Paying no heed to my instructions, Ali came out for Round Three and immediately went back to the ropes, using his now legendary "rope-a-dope" strategy—though I thought it was just the "dope." I didn't have anything to do with it. It was all Ali's idea. There he stood in a "come-into-my-web" pose, leaving George to hew away at him as a lumberjack would a tree, most of his punches looking as if they were launched from somewhere in the third row. George was throwing everything he had, but Ali was blocking them with his arms or evading them completely by leaning back over the ropes out of harm's, and George's, way. George Plimpton, sitting ringside, thought at times that Ali "looked like he was leaning out a window to see if there was something on the roof." Bundini was beside himself, screaming, "DANCE! CHAMP! DANCE!" But there was no dancing, just Ali standing in front of George, making him miss, and miss again. Continuing to throw his cluster bombs, George finally landed one of his "anywhere" punches, a wicked right that hit Ali just under the heart. But Ali just looked at George with one of those "is-that-all-you've-got" looks, causing George to momentarily stop, not knowing what to do. Every now and then, as George took target practice on the covering-up Ali, Ali would grab George and tie him up, leaning on him and pressing his elbows into George's back. The bell ending Round Three sounded, and Ali was still there as George slowly walked back to his corner, beginning to show signs of wearing down.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. By the end of the third it was evident that not only wouldn't George's parachute open, but that it was beginning to close. What I couldn't understand for the life of me was why George's corner kept telling him to "Go out and mash him" after every round instead of telling him to pace himself, to change his tactics instead of just continuing on the attack, round after round, wearing himself out. I told Ali, "George is tiring ... go get him." But Ali had other plans. Taking his "rope-a-dope" further, Ali punctuated his punches with taunts, saying, "Come on, sucker, show me something. I can't feel it. You ain't nothing but a chump. You done run out of gas; now I'm gonna kick your ass." And then he'd pop George a couple of times between his verbal punches.
After watching Ali lean back over the ropes for most of the past two-plus rounds, making George miss and air-condition the entire arena with wild punches in the process, Ali's change of strategy was obvious. At least to me. However, Bundini didn't see it that way. Believing that the ropes, now limp from the tropical heat, should be tightened to enable Ali to, as he had been hollering, "Get off the ropes," Bundini jumped up on the apron and made as if ready to do so. But I grabbed him before he could leave the corner, shouting, "No ... no, for Christ's sake ... don't!!! Leave them alone!" I figured if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And Ali's strategy of staying on the ropes was working fine, thank you. And no thank you, Bundini!
What was surprising was that every time Ali landed a punch it was met with loud cheers while every time George exploded one of his bombs to Ali's head, ribs, kidneys, wherever, it was met with almost complete silence. And make no mistake about it, had the bombs landed, the effect of those punches would be like someone getting hit with a railroad tie. One of those punches did explode in the fourth, George catching Ali with a thunderous right to the back of his neck. But Ali, in an I'm-not-going-to-let-you-hurt-me ruse, grabbed George and said into his ear, "Is that the best you got? Is that the hardest you can hit, chump? Show me sumthing, George. That don't hurt, that's a sissy punch!" And then, head cleared, Ali closed out the round with a stinging combination or two.
As Ali sat down on his stool at the end of the fourth he said, "He's mine ... he's got nothing left. I can knock him out now." "So DO IT," I shouted. "Not yet," said Ali. "He had his turn, now I'm gonna play with him." That said, he got off the stool and led the fans in the familiar "Ali, bomaye!" chants.
For the next three rounds that's exactly what Ali did. He played with Big George, lulling him into a false sense of invulnerability as he continued to whale away. It was a little like a lab test I had seen conducted during one of my high school science courses where the teacher had put a toad in a pan of water and turned up the heat little by little until the toad, unaware of the temperature change, was a goner, toasted alive. Now it was George who was being toasted, little by little. Ali first established homesteading rights to the ropes in the early part of the rounds picking off George's punches, now as weak as day-old ginger ale, and then came to life toward the end of each round with bursts of his own, turning up the heat.
