The first cutting in ALI II also happens to be a cartoon. It’s an advert for Cassius Extra Fine Brandy. A boxer sits on a café chair, legs crossed, holding a glass in one big brawler’s mitt. Perhaps he’s just finished a sparring session? Unlike Goofy, he is bare to the waist and some wiry hairs are sprinkled on his chest. With his lumpy, busted beak of a nose and cauliflower ears, he looks a bit like Henry Cooper. On the spindly table beside him is a man-sized bottle of Cassius brandy – the only photographic image in a world composed of lines of ink – and he looks at it warily, as if he’s met his match. The caption floats above his head:…mmm this Cassius has got punch!
Speculation that Ali would visit South Africa arose in the middle of 1972 and continued into the following year. A handful of cuttings on this subject occur out of chronological order at the start of the second scrapbook. In an article headlined ‘Ali: A serious non-political fight’, Ali spoke about a forthcoming fight in Johannesburg against Negro boxer Al Jones. Nothing came of it.
Some time later, at the beginning of 1973, Theo Mthembu (one of two black journalists in the archive) reported that Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) would definitely hold two exhibition bouts against Jimmy Ellis in Southern Africa. The fights were scheduled for the Somhlolo Stadium, Mbabane (21 April) and the Lesotho National Stadium, Maseru (23 April). The purses and travel arrangements had already been finalized: Ali would touch down at Jan Smuts Airport on 17 April en route to Swaziland, where five new chauffeur-driven cars would be placed at the disposal of his retinue. But these logistical certitudes were not enough to make the visit happen.
In September 1972, Ali fought Floyd Patterson at Madison Square Garden (this is the first actual fight covered in the second scrapbook). They had met once before, in 1965. Despite his professed admiration for Patterson, a boyhood idol who was now 37 years old and past his prime, Ali’s comments were laden with sarcasm: He’s what you call a White House boy. The bitter wordplay rested on the fact that Patterson and his family had recently met President Nixon. He’s a good American, that’s all, a real good American Negro. He don’t bother nobody, just a nice fella. He’s humble, has a real spiritual, righteous attitude. He’s a real gentleman. The mockery continued in the ring, with Ali clowning around, at one point adopting such an exaggerated crouch that Patterson had to punch down at him. The ringside doctor stopped the fight at the end of the seventh, judging that Patterson’s left eye was too badly cut for him to continue.
Two months later, Ali met Bob Foster at the Sahara Casino on Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The fight took place in the High Sierra nightclub before a crowd of just 1 700, but it was broadcast on closed-circuit and satellite TV in one hundred North American cities and twenty foreign countries. Technology was changing spectator sport fundamentally. As the Madison Square Garden matchmaker Teddy Brenner commented: Ali could box Bozo the Clown and draw a crowd. There is not much in the archive about the Foster fight, which Ali won by a knockout in the seventh. According to a report in the Afrikaans daily the Hoofstad, Foster, who was a policeman, had become famous in 1969 when he gave his own wife a traffic ticket.
For nearly two years (as long as I had been following Ali) the boxing press had been focused on the imagined rematch between Ali and Frazier. Ali himself was always talking up this fight, accusing Frazier of hiding from him and urging the press to smoke him out. Call him yellow, call him a coward. But after Foreman beat Frazier in Kingston in January 1973, the focus shifted to an Ali-Foreman title bout, which the press dubbed ‘The Fight That Had to Be’. Foreman’s demolition of Frazier had been brutal: he knocked him down six times before the fight was stopped in the second round. Several boxing experts declared that the referee’s intervention had saved Frazier’s life. Despite Ali’s showboating – he claimed that Frazier had never recovered from their previous fight – a myth quickly sprang up around the noble and savage new heavyweight champion of the world. Foreman, the devout Christian and patriot, would put an end to Ali’s money-making antics and restore the integrity of heavyweight boxing.
Ali laughed it off. Who needs it? It was a question some of his fans must have been asking. I doubt I saw it at the time, but when I read the reports now his heart does not seem to be in boxing.
