Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  She also made a wish: for Joe Frazier to defeat her husband.

  The crowd was multicultural before anyone used the term, an explosion of pride, a funk fashion show, a drug-addled parade of ego and power. Everyone was there, and those who weren’t lied and said they were. Among those verifiably in attendance and breathing the same stale Madison Square Garden air were Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, the Apollo 14 astronauts, Sammy Davis Jr., Colonel Harlan Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, Hugh Hefner, Barbi Benton (who was Hefner’s date, and wearing a see-through blouse under a monkey-fur coat), Hubert Humphrey, Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Miles Davis, Dustin Hoffman, Diana Ross (in black velvet hot pants), Ethel Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Mayor John Lindsay, Burt Bacharach, Sargent Shriver, William Saroyan, and Marcello Mastroianni. Bing Crosby settled for a seat at the sold-out Radio City Music Hall, where he would watch via closed circuit.

  Earlier in the evening, Ali’s brother, Rahaman, had his eighth fight as a professional. Rahaman had never been beaten, but he had never fought an opponent of any consequence either. In the Garden, before the biggest fight of his brother’s career, Rahaman took his first loss, a bad beating from an English fighter named Danny McAlinden.

  Then it was time. Time for The Fight. A thing so immense as to overload the senses of those in Madison Square Garden who watched the fighters march to the ring. Ali arrived first, wearing a red velvet robe, red trunks, and white shoes with red tassels. Frazier wore a green-and-gold brocade robe with matching trunks. Both men were in excellent physical shape. Television producers had gone over every detail, even helping the men select the colors of their trunks, with a darker color chosen to contrast Ali’s lighter skin, and lighter-colored trunks for Frazier’s darker-toned skin. Ali danced around the ring during the introductions, dipping in close to Frazier and calling out to him: “Chump!”

  Frazier showed no interest.

  As the referee gave instructions, Ali jawed at Frazier and Frazier jawed back.

  The opening of a fight, Mailer wrote, “is equivalent to the first kiss in a love affair.” But it’s more like the first missile in a war. In either case, the opening punches in Ali v. Frazier missed their mark. Ali threw jabs and flurries. Frazier ducked, his head moving as fast as his fists, and steamed forward, trying to push through Ali’s jabs. Ali backed up and threw more jabs, but Frazier’s head was always moving and seldom where Ali expected to find it. Ali stung like a bee but didn’t float like a butterfly. He didn’t float at all. It was obvious right away that he wasn’t trying to tire Frazier; he was trying to hurt him, to disconnect Frazier’s synapses, the sooner the better. Ali stood flat-footed and threw jabs followed by flashing hooks, trying to capitalize on his big advantage in height and reach, and trying to end the fight quickly. Joe stayed low, something he had worked on for long hours under Eddie Futch’s watch. In the gym, they’d stretched ropes across the ring and Frazier had practiced ducking them, bobbing, punching, bobbing, punching, hundreds, thousands of times. Now, he bobbed and punched and barreled forward, firing punches as he moved.

  Ali won the first two rounds on points, landing more shots than Frazier. But when the third round opened, Frazier smiled, waving for Ali to come out and fight. Frazier threw hooks to the head and body, still shoving his way forward. Every time Frazier landed a thumping blow, Ali would shake his head vigorously, signaling to the crowd that the punch hadn’t bothered him. At the end of the round, Ali returned to his corner and stood tall, declining a seat, showing Frazier he wasn’t tired. Ali was acting like a kid on a playground sticking out his tongue and taunting his enemy, but the enemy in this case didn’t seem to care.

  Boxing fans were surprised to see Ali fighting Frazier’s fight, standing toe-to-toe and exchanging punches instead of dancing and jabbing. Ali was fighting as if he believed his own hype — as if he believed that he was so much bigger and stronger now that he no longer needed to rely on speed. Frazier’s eyes puffed. His mouth filled with blood. But he kept coming, kept snarling. Even Ali’s punishing left jab didn’t stop Frazier. He took his share, but every so often he managed to slip under one of the jabs and throw his money shot, the left hook.

