The Fight

by Norman Mailer

  Like a drunk hoping to get out of bed to go to work, Foreman rolled over, Foreman started the slow head-agonizing lift of all that foundered bulk God somehow gave him and whether he heard the count or no, was on his feet a fraction after the count of ten and whipped, for when Zack Clayton guided him with a hand at his back, he walked in docile steps to his corner and did not resist. Moore received him. Sadler received him. Later, one learned the conversation.

  “Feel all right?”

  “Yeah,” said Foreman.

  “Well, don’t worry. It’s history now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re all right,” said Sadler, “the rest will take care of itself.”

  In the ring Ali was seized by Rachman, by Gene Kilroy, by Bundini, by a host of Black friends old, new and very new, who charged up the aisles, leaped on the apron, sprang through the ropes and jumped near to touch him. Norman said to Plimpton in a tone of wonder like a dim parent who realizes suddenly his child is indeed and indubitably married, “My God, he’s Champion again!” as if one had trained oneself for years not to expect news so good as that.

  In the ring Ali fainted.

  It occurred suddenly and without warning and almost no one saw it. Angelo Dundee circling the ropes to shout happy words at reporters was unaware of what had happened. So were all the smiling faces. It was only the eight or ten men immediately around him who knew. Those eight or ten mouths which had just been open in celebration now turned to grimaces of horror. Bundini went from laughing to weeping in five seconds.

  Why Ali fainted, nobody might ever know. Whether it was a warning against excessive pride in years to come — one private bolt from Allah — or whether the weakness of sudden exhaustion, who could know? Maybe it was even the spasm of a reflex he must have refined unconsciously for months — the ability to recover in seconds from total oblivion. Had he been obliged to try it out at least once on this night? He was in any case too much of a champion to allow an episode to arise, and was back on his feet before ten seconds were up. His handlers having been lifted, chastened, terrified and uplifted again, looked at him with faces of triumph and knockdown, the upturned mask of comedy and the howling mouth of tragedy next to each other in that instant in the African ring.

  David Frost was crying out: “Muhammad Ali has done it. The great man has done it. This is the most joyous scene ever seen in the history of boxing. This is an incredible scene. The place is going wild. Muhammad Ali has won.” And because the announcer before him had picked the count up late and was two seconds behind the referee and so counting eight when Clayton said ten, it looked on all the closed circuit screens of the world as if Foreman had gotten up before the count was done, and confusion was everywhere. How could it be other? The media would always sprout the seed of confusion. “Muhammad Ali has won. By a knockdown,” said Frost in good faith. “By a knockdown.”

  Back in America everybody was already yelling that the fight was fixed. Yes. So was The Night Watch and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

  16. THE RAINS CAME

  FOR REPORTERS, the fight had just begun. They had to get into Ali’s dressing room. It became Norman’s exclusive, his first. How he got in he was never able to calculate later, but a considerable amount of timely pushing through the squad of soldiers at the door had something to do with it. You had to shove hard enough to make progress, but not so hard that you would promote a rifle butt in your ribs — his final grand effort got one leg through just back of a fat man he had never seen before.

  In the dressing room they were trying to slam the door to protect Ali from an inundation of flesh, so there was a minute where Norman was happy for every muscle he had. When someone made a lunge to get in behind him, the vanguard came down to parts of three bodies coming through the door at once. Since he was in the middle, and the other torsos were soft, he was ensconced. What a timeless squeeze.

  Pat Patterson, with a chrome-plated pistol on his hip and a cop’s rage at the assault on his bastion, finally gave a hand to drive the others out and pull Norman in. To his surprise he was the only reporter in the room. Never did a man proceed to do less with his exclusive. Of course, he would have months to write his piece and half a year to see it printed — there was hardly the need to rush to a telephone in the next ten minutes. But even if a man had been waiting thousands of miles away at a city desk, he might have done no more. He didn’t want to ask Ali questions, he wanted to pay his respects. There are not that many occasions in life, after all, when the sense of irony has clearly departed.

