people around Ali waffled. Herbert Muhammad said he hoped Ali would never fight again, but he promised to stand by his friend if he did. Don King said much the same. As long as there was money to be made, these men and others would not shun it.
On January 19, 1981, Ali was at home in Los Angeles when Howard Bingham called and said there was a man standing on the window ledge of a ninth-floor Miracle Mile office building, threatening to jump. Minutes later, Ali arrived in his two-tone brown Rolls-Royce, driving up the wrong side of the street. He hustled into the building, leaned out a window, and shouted to the man: “You’re my brother! I love you, and I couldn’t lie to you!” In a photograph taken at that moment, it appears that the suicidal man might fall as he tried to get a better look at Ali, but, after about thirty minutes, Ali talked him off the ledge. The next day, Ali visited the man in the hospital, where he promised to buy him clothes and help him find a job.
Three months later, on April 12, Joe Louis died of a heart attack at his home in Las Vegas. He was sixty-six years old. In its obituary, the New York Times said Louis had “held the heavyweight boxing championship of the world for almost twelve years and the affection of the American public for most of his adult life.”
But Louis had been more than a boxer and more than a beloved man. He’d been one of the most influential black men in American history. The same could be said for Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali. These were three men who took chances and absorbed pain, three men unafraid to strip bare to the waist and let the public see their limitations and their powers, showing the world that in a sphere of violence and suffering there is also the possibility of style and beauty.
Back in 1967, Joe Louis and a ghostwriter had published an article in The Ring magazine describing how Louis would have fought Muhammad Ali, or Cassius Clay as Louis called him at the time. Louis said he would have forced Ali to the ropes and pounded away. The older champion was confident of his superiority. Still, Louis expressed admiration for the man who had inherited his crown, and he told a sweet story about the young boxer:
“Once I happened to walk along when Clay was hollering ‘I am the Greatest!’ to some fellows outside the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. When he saw me, Clay came over and shouted to the crowd: ‘This is Joe Louis. WE is the Greatest!’
“That was nice. Cassius Clay is a nice boy and a smart fighter. But I’m sure Joe Louis could have licked him.”
In the fall of 1981, Ali announced he would fight Trevor Berbick in December. “The Drama in Bahama,” he called it, for the fight was to be held in Nassau in the Bahamas. In truth, though, there was little drama in the competition between Ali and the relat
ively unknown and unaccomplished Berbick. Audiences were tiring of Ali’s act. He’d been thrilling in his prime. He’d been entertaining in the twilight of his career. But now, it was clear even to his most loyal fans that he didn’t belong in the ring, and it was becoming increasingly painful to watch Ali taking so many blows to the head. To be sure, those fans would have liked to see one last flash of brilliance from Ali. But was it worth it? Was it even possible? What would it prove?
Questions swirled around Ali’s health and his failed drug test. At first, it wasn’t clear if he would receive a license to fight. Promoters called it “The Last Hurrah.” Even after contracts were signed, television networks in the United States balked at broadcasting the event. Three weeks before the day of the fight, tickets had not gone on sale.
Ali, who arrived in the Bahamas weighing 249 pounds, insisted he wasn’t competing for the money or the attention. But even if that were true, his stated motivation hardly inspired admiration. The goal, he said, was to be the first man to win the heavyweight championship four times. “Nobody will ever do it five times because you know as well as I do that people get old too fast. I used to run six miles a day but now I got to make an effort for three . . . Not even Muhammad Ali could win the title five times . . . People tell me not to fight, but they are at the foot of the wall of knowledge and I am at the top. My horizon is greater than theirs. Why do people go to the moon? Why did Martin Luther King say he had a dream? People need challenges.”
Aware of concerns about his health, Ali frequently asked reporters if they thought he had brain damage or if it sounded as if he were slurring his words. He also made the unusual move of releasing a medical report from an examination made shortly after his fight against Larry Holmes. The report from an endocrinologist at UCLA Medical Center said Ali had first come to the hospital on October 6, 1980, four days after his loss to Holmes, complaining of “lethargy, weakness and shortness of breath.” The report covered four visits to the hospital and said, “The patient tended to talk softly and to almost mumble his speech at times; but when questioned about this, he was able to speak appropriately without any evidence of a speech disorder. He was evaluated by both a neurosurgeon and neurologist who felt that his speech pattern was not pathologic.” The doctors at UCLA said they detected only one other problem in Ali’s condition: he had lost his sense of smell, a problem that may have stemmed from boxing-related damage to his olfactory bulbs, which lie below the frontal lobes of the brain and transmit information from the nose to the brain.