  Ali had predicted a sixth-round knockout, but by the sixth round Frazier was going strong, and Ali showed signs of fatigue. He wrapped his arms around Frazier’s neck, leaned against the ropes, and brushed his hands lightly back and forth across Frazier’s face like a man painting a fence. In the seventh and eighth, he did more of the same, resting and perhaps trying to sap Frazier’s will by pretending he could go on this way all night, that the ropes were his hammock, a nice place to unwind for a while until he was ready to go back to work. Throughout the bout, Ali taunted Frazier, telling him he couldn’t win.

  “Don’t you know I’m God!” he shouted.

  “God, you’re in the wrong place tonight,” Frazier shot back. “Be somewhere else, not here. I’m kicking butt and taking names!”

  The ninth round was shockingly violent, Ali’s gloves caroming off Frazier’s rocklike head, Frazier returning fire with uppercuts that made Ali’s whole body rise and fall. Both men threw their strongest punches and landed them. Frazier’s whole face grew lumpy, as if it had recently been inserted in a beehive. The crowd was on its feet. If the fight had ended there, Ali probably would have won on points. If Ali could have kept fighting this way, he would have knocked Frazier out or won a unanimous decision. But he couldn’t keep it up. He had emptied his tank.

  In the eleventh, instead of attacking, Ali backed off. He not only leaned on the ropes again but beckoned Frazier to move in close and hit him, the equivalent of a mobile home beckoning a tornado.

  “What is he doing?” asked José Torres, the former light-heavyweight champ. “Is he punchy? He had the fight won in the final seconds of the tenth, and now he’s spoiling it.”

  Frazier accepted Ali’s invitation to punch, leaving his feet to throw a chin-rattling left hook and following it with a mean left to the body. They were punches that Ali once would have avoided, but this time, if his mind was telling him to move, his body wasn’t answering. Ali’s knees buckled, and he tried to find his balance. He looked like he was going down, wounded like he had never been wounded in his professional career. But, somehow, he recovered and kept his feet on the ground. He had a phrase for this feeling of semiconsciousness. He called it the “half-dream room.” He described it once: “A heavy blow takes you to the door of this room. It opens, and you see neon, orange and green lights blinking. You see bats blowing trumpets, alligators play trombones, and snakes are screaming. Weird masks and actors’ clothes hang on the wall. The first time the blow sends you there, you panic and run, but when you wake up you say, ‘Well, since it was only a dream, why didn’t I play it cool . . . Only you have to fix it in your mind and plan to do it long before the half-dream comes . . . The blow makes your mind vibrate like a tuning fork. You can’t let your opponent follow up. You got to stop the fork from vibrating.”

  Ali was in the half-dream room. At the bell, his corner men threw water in his face before he got to his stool, trying to snap him out of it. Bundini Brown pointed a finger and shouted, “You got God in your corner, Champ!” The referee, Arthur Mercante, came over to see if the fighter needed a doctor. He was persuaded to let the fight continue.

  Ali came out moving in the twelfth as if to test his legs. Frazier pummeled him again. Ali fought back, but it was clear he had strength enough to fight only in flurries, not for an entire round. In the thirteenth, Ali started strongly again, moving with agility. He scored points by landing jabs, but he never hurt Frazier. After about a minute of playing the aggressor, Ali returned to the ropes, and Frazier, seeing an opportunity, exploded, connecting with an extraordinary forty-six punches. With bloody saliva dripping from his swollen lips and his face a mask of grotesque bruises, Frazier lashed out, throwing punches with the full force of his body and landing almost every one. If Ali’s rope strategy had worked, if it had allowed him to regain energy while his opponent l
ost steam, he might have been hailed once more for his fistic genius. But it wasn’t working at all. For Frazier, it was as if Ahab had discovered his great white whale lying on the beach and waiting to be carved up. Frazier punched, punched, punched, working the body, working the head, striking at will. He planted himself practically inside Ali’s navel and stayed there, so that Ali couldn’t see anything but the top of the shorter man’s head. Frazier was so close that Ali couldn’t extend his arms to strike back even if he’d wanted to. The more Frazier hurled punches, the more Ali assumed the stationary position of a punching bag. His jaw began to swell like a brown balloon, prompting concern in his corner that it had been broken.

  Ali mustered one last reserve of strength and fought gamely in the fourteenth. But now both men were exhausted. It was a wonder either one of them could stand, much less punch and be punched. Ali, who liked to call himself the most scientific boxer in the history of the sport, may have been reconsidering, because this contest was anything but scientific. This was a bloody brawl. This was hell.

