by Mark Kram
“If you wanna know,” Frazier would say, “who won the three fights, well, just look at him now.” Joe, no doubt, was the major figure in the evidence of how he came to be here at Hilton Head, yet there was more, a career-long miscalculation of odds. In one way, he was superbly prepared for fights most of the time, working on his body like Duke Ellington, filling in holes and spaces, hooking his rhythm section together. In another, he was incorrigibly self-destructive, chose to ignore the physics of the brain. Gym work puts a lot of wear on a body, especially for Ali. For a show of invincibility, tossing meat into his maw of an ego, he’d hang on the ropes and let huge men have their way with him; protective headgear, when it comes to the brain, is no protection. Why did he spend round after gym round on the ropes? For the public show, yes, but he had become cavalier, bored, and his rope habit expressed a growing laziness. And, too, in the second half of his career, sexual hedonism was militating constantly against the anchorite in him.
The number of punches he took in the gym (needless) and live bouts (especially in the second half) are incalculable, but were far too many for a fighter with his style, though the volume from Frazier would have been unavoidable even by an early Ali. Above all, Ali knew the fatal extraction so common to the ring. The images never left him. Why did he have a love-ridicule feeling about Joe Louis? He flinched from Louis’s condition, his presence a too sharp reminder of the danger, a mirror of what could be. He had other examples every day in his camp at Deer Lake. Hardly a day passed without a small procession (to whom he gave a meal and money) of the ring indigent, old and broken, like medieval supplicants from a ghostly past. Never far from him were Johnny Juliano, an obscure fighter who did odd jobs, and his brother Rahman. He’d look at Johnny and see his wasted brain, and say: “I’m not gonna be Johnny Juliano. No way.” He’d look at Rahman, with his peculiar habits, and say: “My brother hardly fought at all. And not even he’s right in the head.”
Howard Bingham, his closest friend and a non-Muslim, was in the hospital room, his eyes fixed on Ali tethered to the bed, a scene as incomprehensible to him as it would seem to others who followed the champ’s radiated glow, such was the prognosis of his life after the ring. Ali had known the road away from this, the “road out” that Archie Moore had preached. He knew what the currency of earthly immortality was: get out in time on your own terms, which added an uplifting, stirring Homeric touch. If the fall was too messy, the national psyche, so hooked on the bread-and culture circus of film stars and athletes, would rush to the collision of the gifted and fate and then recoil; there was no suspense, no shot in the arm in the mundane. There was a reason why Rocky Marciano, who left undefeated, was so cherished; he was the model American winner who took it all and beat the system, and so by a curious social osmosis, those who loved him were one with him—winners all.
Ali never looked for long back on Manila, or much else, neither the deadly repetitiveness of his kind of training nor the draining frequency of his fights. The temptation is to put his carelessness into the column of commonplace greed, yet it’s not that simple. Ali had always collected people and things that seemed to reinforce his state of mind of the moment, but he dispensed much more than he gave to himself; he was not a flighty, addicted acquisitor. With money, there was something much deeper. He now had a vague fear of being broke, and a growing concern, having been so loose with his treasure, that he might not be able to provide for the well-being of his children. The other piece to his seeking life extension in the ring was his attraction to power and celebration. He had fun with his chamber fools, but beyond that was the world that adored him. He had, on the interior, become inseparable from his persona, infatuated with the thrall he could elicit, the range of his cultural reach.
With only the conviction of his vanity and a shave of what he once was as a fighter, he pressed on, fighting four times in 1976 against mostly deficient tradesmen, and on occasion was aided by the generosity of awed scoring; officials only seemed to watch what he did, not his opponents’ work. Ken Norton could have received the decision against him late that year in Yankee Stadium and not caused a riot. He fought twice in 1977, was severely punished by Earnie Shavers. In 1978, he lost and regained the title against an ordinary Leon Spinks. Who was going to intervene, end the self-abuse? Murmurs in his camp, behind cupped hands, suggested guilt and worry. Ali had no Yank Durham or Eddie Futch. Where was Herbert, working on his Swiss bank inventory? For years, those in close knew Ali followed Herbert, acted on his every word. Herbert, in turn, always denied he held such control, said Ali only listened to Ali; it is remarkable what a man can come to believe when his end of the take is a hundred percent. Allowing for a laggard or stunted conscience, it was patently obscene to send Ali up against Larry Holmes in 1980, his former stablemate, young with a deadeye aim, who would go 48–0 before losing. Ali was supposed to earn $8 million, but reportedly received only $4 million. What mattered was that Herbert took the fight while knowing that Ali would be sorely tempted and could not afford to pass it up.