By now Ali was so confident he was not only playing with George, he was hollering at Archie Moore in Foreman's corner who was trying to instruct his fighter. "Be quiet, old man, it's all over," he taunted, leading the cheers of the crowd with his free hand. I didn't like what I was seeing. He was playing, grandstanding, and paying no attention to George. I screamed, "Don't play with that sucker. Don't play!" Having heard me, Ali quit his talking and moved away from George, back to the ropes. I hesitate to think what could have happened if he hadn't, no matter how tired George was. For although he looked like a flaccid water hose whose pressure had been turned off, George Foreman still had the power to throw one of his Hail Mary punches and catch Ali when his guard was down and his mouth open.
As the bell for the eighth sounded I shouted, "HE'S OUT OF GAS! TAKE HIM OUT OF THERE ... HE's READY TO GO!" And George looked it, rising unsteadily from his stool. Lumbering to the middle of the ring he began winging punches, but now they were coming with all the speed of a responsive reading and taking longer to reach Ali, who greeted each of his missed-by-a-mile swings with a "Sucker, you look bad" or "Chump, you missed me again." Toward the end of the round, with Ali back on the ropes, George began pummeling him again, one of his shots moving Ali slightly to Ali's right. Trying to follow up, George momentarily lost his balance and fell into the ropes. That was enough for Ali, who shot over a right, then a left-right combination, the effects of which were magnified by George's leaning into him as he tried to regain his footing. Quick to take advantage of George's imbalance, Ali threw another combination, with more snap, more power, and finally let loose with a bodacious right that caught George flush on the jaw. With that final right, George lost his struggle with gravity's pull and submitted to it, as he began a slow, lazy pirouette to the canvas.
As George slowly reeled to the floor, Bundini let out, "Oh, Lawdy ... he's on queer street!" For there he was, down for the first time in his career, and referee Zack Clayton was leaning over him tolling the count, "One ... two ... three ..." as George stirred. "Four ... five ... six ... seven ... eight ..." George got to his knees and made as if ready to rise. Then "nine ... ten ..." or was it "nine-ten ..."? Or maybe just "nine ... and out"? I never heard the fatal "ten." I still don't think that "ten" was ever tolled—maybe as part of "nine-ten" but not "ten." But whatever, George didn't protest. He merely got up and walked disheartedly back to his corner knowing he had been beaten—mentally and physically.
Ali had won! Or more correctly, he had "BOMAYE'd" Foreman. All of a sudden the ring was overrun with an uncountable number of people, all jumping up and down with the joy prisoners feel at the announcement of their release. Over on one side of the ring George was silently leaving the ring as more and more fans brushed by him, trying to become part of the most riotous scene since the French Revolution. Me? I had detached myself from the scene to hang over the ropes and talk to the press in one of my I-told-you-so moments.
Later, in the dressing room, as Ali, tongue firmly implanted in cheek, was telling the press, to roars of laughter, "That couldn't have been me out there, 'cause I can't punch," I ran into sportswriter Skip Myslenski. "You sure called that right, Angie," Skip said, "except you said it would be Round Ten." "Yeah I did, didn't I?" I said with a wide grin on my puss. "Sorry about the round. Muhammad thought it was gonna rain so he decided to finish it." And wouldn't you know it, almost as soon as the fight had ended the heavens opened up and a storm the likes of which you've rarely seen came down in proverbial buckets, leaving three feet of rain in our dressing room. Not on
ly had I called the fight, I was also now practicing to be a weatherman!
If the Sonny Liston fight was the formative one of Ali's career, then the Foreman fight was his most satisfying. To what extent was witnessed by sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, who had been with Ali in the early morning hours after his victory. The two had been down on the banks of the Zaire River where Ali had stood, looking out over the water for the longest period of time as if he were somewhere else. Finally, Ali turned away from the water's edge and said to Izenberg, "You'll never know how long I've waited for this. You'll never know what this means to me."
