Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  In Nassau early one morning, Ali went for a run. It was five in the morning. Roosters crowed. The sun only hinted at its arrival over the Caribbean. Ali ran for about a mile and a half, stopped to walk for a while, and then climbed into a limousine for a ride back to the hotel. His sparring sessions were equally uninspiring, according to reporters on hand. In the days before the fight, Ali refused to step on a scale; he didn’t want anyone to know how much he weighed.

  Although he was clearly not in great condition, Ali remained confident he would beat Berbick, who was twenty-seven years old with a record of nineteen wins, two losses, and two draws, including a fifteen-round loss to Larry Holmes. Ali felt certain that his own loss to Holmes had been an anomaly, the result of a bad mix of drugs. This time, he promised to “sizzle and dance” all night, to stay out of Berbick’s range, to build points round by round and win by an easy margin. He was so confident, in fact, that he was already discussing his next opponent.

  “Berbick,” he told Red Smith two weeks before the fight, “I’ll handle him so easy. I’ll outbox him and outclass him and talk to him. They say I have brain damage, cain’t talk no more. How do I sound now?” Smith conceded that he sounded like Muhammad Ali. “My next opponent will be Mike Weaver. He’s challenged the winner.” And after Weaver, he said, he would fight Larry Holmes again. After Holmes, he told another reporter, “I’ll defend my title a few times, then I’ll retire, go preach all over the world. What’s wrong with me trying it? You ever see so many people worried about one black guy in your life?”

  He winked and asked the writer again: “Do I sound like I got brain damage to you?”

  Four days before the fight, Don King was assaulted in his hotel room, suffering a broken nose, broken teeth, and a split lip. King alleged that the beating had been the work of the mysterious man promoting the fight, Cornelius Jace, who also went by the names James Cornelius, Cornelius James, and Jace Cornelius. No one knew where Jace had come from, although with Ali it was not surprising for business associates to appear and disappear without explanation. Only after the fight would the media learn that Jace was a convicted felon who had pleaded guilty in 1975 to five counts of theft in connection with a used-car dealership.

  “He’s a promoter,” Herbert Muhammad said, when asked about Jace’s background. “He promotes something, I don’t know what.”

  Jace was issuing notes of credit instead of checks to people he had promised to pay. Tempers were running hot. No one had made arrangements to get Trevor Berbick to the Bahamas for the fight. Ticket sales were scant, despite steep price cuts. The makeshift arena — rickety chairs and a jumble of bleachers set in a converted baseball stadium — was still under construction. Some of the fighters on the undercard were threatening to leave because they hadn’t been paid. Even Ali seemed unsure if his money had come through. Two days before the fight, when Ali learned that one of Jace’s checks had bounced, the fighter packed his bags and said he was leaving. He agreed to stay, according to Larry Kolb, only after a group of Bahamian businessmen and government officials presented Ali with a suitcase filled with $1 million cash.

  The fight started late because organizers couldn’t find the keys to unlock the gates surrounding the baseball field where the arena had been built. Ali entered the ring slowly and somberly. He raised his arms halfway to acknowledge the cheers from the small crowd as he awaited Berbick’s arrival.

  Jace had forgotten to purchase boxing gloves for the event, which meant all the fighters on the card that night had to share the same two pairs. By the time of the main event, the gloves were heavy with sweat. Cornelius had also failed to arrange for a proper bell at ringside, so the timekeeper struck a cowbell with a hammer to signal the start of Muhammad Ali’s final fight.

  Ali walked to the center of the ring. He weighed 236 pounds, almost 20 pounds more than he had weighed against Holmes. He had promised to dance for ten rounds, but he abandoned that notion immediately and showed no flashes of the fighter who had once electrified his sport — no fancy footwork, no snake-tongue jabs, not even any mocking of his opponent. Ali simply stood in the center of the ring and tried to trade punches with Berbick.

