The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Days go by. Everything I click on floats me further away from the convention centres and casinos. While I’m fetching a beer from the fridge Terence Stamp starts to talk about Marlon Brando and so I watch that, and then the $99 violin test, and then a lesson that promises: How To Sing Better in 5 Minutes. I’m drawn in by the cluttered sidebars, the insistent pop-ups, the pictures, the tips, the lists. Especially the lists. The 10 Sportsmen You Didn’t Know Were Born With A Cleft Palate. The 5 Best Ways To Lose That Stubborn Fat On Your Midriff. The 10 Coolest Hairstyles In The Premier League. The 22 Best Shots Of Celebrities Getting Out Of Limousines Without Their Underwear. One moment I’m looking at photographs of Henry Cooper and the next I’m reading the lyrics of ‘Lily the Pink’. Every line of every song ever recorded is somewhere on the Net: no one need ever again guess what the words of a pop song are. Here I am on the official site of the Procol Harum Fan Club. All five of the original members are still alive. It’s a miracle. The band was named after a Burmese cat. What’s a Burmese cat? I’m searching for an answer and then I’m looking at Rare Photos Taken Right Before Tragedy Struck. 15 Pranks That Backfired With Fatal Consequences. 103 Famous People You Might Not Know Are Dead. 6 Celebrities Who Have Extremely Troubled Siblings. Only six? What You Didn’t Know About Brad Pitt’s Brother. 24 Historical Photos They Didn’t Show You At School. The Saddest And Most Shocking Celebrity Deaths Of All Time. Everything runs together. There’s no frame. I can’t tell where one thing stops and another starts. It all bleeds. It’s a bloodfest.

  I lock the door of the edit room. If Rita tries to open it she’ll think I’m watching porn in here, but that would be less embarrassing than watching this crap.

  I waste an entire evening on goal celebrations. The victory dances of soccer teams are watched more often than the goals that produced them. Questions spill out of me like ticker tape. When did it start? When did this strutting and crowing become acceptable? Perhaps it was prompted by rising salaries. Who invented the knee slide? When I played football as a kid something like that would have given you a grass burn to remember. The slide looks quaint now, almost modest compared to the chorus lines involving the whole team. Do they practise these moves on the training pitch along with the other set pieces? What do the experts regard as the greatest goal celebration? Are there soccer teams who don’t do them? What is the most serious injury ever sustained by a player under a heap of his teammates? Has any player ever suffered a career-ending injury? Has anyone died?

  Has anyone died?

  This brings me back to Ali. He’s the heart of the problem. It’s not just that there’s too much information about him, it’s that his story is too big. It’s freighted with a history I can’t carry, no more than my brother could, despite a lifetime of training.

  Joe

  ALI VI covers two fights: Ron Lyle in Las Vegas and Joe Bugner in Kuala Lumpur.

  Ron Lyle was a no-hoper, as you can tell from the dearth of press coverage. He’d learnt to box in prison and was out on bail at the time of the fight, facing two counts of felony menacing and one of second-degree assault brought against him by his wife Nadine. In his four-year professional career he had never gone fifteen rounds. Ali conceded that making a million dollars fighting a nobody like Lyle was a rip-off – but I can’t stop fighting while I’m making all this money…I want to take as much money from the rich as I can. Styling himself the Black Robin Hood, he spoke about buying three shopping centres in Ghetto areas. The Muslims will come in and clean up…help make the place livable again. It was reminiscent of the scuppered South Africa visit: I just got through buying two school buses for a dirt-poor Muslim school.

  The philanthropy extended to the media coverage. The Lyle fight was shown on home TV in the US. According to Ali, he’d agreed to work for low wages – the $1 million purse – so that the fans who couldn’t afford $25 for a CCTV seat would get to see the fight in their own homes. In any event, the fight was dull. Scott Hagen wrote a disgruntled, sarcastic account of it as a lacklustre conversation piece. When Ali went into his customery [sic] shuffle, Lyle stood back like a spectator admiring his opponent’s fancy footwork. It was comic.

