Ghosts of Manila

by Mark Kram

  But there was no similarity between their thoughts or actions. They shared only prosecution and hate. Big Jack was a loner and of the epicure school of thought—live hard and let somebody else pay for the burial. To the whites of his time, into the preservation of Nordic purity and dominance, Jack was going eye-to-eye with them, speaking to them of blood and sex and territory. Jack was as personal as the lock pick scratching at the bedroom door, the dreadful promise of untempered polluting sexuality. They drove him out of the country on flimsy pretext. The retaliation against Ali had seemed dry; rustling papers, stamped documents, the system in action like a vise. When it came to black power display, Ali was pallid next to Jack, who faced mob-think with just a confrontational grin and somehow reflected the brutally harnessed energy of his race, all of whose minds carried still lifes of a rope and a high oak tree.

  Jack never had the multitudes of followers that lined up behind Ali for the biggest fight of his life. Not just blacks, but young whites whose fathers had looked upon Ali in the extreme as a traitor, at the least merely an hysterical Little Richard. The young people, the largest bulge of population in American history, influential by weight of numbers, were seeking their own cultural voice. An unjust war was their idealistic, surface complaint; the prospect of being drafted was more visceral. These were not boxing fans, they were seekers of the antihero. What mattered was Ali’s style, his desecrating mouth, his beautiful irrationality so like their music. His black mysticism only added to his credentials, all in all a true-born slayer of authority and the status quo, a man in opposition to whiney, evil politicians and psychotic generals in the field.

  Where did they come from, this mass of angry, mewling youth? They were out of the Beats of the fifties, children of parents with middle class fears and docile lives, with a preoccupation with security and order; nonconformity was a sin. They grew up detesting the noose of the Cold War, people like Senator Joe McCarthy before whom their parents sat as if dumb. Their early spokesman was Jack Kerouac: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who never yawn, or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn.” The kids of the fifties were statistical giants and glutted on a rarefied status that expected every material advantage. “The royalty of the Fifties,” Jay Stevens calls them in Storming Heaven. They grew up with the superheroes in the comics, who lanced with the forces of evil and injustice, graduated to Mad magazine with its knife bent into middle class values. Wave after wave came with their own proclivities that would outrage: rock music, the social deviancy of roles played by Marlon Brando and James Dean, the spirituality of the ethereal poet William Blake, LSD—and now near the death rattle of the sixties, when they would soon return to the suits of the organization man they hated and become ruthless material dandies, they had their own black superhero—Muhammad Ali, who had not the slightest idea of what the hell they were talking about, except there was a mood out there, and he owned it.

  Down in Miami, Ali lay on a table as his black masseur, Luis Sarria, never seeming corporeal, just a pair of eyes beaming out in a dark mine shaft, worked his muscles.

  “See how fit I am,” Ali told me.

  “You look terrific.”

  “Up here, too,” he said, tapping his head.

  “You’d better be for this one.”

  “I know somethin’,” he said.

  “I hope so.”

  “No, I mean I really know somethin’.” He waited for a reaction, then said: “But I’m not tellin’.”

  “Something in the films of Frazier?”

  “Not that,” he said. “Don’t you want to know?”

  “I’m not going to twist your arm.”

  There was silence, then he motioned me down by his ear. “Frazier,” he whispered, “has high blood.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I got spies.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said.

  “Suppose you’re right. The fight’s going to be canceled?”

  “Naaaah,” he said, “he’s too stupid for that. If it’s me with high blood, forget it.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Bad enough,” he said. “And it’s gonna get badder come fight night. He’s gonna explode with tension. Blow up. Right there in the ring. When he sees the whole world behind me. All my people. All my young people out there pulling for me. And there he is. Lonely little Joe. All by himself. Whoeee! That’s scary.”