  Berbick was no great fighter, but he was stronger, faster, and younger than Ali, and it showed. Ali’s jabs had no pop. His combinations were too slow to be effective. He would fight hard for a few seconds and then retreat to the ropes, where Berbick hit him without fear of retaliation, like a military unit shelling an abandoned outpost.

  At the end of the third round, a round in which he had been hit but not hit terribly hard, Ali appeared to lose his footing while looking for his stool. In the fourth round, Berbick rocked Ali with hard punches to the jaw. Ali wobbled but didn’t fall. He recovered and landed a good combination, but Berbick made him pay for it with another solid right to Ali’s jaw. Round after round, Ali rose slowly from his stool. Round after round, he winced at Berbick’s body blows. By the seventh, Ali looked thoroughly fatigued, unable to fight back for more than a few seconds at a time. To start the eighth, he came out on his toes for the first time, exciting the crowd, sparking chants of “Ali! Ali!” But the chorus ended when Ali stopped dancing and Berbick moved in again to attack. At the end of the ninth round, Ali paused before going to his corner. Through glazed eyes, he squinted at Berbick as if measuring the size and strength of his opponent, comparing the man’s young, hard body to his own, and not liking the comparison.

  In the final round of the final fight of his career, Ali tried to summon the magic of his youth. He came out dancing. It was a plodding dance, but it was the best he could do, and it was enough to bring one last cheer from the crowd. “Ali! Ali!” they shouted, their cries meant as encouragement, or wishful thinking, or reminiscence, or farewell, or all those things. Ali danced and jabbed for about ten seconds. After that, the crowd ceased its chanting and Berbick resumed his punching.

  Now Berbick was all over him, smothering him, battering him, knocking him around the ring from rope to rope. With about forty-five seconds to go in the fight, Ali attempted a left hook that looked as if it was moving through water, so slowly and harmlessly did it travel. Berbick blocked it easily and followed with a jolting shot to Ali’s head.

  Thirty seconds to go and Ali tried to steal the round with one final flurry, as he had done so many times against his greatest rivals: Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, and George Foreman. But this time he was on the brink of losing to an inferior opponent, a man who was supposed to be an easy mark, and he needed one last bit of magic or one last knockout punch to avoid defeat. Ali summoned his arms to action and reared back. He tried. But the punches never flew. He couldn’t fight at all. Berbick stepped in and threw a big left to the chin that spun Ali’s head. Before Ali could recover, a right smashed the other side of his face. Ali retreated to the ropes, wrapped his arms around Berbick’s neck, and slipped away. Berbick chased him, landing more big punches to the head. Ali was helpless now. He leaned once more against the ropes, and that’s where his boxing career ended, with fists flying at his face until a cowbell clanged to say it was finally all done.

  The decision was unanimous. Ali lost.

  In the ring after the fight, Ali spoke to a television announcer in short sentences, as if it were too much effort to utter more than a few words a time. His voice was so soft and so slow he was difficult to understand.

  “It was close, it was close,” he said. “I have to submit to the judges. He was strong. He was good. I think he won . . . I saw the shots but couldn’t take them. Father Time just got me.”

  He was asked if his career was finally over? Was this really his last fight?

  “As of now,” he said, “I’m retired. I don’t think I’ll change my mind.”

  In his dressing room, he slouched on a chair. Except for a small bruise over his left eye, he was unmarked.

  “You can’t beat Father Time,” he said, his voice a whisper.

  “Was this your last fight?” a reporter asked again.

  “Yes,�
�� he said, “my last fight. I know it is. I’ll never fight again.”

  He added, “At least I didn’t go down . . . No pictures of me on the floor, no pictures of me falling through the ropes, no broken teeth, no blood. The people of the world will love me more now, see that I’m like them. We all lose sometimes. We all grow old. We all die.”