Ali had retired in 1979, worried about his condition. He had been in the ring twenty years, and had fought roughly 15,000 rounds, live and in the gym. The average fighter’s career is less than three years, and even with success rarely does it go beyond six. Seven months into retirement, his mystery woman got a call from him. He was married to Veronica and living at Hancock Park in Los Angeles. He said he had bills of thirty to thirty-five thousand a month. “I gotta fight again,” he told her. She said: “Please don’t. You’re going to get hurt.” He knew it had been over since Manila, and he’d been caught in what Hegel called the “bad infinite” of his ring life, of repeated diminishing cycles, the torture of losing weight, the hard, hard oiling of mushy reflexes. Greatness hadn’t trickled out of that splendid caramel mold of a body, it had poured out and along with it some of his image. Worse, he had begun to slur his words, sometimes had trouble speaking. “I’m gonna fight Holmes,” he said. “No, Muhammad, don’t,” she said. He was, she worried, on the edge of debilitating injury
Fighters know how to suffer. They demagnify pain and seldom talk about it. Though some fighters have been called “bow-wows” within the sport, thresholds of pain are hard to detect in fighters. Being called a dog, while not good for business, seems a bit much, like libeling the courage of the water boy at the Charge of the Light Brigade; after all, he did show up. I have often suspected that the best fighters are sadomasochists who abjure pain in their words while they secretly warm to it. Old trainers used to tell me that they had known fighters who got hit so much that it became pleasurable, that they even ejaculated; no empirical evidence, for certain, but the history of orgasm pursuit, through Krafft-Ebing, suggests that no stone has ever been unturned.
Eyes, nose, ears, larynx, kidneys, they all take horrific beatings. But their faces tell where fighters have been, the potholes over which they had to rattle, from the small arenas with the single light bulb and a backed-up toilet in the dressing rooms to the flooding light of the big time. Or, at least, that was the route for years until the species became gunned out, and now big money is instantly at hand for the kid of reasonable talent who can be hyped into the cosmos until the cable wires sing. I have seen lips nearly sheared off, eyes so closed they would resist a pneumatic drill. But the face that truly captivated belonged to Chuck Wepner, who went fifteen sluggish rounds with Ali; it was a face embroidered by a tipsy church lady. There were rivers of scar tissue. When he fought Sonny Liston and took too many stitches to count, the press asked Liston if he had ever seen anyone braver than Chuck. Sonny replied, “Yeah, his manager.” Who could blame Wepner’s wife for threatening to leave him if he didn’t take his picture down from behind the bed?
The Victorians, of all people, can be thanked for the concentration on the head in boxing, namely the Marquis of Queensbury. The Marquis, preoccupied with all questions of manhood, got Oscar Wilde sent up for a homosexual fling with his son, and on the side invented the padded glove for boxing. The day
s of the bare-knuckle fighter were over. They fought a lot of rounds in those days (seventy-five sometimes) but had long rests at their whim and did far less damage than today. Queensbury thought gloves would spare knuckles, quicken the pace of fights, often marred by grappling. With the easily damaged pterodactyl wires of the hand given a cushion, the gloves put all the focus on the head as a target and elevated sharpshooting, though the Gothic buttresses, Doric columns, and Baroque portals of the skeleton would remain under siege. If you think of the body as a Renaissance cathedral, then its cupola is the brain, where the simple art of touching your nose is a complicated process.
What happens to the brain when foot-pound pressure descends on it? Neurons are little batteries that conduct billions of electrical transactions, essential to thinking, remembering, walking, all motor skills. It used to be thought of, the brain, as a dull meat machine, now it is seen by brain science as a magnificent computer that is the frontier of everything, this being far from what the Egyptians saw; in mummification, they scooped it out, thought it was worthless; the heart was the center of magic. The brain floats in a cerebrospinal fluid. When the head is hit, the brain oscillates, wearing down much in its path, twisting the brain stem and swiping out neurons. A deft brain science writer, David Noonan, once queried an annoyed Larry Holmes on the subject. Holmes said, “Call a doctor. Anything can happen in life.”
