The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  The fact is that transmission did not always happen this quickly. On 14 March 1971, nearly a week after the event, the Sunday Express ran two colour pictures of the Ali-Frazier fight on its front page and seven more inside. The paper called this another great colour scoop.

  South Africa was not the best place from which to observe developments in the mass media. In the absence of television, sport was still news rather than spectacle. Elsewhere in the world satellite technology was bringing about a fundamental shift and this can be traced through the archive in a rising tide of information about the arrangements and logistics, the facts and figures on television audiences and purses, all the trappings of a nascent global entertainment industry.

  The first Ali-Frazier fight was watched by 20 000 spectators at Madison Square Garden and millions of others on CCTV in specially designated arenas. There were reports of near riots at some of these ‘theatre TV’ venues when the transmission was interrupted. The purse was $5 million. By the time of the rematch three years later, the purse had grown to $6 million and the projected CCTV audience to hundreds of millions. Superfight II was expected to gross $16 million once the TV receipts were counted.

  The Ali-Foreman fight shifted the ground. Significantly, the announcement that the fight would take place in Zaire was made (in March 1974) by Hank Schwartz, the president of Video Techniques Ltd, the CCTV company that had contracted both fighters. The loudmouth money was in the media. The purse was $10 million. The Zaire government had put up guarantees and the promoters Hemdale Leisure Corporation, headed by British businessman John Daly, had coughed up the front money. The fight was scheduled for 3 o’clock in the morning to meet a 10 p.m. time slot on the East Coast of the US. In the face of the predictable outcry, Schwartz expressed confidence in Zaire’s technical capabilities: We will be able to beam the fight to anywhere in the world where there is a TV set or a venue for closed-circuit. It will be the largest sports project of all time. He was also well aware that it was bigger than sport. Muhammad Ali, he said, had become the biggest draw in the history of entertainment, bigger even than Sinatra and Elvis. The company predicted a television audience of one billion people. In August, when a press conference was held to launch the ticket sales, it was announced that Madison Square Garden would participate in the telecast, joining 450 locations in the US and 35 in the UK where the fight could be viewed. According to Daly, the telecast would contribute ninety per cent of projected revenues.

  Earlier that year Daly had spoken prophetically about the increasingly global reach of the mass media:…we could soon see the day when you can stage an event and the whole world will watch. And it can’t be long before everyone has a pay television, where you put your money in the set and tune in to the latest film or football match. Or war, he might have added, or earthquake, or election campaign.

  The scribes were not all thrilled with the way things were going. Alan Hubbard wrote several articles lamenting the fact that the pursuit of cash by a greedy league of boxers, promoters and governments had turned the traditions of boxing upside down. Gone were the days when the cigar-sucking moguls of Madison [Square] Garden, or Miami Beach called the shots; now it was the Swiss bankers, the gnomes of Zurich – and Cairo. Listing the names of the stops on Foreman’s world championship itinerary – Kingston, Jamaica, Tokyo, Japan, Caracas, Venezuela – Hubbard seemed to blame globalization itself for boxing’s ills. Ironically, the pressmen who deplored the commercialization and professionalization of sport were an integral part of the evolving media machinery that made it possible for sport to become a global business. In his disapproving criticism of the Zaire staging, Hubbard put his finger precisely on what was happening: Kinshasa’s stadium will simply act as a giant TV studio.

  None of this had much relevance for South African boxing fans, who had yet to see a TV set. Local entrepreneurs did their best to compensate. In the run-up to the Rumble in the Jungle, the Sterland Complex in Arcadia, Pretoria brought the Ali vs Frazier rematch to the screen. For your ringside seat, contact Cine 16 now. In mid-September, Cine 303 in President Street, Johannesburg screened Ali’s fights against Quarry, Bonavena and Frazier twice a day. Kevin McLintock, the promotions manager of Hunter Cigarettes, which had acquired the South African rights to the film of the Rumble, announced that it would be screened in the main centres in South Africa within a week of the contest.