  There was nothing funny about the way the fight ended. After lying back on the ropes and falling behind on the cards of two of the three judges, in round 11 Ali launched a vicious barrage of punches that soon had the challenger in trouble. The referee stopped it.

  Branko

  Jordan is bringing his new girlfriend home for supper. Her name is Nomaxabiso.

  Don’t even try, he says. You can call her Nomz like everyone else. And don’t ask her what it means.

  He keeps telling me what I can and can’t say. People like me (I’m sure he means us) must learn to listen. The idea is going around at the college. White people, white men especially, have been filling the airspace for too long. They need to shut up and listen to the other side. It doesn’t matter if you disagree, he tells me, or you think someone’s talking nonsense, you’re in no position to judge anyway, the only appropriate response is to keep your trap shut. Silence. The historical moment demands it.

  The week before the planned supper Michael Brown is shot dead by a white policeman in Ferguson.

  Jordan makes me promise I won’t say anything at the dinner table.

  But I’m as outraged as the next person, I say. Police brutality affects all of us.

  How does it affect you?

  This kind of thing has always upset me.

  It’s not about you and your feelings. That’s the whole point.

  But I’m interested to know what Nomz thinks. She’s studying politics, after all. Surely you want me to take an interest.

  I want you to shut the fuck up – the fudge – sorry Dad.

  Don’t talk to me like that.

  I’m starting to worry about Joe’s book. He should have finished it himself, long ago, when white people were still interesting.

  Everyone is talking about race and reading Baldwin. Joe was on to him early: he left me a copy of The Fire Next Time in the Big Jim crate. I spend a day on it. Fascinating stuff. There’s a passage about Elijah Muhammad marked in pencil – Joe never liked to write in books – with a cross-reference to Ali’s proposed visits to South Africa. It could come in useful. Baldwin says that the separatism espoused by the Nation of Islam plays into a racist agenda. The white supremacists of the American Nazi Party like the idea. On an orange Post-it I find a note in my brother’s hand that says Baldwin is a hard-boiled dreamer: the world is mangled by greed and dishonesty, of course he sees that, but still he refuses to give up on our common humanity. ‘Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.’

  What are you reading? Rita asks when she comes to bed.

  I show her. The book falls open at another Post-it.

  ‘White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.’

  She looks at me over the top of her glasses. She only ever wears them after she’s taken out her contacts at night, to set the alarm, and they make her look deeply serious.

  I take the book back from her and read this line marked by an orange flag: ‘How can one, however, dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?’ That’s a question worth asking, I say. Perhaps we can talk about it with Jordy and Nomz on Friday.

  Don’t you dare.

  But I’d like to know what they think. It’s a question their generation will have to answer.

  You like to provoke. Just like your brother. We leave it there and go to sleep.

  Baldwin has pricked my curiosity. What else came out of Big Jim? I spend the morning going over the shelf. A dozen books on sport, media, hip hop, slavery. I sit down with Francis Njubi Nesbitt’s Race for Sanctions: African Americans against Apartheid. The index takes me to Ali and his proposed visit to South Africa in 1972. This is exactly what I need: it tells me what the c
uttings don’t say on the subject. Nesbitt writes about the intense, organized pressure that was brought to bear to stop the Al Jones exhibition fights. I could work some of this into the chapter on separatism and Ali’s aborted visits to South Africa. Reporters for papers like The Star and the Sunday Times tended to underplay the opposition to sporting contact with South Africa: black activists were outraged.

  I take some notes from Nesbitt and start tinkering with my brother’s drafts. Covering my arse, you could say. There’s not much room on the pages, nearly every margin is already crammed with bubbles and brackets, and I’m forced to add my notes on the blank pages opposite, where they suddenly look feeble. The fact is I don’t know enough about anything. Not just boxing, but politics, music, technology. How much will I have to read to plug the obvious gaps?