Holmes did not want to fight Ali. He had nothing to gain from the bout, except widespread censure for cutting down a legend; his large end of the purse forced him to it. Time after time, members of Ali’s entourage would corner him in a restaurant or in an elevator, and the deep-felt request was always the same: “Don’t hurt him, Larry.” Holmes had no belly for the job, promised he would try his best, and you can almost see him, a great precision puncher, pondering his tray of scalpels for the one that would get the job done and allow him to remain a humanitarian. Ali seemed stuck to the ropes, where, with his creaky reflexes, he could get hurt bad. Below him, looking up, was Joe Louis in a wheelchair, drawn and weak and soon to die. Returning to his corner, Holmes complained: “What’s wrong with him? He’s like he’s doped. He won’t fall. I’m hitting him with everything and he won’t fall.” And he never did; Ali could not answer the bell for the eleventh, just sat there exhausted, his head dangling like the broken head of a child’s action figure.
One year later, December of 1981, just when you believed sanity had claimed all parties for good, Ali came back once more for a small-change bout against Trevor Berbick, an earnest plug, in the Bahamas. By now, there was a distinct tremor to Ali’s hands; it had begun after the Holmes fight. He stepped into the ring, goaded by ego or money, who knows, fat jellied on his middle, his hand speed sighing and wheezing like a busted old fan; tropic rot on the trade winds, and the knell for ten rounds came from the counterfeit sound of a cowbell. As Dave Anderson of the Times wrote: “He needed a trip to Nassau to learn that he was forty.” The end result reminded of the discovery by a young scholar early in the century of an Etruscan warrior. When he opened the sarcophagus, he did not see a skeleton, rather a body with all its limbs in place as if freshly buried. In a moment it dissolved. The helmet rolled to the side, the breastplate collapsed. The body had lain inviolate for centuries, and now, with air contact, all was gone, and only a golden plume of dust hovered near the torches.
On the hospital bed in Hilton Head, Ali opened his eyes, his lips parting like manhole covers, and asked the nurses: “You die here…they take you home?” The nurses rolled their eyes and smiled, struck by his innocence; it had nothing to do, they knew, with morbidity. He was not joking, either. The practical aftermath of death seemed to stimulate his curiosity on these days. Nothing urgent, mind you, just something that began to get in your mind when watching 15,000 cc’s of blood move in and out of your body for five hours. But the procedure was not dangerous and there was no discomfort, except for the heavy tedium for someone who had spent his entire life in chaotic mobility. The nurses noticed his blood pressure, slightly rising. They believed he had to urinate. He couldn’t bear being helped to urinate; the idea of women aiding him made him anxious. His eyes were closed. One called out: “Come on now, Ali.” His breathing was barely audible. “Stop it,” the nurse begged. “Please.” She knew he liked to feign death. He didn’t move, then suddenly his head gave a small jerk, then his eyes bucked wide open, and he said, “You thought I was dead. Got no funny people round me anymore. Have to make myself laugh.”
Hospitals had always frightened and bored him; most of all, they got in the way of life. He now decided to tell a joke: “Abe Lincoln went on a three-day drunk, and what’s he say when he wakes up?” He held for a beat, then said: “I freed whoooooo?” He laughed. “Stop it, Ali,” a nurse warned. “You’ll drive the needles through your veins.” Ali calmed, then said: “I’ll never grow up, will I?” That was some of the problem. No one had ever wanted the toy to be real, or obsolete like everything else. He was in better form than the night before when his head had nearly flopped into the dessert. He was like a faraway signal that came in and out, and often he asked, in the airports during the trip down, when people alighted by his rigid, stoic body like birds pecking for proximity to fame: “Where am I?” Dr. Rajak Mendenica, full of cheer, came into the room. He had had a lot of famous clients. His office contained photos of a senator, a Saudi prince, and an ambassador, all of whom signed their pictures with hearty appreciation for his cancer work on them.