There was one other footnote to the fight. Some six months after the fight a squib tucked away under the shipping news completed the financial arrangements for "The Rumble in the Jungle." The story told of how Zaire, in a Mouse That Roared scenario, had requested and been granted a loan of $5 million from the United States for defense assistance—the exact amount it had cost them to stage the fight!
TWELVE
"The Thrilla in Manila" and Joe Frazier
Copyright © 2008 by Angelo Dundee and Bert Randolph Sugar Click here for terms of use.
Having beaten George Foreman to become only the second ever two-time heavyweight champion, Muhammad Ali's fame now bordered on the mythic. He could easily have walked off the stage after his dramatic accomplishment, like Ted Williams retiring after hitting a home run in his last at-bat, assured of his legendary place in boxing history. But even though he hinted at retirement—and would again and again, announcing his retirement and then coming back more times than Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand combined—nothing short of a grappling hook could have gotten him off. His ego wouldn't let him. He delighted in the spotlight and the attention his win had earned him, telling Madison Square Garden photographer George Kalinsky, "I can't get off the stage now ... if I do, nobody will remember me." Rather than taking his newly won heavyweight belt and tucking it under his arm, he embarked upon a campaign to defend it every two to three months.
Making all the world his stage, Ali began what would be a manic every-other-month title tour beginning with a defense in Cleveland against Chuck Wepner. Hardly a marquee name, the hulking 6' 6" Wepner was better known for his nickname, "The Bayonne Bleeder" than for his fistic feats. His thirty wins defined him less than his losses to the likes of Jerry Judge and Randy Neumann. Two of his nine losses had come at the hands and gloves of George Foreman and Sonny Liston—Liston being asked after his KO of Wepner, "Was he the bravest man you ever fought?" To which Liston replied, "No, but his manager was."
With prefight predictions ranging anywhere from a walkover to Wepner beginning to bleed somewhere between "O say" and "can you see," Wepner gave it what you would call in boxing "a good try," hitting Ali on the back of the neck, on the back of the back, anywhere he could. He would have hit Ali on the bottoms of his feet if he had had his chance. In the process, he managed to shock the boxing world by knocking Ali down in the ninth round and staying just nineteen seconds short of the scheduled fifteen rounds.
Besides his gallant effort, which became the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone's Rocky, Wepner and his manager, Al Braverman, made the fight all the more memorable with their unforgettable lines. Before the fight, after being warned by the Ohio Commission that he couldn't use any "foreign substances" to stem the expected flow of his fighter's blood, Braverman added a quote to boxing's quote book by telling the commission, "These ain't no foreign substances. I bought them right here in the United States." And after the ninth-round knockdown, Wepner returned to his corner crowing, "Get in the car ... we're going to the bank ... we're rich." Braverman, who had seen Ali get up with an if-you-ever-dream-of-beating-me-you'd-better-wake-up-and-apologize look in his eyes, told his warrior, "You'd better turn around 'cause he just got up and is he pissed!" But perhaps the funniest of all the lines came from Wepner himself when he told of how he had bought his wife a nightie and told her that she "would be sleeping with the champion tonight." To hear Chuck tell it, when he returned to his hotel room after the fight he was greeted by his wife, sitting on the edge of the bed clad in the nightie, with, "Is Ali coming to our room or am I going to his?"
Next stop on the Ali tour was Las Vegas just two months later, against Ron Lyle, the third-ranked heavyweight in the world. The sinister-looking Lyle had been, by his own admission, "to hell and back," having spent seven-and-a-half years for second-degree murder at the Colorado State Penitentiary where, after a prison brawl, the seriously injured Lyle had been declared "clinically dead." His life in the ring had also been one of survival, his career a series of comebacks. He had lost to Jerry Quarry but had come back to beat Oscar Bonavena and Jimmy Ellis. Now he brought a record of thirty-one wins and twenty-one knockouts into the ring against Ali.