  It comes back to me now: Joe and I were discussing his book. I told him that everything he’d ever want to know about Ali was on the Net and he started arguing the case for his archive. Its merits are in inverse proportion to its limitations, he said, its saving grace is that it’s full of holes.

  And you were right, boet.

  Before I can have second thoughts, I go back over the file and edit out all the little references I’ve woven in, including my well-chosen quotes from Baldwin and Biko and Torres. I’m telling a story: I don’t have to demonstrate that I’ve read everything.

  I’m relieved when Nomz gets the flu and can’t make the supper. It’s not that I want to avoid her, I just need to get a few things straight in my head. And on paper. I’m busy with my sixth manuscript book and my text is starting to look as chaotic as my brother’s. It’s time to go digital. And it’s time to change the names of the people. Elementary, I know. Remembering things as they were is all very well if there aren’t secrets to keep.

  In the small hours, when I’m fretting over the book, the pathetic reality comes home to me. It was bad enough being stuck with my brother’s problems. Now I’m stuck with his solutions.

  Joe

  After the sideshows of Wepner and Lyle, it was back to the big top for the Bugner return. Joe Bugner was Britain’s first serious title hope since Cooper. Two years earlier, he had gone the distance with Ali. The return, scheduled for Kuala Lumpur at the end of June, would be Ali’s fiftieth professional fight. Reports said he would be travelling with an entourage of one hundred people.

  For the Malaysian Coordinating Committee, which reported directly to Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak, this was a national event with the potential to put the country on the map. Promoter Ismail Kamat complained that when he tried to call Malaysia from New York, people sometimes didn’t even know where or what this country was. And he added, Well, they soon will. The same had been said of Zaire before the Rumble. Much was made of the fact that Ali was the first Muslim world champion and it was reported that he had joined Abdul Razak in prayer at the national mosque. The Sultan of Perak had made Ali a Caliph of the Malaysian art of self-defence.

  As they’d done before Wepner, Ali’s camp joked about the racial contest with Bugner. Ali said: He’s the perfect match for me. He’s White, he’ll draw a crowd and he can’t fight. Ali would simply have to win, he said, to avoid the embarrassment of telling his daughters he’d been beaten by a blond, and to prevent Bugner from getting all the attention and the TV commercials. The Queen will be at the airport to meet him. He’ll get a bigger reception than the Beatles. He’ll be fighting for the honour of his country. England will be back on the map. At one press conference, Ali took the mickey out of British reporters by asking in a plummy accent: I say, chaps, would you like some tea?

  Like Wepner, Bugner decided that two could play that game. Although he’d been born in Hungary (his family left after the Soviet invasion when he was six years old) he said he was thoroughly British and would fight the British way. Asked how he would deal with Ali’s antics, he replied: I shall be firm but polite…The perfect gentleman. If there is one thing Ali can’t stand it is politeness…He gets you mad and that way he’s got you by the knick-knacks…But if he starts calling me a big boob, or anything like that, I shan’t respond. I shall simply say, ‘Don’t be a silly chap. Please settle down.’ That will really get under his skin. Either that or I shall ignore him. He can’t stand that either.

  Even by the standards set in Zaire the levels of hype were high, as suggested by the forty pages of cuttings on the buildup (the fight itself produced six). An official press conference was held in the Chempaka Room at the Kuala Lumpur Holiday Inn, on a dais with yellow and red flowers, and the president of the Malaysian Boxing Federation Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Yeop read out the rules. When he said the fighters could not use the ropes, Ali was astonished.

  ‘I can’t use the rope-a-dope?’

  ‘You can use the ropes,’ the Commissioner explained. ‘But not take advantage of the ropes.’

  ‘I won’t hang him,’ Ali said.

  The gloves for the fight were displayed on a table.

  ‘Red gloves,’ Ali said. ‘Now we can’t see the blood. The gloves should be white.’