  In the gym during workouts, Ali produced a scripted set piece. Only the gym itself remained free of tinkering. It was always the same: thick, steaming air heavy with sweat; fading fight posters and the counterpoint of sound from gloves working speed bags and heavy bags; the gabby old retired milliners and beach wanderers as aspish as theater critics; the creak of the ring apron sighing under the desperate footwork of prelim boys; sun lasering through dirty windows turning the dusty, whitewashed walls into a dull yellow; spit buckets forming a gruel that could spawn tadpoles. Plants, Ali’s straight men, popped out of the crowd on cue, faces wreathed with cigar smoke and anger, predicting doom for him at the hands of Frazier, what Joe was going to do to that face. He’d stop sparring, engage in fake vitriol. “You there,” he’d shout, pointing to a guy with no teeth who was getting five bucks for his lines. “You lay off my pretty face! I’ll come down there and turn your face into raw meat! Like I’m gonna do to Frazier. Throw that old beggar out!” And his aides would rush into the crowd. Dressed and showered, he’d then take, say, Burt Lancaster on a tour of the Miami ghetto. “A real show,” he said to Burt. “But wait till New York, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  His mother, Odessa, stopped by on her way to the Bahamas. She couldn’t bear to watch the fight.

  “Baby,” she said, “don’t underestimate this Frazier. Work hard. I’m too nervous.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” Ali said. “I’ll be in top shape. He’s a bum.”

  “Sonny…he’s no bum,” she said, kissing his cheek.

  Not like the zoos of Philly, Fifth Street was priceless as a one-dollar look into the entrails of boxing, and it would vanish in time, its history gone as suddenly as the old Garden that now conducted boxing in a new high-rise above Penn Station. But the old Garden, a slattern of a building, was irreplaceable as a venue. Where for decades so many inflamed rallies had been held by American Nazis and flaying evangelists. Where Marilyn Monroe sang to JFK, where ballroom dancers and ice queens and clowns seemed endless. Mainly the old Garden had been the temple of world boxing. Kids doing roadwork in the half-light of a Nigerian or Bangkok morning, or kids listening by a radio, like Ali himself, knew it as a dreamlike place of torn flesh and majesty.

  The move of Garden boxing signaled, too, an environmental change. The old-style managers, with lunch on their ties, had their patch for doing business, a couple of blocks on Eighth Avenue smeared with grimy windows filled with old school rings, dusty Army greatcoats, of long and stained shot-and-a-beer bars with an Edward Hopper kind of lighting. No more doing business on a sticky phone in a booth, no more dropping in on a matchmaker, flopping down and putting your feet up on his desk. No more characters like Al Weill, who concealed his cigars and never carried more than seven dollars in mortal fear of being “touched up” by indigent managers and fighters. The whole feel was gone. Rapscallions and double-crossers to the bone, the old power now saw their haphazard stealth to be short of the mark. Well-fed lawyers with intricate traps in their attaché cases who saw big money in boxing were up ahead and lay in wait; boxing was in a double-breasted suit. Fighters were properties; managers had become hirelings.

  But Yank Durham thought of Frazier as his own. So what if Cloverlay had his contract, merely a matter then of insufficient funds. He had been there through his ring infancy, he had his heart and mind, had hacked his way through all the nonbelievers. He and his trainer, Eddie Futch, had gone first class with the fighter, did things the right way, produced a machine as carefully as he used one of his old welding torches. Yank
had got his chance, too, and proved he was more than just an amateur who specialized in turning street layabouts into prelim boys. He was a cagey old schemer, but not like most of the pickpockets on their way out; he had a trust and, though soaring in a fantasy present, the future intruded on the edge of consciousness. If Joe won, then, maybe, there was a fight or two left in him. If he lost, he’d have to set him down, close him out; it wouldn’t be easy. Fighters like Joe climbed to the top out of breathtaking will, got there inch by inch, leaving mounting pain on each rung. He’d have enough money to quit. Yank didn’t want him hurt, he was not a fighter of longevity. He knew Ali was going to be a mean night. Too mean, the kind of fight that might cut Joe to a scrap, and he’d have to shut him down. His nerves, he said, jumped at the sad prospect.