Ali’s next fight was against Joe Bugner at the Las Vegas Convention Center in February 1973. Ali wore a spangled robe given to him by Elvis Presley, and Sammy Davis Jr and Diana Ross were at the ringside. He had predicted that the British fighter would be in heaven, in round seven, but the fight went the full twelve rounds and Ali won on points. Alan Hubbard observed that Ali could have knocked Bugner out but deliberately extended the contest so as not to destroy a young fighter. The same thing had happened during the Mathis fight. Apparently Ali was concerned to give a good account of himself. Afterwards he asked reporters: Was it a good fight? Was there enough action for you?
Now for Ken Norton. The fight, scheduled for the end of March in San Diego, would set up the inevitable title fight with George Foreman. It had to be.
5
Silence
Two miners killed
Johannesburg – Two African mine workers were killed in a fall of hanging on 50-level of the Westonaria Gold Mine today, a spokesman for Johannesburg Consolidated Investments announced here. The men’s next of kin have not yet been informed. – Sapa
– Pretoria News, February 1973
Joe
On 31 March 1973, Ali suffered the second loss of his professional career when he was outpointed by Ken Norton over twelve rounds in San Diego. Norton broke Ali’s jaw in the first round and his corner wanted him to retire at the end of the second, when the damage became evident, but he stubbornly fought on. Afterwards he underwent a ninety-minute operation to put his jaw back together and wire it shut.
It’s incredible that he carried on, I told my father.
Say goodbye to Gaseous Cassius, he said. That loudmouth finally got what was coming to him.
My father’s antipathy for Ali pleased me in some way. I understood that my allegiance had settled on the wrong hero and that this gave me some clout. Dad did not tolerate backchat from his children. Don’t give me a thousand words, he would say. Don’t give me a lot of lip. Like most white men of his generation, he also did not expect to be questioned by women or black people, and it did not often happen. Now the Louisville Lip was more full of chat, back and front, than any man alive. This mouthing-off riled Dad, and the more riled he got, the more I liked it.
Ali riled the boxing writers too, but they couldn’t stop writing about him. When he lost to Norton their schadenfreude was palpable. He can’t talk! He’s speechless! They devoted reams of newsprint to the defeat. I pored over these articles, returning again and again to the same photographs.
The first shows Ali leaving the ring after the decision, bruised and dazed, passing his tongue over his lips as if he wants to speak but his mouth is dry. He is leaning on Bundini Brown, whose face is crumpling. Or perhaps he’s already burst into tears – that could be the trace of a tear down his cheek. A smaller photograph above this one shows a beaming Ken Norton, handsome as a movie star and aglow with good health. The caption says that San Diego’s hometown hero employed the services of a hypnotist before the fight. That’s the power of positive thinking for you!
The third photograph, which now seems to echo out of an unknowable future, is more troubling. It shows Norton visiting Ali in the San Diego Hospital. The victor looks at ease in an open-necked shirt, with huge seventies collar and turned-back cuffs, and teardrop shades. His belt has a large flashy buckle. He stands at Ali’s bedside with the fingers of his right hand resting lightly on the bed rail. Ali lies on his side, propped up on the pillows amid rumpled sheets. His face is grossly swollen. He looks like an oversized schoolboy who’s come down with the mumps.
The scribes were always ready to think the worst: it was in their headline-chasing, deadline-twisted DNA. The papers were full of speculation,
some of it sad and some of it gleeful, that Ali’s career was over. An article in the Pretoria News under the headline ‘End of the road for Ali? Bright flame goes out’ carried the pronouncements of doom from Fleet Street. Neil Allen in The Times said that as Dr Ferdie Pacheco led Ali from the ring at the end of the fight, he uttered these agonized words: He can’t talk, he can’t talk. Desmond Hackett of the Daily Express put it bluntly: This is the end of the Muhammad Ali era. He worried that Ali would return to the ring as just another has-been. In Hackett’s view, Ali did not stand a hope in hell against an explosive man like the world champion, George Foreman. He might even be beaten by Joe Frazier.