  Better late than never.

  Branko

  The call comes from Em’s phone but it isn’t her on the other end.

  You don’t know me, a man says. My name’s Riaz and I’m your brother’s neighbour, from number 42, the house with the blue wall.

  I think: I know that house – but I can’t speak. Why’s he calling?

  Listen, he says. You’d better come now. Something’s happened to your brother.

  What’s happened? I say. Let me talk to Em. Is she there?

  She’s here but she can’t talk now. She asked me to phone you.

  What is it? I say. You have to tell me.

  He’s been shot.

  Oh Jesus. What happened? How is he?

  It doesn’t look good.

  What do you mean?

  Just come.

  Is he dead?

  He rings off.

  I look at the clock on the kitchen counter. Six fifteen. Rita won’t be back before seven and I can’t call her either: she’s in her yoga class with her phone switched off.

  I dial Joe’s home number and get the answering machine. Em, are you there? If you’re there, please pick up. Nothing. Riaz? Nothing. Fuck this.

  Jordan comes out of his room. His ears are uncannily sharp when there’s something he wants to hear. What’s up Dad?

  I’m not sure.

  The salad is already on the table. Just the three tomatoes still to add standing next to the bowl: I always cut those at the last minute so the lettuce won’t go limp. Who gives a shit? Rita says. Stop being so controlling. I’m holding the dressing in my hand, the honey-mustard mix I got from Sylvie, which I was shaking up in a Grolsch lager bottle when the phone rang. My mind can’t settle, it keeps skipping from one thing to another, the salad, the tomatoes, my brother, the dressing. I put the bottle down and wipe my hands on a dish cloth.

  We’re supposed to watch the rough cut of Jordan’s movie tonight. I’ve already put him off twice.

  I need to go out. Mom will be home soon. I’ll try to call her from the car, but you know how she forgets to put her phone back on. If she hasn’t heard from me by the time she gets here, tell her I’m at Uncle Joe’s and she should phone me.

  What’s going on?

  I don’t know. He had some sort of accident.

  I take the umbrella from the stand at the front door.

  Can I come with you?

  No Jordy, I need you to look after things here. There’s chicken in the oven. It should come out in twenty minutes.

  Then I run for the car.

  When I turn the key a red tide of strings surges out of the dash and almost drowns me. It’s Morricone’s score for The Mission. Not on your life. I grab a movie-theme compilation from the console and jam it in the player.

  The drive is all jump-cuts and cross-fades. The wipers keep clearing my mind, flinging one anxious thought aside so that a new one can fall in. The traffic is thick on Houghton Drive. More people take their cars to work when it rains, apparently. Especially on a Friday. There’s the usual current of hysteria that rises with the first rain of the season, pedestrians with garbage bags over their heads darting between the cars, a taxi without lights turning into the oncoming stream. But the traffic thins as I go up Harrow Road. It’s been Joe Slovo Drive for five years and the old name still comes into my head.

  Once upon a time I came this way often, driving to Yeoville or Kensington or going into town. Now I hardly cross Louis Botha from one year to the next. Joe was right: I’m suburban to my c
ore. The Becker Street corner still makes me uneasy. A man used to beg here near the shul, a youngish man with curly hair and shabby clothes, and Rita said he must have been left behind from the eighties when there were still Jews in Yeoville. He’d be waiting on the kerb and then he’d shuffle up to the car when you stopped at the light and show you to wind down the window. Making that circular motion with his finger that usually means you’re crazy. Always wanting money for medicine. Ja sure. And then one day he was in a dressing gown and slippers, with his head shaved and a plastic cup in his hand, like someone escaped from quarantine.

  While I’m waiting for the robot I call Em’s phone. I let it ring until it goes to voicemail and then I don’t leave a message.