  When Frazier broke camp five detectives rode shotgun with him to New York, underlining how serious they had taken the many threats to the fighter’s life. Joe didn’t say much, said one, and “he looked so distant we joked that he was sitting there waiting for us to give him the menu for his last meal.” Not unusual for a fighter; muteness is helpful when reels are turning so fast in the mind, though some become unusually garrulous, making one wonder what visions they are trying to muffle. The group rolled out of the Holland Tunnel and were joined by a small fleet of New York police for escort into Manhattan. Durham and Joe checked into the City Squire on Seventh Avenue, then suddenly left when the hotel fielded a bomb threat. To protect himself from the crushing mob on the streets, Ali put up at the Garden. On the night before the fight, Joe was now at the Pierre Hotel, and Joe says in his book Ali called him.

  “Joe Frazier, you ready?” Ali asked.

  “I’m ready,” Joe said.

  “I’m ready, too, Joe Frazier. And you can’t beat me.”

  “You know what?” Joe said. “You preach that you’re one of God’s men. Well, we’ll see.”

  “You sure you’re not scared, Joe Frazier?”

  “Scared of what I’m going to do to you?”

  “Ain’t nothing you can do,” Ali said. “See you.”

  “I’ll be there,” Joe said. “Don’t be late.”

  With his entourage streaming out before him, Ali went down and settled into his dressing room, a place that he could turn on the quickest whim into dramaturgy. He’d rouse Bundini to the point of crying, jump on one of his comments and purposely misinterpret it. He’d taunt other members, calling up a bungled chore. He’d joke with Pat Patterson, who had his water bottle under lock and key, and try to guess on what part of the body the inventive bodyguard was packing his iron. You never knew if he was going to show up hysterical or with a calm that nearly rocked everyone else to sleep. Now, he just watched Angelo Dundee float in the room as if he were a priest arranging details for a high mass. They never talked over plans; Ali never worked from notes. He lay on the table and drifted into a half-sleep under Luis Sarria’s hands, the buzz of Bundini far off: “Oh, mercy, we gotta big one tonight.” “Shut that nigger up,” Ali mumbled. Butch Lewis, from Joe’s camp, came in to watch the taping of Ali’s hands. He then shot up from the table, started to pirouette through the room with volleys of punches. He shouted to Lewis: “Take this back to your dumb chump!”

  There were only a handful of people in Frazier’s room, Durham, Futch, an assistant, Les Peleman, and a Philly cop-bodyguard. Joe was gloved and ready. Durham took him to the far corner of the room, put his hands on his shoulders, looked him straight in the eye and in his signature voice said: “Well, we’re here. I want you to know what you’ve done, boy. There will never be another Joe Frazier. They all laughed. You got us here. There’s not another human who ever lived I’d want to send out there, not even Joe Louis. Win tonight, and the road will be paved in gold. Think of those mammy-suckin’ white people and the hot fields soaking up the sweat and hope of your parents. You were made for this moment. Take it, cocksucker.” They hugged and laughed. Joe then lay on the table, a dark bomb ready to be rolled into a hangar. “Five minutes!” someone shouted. Joe got up, loosened up with some body rolls and punches. He then knelt in the center of the room and prayed aloud: “God, let me survive this night. God protect my family. God grant me strength. And God…allow me to kick the shit out of this mothafucker!”

  How do you describe a roar? Like a cataract, maybe if you had ever looked down on Niagara Falls. Otherwise, a roar is a roar, it goes no place in the mind. It is an empty word in text, it is a sensory word, it has to be heard to be given features. As soon as the fighters began their parade to the ring, there was this sonic blast of sound that seemed to bend the plinth of yellow light over them, and it would seldom drop in decibel. If the guy next to you in the press row spoke, you couldn’t hear him. The wall of sound sent a current up the back and made palms moist. The whirlpool of race politics that had for weeks spread to so much passionate exchange, the cross section of accusatory idiocy, eddied out of sight. There was just The Fight now, the pure and inescapable sorting out, and there was a twinge of sympathy for their stark aloneness and the immensity of performance, of expectations they faced. Burt Lancaster was doing the color for 340 closed-circuit outlets, Don Dunphy, graceful and spare, had the blow-by-blow, and Sinatra was shooting pictures for Life. The place was filled with the aristocracy of fame: Elvis, the Beatles, Salvador Dalí, just about everyone, all of them presumably dispatched from the limos that strung around the Garden two-deep like black pearls.