Colin Hart, writing in the Johannesburg Sunday Times, said the blow that broke Ali’s jaw also smashed a legend into fragments and made Ken Norton as famous and feared as the man who shot Liberty Vallance [sic]! In the more emotional parts of the world, he went on, Ali’s Black brothers, who often treated him as a Messiah, will be mourning today as if the man – and not the myth – had died. As much as he loved and admired Ali, Hart expressed the hope that the next time he is able to speak it will be to announce his retirement…
It’s hard to say why Hart referred to Liberty Valance. John Ford’s Western, in which a principled but hapless senator is credited with killing a ruthless gunslinger when in fact he was shot by a more capable rancher, is about the persistence rather than the demise of myth. A reporter who uncovers the truth about the story decides to conceal it, uttering the well-known line: ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’
Norman Canale, the most vitriolic of the local sportswriters, could not help gloating: Quite obviously the former world heavyweight champion and a fighter whose name was on everybody’s lips – never more so than his own – is washed up as a world title contender. Canale sought the support of Chris Lessing, a local boxing fan and collector who had met Ali the previous year and hated him with a passion. Lessing said Ali might yet fight some corpses from the fistic graveyard, but he would never be a drawcard again. Asked who the best boxers of all time were, he said he wouldn’t have Ali in his top ten at any price.
The consensus was that Ali had been silenced rather than beaten. Every reporter had to make the point that for the first time in his career Ali was unable to talk. Ali, who for 13 years has been wired for sound, lies in a hospital bed wired for silence…Boxing’s biggest mouth will be shut for six weeks…So for once Ali…couldn’t speak his mind.
Boxing writers like nothing better than a pun. It is almost a punch, after all. While the scribes were throwing puns left, right and centre, the subeditors went reeling, positively pun-drunk, from one headline to another: ‘Muhammad Ali speechless’…‘Injury puts muzzle on Ali’…‘Unspeakable defeat – words fail Ali.’
The thought that Ali might not box again dismayed me, not least because I would never hear the end of it from my father and brother. Amid all the sob stories, I was reassured by one dissenting article under the headline ‘Broken jaw hasn’t crossed Ali’s wires’. According to this piece by an unnamed reporter, even a broken jaw and a mouthful of wire hasn’t stopped Muhammad Ali talking. People who’d visited him in hospital said his verbal sparring was as sharp as ever: ‘The Mouth’ is still as quick with a ready quip as a left jab. Asked whether he was still able to speak, a nurse said, Oh heavens yes. He talks through clenched teeth. A photographer who was present during Norton’s visit corroborated this: Ali, speaking through an almost closed mouth, lectured his conqueror on saving money and keeping away from fast women.
Ali’s loss to Norton scuttled all the plans for a title fight with Foreman, on which a huge amount of money was riding – and not just for the boxers. It put Joe Frazier, who had lost his title to Foreman a few months earlier, back in the picture. Frazier was at the ringside in San Diego and couldn’t wipe the smile off his face.
Branko
I’m rifling through Joe’s schoolbag when I come across the shoes. He’s gone to Funchal Caffie to buy potatoes or bread for Mom and the canvas bag is lying on his bed with books spilling out of it. It has a peace sign and some other stuff written on it in faded Koki – Jimi Hendrix, Monty Python, What, Me Worry? He would have covered the whole thing with crap like this but the Boss – that’s the headmaster – made a rule that says you can’t write anything on your bag. He wanted us all to get new ones but the folks said no. So it went in a tin bath with a cupful of Jik. Anyway the bag is lying there asking to be examined. He’s my little brother and I need to see what he’s carrying around. You never know. Last month it was a copy of Sex Manners for Men that Frank Burger found in his dad’s wardrobe and was renting out to his classmates on overnight loan for twenty cents a shot. All those sticky little fingers. I had to pick the thing up with a tissue. And once I found a photograph of Julianne Swart when she was in the drum majorettes, which is how I know he’s got the hots for her, even though she’s going steady with a boy at the Tech who has a car. And there’s always the usual stuff: balls of wax paper smeared with cheese spread, a Fanta Orange yoyo, a two-day-old Chelsea bun.
