On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  As it happens, Hauser’s succinct commentary on the Ali phenomenon and his shrewd analysis of the boxing world, including Don King’s role in it, in The Black Lights, can provide, for the reader of the biography, a kind of companion gloss; the books are helpfully read in tandem. It is a remark of Ali’s, in 1967, that gives The Black Lights its ominous title:

  They say when you get hit and hurt bad you see black lights—the black lights of unconsciousness. But I don’t know nothing about that. I’ve had twenty-eight fights and twenty-eight wins. I ain’t never been stopped.

  Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 17, 1942, grandson of a slave, began boxing at the age of twelve, and, by eighteen, had fought one hundred and eight amateur bouts. How is it possible, the young man who, in his twenties, would astonish the world not just with the brilliance of his boxing but the sharpness of his wit, seemed to have been a dull-average student in high school who graduated 376th out of a class of 391; in 1966, his score on a mental aptitude test was an Army I.Q. of 78, well below military qualification. In 1975, Ali confessed to a reporter that he “can’t read too good” and had not read ten pages of all the material written about him. I remember the television interview in which, asked what else he might have done with his life, Ali paused, for several seconds, clearly not knowing how to reply. All he’d ever known, he said finally, was boxing.

  Mental aptitude tests cannot measure genius except in certain narrow ranges, and the genius of the body, the play of lightning-swift reflexes coupled with unwavering precision and confidence, eludes comprehension. All great boxers posses this genius, which scrupulous training hones, but can never create. “Styles make fights,” as Ali’s great trainer Angelo Dundee says, and “style” was young Ali’s trademark. Yet even after early wins over such veterans as Archie Moore and Henry Cooper, the idiosyncracies of Ali’s style aroused skepticism in boxing experts. After winning the Olympic gold medal in 1960, Ali was described by A.J. Leibling as “skittering…like a pebble over water.” Everyone could see that this brash young boxer held his hands too low; he leaned away from punches instead of properly slipping them; his jab was light and flicking; he seemed to be perpetually on the brink of disaster. As a seven-to-one underdog in his first title fight with Sonny Liston, the twenty-two-year-old challenger astounded the experts with his performance, which was like none other they had ever seen in the heavyweight division; he so outboxed and demoralized Liston that Liston “quit on his stool” after the sixth round. A new era in boxing had begun, like a new music.

  “Ali rode the crest of a new wave of athletes—competitors who were both big and fast…Ali had a combination of size and speed that had never been seen in a fighter before, along with incredible will and courage. He also brought a new style to boxing. Jack Dempsey changed fisticuffs from a kind where fighters fought in a tense defensive style to a wild sensual assault. Ali revolutionized boxing the way black basketball players have changed basketball today. He changed what happened in the ring, and elevated it to a level that was previously unknown.”

  (Larry Merchant, quoted in Hauser)

  In the context of contemporary boxing—the sport is in one of its periodic slumps—there is nothing more instructive and rejuvenating than to see again these old, early fights of Ali’s, when, as his happy boast had it, he floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee and threw punches faster than opponents could see—like the “mystery” right to the temple of Liston that felled him, in the first minute of the first round of their rematch. These early fights, the most brilliant being against Cleveland Williams, in 1966, predate by a decade the long, grueling, punishing fights of Ali’s later career whose cumulative effects hurt Ali so irrevocably, resulting in what doctors call, carefully, his “Parkinsonianism”—to distinguish it from “Parkinson’s Disease.” There is a true visceral shock in observing a heavyweight with the grace, agility, swiftness of hands and feet, defensive skills and ring cunning of a middleweight Ray Robinson, or a lightweight Willie Pep!—like all great athletes, Ali has to be seen to be believed.