  What would I say? Is this emergency legit? Just checking. I’m worried about Joe, scared to death actually, but my mind keeps straying to other anxieties. What if I’m being lured into a trap? I think I’ve heard Joe speak about this Riaz but I can’t be sure. Maybe someone stole Em’s phone and now they’re using it to set up her contacts. For what? Riaz could be in on the scam. Or maybe he’s got a gun to his head.

  The last time I came this way was when I took the ALI I scrapbook back to Joe’s place. My plan was to leave it in his letter box, but I thought better of it and handed it over to Violet. I haven’t spoken to him since. His nose must be out of joint. When was that? A couple of months ago. The end of winter.

  The slip road that takes you down to Saratoga Avenue has always felt like the cold heart of the city. They put some mosaics on the pillars of the flyover before the World Cup and it brightened the place up. But on a wet night like this, in the yellow glare of the spots on the concrete overhang, the place looks like a butchery. Water sheets down from the motorway above. As always, people are asleep on the traffic island under mounds of blankets and newspaper. Tonight they look like graves. While I’m considering this and keeping one eye on the mirrors for smash-and-grab artists, Cinema Paradiso winds to an end, the beautiful love theme that plays over the closing montage of movie kisses. Fine. Now the credits will roll upwards. It’s always up. So that we can read down. That’s the way it is.

  Saratoga Avenue is a mess. The lights are out and every intersection’s clotted with cars and taxis. Forcing my way into the jam, I get stuck in the downpour sluicing off the motorway and it’s like I’m in a car wash. In a movie, a car wash is always bad news. It’s a place where people hold furtive meetings, where they pass on secrets and get killed. Then the CD pops out of the slot and the mood of imminent danger eases.

  The old man didn’t like the radio playing while he was driving. Something about being able to hear the engine. When we were parked somewhere he’d let us turn it on. He and Mom would go shopping at the OK Bazaars in Valhalla, while we kids sat in the car in the parking area and listened to the Pip Freedman show. And when we drove to a cycle race on a Sunday morning, Mom would insist on music: it was the price of her company. Then she’d tune the radio to the A programme and it was always the King’s College Choir or some churchy a capella group. Why couldn’t they just sing the words? Joe would get their nonsense into his head and drive us all crazy for the next three days. Da ba da ba da.

  There’s a pool of water in the dip at Ellis Park next to the Rea Vaya bus stop, but it can’t be too deep because cars are inching through. I hit one of the preset tuning buttons on the radio. On Classic FM someone’s chatting to the head chef of the new Thai place in the Hilton. Joe hates these bus stations. Such a waste of money, he says, all you need is a sign on a pole. The important thing is that the buses come, that they come on time, that they go where they say they’re going. That’s what you should spend your money on. Our money! Who gives a toss about the bloody stations. I switch over to 702. Business talk with Bruce Whitfield. He’s chatting to an expert on small business development about the seven – or is it eight – phases every business goes through. They’re busy with number three. The expert says everyone can be an ontroppanaw. So I end up on Khaya. Machine-made music, that’s what I need, something untouched by human hands. Doef doef doef.

  That’s still repeating on me when I turn into Nourse Street and pull over. There’s the car at the dark end of the block, where the street runs dead against the park, Joe’s Mazda at an odd angle under the streetlight with one wheel up on the kerb. That stupid jalopy he drove because no one in their right minds would want to steal it. The driver’s door is open. A knot of people there on the pavement under umbrellas. Some of them standing, some of them kneeling. A big striped beach umbrella. That was Riaz. It’s our speciality, he told me afterwards, pulling together in a crisis. It brings out the best in us. Everything calm and still, coming and going to the rhythm of the wipers. What did I expect? Flashing blue lights, luminous tape, cameras, lights, action? I switch off the radio. Later, when I go closer, in a booming silence, I’ll see that Joe has been lifted from the car and laid on the pavement on his back. Someone has rolled up a jersey and put it under his head. There are crystals of glass in his hair from when the hijacker smashed the window. That was outside his own gate, the one with the ingenious flaps, before he drove off down here with a bullet in his chest. Someone else has covered him with a blanket. Em wanted to rush him to the Kensington Clinic, it’s just around the corner, you can almost see the turrets from here, or carry him inside out of the rain, but Riaz said there might be evidence to gather, you shouldn’t disturb the crime scene. The police are on their way. She should have insisted. How he would have hated this, lying out here in the street. Riaz won’t budge: everything just as we found it. The only thing that will be moved is the blanket. By the time I go down there, it will have been pulled up to his chin. She won’t let them cover his face. He’s white as a sheet, as they say, and there’s a dark shadow on the pavement which is blood, as I’ll discover when I put the heel of my hand down in it, leaning over to kiss his forehead, something I haven’t done since we were children, if ever. But now I’m sitting in the car looking down the long dirty street. The rain has eased but the gutters are running like mountain streams, like Tonquani Gorge in spring. The wipers are still flicking, slow time, to the dead march in my temples. Doef doef doef. The phone will ring any second now and it will be Rita to find out where I am.