  Like certain soufflés, heavyweight title fights disappoint more than satisfy. If it ends quickly, it’s a fix (an artifact from film noir and vagrant, inglorious incidents stuck too much in the lexicon of fans and press). Go the distance, and you’re a bum with no punch, or you carried him. But a fight has its own reality (similars in style equal a negative), full of snares, letdowns, inertia, and flashing drama when all the parts locked in right—just like life. It wasn’t a film with Martin Scorcese on a skateboard with a hand-held camera, with Robert De Niro being pumped like a fountain of blood, his face dissolving into a hurt built by a makeup man. No wonder the Rocky series, which pulverized every cliché in the game, has turned boxing into distorting cartoon, heightened the prospectus, the coming visuals to a level unattainable. Rarely, if ever, do two fighters with opposing styles, the long blade and the shattering rock pick, conjoin, and rarely does a fight evoke such pressing magnitude, void of the relentless smear of hype; this one had no forced marketing blare, none of the verbal offal that passes for coverage today; the Garden was sold out five weeks before the event. Scalpers were getting seven hundred dollars a pop on the sidewalk.

  Ali was the first in the ring, in a red velvet robe with matching trunks, and white shoes with red tassels. He glided in a circle to a crush of sound, a strand of blown grass. Whatever you might have thought of him then, you were forced to look at him with honest, lingering eyes, for there might never be his like again. Assessed by ring demands—punch, size, speed, intelligence, command, and imagination—he was an action poet, the equal of the best painting you could find, or a Mozart who failed to die too early. If that is overstatement, disfiguring the finer arts by association with a brute game, consider the mudslide of purple that attaches to his creative lessers in other fields, past and present; Ali was physical art, belonged alone in a museum of his own. I was extremely fond of him, of his work, of the decent side of his nature, and jaundiced on his cultish servility, his thermopolitical combustions that tried to twist adversaries into grotesque shapes. It never worked, except perhaps on Liston, who came to think he was clinically insane. It did work on himself, shaped the fear for his face and general well-being into a positive force, a psychological war dance that blew up the dam and released his flood of talent. The trouble was that, like Kandinsky’s double-sided painting of chaos and calm, it became increasingly difficult for him to find his way back from one side to the other.

  In a green and gold brocade robe with matching trunks, Joe Frazier almost seemed insectile next to Ali in the ring, and he was made more so as Ali waltzed b
y him, bumped him and said: “Chump!” Far from that slur, Joe was a gladiator right smack to the root conjurings of the title, to the clank of armor he seemed to emit. Work within his perimeter, and you courted what fighters used to call “the black spot,” the flash knockout. He was a fighter that could be hit with abandon, but if you didn’t get him out of there his drilling aggression, his marked taste for pursuit and threshing-blade punches could overwhelm you; as one military enthusiast in his camp said, “like the Wehrmacht crossing into Russia.” I was drawn to the honesty of his work, the joy he derived from inexorable assault, yet had a cool neutrality to his presence. In truth, with a jewel in each hand, I didn’t want to part with either of them, thus making me pitifully objective, a capital sinner in the most subjective and impressionistic of all athletic conflicts.

  A low restless hum, a crepelike hush, and finally the releasing bell. Four inches taller, nine and a half pounds heavier, and with prehensile arms compared to Joe’s uncommonly short pistons, Ali disabused the crowd of any idea for a judicious, point-building first act. He wanted to shoot the lights out early, stop him with a cut or turn him into a groggy drifter, or at the very least discourage the jungle beat of that left hook. It surprised but made eminent sense once you saw him unfurl his plan. He couldn’t risk trying to dance Joe into dawn. His body was not built for that approach anymore. He was a blend of hitter, when legs were planted, and flyer—but for fifteen rounds? He had to conserve and blast. Time after time, Ali set and laid out an enfilade of shots, a singing sound of leather with a frequency that jolted you forward in your seat. He was working in time chunks, a miser one minute and all leg, buying the bar drinks in the next, and in one furious spree he sent a shower of spray from Joe’s face into a silvery dance up in the lights, causing Durham to bolt upward, screaming: “Goddamnit, roll that head!”