8
Tactics
CAPE TOWN – Tonight’s boxing tournament here had to be postponed for a second time when West German Arno Prick, brought in to fight Mike Schutte, had still made no appearance late last night.
– The Star, January 1974
Joe
Everyone knows that Muhammad Ali was more than a boxer, that he was an artist of the ring. Alongside the catchphrases and prophetic rhymes that have become part of popular mythology, he invented an idiosyncratic tactical language to describe his artistry. Most boxers are journeymen who learn the trade without expanding its possibilities. Ten thousand hours of sparring will knock the ideas out of your head. Ali was an innovator, in the ring and out of it, and naming his innovations magnified their power.
Like the virtuosic riffs of a musician or the metaphorical embellishments of a writer, Ali’s figures were meant to astound. He nearly always spoke of them extravagantly, drawing attention to them as aspects of a show, in the same way a magician pops his cuffs or flourishes his empty top hat. This routine was designed to psych out his opponent, a technique he perfected, but it bore little resemblance to the jaw-thrusting and chest-butting practised by later boxers.
Ali’s best known tactics were the rope-a-dope and the shuffle. The rope-a-dope, where he lay back on the ropes and defended, was showy but functional, aimed at keeping out of trouble when his own offensive moves weren’t working, and tiring out the other man; the shuffle, which involved shifting from one foot to the other in an eye-crossing blur, was a purely rhetorical demonstration of speed and virtuosity.
In the run-up to his fight against Buster Mathis in 1971, Ali told reporters: I’ve developed a new punch. I found it during my fight here against Jimmy Ellis four months ago. It’s a half-chop right hand and it dazed Ellis. He found it, the way a painter might find a new method of applying paint to the canvas or a guitarist a new tuning for his instrument. Demonstrating the short right on an imaginary opponent, he explained the mechanics: It’s a chop with a twist…I call it the linger-on punch. I’ll execute it on Buster in the third round…and he won’t know where he is. After the fight, he spoke about the new punch as a means of protracting his opponent’s suffering: It doesn’t make you critical. It just makes you linger on.
Whether or not the punch was new in Ali’s repertoire, Henry Cooper had felt something like it in the ring with him: [Clay] is a long puncher, he said. He flicks with his wrists at the last split second. It is a reflex down-clip with the heel of the glove. He drags the skin, and tears it.
Bout by bout, the tactics multiplied. By the mid-seventies, Ali was expected to unveil a ‘secret weapon’ before each fight and they rolled straight off his tongue and into the press. Before Chuck Wepner, it was the ‘Wepner Whupper’, before Foreman, the ‘Ghetto Whopper’. The latter was a version of the ‘Bolo punch’ invented by Kid Gavilan, the former world welterweight champion from Cuba, who was then in Ali’s retinue. The Ron Lyle fight prompted a new awkward offence: I’ll rush at him and stop short…People won’t recognize me. The idea is to confuse Lyle. After a couple of rounds of him trying to figure out what I’m doing he’ll get tired and I’ll finish him off. Bamboozled into submission.
In the event, Lyle proved difficult to fool. He would not fall for my rope-a-dope game, Ali said afterwards. So I played the mirage game from the centre of the ring. That’s when a man thinks he sees an opening and he don’t. No other fighter can do what I’m doing. Lyle didn’t even try. When Ali went into the shuffle, he stood back and watched in admiration.
The tactical rhetoric reached a manic climax before the fight against Joe Bugner in Kuala Lumpur. One of the not-so-secret weapons rolled out before the press, the ‘Russian Tank’, was a parody in itself: it involved wrapping both arms around his head with his elbows jutting forward like the prow of an armoured vehicle. The ‘Malaysian Waltz’ was designed to knock Bugner off balance.
After one training run, Ali told reporters he would be using both the Malaysian Waltz and the Ghetto Whopper on Bugner. This is in addition to my mirage, rope-a-dope, the Russian tank, the Ali shuffle and double shuffle to outwit, out-hit and outclass Joe Bugner…My five tactics will throw him off balance, and with two more new styles, I predict now that he will not last the distance with a man of my experience.
Five tactics! Two new styles! It was comically excessive, like the five boxing-themed cocktails they were serving up in the Ringside Bar at the Hilton.
Entering into the spirit of things, Bugner’s camp gave as good as it got. Manager Andy Smith said that in addition to his ‘Bazooka’ tactic – a sensible response to the Tank – Bugner would use the new Kuala Lumpur lumper – a hammer-like punch on which Bugner was practising very hard. ‘Ali will be disagreeably surprised when he gets one of these in.’
The press devoted a remarkable amount of space to Ali’s inventions and Bugner’s ripostes, despite the fact that no one was taking any of it seriously. Ali was a copy-generator and column-filler. Sometimes the demand was so intense that the dynamo faltered. Even as the tactical repertoire grew, the threats became more generalized. I’ve got a new tactic to surprise him. In the first round I’m going to do something that will put fear into his heart. He’ll be so frightened he’ll go weak at the knees. There will be a slaughter – they’re going to lock me up for what I’m going to do to him. It will be against the law.
