The Fight

by Norman Mailer

Of course, Belinda had just returned to Zaïre. She had arrived with Ali six weeks before, but after the postponement she flew back to America. If Ali had a training problem, it was not hard to find. Ever since Joe Namath spent a night with a girl and then went out next afternoon to beat the Baltimore Colts in the Superbowl, next proceeded to tell the world about The Method, the training world of an athlete had been tickled to its root. The impact on sports of Namath’s feat was equal to the shock on Henry Luce’s American Century when Sputnik went up. Every athlete was up against the old question — could the refinement of your best reflexes which sex offered be worth the absence of rapacity it might also leave? At the beginning of his career Ali trained so virtuously that before the time of the first Liston fight, Sonny’s people tried to suggest he had never known a woman.

  That may have changed. Before the first fight with Frazier, Ali could hardly wait for training to conclude each day — he was known to replace Fiesta or Royal Crown Cola with champagne for supper. Before the first engagement with Norton he was up all night. Doubtless he calculated to sleep all day. Next night, finding himself in the ring, jaw broken, reflexes missing their synapses, he succeeded in dancing his hardworking way through the stupor. He looked awful, he aged that night, but considering his shape, some would argue it was Ali’s greatest fight. Days later, jaw wired, orange juice coming through a straw, he must have determined on changing his routine. Training had been less enjoyable since. Nonetheless, Ali’s methods remained Ali’s own. Belinda had just come back.

  Weeks before, boasting to friends in Kinshasa on how he would beat Foreman, Ali said, “He’s going to fall on his ass.”

  “You,” Belinda murmured, “better take lessons on how to fall on your ass.”

  “What did you say?” said Ali.

  “I said you better take lessons on how to fall on your ass.”

  “Oh,” said Ali, “I thought you said ‘fall in love.’ ”

  Led by the blue blinking light of a police car, the convoy continued, but at a slow frustrating pace. Used to going at eighty miles an hour on that stretch of deserted superhighway between Nsele and the airport, they moved along now at half the rate. The empty landscape offered few distractions in the dark. Occasionally, they would pass a few Blacks who were ready to demonstrate at the sight of the convoy, but speed was slow and the mood was slow.

  Even as they passed the airport and entered the far outskirts of Kinshasa, there were still not many people. It was getting near to three in the morning. Whoever was up for the fight had gone to the stadium hours ago. So there was time to meditate on one’s own relation to the fight, time to think over the peculiarities of a passion for boxing which could take a man away from his own work for months and more. He even wondered at his loyalty to Ali. A victory for Ali would also be a triumph for Islam. While Norman was hardly a Zionist, and had never gone to Israel, he had been to Cairo and the collision of overflowing new wealth with scabrous poverty, teeming inefficiency, frantic traffic and cripples walking on sores, left him sympathetic to Israel’s case. Countries as gargantuan, fascinating, and godawful as Egypt did not deserve to dictate terms to one beleaguered Hebrew idea in the desert. Since he knew little of the politics of the Near East, his politics were as straightforward as that. And conflicted with his loyalty to Ali. Of course he would not be alone in such paradox. It was striking how many of the Jewish writers at Nsele had affection for Ali, a veritable tropism of affection, as if, ultimately, he was one of them, a Jew in the sense of being his own creation. Few things would inspire more love among Jews than the genius to be without comparison.

  That could account for much. It could certainly explain why he liked Foreman, and yet was not bothered for an instant in his loyalties. It was as if contradictions fell away with a victory for Ali. That would be a triumph for everything which did not fit into the computer: for audacity, inventiveness, even art. If ever a fighter had been able to demonstrate that boxing was a twentieth century art, it must be Ali. It would certainly come off as a triumph for the powers of regeneration in an artist. What could be of more importance to Norman? He knew some part of him would have to hate Ali if the fighter lost without dignity or real effort, even as a part of him could not forgive Hemingway because of the ambiguity of his suicide — if only there had been a note. The absence of a note left a void in anyone who loved the work and the man.