But there were questions of a commonsense variety. The very expensive procedure he was using on Ali was called plasmapheresis. The blood cleaning removes the immune complex, which in turn removes toxins. It was a solid treatment for a blood problem and would provide an energy bounce for any patient. Did Ali have a blood condition? “He’s been poisoned by pesticides,” Mendenica said with confidence. The comment startled. It was contrary to an earlier finding by Dr. Dennis Cope of U.C.L.A., who found that Ali had “Parkinson’s syndrome, secondary to pugilistic brain syndrome.” In short, he had taken too many head shots. Certain that Ali would recover completely, Mendenica said: “I find absolutely no brain damage. The magnetic resonator tests show no damage. When I became his doctor, I watched a number of his fight films. He did not take many head blows.” Film would have shown him precious little of true impact. Was he kidding?
“No,” Mendenica, an émigré from the Balkans, said. “I do not see many head blows. When I first began work on him, he was in bad shape. Poor gait. Difficult speech. Vocal cord syndrome, extended and inflamed. He is much better. He just travels too much.” Earlier, a mention was made in Ali’s room about a comment by Floyd Patterson, who was critical of the treatment. Ali insisted on hearing what Floyd had said. “No brain damage?” Floyd had said. “Next you’ll be hearing Ali was bit by a cockroach. He’ll drop dead in a year.” Ali thought a moment, then said: “Floyd means well.” Floyd’s comments were now being given to the doctor. “He’s rather ignorant,” he replied. “I’m going to have to call that man.” But Mendenica had other more serious problems. Marshall Tito, once head of Yugoslavia, had been so grateful for the doctor’s treatment that he arranged funding for a clinic in Switzerland. When Tito died, Mendenica’s funding was cut off, and he was left with the bills and a criminal indictment by the Yugoslavians and the Swiss. Ali would testify for him at the Swiss trial. The good doctor may have known his blood, but he was at a loss in the webbing of the brain; once more, as in the ring, Ali was in the wrong hands. As Ali left that night, he was asked about the treatment. “Sheeit,” he said wearily. “Nothing helps.”
After Manila, Joe Frazier, with his head shaved to a glistening point, heavy and slow, met George Foreman in June 1976. In training, Futch noted that Joe spent long parts of sessions on the ropes, where he’d go for rest, lie back and pick off punches, and often miss the one you did not see, then it’s over; this is where careers end. Eventually, fans grow tired of a fighter’s survival and want the seriously new to sweep out the old. George wasn’t ne
w, but at least he’d dispatch a barnacled name once and for all. George dribbled him, then stopped him in the fifth, with most of the crowd shouting Ali’s name. Frazier came down with hepatitis, and five years later came back to fight to a draw against a barrel of congealed rust named Jumbo Cummings. “No, I don’t approve,” Futch said, refusing to work with him, opening the split between them that had been dormant after Manila. Joe was fond of saying: “I got mugged by the ref in the second Ali fight, and Futch took Manila away from me.” He particularly resented what Eddie had said after the third fight: “Ali’s too strong for him now, and Joe’s too small.” When Joe later took some of his fighters to North Carolina, Eddie was there and Joe just gave him a curt nod of acknowledgment.
Frazier’s life settled into the Broad Street Gym, a local fixture in the rough precinct where he had begun. His life fell into a groove, working with his fighters, checking into hotels, minding clocks and schedules. He had bought the gym from Cloverlay for $75,000 along with the remaining fighters under contract to the syndicate. Among his first fighters was a then-promising Duane Bobick, a white heavyweight; nothing more arouses ownership interest, and Faustian pacts are made in the endless search for one. Joe was getting him ready for a workout and slipped a right hand glove on his left hand. Accidental, but Bobick looked at him with disgust and said: “Yeah, and you want to be a trainer?” Bobick disappointed; white heavyweights invariably break your heart. But Joe learned that you can’t be friends with fighters, that he’d have to grow a new, tough hide in a new, subtle game. He’d adopt the method used by Yank Durham on him, clever but definitely not subtle. Yank insisted on obedience and punctuality, no lip and industry; even Yank’s voice scared Joe.