  In a secular, yet pseudo-religious and sentimental nation like the United States, it is quite natural that sports stars emerge as “heroes”—“legends”—“icons.” Who else? George Santayana described religion as “another world to live in” and no world is so other, so set off from the disorganization and disenchantment of the quotidian than the world, or worlds, of sports. Hauser describes, in considerable detail, the transformation of the birth of Ali out of the unexpectedly stubborn and idealistic will of young Cassius Clay: how, immediately following his first victory over Liston, he declared himself a convert to the Nation of Islam (more popularly known as the Black Muslims) and “no longer a Christian.” He repudiated his “slave name” of Cassius Marcellus Clay to become Muhammad Ali. (A name which, incidentally, the New York Times, among other censorious white publications, would not honor through the 1960’s.) Ali became, virtually overnight, a spokesman for black America as no other athlete, certainly not the purposefully reticent Joe Louis, had ever done—“I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” he told white, media-dominated America, “I’m free to be what I want to be.” Two years later, refusing to be inducted into the army to fight in Vietnam, Ali, beleaguered by reporters, uttered one of the great, incendiary remarks of that era: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”

  How ingloriously white America responded to Ali, how unashamedly racist and punitive: the government retaliated by overruling a judge who had granted Ali the status of conscientious objector, fined him $10,000 and sentenced him to five years in prison; outrageously, he was stripped of his heavyweight title and deprived of his license to box. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the conviction, and, as the tide of opinion shifted in the country, in the early 1970’s as the Vietnam War wound down, Ali returned triumphantly to boxing again, and regained the heavyweight title not once but twice. Years of exile during which he’d endured the angry self-righteousness of the conservative white press seemed, wonderfully, not to have embittered him. He had become a hero. He had entered myth.

  Yet the elegiac title of Angelo Dundee’s chapter in Dave Anderson’s In The Corner—“We Never Saw Muhammad Ali at His Best”—defines the nature of Ali’s sacrifice for his principles, and the loss to boxing. When, after the three-and-a-half-year layoff, Ali returned to the ring, he was of course no longer the seemingly invincible boxer he’d been; he’d lost his legs, thus his primary line of defense. Like the maturing writer who learns to replace the incandescent head-on energies of youth with what is called technique, Ali would have to descend into his physical being and experience for the first time the punishment (“the nearest thing to death”) this is the lot of the great boxer willing to put himself to the test. As Ali’s personal physician at that time, Ferdie Pacheco, said,

  [Ali] discovered something which was both very good and very bad. Very bad in that it led to the physical damage he suffered later in his career; very good in that it eventually got him back the championship. He discovered that he could take a punch.

  The secret of Ali’s mature success, and the secret of his tragedy: he could take a punch.

  For the remainder of his twenty-year career, Muhammad Ali took punches, many of the kind that, delivered to a non-boxer, would kill him or her outright—from Joe Frazier in their three exhausting marathon bouts, from George Foreman, from Ken Norton, Leon Spinks, Larry Holmes. Where in his feckless youth Ali was a dazzling figure combining, say, the brashness of Hotspur and the insouciance of Lear’s Fool, he became in these dark, brooding, increasingly willed fights the closest analogue boxing contains to Lear himself; or, rather, since there is no great fight without two great boxers, the title matches Ali-Frazier I (which Frazier won by a decision) and Ali-Frazier III (which Ali won, just barely, when Frazier virtually collapsed after the fourteenth round) are boxing’s analogues to King Lear—ordeals of unfathomable human courage and resilience raised to the
level of classic tragedy. These somber and terrifying boxing matches make us weep for their very futility; we seem to be in the presence of human experience too profound to be named—beyond the syntactical strategies and diminishments of language. The mystic’s dark night of the soul, transmogrified as a brutal meditation of the body.

  And Ali-Foreman, Zaire, 1974: the occasion of the infamous “rope-a-dope” defense, by which the thirty-two-year-old Ali exhausted his twenty-six-year-old opponent by the inspired method of, simply, and horribly, allowing him to punch himself out on Ali’s body and arms. This is a fight of such a magical quality that even to watch it closely is not to see how it was done, its fairy tale reversal in the eighth round executed. (One of Norman Mailer’s most impassioned books, The Fight, is about this fight; watching a tape of Ali on the ropes enticing, and infuriating, and frustrating, and finally exhausting his opponent by an offense in the guise of a defense, I pondered what sly lessons of masochism Mailer absorbed from being at ringside that day, what deep-imprinted resolve to outwear all adversaries.)

