Authors: Mark Kram
Young white men, Jews, Italians, Irish, Hispanic, never have to fret much about their racial character. In these times, perhaps always so, young blacks were forced to dwell on the steps to be taken on the wavy line of their existence, of going along or burning down, and this was no time to be neutral. In this regard, where had Frazier failed the test, a young kid run out of town by his mother in fear for his life, while the young Ali, understandably, sucked and slurped the big orange of the Louisville rich and fingered the laurel wreath of wide recognition from hometown whites? Move back three decades, and Frazier had a ring DNA similar to that of Joe Louis, self-effacing, reticent, and worshipped by all blacks. Long after his career, he would say on the subject of Ali: “I don’t believe in the separation of races.” Where, then, was the justice? “There ain’t none,” Frazier said. “Not for me. It eats at me, but I don’t let on and don’t forget. He uses his blackness to kick up a stir, get people excited, maybe convince himself of somethin’, then he’s gone. He thinks no hurt’s left behind. What he ever do for people but give ’em a lot of silly words?”
He added: “He’s no martyr. The heroes are them kids with their pieces of body all over Vietnam, a lot of poor blacks. I don’t care about his draft thing. His politics. His religion. But he ain’t no leader of anything. He stop the war? How do people buy his shit?”
From an irrational rouser for a pseudo Master Race (Bundini said: “Only two kinds of blacks to the Muzzies—niggers and themselves!”) and now to a brave, slashing avatar of black thinking, Ali seemed to have a whole nation in stride, the prime figure ready for the gladrags of empty, make-believe sixties radicalism. Young blacks bought the whole hog, not knowing or caring that the Muslims had him in a
choke collar and a leash, taking no notice that he had, with great arrogance, betrayed another hero of large appeal, Malcolm X. Black magazines, confused about whether they were MLK passives or Stokely Carmichael’s troopers, slew Frazier’s blackness at every turn. In
Soul on Ice,
Eldridge Cleaver had his say on Ali as a race dragon: “A slave in private life, a king in public—this is the life that every black champion has had to lead.” He called Ali the first “free” black champion, a “genuine” revolutionary, “the black Fidel Castro.” Ali led an “autonomous private life” and was a “serious blow” to the white man’s self-image, “a champion who denied white superiority, could not fulfill the psychological needs of whites.”
Joe Louis and Sugar Ray as slaves? Sugar bowed to no man, led a private and public life the envy of most whites. There had been no greater symbol than Joe Louis, even for many whites who were with him against Billy Conn. He towered over the racially criminal times with nobility and, while on symbols, he was the physical repudiation of white supremacy. He was a slave only to a bad golf score, to which he lost thousands, and a terrorizing IRS (so rank and callous that it made the injustice toward Ali look like a prank). Hounded by the IRS, his mind often sizzled by cocaine from “friends” to ease his worries, Louis had to be hospitalized for clinical paranoia. When he regained his balance, he went under the sinecure of Caesar’s Palace in Vegas as an official greeter to high rollers. A saving, not a demeaning role; Mickey Mantle years later would have the same function in Atlantic City.
Inwardly, Ali admired Louis, but expression of his feelings came hard. His ego would not allow space for anyone (except for Sugar Ray, a middleweight) who might be as large as himself. He could be unkind to Louis, serving him up as a model to be pitied and not emulated, or did he see in Louis the future that was always possible? He often ridiculed Louis’s shuffling, the slow cadence of his speech,
turning him into a freak without dignity; years later he would offer Louis $30,000 to stay with him for ten days before a fight with Ken Norton. But mostly Joe was poor, old sick Joe. “He’s gotta stand round,” Ali said, “like a statue in a place full of Roman ones. If I go down, it’s gonna be in a big jet goin’ to visit some head of state. If I ever end up lookin’ sick, ain’t
nobody
gonna see me in public. I’m leavin’ the ring with
all
my faculties—and all the money. I’m gonna take every quarter out of this game, then sit back and collect the interest.”
The big jet was in reference to the death of Rocky Marciano. “Look at Rocky,” Ali said. “He’s gotta go ’round diggin’ up chump change in Nebraska, wherever. Gets himself killed in a dinky old plane doin’ it.” Rocky never went for much luxury. If it was cheap, it was good, a line of thought he picked up from the parsimony of his manager, Al Weill, who never called him by his name; always just “get the fighter” or “tell the bum he’s workin’ five rounds today.” Or, perhaps, it was from the tutoring of Charlie Goldman, who often explained the perils of being a sucker, whether for a right hand or an open palm. Marciano didn’t trust banks, and when he died his family could barely find a dime and spent years trying to locate his “lost treasure.” There was nothing volatile between Rocky and Ali. He had been an early critic of Ali’s style (imagine, Rocky a connoisseur of technique!), and sometimes muttered something about flag and country; controversy gave him hives. He was once involved with Ali in a moronic computer fight, and Rocky showed up with a toupee and quite serious; he won. “Too much,” Ali responded. “Men in toupees beatin’ me now!” Marciano seemed to sense the pain in Ali. He told Belinda: “Tell him to stop torturing himself. Get him out of boxing, forget the whole thing.” With the death of Rocky, Ali had lost an historical playmate, and white America its last stalwart, its obstinate link to a time that surely was no more, and shot glasses were said
to have been raised to his picture above bars, next to Louis, the undefeated free-swinger of dessicated nose and inviting eye.
Another soon-to-be prop for Ali’s historical sweep was Jack Johnson, long dead. He and his father had watched films of Jack in action, and it speaks to his analytical genius that he took away from those grainy strips the one thing that Ole Jack could give him—the art of defense; unglamorous and the hardest gift to perfect in the ring; Jack was a master, Ali would have no equal, picking off punches like lint on a lapel. Ali honed in on Jack while Howard Sackler’s
The Great White Hope
was having a good run on Broadway. James Earl Jones reanimated Johnson with a mighty voice that seemed to vibrate the lobby doors. Ali immediately injected himself with the stage power of Johnson, took his intransigence and placed it next to his own. He had seen James Earl on Broadway one day, sprinted up to him and shouted: “The line! Gimme the line!” Jones bellowed with defiance: “Here…I…is!” Jumping up and down, Ali screamed: “That’s it! That’s me! You can see it’s me! I’m Jack Johnson. Without the white women.”
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.