Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

by Budd Schulberg

  Ali was in high spirits. He looked fit and was proud that he had been in camp all summer, training harder for this fight than for any bout since he was allowed to fight again four years ago.

  “You wanna watch me run in the mornin’, you’ll have to get up real early.”

  The call I had left for 5:30 a.m. seemed to come two minutes after my head touched the pillow. A quick cold shower told me I was awake, and after a hot coffee and Danish in the kitchen with Bundini Brown, who somehow was philosophizing before the sun was up, we drove down the long curving hill with Ali and turned into a green rolling valley where Ali said to his sidekick Gene Kilroy, “Okay, stop here.” He got out of the car and started running along a deserted road between dairy farms. He ran in heavy field boots, not jogging sneakers, and a thick elastic belt drew the excess liquid and fat from a body now pared down from over 230 to 218. On he ran, mile after mile, while we chugged along behind him, with the September sun beginning to light the day. Occasionally a curious cow or a horse would come to the fence along the country road to watch him pass. For almost half an hour he ran, occasionally backward, sometimes pausing to whistle punches into the sweet morning air. When he finally came to the end of his self-appointed marathon, he did a little more shadow boxing to taper off, attracting a small audience of early rising farmers and their children.

  “I’m ready,” he assured these rural neighbors who had never seen a prizefight but to whom the peregrinating Ali had become a welcome sight.

  “Just ran half an hour and I’m not even breathin’ hard. Tomorrow I’m leaving for Africa! The rumble in the jungle! George Foreman is in big trouble. I’m goin’ over there as the champion of the people and I’m comin’ back as the official champion of the whole world.”

  “If you think Evel Knievel made that jump, wait ’til I beat Foreman’s rump!”

  I wasn’t sure these simple country folk knew exactly what he was talking about, but they seemed as hypnotized as his most ardent fans in the ghetto.

  That afternoon, after going eight spirited rounds with four sparring partners, Ali showered and dressed in the meager quarters off the gym where he also slept, and then perched himself atop a pile of logs. A sense of well-being and the excitement of going to Africa, “back to the homeland,” had raised his usually ebullient spirits even higher.

  “If you think the world was amazed when Nixon resigned, wait ’til I beat George Foreman’s behind.”

  Then he grew serious. “It’s much more than a sports event. It’s a symbol of the Black Awakening, with black American stars like me going back to our African roots. Stars like Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross and James Brown and Aretha Franklin, all those beautiful black people goin’ home to share their experiences with the black musicians who never left. And all the black people of Africa and the leaders of a young black country bigger’n all of Europe ’n India put together! That’s the real story. It’ll make history. The first comin’ together of Afro-Americans and their African brothers.”

  His eyes widened in amazement at the enormity of this impending phenomenon. “Let’s get it on!”

  After two days of zigzagging over oceans and across continents, we were finally deposited in downtown Kinshasa, at the Hotel Memling, where the heat impresses you like an affectionate ghost, while invisible bugs cuddle up for comfort.

  Meanwhile, a journeyman heavyweight named Bill McMurray had sliced the invincible George Foreman over the right eye. The fight had been postponed! For a week, a month? Nobody knew. Foreman & Co. were barricaded behind locked gates and armed guards, as inaccessible to the press as Nixon at San Clemente.

  Next morning I was on the road to N’Sele, about forty miles from Kinshasa, where Ali and his retinue were set up in style in the presidential villas provided for visiting dignitaries. The road was narrow and jammed with traffic leading out of town, but then it widened to the only four-lane, divided highway in all the 900,000 square miles of Zaire. The land was cracked with heat and looked more like sand than life-giving earth. It was a country thirsty for the rains that would come in October and beat down relentlessly for the six months of the monsoon season. We passed small villages with one- and two-room houses of cement block. The women along the road were tall and stately, dressed in colorful ankle-length wraparounds. Walking like models, they were carrying incredible loads on their heads, sacks of potatoes, baskets of laundry, even wood. Occasionally we would pass a small stream where black children were swimming. Every few miles there were huge roadside signs in green and yellow, clearly lettered in English: “Ali-Foreman—You Are Our Brothers. Let the Best Man Win.”