  Yet he in his turn had refused to go out on that balcony without a railing and slip cold sober around the partition. But then he was weary of his comic relation to magic. He never knew which forces he helped. Too many of the fighters for whom he rooted over the years had lost, and lost in miserable encounters. Patterson had lost, for example, in his two fights with Liston, and Sonny lost in his two fights with Ali. Norman had even come to decide that if he was one of a hundred or a thousand magical forces at ringside, his effects were perverse. Or inept. Or scandalously restricted. On the night José Torres beat Willie Pastrano for the Light-Heavyweight Championship, he had been afraid to cheer for fear bad luck would fall upon his friend José. He loved Torres more after the fight because he had been able to win despite the luxury of a friend who was such bad luck as Norman Mailer. That is a frightful idea for a man to have of himself. It is inverse vanity more poisonous than vanity itself. The agent of bad luck. He even doubted whether he had had the right to run with Ali. So a victory for Muhammad on this night would be like a sign of liberation for himself, an indication that he might be rid of the curse of carrying treacherous luck.

  They had come to the stadium. It was equal to arriving in the retinue of a matador. The crowds outside were cheering, and police took them through the narrow gates. In less than a minute, the men who had traveled in convoy were in Ali’s dressing room. Having said good-bye to Belinda, and given a farewell kiss, the fighter began to get ready.

  12. THE DRESSING ROOM

  IT WAS a grim dressing room. Perhaps it looked like a comfort station in a Moscow subway. Big, with round pillars tiled in white, even the wallpaper was white. So it also looked like an operating room. In this morgue all groans were damped. White tile was everywhere. What a place to get ready!

  The men gathered had no more cheer than the decor. Dundee, Pacheco, Plimpton, Mailer, Walter Youngblood, Pat Patterson, Howard Bingham, Ali’s brother Rachman, his manager, Herbert Muhammad, his business manager, Gene Kilroy, Bundini, a small fat Turk named Hassan, and Roy Williams, his sparring partner, were in the room and no one had anything to say. “What’s going on here,” said Ali as he entered. “Why is everybody so scared? What’s the matter with you.” He began to peel off his clothes, and wearing no more than a jockstrap was soon prancing around the room, shadowboxing with the air.

  Roy Williams, dressed to go into the ring for his semifinal fight with Henry Clark, was sitting on the rubbing table. Through a miscalculation of others, he had arrived at the stadium with the convoy, too late for a ten-round semifinal. They were planning to hold it now after the main event, not the easiest delay for a fighter.

  “Scared, Roy?” Ali asked as he danced by him.

  “Not a drop,” answered Williams in a rich and quiet voice. He was the blackest man in the room, also the gentlest.

  “We’re going to dance,” cried Ali as he flew around, enjoying each near collision with the pillars at his back. Like a child, he had a sense of objects behind him as if the circle of his sensations did not end at his skin. “Ah, yes,” he shouted out, “we’re going to stick him,” and he threw jabs at the air.

  With the exception of Roy Williams, he was the only cheerful presence. “I think I’m more scared than you are,” said Norman as Ali came to rest.

  “Nothing to be scared about,” said the fighter. “It’s just another day in the dramatic life of Muhammad Ali. Just one more workout in the gym to me.” He turned to Plimpton and added, “I’m afraid of horror films and thunderstorms. Jet planes shake me up. But there is no need to be afraid of anything you can control with your skill. That is why Allah is the only
One who terrifies me. Allah is the only One of whom the meeting is independent of your will. He is One, and has no associates.” Ali’s voice was building in volume and piety. As though to protect himself against too much strength being discharged into a sermon, he went on quietly, “There’s nothing to be scared of. Elijah Muhammad has been through things that make this night nothing. And in a small way, I have been through such things. Getting into the ring with Liston the first time beats anything George Foreman ever had to do, or I have had to do again. Except for living with threats against my life after the death of Malcolm X. Real death threats. No, I have no fear of tonight.” He darted away from the writers as if his minute in the corner was up and shadowboxed some more, teasing a few friends with quick lancing shots that once more stopped an inch from their eyes. As he went by Hassan, the fat little Turk, he extended his long thumb and long forefinger to pinch him in the ass.