  These hard-won victories began irreversible loss: progressive deterioration of Ali’s kidneys, hands, reflexes, stamina. By the time of that most depressing of modern-day matches, Ali-Holmes, 1980, when Ali was thirty-eight years old, Ferdie Pacheco had long departed the Ali camp, dismissed for having advised Ali to retire; those who supported Ali’s decision to fight, like the bout’s promoter Don King, had questionable motives. Judging from Hauser’s information, it is a wonder that Ali survived this fight at all: the fight was, in Sylvester Stallone’s words, “like watching an autopsy on a man who’s still alive.” (In The Black Lights, Hauser describes the bedlam that followed this vicious fight at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, where gamblers plunged in an orgy of gambling, as in a frenzy of feeding, or copulation: “Ali and Holmes had done their job.”) Incredibly, Ali was allowed to fight once more, with Trevor Berbick, in December 1981, before retiring permanently.

  Hauser’s portrait of Ali is compassionate and un-judging: is the man to be blamed for having been addicted to his body’s own adrenaline, or are others to be blamed for indulging him—and exploiting him? The brash rap-style egoism of young Cassius Clay underwent a considerable transformation during Ali’s long public career, yet strikes us, perhaps, as altered only in tone: “Boxing was just to introduce me to the world,” Ali has told his biographer. Mystically involved in the Nation of Islam, Ali sincerely believes himself an international emissary for peace, love, and understanding (he who once wreaked such violence upon his opponents!); and who is to presume to feel sorry for one who will not feel sorry for himself?

  The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing describes a small, self-contained arc—a few years in the career of a boxer named Billy Costello, at one time a superlightweight titleholder from Kingston, New York. Like Muhammad Ali, it is a sympathetic study of its primary subject, Costello, his manager Mike Jones, and their families and associates; yet, in the interstices of a compelling narrative taking us through the preparation for a successful title defense of 1984, it illuminates aspects of the boxing world generally unknown to outsiders—the routine and discipline of the boxer in training; the complex role of the fight manager; the exhausting contractual negotiations; the state of this “red-light district”—

  “Professional boxing is no longer worthy of civilized society. It’s run by self-serving crooks, who are called promoters…Except for the fighters, you’re talking about human scum…Professional boxing is utterly immoral. It’s not capable of reformation. I now favor the abolition of professional boxing. You’ll never clean it up. Mud can never be clean.”

  (Howard Cosell, quoted in Hauser)

  Like others sympathetic with boxers, who are in fact poorly paid, non-unionized workers with no benefits in a monopolistic business without antitrust control, Hauser argues strongly for a national association to regulate the sport; a federal advisory panel to protect boxers from exploitation. His portrait of Billy Costello allows us to see why a young man will so eagerly risk injuries in the ring, which is perceived as a life-line, and not a place of exploitation; why he will devote himself to the rigors of training in a sport in which, literally, one’s entire career can end within a few seconds.

  Black Lights ends dramatically, with Costello retaining his title against a thirty-seven-year-old opponent, Saoul Mamby, and with his hope of moving up in weight and making more money. Since its publication in 1986, the book has become a boxing classic; it is wonderfully readable, and, unlike Ali, judiciously proportioned. Yet to end the book with this victory is surely misleading, and even, to this reader, perplexing. The “black lights of unconsciousness” will be experienced by Billy Costello shortly, in a bout with a dazzlingly arrogant and idiosyncratic Ali-inspired young boxer named, at that time, “Lightning” Lonnie Smith, who would KO Costello in one of those nightmare scenarios all boxers have, before a hometown audience in Kingston. Following that devastating loss, Costello would fight the aging Alexis Arguello, one of the great lightweights of contemporary times, who would beat him savagely and end his career. To end with a tentative victory and not supply at least a coda to take us to the collapse of Billy Costello’s career deprives Black Lights of the significance it might have had—for boxing is about failure far more than it is about success. In the words of the battered Saoul Mamby, “I’ll miss it. I love boxing. Everything passed too soon.”

  MUHAMMAD ALI

  THE GREATEST

  I was determined to be one nigger that the white man didn’t get.

  —MUHAMMAD ALI, 1970

  Boxing was nothing. It wasn’t important at all. Boxing was just a means to introduce me to the world.