  At the entrance to N’Sele, which is also a large experimental farm and the meeting place of President Mobutu’s Popular Revolutionary Movement (the country’s only political party), I was surprised to find that we entered through a pagoda-like archway. It seems that this luxurious retreat for the President, his advisers, and visiting heads of state was built as a gift from the Taiwan government. At the end of a long driveway, we came to a dead end. And there it was, the mighty Congo that Stanley had marveled at and that Conrad had so vividly described when he first saw Kinshasa (then Leopoldville) as a village of grass huts and wooden shanties more than eighty years ago.

  I was anxious to see how Ali was taking the postponement, but the river held me. It was so wide, four miles across, that Brazzaville on the opposite shore was a grey-purple haze. Anchored at the bank in front of the large villas was the presidential yacht, actually a four-decker riverboat. In front of it was a companion vessel, the Mama Mobutu, which runs up and down the great river, passing out medicines to the villages and taking on patients in need of more serious medical attention. What I had not realized was that this giant of a river, second only to the Amazon, was choked with hyacinth. Clumps of hyacinth, even small islands of them, floated in slow motion down to Matadi and the sea. A grey, torpid silence hung over the river. I stared at a narrow boat in which fishermen were drifting upstream against the downflowing current, and wondered if it was an illusion caused by sunstroke or jet-lag. But these fishermen knew the peculiar currents that would carry them against the flow of the river. I longed to follow it as it twisted its way like a two-thousand-mile cobra into the heart of darkness, the rain forests, the trackless savannas, and the lush valleys where ancient Africa still lives. Day after day, during my weeks in Zaire, I would return, walking the mile-long promenade in front of the villas, to watch the river. A few times I watched it from the top deck of the Mama Mobutu, where I had accompanied Ali’s old Cuban trainer, Luis Sarria, whose gout had flared to an unbearable extreme in the oppressive humidity. Waiting for the doctors to treat the taciturn, long-suffering Sarria, I kept looking down at the purple flowers, no two clumps the same size or shape until suddenly I realized that almost an hour had passed. I couldn’t believe it. I was intoxicated with hyacinth and heat and a mysterious haze that seemed to conceal and at the same time intensify the sun. At the villa, I found Ali, surrounded by familiar faces, installed in a spacious house with marble floors, plush couches and easy chairs, elaborate chandeliers, an ample kitchen and pantry, and two large bathrooms. There were two framed blow-up photos of President Mobutu, as there are in every villa, every home, every store. In his leopard-skin hat (the leopard, not the lion, is the king of the jungle in Zaire), his piercing eyes measuring you through horn-rimmed glasses, his jaw thrust forward, this ex-journalist turned general who then proclaimed himself president, is a man to be reckoned with. When John Gunther, researching Inside Africa twenty years ago, asked the Belgian governor-general, “Who runs the Congo?” the answer was unhesitating: “I do.” Now President Mobutu could give a similar answer. Democracy is still a stranger to the Republic of Zaire. But Mobutu could argue that all the wealth of a country rich in diamonds, copper, and cobalt is no longer siphoned off to the Belgians. If some may be siphoned off to secret bank accounts in Switzerland, millions more are being reinvested in the internal development of Zaire. And where there was only a single na
tive lawyer and a handful of university students twenty years ago, now there are four thousand students at Kinshasa University alone, and Zairians are beginning to fill the middle-class and professional slots that were once the exclusive province of the tiny Belgian minority.