  Yet for all this fine effort, the mood of the room hardly improved. It was like a corner in a hospital where relatives wait for word of the operation. Now Ali stopped dancing and took out the robe he would wear into the ring and put it on. It was a long white silk robe with an intricate black pattern, and his first comment was, “It’s a real African robe.” He said this to Bundini, who gave him the full look of a child just denied a reward which has been promised for a week.

  “All right,” Ali said at last. “Let’s see your robe.”

  Now Bundini displayed the garment which he had brought for Ali to wear. It was also white but had green, red and black piping along its edges, the national colors of Zaïre. A green, red, and black map of the country was stitched over the heart. Bundini wore a white jacket of the same material and decoration. Ali tried on Bundini’s robe, looked in the mirror, took it off, handed it back. He put on the first robe again. “This one’s more beautiful,” he said. “It’s really prettier than the one you brought. Take a look in the mirror, Drew, it’s really better.” It was. Bundini’s robe looked a suspicion shopworn.

  But Bundini did not look in the mirror. Instead he fixed his look on Ali. He glared at him. For a full minute they scalded one another’s eyes. Look! said Bundini’s expression, don’t mess with the wisdom of your man. I brought a robe which matches my jacket. Your strength and my strength are linked. Weaken me, and you weaken yourself. Wear the colors I have chosen. Something of that strength had to be in his eyes. Some unspoken threat as well, doubtless, for Ali suddenly slapped him, sharp as the crack of a rifle. “Don’t you ever dare do that again,” he cried out at Bundini. “Now take a look at me in the mirror,” Ali commanded. But Bundini refused to look. Ali slapped him again.

  The second slap was so ritual that one had to wonder if something like this was a well-worked ceremony, even an exorcism. It was hard to tell. Bundini seemed too furious to speak. His expression clearly said: Beat me to death, but I will not look in the mirror. The robe you describe as beautiful is not the one. Ali finally walked away from him.

  It was time to decide on the trunks. He tried several. One pair was all white with no decoration at all, as pure and silver a white as the priestly robes of Islam. “Take this one, Ali,” his brother Rachman cried, “take this white one, it’s nice, Ali, take it.” But Ali after much deliberation before the mirror decided to wear white trunks with a vertical black stripe (and indeed in the photographs one would see later of the fight, there is the black stripe articulating each movement from his torso down to his legs).

  Now Ali sat on a rubbing table near the middle of the room, and put on his long white boxing shoes and held each foot in the air while Dundee scraped the soles with a knife to roughen them. The fighter took a comb someone handed him, the Y-shaped comb with steel teeth that Blacks use for an Afro, and worked with deliberation on his hair while his shoes were being scraped. At a signal of his finger, somebody brought him a magazine, a Zaïre periodical in French which gave the complete list of Foreman’s fights and Ali’s. He read the names aloud to Plimpton and Mailer, and once again contrasted the number of nobodies Foreman had fought with the number of notables he had met. It was as if he had to take still one more look at the marrow of his life. For the first time in all these months, he seemed to want to offer a public showing of the fear which must come to him in a dream. He began to chatter as though no one were in the room and he were talking in his sleep, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, you can’t hit what you can’t see,” he repeated several times as though the words were long gone, and then he murmured, “I been up and I been down. You know, I been around.” He shook his head. “It must be dark when you get knocked out,” he said, contemplating the ogre of midnight. “Why, I never been knocked out,” he said. “I been knocked down, but never out.” Like a dreamer awakening to the knowledge that the dream is only a net above one’s death, he cried out, “That’s strange … being stopped.” Again, he shook his head. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s a bad feeling waiting for night to choke up on you,” and he looked at the two writers with the blank eyes of a patient who has encountered some reality in the coils of his condition no doctor will ever comprehend.

  Then he must have come to the end of this confrontation with feelings that moved in on him like fog, for he used a phrase he had not employed in months, not since he had last given great woe to every high official in Zaïre, “Yes,” he said to the room at large, “let’s get ready for the rumble in the jungle,” and he began to call to people across the room.

  “Hey, Bundini,” he cried out, “are we gonna dance?”

  But Bundini did not reply. A sorrow was in the room.

  “Does anybody hear me?” cried Ali. “Are we going to the dance?”

  “We’re going to dance and dance,” said Gene Kilroy sadly.