  —MUHAMMAD ALI, 1983

  In the twentieth century, and perhaps most spectacularly in the 1970s, sports has emerged as our dominant American religion. Through the excited scrutiny of the media, our most celebrated athletes acquire mythopoetic status; they are both “larger than life” and often incapacitated for life in the ordinary, private sense. To be a champion, one must only be a consistently better performer than his or her competitors; to be a great champion, like Muhammad Ali, one must transcend the perimeters of sport itself to become a model (in some cases a sacrificial model) for the general populace, image-bearer for an era.

  Though he came of age as an extraordinary young boxer in the 1960s, and made his mark as a radical political presence during that decade, it was in the 1970s that Ali achieved greatness. The 1970s, following the inglorious end of the Vietnam War, is our decade of transition; a time of accommodation, healing and reassessment. Who would have thought that Muhammad Ali’s defiant repudiation of American foreign policy, in the mid-1960s considered virtually traitorous by some observers, would come to be, in the decade to follow, a widespread and altogether respectable political position? Who would have thought that the lone black athlete, like Ali, once ostracized by the media, would come to be emblematic of the “new” era in which, following Ali’s example, athletes like Reggie Jackson (the first major league baseball player to sport a moustache since 1914) could express (or exhibit) themselves in essentially playful, theatrical gestures that had little to do with their utilitarian function as athletes? Who would have thought that such flamboyant, controversial gestures as Ali’s penchant for declaiming poetry and the comical “Ali shuffle” would influence a new generation of blacks?—in music, where “rap” soared to prominence, and in the scathingly funny comic routines of performers like Richard Pryor; above all in basketball, where players of the caliber of Michael Jordan combined extraordinary skill, like Ali, with a personal sense of style? (Compare the modest, constrained public personae of Joe Louis, Ezzard Charles, Jackie Robinson of an earlier era in which the black athlete was given to know that his presence was provisional and not a right; his very career was a privilege that might be revoked at any time.) The phenomenon of media attention, and hype, accorded every turn of Ali’s career was unlike any that preceded, just as the ever-increasing pur
ses and salaries paid to professional athletes in our time are a consequence of Ali’s role in the public consciousness. Perhaps free agentry in sports like baseball and football would have followed in due course, but not so swiftly in the 1970s (leading to the 1974 strike in football, for instance) without Ali’s example. Ali is the quintessential “free agent” as his much-maligned predecessor Jack Johnson might have been, except for the overwhelming opposition of that era’s white racism. And Ali was the Muslim pioneer through whose unwavering example such athletes as Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were allowed to change their names and present themselves explicitly as members of a distinctly non-Christian and non-traditional religion.

  Viewed from the perspective of the new century, the 1970s was a transitional period in which, in a sense, a New Era of sports was born. If the celebrity athlete with his astronomical contract is a permanent fixture of American public life, who but Muhammad Ali, once Cassius Clay of Louisville, Kentucky, was his progenitor?

  Among boxing historians and fans it will long be debated whether Ali, or Joe Louis, was the greatest heavyweight boxer in history. (And what of the undefeated Rocky Marciano?) It is beyond debate, however, that Ali as athlete, champion, and cultural icon has acquired a significance beyond sports that no other boxer has attained, nor is likely to attain. (Prior to Ali’s ascendency in his fights with Joe Frazier, it was the vengeful, brilliantly triumphant Joe Louis of the Louis-Schmeling fight of June 1938 who most captivated the public’s imagination. Having been defeated by Nazi Germany’s “master race” athlete in 1936, the twenty-four-year-old Louis returned to knock out Schmeling in 124 seconds in the most famous boxing match in American history.) Muhammad Ali’s meteoric rise to prominence as an extraordinarily gifted if idiosyncratic and willful young boxer in the early 1960s, culminating in his unexpected defeat of heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in 1964, happened to coincide with at least three historical developments unique to the era: the first, the enmeshed, expanding entanglement of American intervention in Vietnam which both was, yet was not, a traditional war and which was fracturing American society along lines of class, race, generations, and political and patriotic allegiances; the second, the rise of black separatist movements following (in fact, predating) the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, and the awareness on the part of militant black leaders that since the civil rights victories of the 1950s, black advancement had been stalled; the third, the intensification of media influence and the growth of what might be called electronic mass marketing of “images” detached from content.