  The men touched gloves to begin the fifteenth and final round. The bright overhead lights cast ugly shadows over both their swollen faces. The air reeked of sweat and smoke. Even the crowd was exhausted, but they were on their feet and screaming for more.

  Ali came out dancing, as if to tell the world he was still strong, still fast, not yet done. He opened with a left that shot a spray of blood from Frazier’s mouth. Frazier hammered a few blows to Ali’s gut that made it clear he wasn’t done either, and then grabbed Ali in a clinch. They broke and circled. Frazier moved forward, as he had the whole fight. Ali retreated. Frazier reached back with his left — reached all the way back, as he would say later, to the hot turnip fields of South Carolina, to his childhood days of poverty and hate — and let fly a left hook. Perspiration sprayed from Ali’s head as the punch made impact. Ali’s head jolted. His eyes closed, his mouth opened, and his legs folded. He landed on his back and elbows, head bouncing on the mat, legs flailing in the air.

  Unbelievably, though, Ali got up.

  He got up as soon as his body hit the mat.

  He got up and resumed fighting.

  Later, Angelo Dundee would say that Ali was out cold as he fell and regained consciousness when his ass hit the floor, which is exactly how it looked. When Frazier hit Ali with the left hook, it shook Ali’s brain, causing brain cells to stretch and tear, and temporarily disrupting cell function and communication. Hooks do more damage to brain tissue than jabs because the neck helps absorb the impact of a punch that comes straight toward the face. When a punch comes from the side, the head rotates and rocks, the neck offers less help in blunting the force, and the whole brain shakes like Jell-O. That explains why Ali fell. What it doesn’t explain is how he got up, and how he did it so quickly — before the referee could count four. A solid blow to the head can damage the brain’s axons (the long, thin branches that transmit signals throughout the nervous system), and complete recovery might take weeks, months, or never come at all. But Ali rose and stayed on his feet and battled for the last two and a half minutes of the fight, as 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden and 300 million around the world screamed.

  Was it courage that carried them? Was it neurology? Was it hubris overriding physiology? The men fought on until, finally, the bell rang and the referee stepped between them, signaling the end of one of the most intense and best-fought boxing matches in history. Fans swarmed the ring as Frazier was announced the winner by a unanimous decision.

  Writers such as Norman Mailer attempted to describe the battle between these two men as something quasi-spiritual, something far beyond man-to-man combat. “There are languages other than words, languages of symbol and languages of nature,” Mailer wrote. “There are languages of the body. And prizefighting is one of them. There is no attempting to comprehend a prizefighter unless we are willing to recognize that he speaks with a command of the body which is as detached, subtle and comprehensive in its intelligence as any exercise of mind by such social engineers as Herman Kahn or Henry Kissinger.” After the fight, abstractions such as those gave way to the hard truths of pain and injury. Ali stretched out on a long table, motionless, eyes closed, naked but for a white towel. Angelo Dundee wandered around the room as if lost or bereft. Odessa Clay sat on a bench next to the table holding her son. “He’ll be all right,” she said over and over again.

  Belinda was nowhere in sight, but Ali sat up when Diana Ross arrived in the dressing room. Ross took an ice bag from Bundini, pressed it to Ali’s jaw, and whispered in the fallen fighter’s ear. Ali managed a wink.

  With his jaw the size of a small pumpkin, Ali went to Flower First Avenue Hospital for X-rays. Doctors said the jaw wasn’t broken, but they suggested Ali stay overnight. He refused. He didn’t want to let Frazier think he had been badly hurt. Ali was already talking about a rematch, and by refusing medical care he was launching the first attack in his psychological battle.

  35

  Freedom

  In Harlem, they called it a fix. In the White House, President Nixon rejoiced, cheering the defeat of “that draft dodger asshole.” Everyone had an opinion, but none of them mattered. Frazier had won, and Ali would have to fight his way back if he hoped to be champion again.

  After the fight, Sports Illustrated sent George Plimpton to Ali’s new home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to see how he was handling his first defeat. Plimpton found Ali in the driveway, entertaining neighbors, tussling with dogs, hugging small children, and signing autographs. He invited not only Plimpton but also the sightseers gathered on the street to come inside for a tour of his house, which was still only partly decorated. An oil painting of Elijah Muhammad sat on the floor in one room, propped against a wall next to bouquet of flowers with a card from the singer Aretha Franklin. In another room, Belinda sat on the floor watching television, ignoring Ali and his guests.