  When it became clear that Ali really was quitting this time, members of his entourage wanted to memorialize their time together. They decided to pitch in money for a plaque that would go outside the log-cabin gym at Deer Lake, where they had shared so many good times, where they had come together to form their own strange and beautiful family, with Ali as their glorious, glowing leader. They would list their names alphabetically: Howard Bingham, Bundini Brown, Angelo Dundee, Jimmy Ellis, Gene Kilroy . . .

  The job of purchasing the plaque fell to Bundini.

  He ordered a tombstone.

  53

  Too Many Punches

  One day in November 1982, an elderly African man and a young boy rang the doorbell of Ali’s big white house in Hancock Park.

  Ali’s friend Larry Kolb answered.

  “We are here,” the elderly man said, “because — before I die — I wish to introduce my grandson to the great Muhammad Ali.”

  Ali told Kolb to let them in. The boy carried a Big Mac in a paper bag: a food offering for Ali. Muhammad hugged the little boy and performed a magic trick for him. He ate the Big Mac.

  The elderly man said they had traveled all the way from Tanzania, going first to Chicago in search of Ali. They had been in Los Angeles three days.

  “Today we found you,” he said, according to Kolb. “Tomorrow we can go home.” Ali fed them and then drove them in his Rolls-Royce to their low-budget airport hotel. He hugged them and kissed them and told them to go with God.

  On the drive home, Ali told Kolb he believed that every person on Earth had an angel watching him all the time. He called it a Tallying Angel, because the angel made a mark in a book every time someone did something good or bad. “When we die,” Ali said, “if we’ve got more good marks than bad, we go to Paradise. If we’ve got more bad marks, we go to Hell.” Hell, he said, was like mashing your hand down in a frying pan and holding it there, flesh sizzling, for eternity.

  “I’ve done a lot of bad things,” he told Kolb. “Gotta keep doing good now. I wanna go to Paradise.”

  Later the same month, Ali sat in the locker room of the Allen Park Youth Center in North Miami, a short drive from the spot where he had defeated Sonny Liston in 1964. He squeezed into a pair of boxing trunks and laced up his shoes, preparing for a workout, trying to get fit for a series of paid boxing exhibitions planned for the United Arab Emirates. The money raised during the trip would go to build a mosque in Chicago, he said.

  A reporter asked when he would be back. He mumbled, words “clinging together as cobwebs of dust do,” as the journalist put it. “I’ll be gone six weeks,” he said, counting with his fingers. “I’ll be back November tenth,” he said.

  “You mean December tenth, don’t you?” the reporter asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, lifting his eyes. “December tenth.”

  “Then you’ll be away about three weeks, not six weeks.”

  “Yeah,” he said, slowly. “I’ll be away three weeks.”

  It had been one year since Ali’s loss to Trevor Berbick. Since then, he had only joked about a comeback. “I will return . . . ,” he liked to say, pausing before adding: “To my home in Los Angeles.”

  Now, he said, he was content to travel and raise money to promote his religion. He had come to the gym in North Miami to get in shape, to drop a few pounds, not with any interest in competing again, just so that he would look reasonably good when he boxed in exhibitions.

  “My life just started at forty,” he said. “All the boxing I did was in training for this. I’m not here training for boxing. I’m going over to those countries for donations. When I get there, I’ll stop the whole city. You don’t hear nothin’ about Frazier, or Foreman, or Norton, or Holmes, or Cooney. But when I get to these cities, they’ll be three million people at the airport. They’ll be on the sides of the road going into the city.”

  With that he went downstairs to the gym, climbed slowly up the small wooden steps and into the ring. The bell rang. Ali moved toward his sparring partner and punches pounded his headgear.

  Two days before Ali’s interview at the gym in North Miami, a South Korean boxer named Duk Koo Kim had been knocked out and rendered comatose after a long, brutal fight with Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini. Soon after, Kim died of cerebral edema — swelling of the brain. The death prompted legislative committees in the United States to examine the safety of boxing. But, in the end, little changed. “What does the boxing profession think of the controversy?” asked U.S. representative James J. Florio of New Jersey. “Well, the answer is: There is no boxing profession. It’s not a system, it’s a nonsystem, and it’s getting worse.”