  “We’re going to dance,” said Ali, “We’re going to da-ance.”

  Dundee came up to tape his hands. The observer from Foreman’s dressing room, Doc Broadus, now moved up to study the operation. He was a short sturdy Black man about sixty who had discovered Foreman years ago in the Job Corps and had been with George for much of his career ever since. Broadus was well known around the Inter-Continental for his prophetic dreams. In his sleep, he had picked the knockout round for both the Frazier and Norton fights. Now for Ali, he had also had a dream that George would win in two rounds, but this time he wasn’t making the prediction for certain. There had been some flaw in the dream.

  Ali devoted time to talking to him, as if the most valuable man in the room might be Doc Broadus, who could bring back word to Foreman of every detail in his last-minute condition.

  Ali stared at him hard, and Broadus shifted his feet. He was shy with Ali. Maybe he had admired his career for too many years to be able to confront him easily now.

  “Tell your man,” Ali said confidentially, “he better get ready to dance.”

  Again, Broadus shifted uncomfortably.

  At this moment, Ferdie Pacheco came bursting back into the dressing room. He was in a state. “I can’t get in to see Foreman,” he said to Broadus. “What the hell is going on? What is this?” he said in a tone of fear and considerable shock, “we’re boxing tonight, not fighting World War Three!” He seemed disturbed by the fury of the other dressing room. Broadus got up quickly and went out with him.

  Now Ali started talking to Bundini. “Say, Bundini, we gonna dance?” he asked. Bundini would not reply.

  “I said, are we going to dance?”

  Silence.

  “Drew, why don’t you speak to me?” Ali said in a big voice as if exaggeration were the best means to take Bundini out of his mood. “Bundini, ain’t we going to dance?” he asked again, and in a droll tender voice, added, “You know I can’t dance without Bundini.”

  “You turned down my robe,” Bundini said in his deepest, huskiest and most emotional voice.

  “Oh man,” said Ali, “I’m the Champ. You got to allow me to do something on my own. You got to give me the right to pick my robe or how will I ever be Champ again? You going to tell me what to eat?
You going to tell me how to go? Bundini, I am blue. I never seen a time like this when you don’t cheer me up.”

  Bundini fought it, but a smile began to tickle his lips.

  “Bundini, are we going to dance?” asked Ali.

  “All night long,” said Bundini.

  “Yes, we’re going to dance,” said Ali, “we’re going to dance and dance.”

  Broadus was back from the job of getting Pacheco admitted to Foreman’s dressing room, and Ali began to perform for him again. “What are we going to do?” he asked of Bundini and Dundee and Kilroy. “We’re going to dance,” said Gene Kilroy with a sad loving smile, “we’re going to dance all night long.”

  “Yes, we’re going to da-ance,” cried Ali, and said again to Broadus, “You tell him to get ready.”

  “I’m not telling him nothing,” muttered Broadus.

  “Tell him he better know how to dance.”

  “He don’t dance,” Broadus managed to say as if to warn: My man has heavier things to do.

  “He don’t what?” asked Ali.

  “He don’t dance,” said Broadus.

  “George Foreman’s man,” cried Ali, “says George can’t dance. George can’t come to the da-ance!”

  “Five minutes,” somebody yelled out, and Youngblood handed the fighter a bottle of orange juice. Ali took a swig of it, half a glass worth, and stared with amusement at Broadus. “Tell him to hit me in the belly,” he said.

  13. RIGHT-HAND LEADS

  GEORGE WOULD. George was certainly going to hit him in the belly. What a battle was to follow. If the five-minute warning had just been given, it passed in a rush. There was a bathroom off the dressing room and to it Ali retired with his manager, the son of Elijah Muhammad, Herbert Muhammad, a round-faced benign-looking man whose features offered a complete lack of purchase — Herbert Muhammad gave the impression nobody would know how to take advantage of him too quickly. He was now dressed in a priestly white robe which ran from his shoulders to his feet, a costume appropriate to his function as a Moslem minister, for they had gone into the next room to pray and their voices could be heard reciting verses of the Koran — doubtless such Arabic was from the Koran. In the big room, now empty of Ali, everybody looked at everyone and there was nothing to say.