Not long before he fought Bugner, he unveiled yet another fighting style, but wasn’t bothered to name it. It is defensive and I’ll tell you the name later. The new style involved blocking Bugner’s punches. The whole point is to manoeuvre your opponent into vulnerable positions, hit him quick and get out, and at the same time stay out of hitting range.
In other words: boxing.
9
Pictures
Charlie Chaplin plans comeback
London – Charlie Chaplin, after nine years of retirement, is planning a return to film-making. During the past weeks at his Swiss home he has been completing a film he has written and hopes to direct. It is called “The Freak.” It is the story of a scientist in South America who captures a girl with wings and is exploited. Chaplin has also been writing music.
– The Star, March 1974
Joe
Two composite pictures. The first was taken from a magazine, probably Scope or Personality, and is made up of three images over the headline ‘Louisville Loudmouth’. Three full-figure portraits floating on a palegrey background show Ali the boxer at three different ages. From right to left, counter to convention, they show the boy, the teenager and the man. The three figures are not in proportion: they’ve been scaled to suggest a progression in a pleasing visual arrangement.
On the right, Ali as a ten-year-old. He has his guard up, bare-knuckled, and wears a pair of satiny shorts with LOU KY in block capitals on a white stripe down the side, and black shoes. He’s looking straight out at the camera with a questioning expression on his face. Like so? he could be saying. His right shoulder is dropped and his chest turned away defensively.
In the middle, Ali as a youngster around the time of the Rome Olympics. This time he’s gloved up, the guard is a little lower and his muscles are slack. He looks like a gangly, uncertain teenager. His chin is down and his eyes don’t meet yours. The high-waisted Everlast shorts and flat-footed stance make his legs look skinny.
There is little in the first photo, and not much more in the second, to suggest that you’re looking at The Greatest. But that’s him in the third, no doubt about it, the heavyweight champion of the universe. He’s around thirty or so and in his prime, perfectly toned, handsome and groomed. His stance is coiled, his gloves dropped almost to his waist, elbows floating out from his sides. He looks straight into the camera, eyebrows raised in a look of supreme assurance. Nothing in the pose is defensive: he’s itching to throw a punch. Note the haze around the right glove, a flicker on its glossy curve, as if
it’s already moving.
The second composite picture, possibly cut from the same magazine and accompanying an article on the documentary a.k.a. Cassius Clay, shows Ali in loudmouth mode. Five matchbook-sized portrait photos are stacked down the edge of a page like a strip of film. Two of them are famous images of a young Ali shouting the odds, with his mouth stretched so wide you can count his teeth. His nostrils are flared, the whites of his eyes glaring. You can tell at a glance that he’s clowning around, playing the fool. In the third open-mouthed portrait, Ali – caught in the middle of an uncharacteristically modest knockout prediction? – is showing the camera nine fingers. The remaining images, the top and tail of the strip, belong to a later era. In one he has a folded towel draped over his head as if he’s just finished fighting or working out, in the other he’s bareheaded; in both, his eyes are shut and his mouth is wide open. If you didn’t know the context, you would assume it was a scream of terror, pain or rage.
It’s striking that a boxer who made so much of his good looks, his prettiness, should so often pull faces for the camera. I was surprised then not just at the shape Ali managed to stretch his face into, but that he did it at all. Adults did not usually behave like this. Even children were discouraged from mugging. If someone sneezes, my mother used to say, your face will stay like that.
Some of the loudmouth pictures are like freeze frames in which the camera, seeing so much more than we do, reveals exactly what happens when a fist hits a face, how skin and muscle bulge away from the bone, what purpose is served by the skeleton. These pictures bear some resemblance to the photographic convention of the mock blow – the posed image in which the boxer pretends to punch someone. This accomplice, who could be anyone from a fan to the president of a country, or very occasionally another boxer, and then usually a former opponent or a fighter from an obviously different weight division, contributes to the charade by pulling a face, trying to look like someone who’s just been punched. The mock blow with its affectionate assertion of dominance sends a double message: I could punch you, it says on the part of the sender, and break your jaw, but I wouldn’t dream of it. And on the part of the recipient: I trust you not to punch me, but here’s my jaw anyway, go ahead if you must, my pleasure.
There are mock-blow portraits of Ali scattered through the archive. The edition of Time magazine that hit the streets on the morning of the Fight of the Century contains two. The first is on the ‘Letter from the Publisher’ page and shows Ali with his left fist resting precisely on the chin of Time correspondent Joseph Kane. Ali is glaring down at the reporter, who looks back through black-framed spectacles and gives him a goofy grin. The other is in the body of the article and shows Ali mock-punching his beefy handler Salameh Hassan. The two are side by side in the back seat of a car. Ali has his right arm crooked around Hassan’s neck to pull him close and his left fist mashing into his nose. Hassan has the mug of an old brawler anyway, but he enhances the effect by screwing shut his eyes and pulling a crooked mouth. Ali is biting on his bottom lip, all concentration.