  In 1983, a pair of editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association called for the abolition of boxing. In other sports, one editorial said, injury was an undesired byproduct. But “the principal purpose of a boxing match is for one opponent to render the other injured, defenseless, incapacitated, unconscious.” Muhammad Ali, interviewed on national TV, was asked for a response to the editorial. He appeared tired and unfocused as he sat in front of the fireplace in his Los Angeles home. His voice came through soft and muddy. Asked if it was possible that he suffered brain damage from boxing, he replied faintly: “It’s possible.”

  On April 11, 1983, Sports Illustrated published a special report on brain injuries in boxing, pointing out that deaths in the ring had long prompted calls for reform, but scant attention had been paid to the chronic brain injuries caused by thousands of blows taken over the course of a career. The magazine pointed to Ali as a prime example, saying that the former champ was not only slurring his words but also “acting depressed of late.”

  To some observers, Ali seemed bored and emotionally detached. To amuse himself, he would take out his personal phone book and dial famous friends. But sometimes he would pause in the middle of the conversation, having forgotten to whom he was speaking. Sports Illustrated reported that “many observers” believed Ali was already punch-drunk.

  The magazine asked Ali if he would agree to undergo a series of neurological tests, including a CAT (computerized axial tomography) scan, which was a relatively new tool for doctors at the time, one that was capable of revealing cerebral atrophy. Ali declined to undergo the test. But the magazine obtained scans of Ali’s brain taken at an exam at New York University Medical Center in July 1981 and showed them to medical experts. The radiologist’s report in 1981 had found Ali’s brain to be normal, but the doctors reviewing the scans at the behest of the magazine were more familiar with boxing-related brain injuries than most radiologists, and they disagreed with the earlier conclusion. They saw signs of significant brain atrophy — specifically, enlarged ventricles and a cavum septum pellucidum, a cave in the septum that shouldn’t be there.

  “They read this as normal?” asked Dr. Ira Casson, a neurologist at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center. “I wouldn’t have read this as normal. I don’t see how you can say in a thirty-nine-year-old man that these ventricles aren’t too big. His third ventricle’s big. His lateral ventricles are big. He has a cavum septum pellucidum.”

  The Mayo Clinic had spotted some of the same things but had deemed them unrelated to boxing. In an interview decades later, Dr. Casson strongly disagreed with that conclusion: “It was all consistent with brain damage from boxing,” he said.

  Although he was finished as a fighter, Ali continued traveling extensively. He never tired of meeting new people and seeing new places. One night in Japan, as he was returning to his hotel room after dinner with his friend Larry Kolb, Ali stopped in front of his door and gazed down the long hallway. It was the custom at this hotel for guests to trade their shoes for sli
ppers upon entering their rooms and to leave their shoes in the hall. Now, with most everyone asleep, there were shoes in front of every door. A mischievous look crossed Ali’s face. He nodded at Kolb. Without a word, the two men moved up and down the hall, rearranging the shoes. When they were done, they giggled and retreated to their rooms.

  In May 1983, Ali was in Las Vegas, where Don King was paying him $1,200 “hang-around money” to schmooze with fans before a Larry Holmes fight at the Dunes. King knew Ali would engage with fans all day, even for a mere $1,200. He did it without compensation every time he stepped out of his home. And so the former champ signed autographs and performed magic tricks and ran into Dave Kindred, one of the reporters who’d been covering him since his earliest days as a professional fighter. “He was an old man at forty-one,” Kindred wrote.

  Ali admitted he was worried about his condition. His friends and family were worried, too. He was drowsy all the time. He shuffled when he walked and murmured when he talked. His left thumb trembled. He drooled at times. He felt suddenly like an old man, and he wanted to know what was happening.