  Ali sat on the rubbing table with his hands on his knees looking like a happy and tired host after a good party. His face was unmarked except for a small red bruise on one cheekbone. Maybe he never appeared more handsome. He stared out like a child. “I have stolen the jam,” said his eyes, “and it tastes good.” Light twinkled in those eyes all the way back to the beginning. Truth, he looked like a castle all lit up.

  “You did everything you said you were going to do,” Norman offered in simple tribute.

  “Yeah. It was a good night.” Neither mentioned that he had not danced. That must have been the surprise he promised.

  “Fantastic fight,” Norman said. “You’re going to like looking at the films.”

  Ali drew a breath. “Maybe they’ll admit,” he said softly, “that now I am the professor of boxing.”

  The door to the dressing room was opened again to admit Belinda Ali. Husband and wife looked at each other silently as if a question of long standing was at last being resolved. They kissed. The object of love would prove for once deserving of love. He gave her a smile as open as the sweetness of his feelings. There was something so tender in Ali’s regard, so mocking, and so calm, that the look appeared to say, “Honey, my ways got to be curious to you, and we both know I am crazy, but please believe me when I try to tell you that I am, my darling, by all scientific evidence a serious fellow.” (Or is that the way Norman would have spoken if he had ever won anything that well?)

  Belinda now moved around the room to exchange congratulations. She made a point of going up to Roy Williams, who had waited through this long night without a fight. “I want to thank you, Roy, for all you’ve done,” she said. “We couldn’t have won this fight if you hadn’t gotten Ali ready the way you did.”

  “Thank you,” he said with pleasure, “it was sure a good night.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t have your fight.”

  “Oh,” said Roy in his deep voice, “Ali won and that counts.”

  If Norman had been keeping his journalistic wits, he would now have gone to the other dressing room, but he wanted to discuss the fight with Ali, a feeble practical judgment. Other reporters were getting in to see the new Champion, and so many surrounded the rubbing table and Ali spoke in so low a voice that no more rations for the literary mill were going to be collected.

  By the time he left, Norman would discover to his un-happiness that he had missed George Foreman in his dressing room, a sore loss, for Foreman had things to say. Other reporters filled him in, notably Plimpton and Bob Ottum of Sports Illustrated. Given the essential generosity of reporters to one another, it was all too easy to form atrocious habits and cover one’s stories from the telephone in the bathtub. Yes, even as reconstructed, Foreman had things to say. Yet what a loss not to feel the battered aura of the ex-Champion’s mood. Every wound has its own revelation.

  The dressing room he never saw had red walls, and the fighter after the fight was covered with towels in gold lamé. “I got to beat this guy,” Ali had said once. “I saw him at Salt Lake City. He was wearing pink and orange shoes with platforms and high heels. I wear brogans. When I saw his fly shoes, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to win.’ ”

  Yes, red and gold for fallen kings. Foreman lay beneath ice packs. According to Plimpton he first asked Dick Sadler if he had been knocked out, then he counted backward for a while from a hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, to see if his head was clear, and he called out the n
ames of the twenty people in his camp one by one. “I felt secure,” said Foreman. “I had a true feeling I was in control of this fight. I was surprised when the people jumped into the ring.” He said everything in a quiet calm voice. “I was counted out,” he said, “but I was not knocked out.”

  Let us quote Plimpton’s account here:

  He repeated, at times so slowly that it seemed as if he were stumbling through a written text, what he had so often said in dressing-room statements following his victories: “There is never a loser. No fighter should be a winner. Both should be applauded.”

  The reporters stood around uncomfortably, knowing that it would finally sink in that for the first time in his professional career his generous words for a loser referred to himself.

  Then Foreman spoke of Ali. “A fine American,” he said, “great gentleman. A wonderful family man.” The reporters were counting how many times Foreman had been hit in the head over eight rounds.