  The weigh-in was an extravaganza featuring costumed Malay warriors and natives carrying immitation [sic] multi-coloured palms. Alan Hubbard, who had also reported on the Rumble, returned to the jungle imagery: Bugner is the traditionally equipped White hunter about to plunge into a tropical jungle in search of an awesome prey. He made a fuss about Bugner being in an alien environment – he is bound to find the atmosphere disturbingly foreign to him in every way – as if Ali would be right at home. Defeat for Ali would be unthinkable enough, without the additional humiliation of losing to a White man before an audience of Muslim brothers.

  The fight was staged in an outdoor arena and the promoters hired a witchdoctor to ward off rain by chanting and rattling dry bones. Unfortunately he did his job too well and the water levels dropped, threatening the hydroelectric supply needed to power the generators for the TV transmission. Another witchdoctor was hired to bring back some rain – but not too much.

  Just five years after Jerry Perenchio had the idea of auctioning off the boxers’ gear, the merchandising department was in full flight, with tenders put out for the rights to produce and sell T-shirts, towels, travelling bags, ashtrays, key chains, caps and badges, which will feature pictures of Ali and Bugner and words and phrases referring to the fight.

  Meanwhile the Kuala Lumpur Hilton where Ali was due to stay had created a Ringside Bar in the lobby to sell five special cocktails: the Knockout or KO, the Russian Tank, named for the defensive technique Ali said he would be using, the Rope-a-Dope, the Uppercut and Ali’s Punch.

  Amidst all the joking, Ali complained, not for the first time, that he was tired. At a subdued news conference in the royal suite of the Hilton, he said: Horses get old, cars get old, the pyramids of Egypt are crumbling. His punishing schedule left no time for his family and his religion. The constant attention was also starting to pall. As much as he liked the fans and signing autographs, he wished he could take his family out sometimes without being bothered by anyone. When a reporter reminded him that he’d always revelled in the attention, he replied: I did, and I still would, if it was kept to a limit. It’s terrible now, and it’s getting worse.

  From the beginning Ali had courted and goaded the press. Now he felt they were hounding him. In years to come, the pattern of chasing publicity and then running away from it would be repeated by people in the public eye often enough to become a cliché.

  Despite the frenzy of promotion, on the day high ticket prices and live TV coverage kept the punters away from the stadium and only a third of the seats were filled. Ali won an unimaginative fight on points. Afterwards, he paid the young challenger a backhanded compliment: once he retired, Ali said, Bugner might even win the title. You’ve got the right complexion and the right connections. The jingle was tired too.

  14

  The Thriller in Manila

  The standing prohi
bition on gatherings in streets surrounding the Johannesburg City Hall, but not in the building itself, has been extended for another two years, according to a Government Gazette notice.

  – Pretoria News, September 1975

  Branko

  I’m tidying the edit room on a Sunday afternoon – displacement activity, Rita calls it, I should be working – when I come across a disk marked ‘Overkill’. It’s the movie Jordan made for his finals two years ago. We were supposed to watch a rough cut on the night Joe was murdered.

  Rita is reading under the gazebo.

  Have you watched this? It’s Jordy’s movie, the rough cut anyway. It just turned up in my stuff.

  She puts her book down on the table and blows smoke up at the thatch. Which one is it?

  ‘Overkill’. I think it’s a fan version of Pulp Fiction.

  No, that was in his first year, this is the one after. The one about us.

  What do you mean?

  Haven’t you watched it? I think we watched it together.

  No, I was otherwise occupied. But I’m going to watch it now.

  I go back through the French doors into the lounge and stick it in the player. While I’m fiddling with the remote Reet comes in, flops down next to me and hands me a disk. The finished product, she says.

  I switch the disks and hit play. The title comes up on a black screen in wobbly white letters that might have been arranged by a child. OVERKILL. A film by Juwardi X. Subtitled: A speculative documentary about death.