  In his villa, Ali was a restless tiger. He had honed himself physically and psychologically to a fine edge, pointing his entire year toward the night of September 24. Now he would have to ease off, put on weight so he could carve it off again, timing himself to the bell. That’s not easy when the opponent has the hole card—Foreman has the cut and the advantage of deciding when he’ll be ready. Ali suspects the cut may just be a Foreman ploy. He had blown up with idleness and success. He wasn’t ready. “It won’t be no week, it’ll be a month, maybe more,” Ali grumbled, no longer the ebullient long-distance runner I had followed at Deer Lake only a week before. Then he shifted emotional gears. “I’ve got to turn a negative into a positive. Poor George is goin’ to come into that ring knowin’ he’s no superman, knowin’ if a sparrin’ partner c’n cut him, I c’n jab-jab. [He illustrated with vicious lefts that missed my chin by inches.] I’ve got to keep runnin’. I’ve got to keep my edge. I’ve got to hold this whole thing together. I think Foreman is just stallin’ for time. He knows I’m ready and he ain’t. Well, I’ll wait him out. I don’t know what I’ll do with myself, outside of trainin’. Wish I knew French. I don’t understan’ what they’re sayin’ on television. I wish they’d show some Westerns like we have back home.”

  Ali was back in his homeland but he was homesick. He missed Deer Lake. He missed Chicago. He missed his new custom-built bus in which he could go streaking down the turnpikes of America talking on his mobile radio to truckers with code names like Girlwatcher and Sneaky Pete, often rednecks who became instant pals when they realized that Big Bopper was actually Muhammad Ali. As he talked out his homesickness, I realized how intensely American he was, as American as Gerry Ford and Mickey Mantle. Africa was a dream, a loving and lovely dream, a distant remembrance of things past. Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay, the kid from Louisville, the child of Little Richard, Tutti-Frutti, and the American Dream Machine.

  I walked down the row of villas calling on various members of the Ali entourage, and it was comic relief to greet the same faces I had seen at the primitive cabins of Deer Lake now ensconced in palatial villas.

  The sparring partners, lacking Ali’s patience, imagination, and incentive, were going up the wall. Another month in this God-forsaken splendor? Nothin’ to do but stare at them weeds in the water. They wanted out. Even the ever-patient Angelo Dundee, who had seen his fighters through a hundred crises, was wondering out loud how he’d get through another month of splendid isolation in equatorial heat. Angelo isn’t a player who runs to town to find the action. He stays close to his fighter. He minds the store. He’s ready with the smelling salts, the Q-Tips, the adhesive, and all the other medical tricks of his specialized trade. He’s ready to slap Ali sharply on his thighs if he starts leaning back against the ropes, inviting Foreman’s pile-drivers. He’s ready for the fight. But if tropical rivers and African sculpture don’t turn you on, what do you do with yourself on an experimental farm near the equator?

  I found a mutiny mounting in the press room. Carpenters were hammering and sawing away, belatedly building phone booths for reporters to phone in their stories. Newscopy was being torn from Telex machines by overzealous Zairians who objected to what they considered slurs on the country, the fight, and its management. They even ripped out the simple truth—that the Foreman cut may have been a blessing to the government of Zaire because telephone and Telex communications were nowhere near ready to service the reporters from all over the world who would be on hand when and if the fight took place.

  That evening I dined with friends from the American embassy and Zairian acquaintances who had been educated in the States. I passed on to them the mood of the press and suggested that if the local authorities didn’t want to totally alienate them, why not call a meeting, admit this was a situation they’d never coped with before, and ask the reporters to bear with them as they worked out their difficulties?

  This simply is not done in African countries, they explained. It would mean a loss of face. No one admits mistakes, and since there is a rigid pecking order in the political structure of Zaire, with no one willing to report to his superior that anything is amiss, the chances were that President Mobutu knew nothing of our problems. He had kept his word. The soccer stadium had been enlarged to a capacity of 62,500. Streets repaired and widened, new street lights installed. New buses in circulation. The fighters enjoying the most luxurious hospitality the country could afford. And at this very moment, famous musical stars from America were on their way. Kinshasa, Zaire, was on the map, which was the main purpose of the government’s $12 million investment in the face-lifting. Not to mention the $10 million guaranteed the fighters by a mysterious Swiss company called Risnelia, in which President Mobutu was said to be involved.