  After the tour, Ali told Plimpton he was ready to talk — but Plimpton would have to share the interview with two other journalists, boys from a nearby high school who were producing an article for their school paper, one of them clutching a tape recorder, the other a Polaroid camera. When the boy with the Polaroid snapped a picture, Ali asked to see if the photo made his jaw look swollen. The other boy turned on his tape recorder and asked Ali to hold the microphone.

  “When is this going to appear?” Ali asked. “What’s the name of the paper?”

  “The Sentinel,” the reporter said. “It’s mimeographed.” The photos would be hung from the school’s bulletin board because the mimeograph machine wouldn’t reproduce pictures, he explained.

  That sounded fine to Ali. He began by saying he and ten of his friends had gone to a theater in Cherry Hill the night before to watch a twenty-five-minute recapitulation of the Frazier fight. He got up from the sofa and reenacted his favorite part, in the eleventh round, when he backed around the ring and Frazier chased after him, strutting, with his hands down, before throwing the left that shook Ali like he had seldom been shaken. “That long long walk of Frazier’s,” he said. “Oh, my, we were laughing at that.”

  Throughout the fight, he said, that left hook had constantly surprised him. Why did he keep getting hit? He had thought the first couple had been lucky shots, but they had kept coming and coming.

  The photographer asked: “How . . . I mean, what was wrong?”

  Ali raised a hand to his head. “Here’s how you’re supposed to do it,” he said. “I had my hands too low.”

  “Couldn’t you bring them up?” the boy asked.

  “That sounds simple, don’t it?” Ali said.

  The photographer asked if Ali was still dwelling on his loss.

  “Not as much as I thought I would,” Ali said. “For me now, fighting is more a business than the glory of who won. After all, when the praise is over” — and, according to Plimpton, Ali shifted here into the lower, hypnotic voice that he reserved for poetry and inspirational sermons — “when all the fanfare is done, all
that counts is what you have to show for it. All the bleeding, the world still turns. I was so tired. I lost it. But I didn’t shed one tear. I got to keep living. I’m not ashamed.”

  In the meantime, Ali had another fight to worry about — the legal battle over his draft status — and there was every reason to believe he was going to lose that one, too.

  In 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court had voted not to hear Ali’s case. Ali was saved from prison only by an acknowledgment from the Department of Justice that they had wiretapped some of the boxer’s conversations, which led the Supreme Court to send the case back to the district court. Ali lost again in district court, and in January 1971 the justices of the Supreme Court appeared uninterested in hearing his case. That meant the district court’s conviction would be affirmed and Ali would go to jail for five years.

  But Ali got a big break. Supreme Court justice William Brennan urged the court to hear Ali’s case, and he made an unusual argument. He didn’t expect his colleagues to change their minds. He didn’t expect Ali to prevail. But given the boxer’s fame and given the outcry over Vietnam, Brennan worried that Americans would misunderstand the decision. He feared that Ali might appear to be the victim of a political prosecution if he didn’t at least get a chance to argue his case before the court.

  On April 19, 1971, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Cassius Marsellus Clay Jr. v. United States. The case referred to Ali by his old name because Ali still had not filed paperwork to make his name change official. It used the middle name “Marsellus” instead of “Marcellus” because Ali had misspelled his own name on his original Selective Service forms when he had registered for the draft in 1961.

  Ali did not attend the oral arguments. Chauncey Eskridge represented him, but Eskridge’s arguments, described later by one of the justices as “confused,” were greeted coolly. Erwin Griswold, the U.S. solicitor general, argued on behalf of the government and questioned the basis of Ali’s antiwar status. When Ali had said he had “no quarrel” with the Viet Cong, according to Griswold, he wasn’t saying he opposed all war; he was really saying that he opposed this particular war. If the Viet Cong had been attacking Muslims, Griswold argued, Ali would have fought. Also, when Ali said he didn’t want to fight for a country that treated him like a second-class citizen, he wasn’t saying he was a pacifist; he was really making a political statement, saying he didn’t want to fight for this particular government at this particular time.