You'd have thought that facing a challenger with a capital "C" would psyche up Ali. But the pursuit of the championship seemed to be more exciting to Ali than his possession of it. And it showed as Lyle outworked and outscored him, leading on all three cards after ten rounds. However, in the eleventh Ali suddenly reawakened the echoes and, resembling the Ali of old, threw an avalanche of punches that forced referee Ferd Hernandez to call a halt to the proceedings—a halt Lyle's trainer, my old mentor, Chickie Ferrara, indignantly screamed, "... wasn't kosher. It wasn't a four-round fight, it was a championship fight." As Chickie said, "It was a championship fight," and another successful title defense for Ali, his second in his second reign and his tenth overall, second only to Joe Louis.
Now the Ali title tour traveled many of the same roads Hollywood legends Bob Hope and Bing Crosby had taken three decades earlier in their famous Road movies, first going to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where Ali defended his title against Joe Bugner, the European heavyweight champion. The two had met two years before, Ali defeating Bugner in a twelve-round decision in Las Vegas. This time, going through the motions without any emotions in a forgettable fight, the result was the same, only the site and number of rounds were different, with Ali ultimately winning a fifteen-round decision.
Before the fight Ali had announced his retirement for the umpteenth time. But retirements don't mean much in boxing, which has seen more retirements than the Social Security office. And after the fight, Ali, lying on his bed back at the hotel watching films of his second fight with Joe Frazier, suddenly jumped up and hollered, "Get me Joe Frazier." His brief retirement was over. Now it was on to Manila.
There have been twosomes in almost every imaginable field that are as inseparable as salt and pepper—biblically, Cain and Abel; musically, Gilbert and Sullivan; comedically, Abbott and Costello; and on and on. But if you're a boxing fan, there has never been a more famous pairing than Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. It's almost as if they were linked together in boxing history, always to be connected by a hyphen, the average fan unable to say the name of one without the other. Together these two greats had had two fights and twenty-seven rounds filled with almost nonstop action and great thrills. Now they were to fight a third time. A rubber match for bookkeeping superiority in a fight that would give the fans one of the greatest matches of all time and give boxing a new word, trilogy.
Convinced that Frazier was all but through, a mere facsimile of what he once was, Ali wanted a third match with Frazier to prove to the world that by beating him two out of three he was indeed "The Greatest."
Almost before the ink was dry on the contract for their third matchup, Ali, his juices flowing once again, reverted to his old psychological tricks and shticks. First he added Frazier's name to his rogue's gallery of opponents, a list that included "Bear" for Sonny Liston, "Rabbit" for Patterson, "Washerwoman" for George Chuvalo, and "Mummy" for George Foreman. To these, Ali added "Gorilla" for Frazier. Then he incorporated it into a poem: "It'll be a killa, a chilla, a thrilla, when I get the Gorilla in Manila"—hence the name of the fight: "The Thrilla in Manila."
Continuing the beat, Ali once again brought up the "H" word, as in hospital, the word that had so angered Frazier in the ABC-
TV studios that he had challenged Ali to a fight right then and there. Now Ali said, "I've got two punches for Frazier, the balloon punch and the needle punch. My left jab is the balloon and my right is the needle. I promise Joe Frazier will be in the hospital again!"
My opposite number this time would be Eddie Futch, who had taken over Frazier's corner from Yank Durham, Joe's original manager-trainer, who had died the year before. A master of psychology, Eddie was alert, shrewd, and instantly responsive to any situation. His concern now was Joe becoming overly emotional. "Joe was a little too emotional in the second fight," Futch said, assessing Joe's performance. "But he's not seething anymore ... he's got quiet resolve."
However, Eddie's assurances about Joe "not seething anymore" apparently hadn't reached Joe, whose resentment of Ali and his mocking remarks, especially being called a "gorilla," reached the boiling point, with Frazier retorting, "It's real hatred. I want to hurt him. I don't want to knock him out in Manila, I want to take his heart out."
I have always tried to blend with my fighters, have a personal touch with them. But there was one place I could not and would not go and that was their personal lives. I just could not get involved. For a trainer, it was a no-no. It was that way with Willie Pastrano, with Doug Vaillant, and with all my other fighters, including Muhammad. However, there was one time I almost got caught in the undertow of a personal problem that came bubbling to the surface.
My View from the Corner Page 24