While Ali was in training for Foreman at Deer Lake, he posed for no fewer than three mock-blow shots with animals (there are three in the archive at least, and there may be others). Perhaps the country atmosphere captured in the name of the camp had something to do with it. First up was his horse. Ali has the reins in his left hand and his right fist raised as if he’s going to use the horse’s nose as a speed ball. According to the caption, he and this spirited animal are getting acquainted. In the second photo, Ali is shaking his right fist at a chained cougar. Illusionist Doug Henning used the cat in his magic show, which so impressed Ali that he invited them to visit Deer Lake. The caption reads: Muhammad is doing his share of the snarling in this Ali-cat show. In the final image, Ali is standing at a wire fence, which calls to mind the ropes of a ring, with his fists raised, gazing apprehensively at a cow in a field. The cow turns its long white face towards the camera and looks pensive and bemused, as cows often do. Who knows what it’s thinking? In the article overleaf, Ali says of Foreman: He’s slow as a cow – got a face like one too.
In the whole of the archive there is not a single photograph of Ali with a bloodied nose or a cut eye. The closest thing to an injury is his swollen jaw after the loss to Norton, and then, lying in his hospital bed, he looks more insulted than injured. He’s always going on about his unmarked face, his flawless good looks, and so this unlovely swelling must be an affront.
The idea that Ali was never hit is a fiction, of course. He was not a slugger and he was fast enough to keep his head out of range some of the time, but he was hit repeatedly in every fight, like every fighter. Leafing through these pages, it would be easy to get the wrong idea. To see the busted-beak industry for what it is, you need to look at the men Ali beat, at Joe Bugner and Chuck Wepner.
At Henry Cooper.
The famous photo of Cooper after his Wembley Stadium fight against Ali (then Clay) in 1963 is the most shocking in the archive. It renders literal Budd Schulberg’s comment that great fights are ‘allegories authored in blood’ (Cooper: the damage always looked worse than it was). Cooper was cut above the left eye in round 3 and his corner wanted to throw in the towel, but he carried on. By the time the fight was stopped in the fifth, the eye was swollen shut and the cut was open like a mouth. In the photo, he looks butchered, with thick gouts of blood from brow to chin and a thinner tracery on his neck and chest. He has blood in his ear, blood in his hair. It looks like the make-up department got carried away. It looks like the end of Rocky. Except that this is no Technicolor fantasy, but the murky, black-and-white world of the real on newsprint. It reminds me of the scenes I pored over in True Detective where the bullet-punctured corpses of mobsters lay sprawled among overturned tables, broken dinner plates and white linen, in spills of blood that seemed to my innocent eye impossibly dark and extravagant.
Branko
The Louisville Loudmouth. My brother should know better than to show me these pictures. It’s exactly the showing-off that made me dislike Cassius Clay in my schooldays. Having a big mouth was not a virtue then. We’ve gotten used to it now, but too much yackety-yak used to be seen as a feminine failing. Men kept their traps shut. They didn’t cry either, but now everyone’s expected to do it. If you hold your tongue and put on a brave face, people think there’s something wrong with you.
You know, I was thinking about what you said the last time, Joe says. ‘Listen to the material.’ I followed your advice and I came to an interesting conclusion. The weirdest thing about all this stuff is that it’s so silent. It doesn’t say a word.
I look at a photo of Ali and words come pouring out of the mouth, the loudmouth, in a long beeline.
Isn’t it strange? Joe goes on. He was famous for the patter and the poetry and all we ever saw was dumb pictures. I don’t think I ever heard his voice. Can you remember?
It irks me that I can’t. I say: He must have been on the radio.
That’s what I thought, the transistor was on all day. We’d have heard him on the news. I am the Greatest!
There would have been clips from the fights on the newsreels too, on African Mirror or whatever.
Do you think so? Wasn’t that all Stirling Moss and Danny Kaye?
Maybe when he fought Henry Cooper.
Here we are again: paging and smoothing. It’s two months since I visited him in Troyeville and I thought this was behind us. But he’s back at my dining-room table, unannounced as usual, with his pile of old paper. Where does this new single-mindedness come from?
As he fidgets through his archive the smell of dust and damp comes off it. It smells old. It actually stinks of the past.
It’s true that the pictures are silent, I say. They’re also still. Maybe that’s even stranger when you think about it. Boxing is nothing but action – and look how calm it all seems. This staging, without a breath of movement, makes it seem so significant. This is the moment that
matters, this moment and no other. It’s all poise, all pose with nothing in between, none of the clinching, panting and grunting. There’s no soundtrack. The world used to come to us like this. Stopped in its tracks. Even the bloody moon landing escaped us. It was live on television, the single most dramatic moment of the century, and all we got were grainy pictures on the front pages the next day. Do you remember how we longed for television?
The nationalists thought it would be bad for us.
And they were right, boet.
Fucking Nazis.
Then he stops paging and points at another photograph. Also a characteristic expression: the snarl. Judging by how sweaty and tousled Ali looks, it must have been taken after a fight or a sparring session.
The Distance Page 14