  He was still talking as the winner. There is all the temporary insanity of loss. One knows that there is a reality to which one can return, at least the odds are great that it will still be there, but reality does not feel real. It is too insubstantial. Reality has become a theory introduced into one’s head by other people. It does not seem as natural as what one feels. George Foreman still felt like the Champion.

  He took the ice pack off his face. “I have a statement to make. I found true friendship tonight,” he said “I found a true friend in Bill Caplan.”

  That was Bill Caplan who beat Foreman at Ping-Pong every day. Sturdy Bill Caplan with his round face, his eyeglasses, and a hundred reporters always mad at him because Foreman was uncooperative about interviews. With what eyes of Jewish compassion must Caplan have looked at Foreman after the fight. George’s own people would not be so kind. By Black measure, defeat is as bad as disease.

  “I imagine,” said George, “that the punch that knocks a man down he doesn’t really see. I suspect he doesn’t know about it.”

  There were crowds on the street outside the stadium, and Blacks celebrating in the dawn. It was as if they had not dared to feel too much hope for Ali in advance of the fight. Yet just as there are men who only reach their rightful historical stature in the hour of assassination, so others do it on the morning of their victory. Outside the stadium, at 6 A.M., there was a crazy air of liberation all over the boulevards and back streets of Kinshasa. People were drunk, people were bowing to one another, people extended their arms and legs in the long moves appropriate to a basketball court. That seemed the way to float down the road. There was laughter, and people waving to one another two blocks away. Catcalls at the sight of him. A white man. Must certainly be for Foreman. Yes, the sweet spirit of revolution was back, not all sweet, let us say it is the spirit of change, and lions, cockroaches, and philosophers are all awake. Nommo (if we remember) is the Word, and the word is in the water, and life is in the air. The damp air on this dawn is full of the n’golo of the living and the thirst of the dead. It is a weird morning. Under these heavy clouds, there is a dawn which does not lift. The light is reminiscent of the pallor of the earth in an eclipse.

  On the street, Norman has run into a gambling friend he knows at the Casino and the two debate whether to try to walk all the way home, but it is eight miles and more. Finally they get a cab. His friend promotes it. His friend sees a whore he knows passing in a cab and calls to her and offers to pay the fare if she will share it with them. She is a young and lovely whore with a dark bronze skin, a body as lithe as a climbing vine, and an abundance of dark bronze hair in her armpits. She is at this hour in love with Muhammad Ali — one does not wish to change places with her pimp at this hour. She will not appear again in our account and since Africans, according to good Father Tempels, believe “the name is not a simple external courtesy, it is the very reality of the individual,” let us give to print the full value of the reality she chooses for herself — which is Marcelline. They leave her soon at her house, a hovel with a tin roof on a humped dirt road with oil stains, tropical puddles, and dead foliage. Marcelline has been as beautiful as a movie star.

  At the Inter-Continental, everybody is drinking in the timeless dawn. At the bar and on the patio people are celebrating, people are toasting the morning in champagne. He runs into Jim Brown and cannot resist asking, “Think the fight was fixed?” Jim Brown grins ruefully, he shakes his head. He is happy to feel in error. “Man,” he says, “I never been more wrong in all my life.”

  One by one, Foreman’s people were there to talk to. Maybe it is the mark of a good man that defeat does not leave more than one good sentence in the mouth. Henry Clark, having lost his big bet, merely said, “The better fighter won.” Doc Broadus looked sad but firm. “It did him good,” was his measure. Foreman’s Uncle Hayward, a big old Black man with powerful connections and a huge kettledrum paunch reminiscent of classic Southern white politicians, replied in answer to the wish that people not call George a bum, “He deserves to be called a bum.”

  Elmo, encountered in the lobby, was not saying a word. Norman said at last, “George met the man at his best.”

  Elmo gave a silent nod. He smiled. “Working on it,” he said. “Oyé.”

  Archie Moore let a few words drop: “Boxing is syllables. You learn them one by one.” Still his eyes had a light. He was loyal to George, but Ali was the triumph of his own tradition.