But I don’t expect this: shoes. Shoes with a history. They’re the school shoes that the dog chewed up. Buster was a stray that pitched up one day and moved in with us. We were a one-dog family, and we already had Cassie, but Sylvie made a song and dance about it and so he stayed. Cassie didn’t seem to mind. I’ve never seen such a stupid mutt, Dad said, and I knew a few on the farm, believe me. Buster’s main problem was that he had retriever blood in his mongrel veins. That’s what we decided anyway. He kept bringing things home. Things like Mrs Mitchell’s favourite jersey which she was drying on a table in her own yard. On the way home he dragged it through a rose bush and then through the hole he’d dug under the fence. Mom knitted Mrs Mitchell a replacement, but it wasn’t quite the same as the original, which she’d bought at Debenhams in Leicester and brought all the way to Pretoria with her.
Another time he retrieved one of Mr Burt’s clivias. Our neighbour kept his prize plants in a little makeshift greenhouse. Buster fetched the pot in his jaws and shook it out on the front lawn. Then he lay there chewing the roots.
That dog is wicked, Mom said. He’s got the devil in him.
He just needs to be trained, said Sylvie. She loves dogs and she’s read a book on animal behaviour.
I think he’s beyond help, Mom said. Something has to be done.
Buster loved chewing things, shoes, chair legs, rose bushes, tyres. He even found the tennis ball Dad put over the tow bar on the car and chewed that to pieces.
When we got in from school one day he was gone. Joe went all over the neighbourhood, as far as Yale Avenue, calling under hedges and over gates, but there was no sign of him.
He’s run away, Dad said, buggered off as suddenly as he came. He’ll have attached himself to some other suckers by now. Good luck to them.
But then Sylvie, who was in on the lie all along, let slip that Dad had taken Buster to the SPCA. Where he’d been put down, no doubt. Who would want such an ugly dog? Joe was beside himself with rage and grief. I heard him kicking things to pieces behind the servants’ quarters, sobbing and cursing, words I didn’t think he knew, threatening Mom and Dad with terrible violence.
It couldn’t go on, Mom said. I’m sorry for your brother, but really that dog was making our name mud.
As it happens, the last straw was the shoes, which he chewed to pieces a couple of days before he was dispatched. I know for a fact that those shoes were thrown in the rubbish bin and a new pair bought to replace them. But here the old ones are in Joe’s schoolbag.
I’m an old hand at this big-brother stuff. I put everything back in the bag just the way I found it and keep the discovery to myself. The next morning, before Joe goes to school – we used to cycle together but he’s leaving early these days, he says he’s meeting his friends before class – I check out the footwear. He’s wearing the new shoes. Cheap ones from Edworks because times are tough.
Dad’s having trouble paying off the new Zodiac. Later that day, at first break, I go looking for Joe. Usually we avoid one another at school, he’s under instructions not to come within a fifty-metre radius, but I’ve got business with him. I find him on the pavilion behind the tuck shop eating a jam doughnut. Of course, he’s wearing the old shoes. Sneaky little bastard.
Nice shoes, I say, sitting down beside him. He nearly jumps out of them, which wouldn’t be hard because there’s so little left of them. They look like the dog’s breakfast. There’s a big chunk of leather out of the back of the left one and tooth marks all over the right. Why the hell are you wearing those? You should be ashamed of yourself. What will people think of us?
The story spills out of him. He hates the new shoes. For one thing they’re made of plastic – patent leather, I correct him – and the toes are pointed. He looks like a ducktail from Danville in those things. They’re an odd sort of brown – it’s true – like watered-down Milo. He’s polished them with Kiwi military tan but it’s only made things worse. Also the shoes are a size too big for him. They were bought that way so he can grow into them. This still isn’t the worst. The main problem is that they squeak when he walks. There’s nothing he can do about it. Every step produces a squeal. He tries to tread softly, but that just turns the squeal up at the end, as if the shoes are asking questions. It’s totally embarrassing. He complained about the shoes in the shop but Mom insisted. So when they got home, he retrieved the old pair from the rubbish bin. He carries them to school every day and changes on the rugby field before the bell goes. And he changes back into the new ones before he goes home.
The Distance Page 8