  I returned to the press room next morning expecting another battle report from our writers in their struggle for free speech in this vast, recently chaotic country held together by authority. Instead I heard that Tschimpumpu Wa Tschimpumpu, director of the press for the Foreman-Ali Commission, had called a conference for 10 a.m. to “straighten everything out.”

  I called my friend at the embassy who hurried over to the meeting to see this miracle for himself.

  He needn’t have hurried. The meeting began at 11:45. Meanwhile, handsome hostesses in flowing gowns and exotic hairdos mollified us with excellent Simba beer. Finally, Tschimpumpu—a name that was to be constantly on our lips— made his entrance, a young man with savoir faire, genuine charm, and ready wit. He began with an apology for any inconveniences the press may have suffered in their first few days. My embassy friend turns to me in amazement. In the two years he’s been stationed here he’s never heard such an apology. Tschimpumpu assures us that President Mobutu was a journalist himself and understands our problems. Somehow our unease must have reached the president’s ear, otherwise citizen Tschimpumpu would have never taken it upon himself to offer excuses.

  What we are experiencing is a confrontation of cultures, Western vis-à-vis African, the first baby steps on both sides in an effort at accommodation. Having assured us that “there would be no ‘probe-blems,’” that additional telephone lines would be installed in time, and the Telex machines unmolested, he went on to lecture us on the sensitivities of the new republic. “The country is no longer to be called the Congo because we do not want to be reminded of colonial days. Our great river is no longer the Congo River but the Zaire. The name of our president is not Joseph Desire Mobutu, but Mobutu Sese Seku. We have all changed our names from the French Françoises and Pierres handed us by the Belgians to the true names that reflect our African heritage. Is it too much to ask that our president’s name be spelled correctly and fully? We are a young country but we are a proud country. We need your understanding and your help.” Then he flashes an ingratiating smile. “If anyone disappears, or is eaten, please let us know.”

  Momentary laughter. Then reporters begin to shout: “This means no more censorship?”

  “And the phone won’t be banged down if you hear something you don’t like?”

  The free-for-all of a presidential press conference is unknown in Zaire. Still Tschimpumpu smiles and charms his way through the extraordinary session, announces that The Fight will definitely be rescheduled for October 29. To which Foreman’s fast-talking trainer Dick Sadler adds, “If George’s eye is ready.”

  The festival-night seemed to reel from disaster to disaster. Five hundred American musicians, technicians, advance men, male and female groupies swarmed into the Intercontinental Hotel, accompanied by sixteen camera crews who were to shoot five hundred miles of film. But Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin were no-shows, and James Brown, said to have been guaranteed $100,000 for his appearance, finally went on at 4 a.m. to an audie
nce of three hundred, two hundred of whom could not be awakened even by Brown’s musical histrionics. The old star, Etta James, on the comeback trail, never got on at all and went back to her hotel in despair. Ali’s dream of black Americans and their African brothers coming together to make music still remains just what it was back in Deer Lake—a dream. On the first night of the festival, overpriced from $3 to $20, there were five thousand people looking very lonely in the vast soccer stadium. The following night there were only fifteen hundred. Our black American musicians found the Zairian music boring. The few Kinshasans on hand were mystified by the sophisticated sound of the Jazz Crusaders and the Appalachian poetry of Bill Withers. Only Miriam Makeba, who spoke French, sang the songs of her Black South African people, and moved in her theatrical gown like a wicked angel, was able to establish any rapport with her audience.

  Maybe, I wondered, as I watched the talented Pointer Sisters bomb with the rest of the talented American stars, you can’t go home again. You can only dream of home. Of course there are African echoes in the soul music of America. But the ears of the Zairians seemed deaf to them.

  Towering Don King, the ex-numbers boss who had had plenty of time to dream while doing time in the pen for inadvertently killing a runner with his fists, had conjured up this festival, just as he had sweet-talked the fighters into signing for $5 million each before finding the source of that munificence. In a flowing robe incongruous to modern Kinshasa, he had presided over the plush lobby of the Intercontinental. Now, with the music festival in ruins, and the fight in jeopardy, our Emperor Jones was suddenly incommunicado.