  Dick Sadler talked at length. If he was a good man, then defeat gives speech to some. “It wasn’t what Muhammad did,” Sadler said, “it was what George didn’t do. He didn’t move. He didn’t listen. I don’t know what was going on. George don’t let anybody hold him. He let Muhammad. We told him Muhammad was going to hold. George knew before the fight what Muhammad was going to do. But he punched himself out. George can punch all day. How does he punch himself out? I’m going crazy. Big bad George Foreman, known to be a brutal fighter, hits people back of the head, hits men when they’re sitting on the ropes, hits them when they’re down, bombs them in the kidney, a rough mean fighter, and he lets Muhammad hold him. I showed him what to do. If Muhammad’s got his gloves up protecting his head, then he can’t see, so, George, poke him where he’s blind. If he’s down protecting his gut, let him hear it in the ear. Set him up with the left, George, give it to him with the right. He wouldn’t do it, he couldn’t do it.”

  “Maybe Ali is different from other fighters.” Norman was tempted to broach his idea that this was the first major fight which bore serious resemblance to chess. Such comparisons were sentimental conceits, and this was hardly the time. Still!

  It is fortunate he kept his mouth shut for Sadler next remarked, “I’m just as stupid on the fight as you are. I got to think about it.”

  A six-year-old girl, down for early breakfast, early as could be, passed by and Sadler went to give her a hug. “Bonjour, ma petite,” he said, “Bonjour.”

  The conversation still bothered him, however. He came back to Norman, and said, “I ain’t got the answer.”

  Then the rainy season, two weeks late, and packed with the frenzy of many an African atmosphere and many an unknown tribe, came at last to term with the waters of the cosmos and the groans of the Congo. The rainy season broke, and the stars of the African heaven came down. In the torrent, in that long protracted moon-green dawn, rain fell in silver sheets and silver blankets, waterfalls and rivers, in lakes that dropped like a stone from above, and with a slap of contact louder than the burst of fire in a forest. It came in buckets, a tropical rain right out of the heart overhead. He had not seen a rain so bad in thirty years, not since he sat under a pup tent in the Philippines.

  Later he heard what the storm did to the stadium. It poured onto the seats and poured through the aisles, it flowed down in jungle falls and streamed through the stairs and narrow entry halls, flooded the soccer field and washed beneath the ring carrying for its message the food and refuse of the sixty thousand souls once sitting in the seats. Foreman’s dressing room was a dark pool wit
h old towels floating in a foot of water, the kids were prowling the stadium by the end of the deluge. Orange peels and fight tickets drifted into collection beneath the canvas, and batteries’ were drenched, generators gave out. Half the Telex machines broke down in the storm, and the satellite ceased to send a picture or a word. What a debacle if the storm had come while the fight was on.

  Ali would laugh next day and offer to take credit for holding back the rain.

  17. A NEW ARENA

  ON THAT NEXT DAY (which is the same day just after sleeping from nine to noon) Norman had lunch and decided to go out to Nsele one last time and say good-bye to Ali. On the way, he was thinking of a conversation he might like to have with the fighter, and wondered if it wouldn’t be easy when all was said to explain to Ali how the fight was not only a revolution in boxing (with which Ali would certainly agree) but had a counterpart in modern chess.

  Since Norman was always too ready to serve as matrimonial agent to the mating of large ideas, and prone to offer weighty metaphors without constructing a seat, he tried these days to be careful. A writer does well to work on his vice. Still, he liked the new idea. In chess, no concept had once been more firmly established than control of the center, and for much the same reason as boxing — it gave mobility for attack to the left or the right. Later, a revolution came to chess, and new masters argued that if one occupied the center too early, weaknesses were created as well as strengths. It was better to invade the center after the opponent was committed. Of course with such a strategy you had to be resourceful in a cramped space. Tactical brilliance was essential at every step. Was that not exactly what Ali had accomplished? It was doubtful, however, if many a chess game had been played which equaled in timing Ali’s climactic occupation of the center of the ring.