  Joe

  In the whole of my archive there isn’t a single line on the Rumble in the Jungle. I have scores of cuttings on the buildup to the fight and scores more on the fights Ali had the following year. But on the Ali-Foreman fight in Kinshasa on 30 October 1974: nothing.

  It’s a glaring absence, yet I don’t recall when it first struck me.

  The fight could not have passed without my noticing. I wrote matric at the end of 1974 and studying for those exams took up my time, but I was collecting reports on the buildup until the middle of October, just a fortnight before the fight itself. Dad must have gone on buying the papers and could have set them aside for me. Chances are that when the new year came and I was waiting to register as a university student, the papers from the first week of November were still stacked up in the kitchen by the back door.

  Could a scrapbook devoted to the Rumble have gone astray? There may well have been enough cuttings to fill a drawing book called ALI IV. Or did I gather the cuttings together in a folder, meaning to paste them up later, and then lose the lot? Perhaps Mom ditched them by mistake. The fact is that none of the cuttings from the following year – those recording the matches with Wepner and Lyle and the returns against Bugner and Frazier – were pasted into books. They were all left loose in cardboard folders.

  For whatever reason, my archive preserves nothing of what many consider to be the greatest heavyweight boxing match of all time. Certainly it was the high point of Ali’s career, a transcendent half-hour in which athletic grace and power, tactical cunning and experience, and flamboyant showmanship came into harmony.

  I could put down what happened, but no one really needs the blow-by-blow account. It’s a lucky break for me. So much wa
s written about the fight at the time, and so much more has been written since, that I’m relieved not to frame it for myself. My deficient archive authorizes me to pass over the Rumble like a shadow.

  Then again, I could pretend the archive is complete. It wouldn’t be hard to track down the relevant copies of the Pretoria News and the Sunday Times. I could read Norman Mailer, Budd Schulberg, George Plimpton, who were all ringside. Hunter S Thompson was in the vicinity too. But what good would it do? You can read them for yourself.

  Branko

  Pierre Fourie fights Victor ‘The Animal’ Galindez at Ellis Park in April 1975. It’s the Argentine’s first defence of his WBA light-heavyweight crown. Pier-rie (we give it two syllables) has had two shots at the world title against Bob Foster and lost both narrowly on points. If he beats Galindez he’ll become only the third South African world champion after Vic Toweel and Arnold Taylor. Galindez has won more than half his 46 fights by a knockout. Fourie has just four KOs in 52 fights. The match is billed, unfairly to Galindez, as the classic boxer-vs-brawler encounter.

  Dad’s old work buddy Manie Steenkamp gets us tickets and comes along to the fight. It’s a pity because that means Joe and I have to sit in the back of the bakkie like japies. Dad always swore he would never drive a Japanese car, but when the price of petrol starts to go up during the oil crisis, he spends his Christmas bonus on a Datsun bakkie. His love affair with Pontiacs, Chevrolets, Buicks, with the sound of the names and the engines, is over.