Ali

by Jonathan Eig

  King knew little about the business of boxing, but he was a huckster. He could sell anything — even freezers to Eskimos, as he liked to brag. Selling Muhammad Ali would be easy. Anybody could sell Muhammad Ali, but Don King was going to sell Muhammad Ali like no one had ever sold him before. It would be glorious. Stupendous. Exhilarating. It would make King a king of the ring.

  When Ali and King first met, King showed up carrying a man’s purse. Inside, he had $225,000 in cash according to Ali friend Reggie Barrett, who said in an interview years later that he had witnessed the encounter. Soon after, Ali visited King’s home in Cleveland, where there was yet more cash on hand, much of it lying loose in dresser drawers.

  “I had tons of cash,” King said, recalling Ali’s first visit to his home. “So I threw open the drawer.”

  As Ali’s eyes bugged wide at the sight of so much green, King asked the boxer if he was familiar with the claw machines commonly found in bars and arcades, the ones that allow players one chance to drop a metal claw into a pile of toys and grab a prize. King told Ali he could reach in the drawer one time — only one time, with only one hand, and with his fingers pointed down, like the claw — and he could keep as much cash as he cleanly grasped and carried away.

  Ali rolled up his sleeve and stretched his fingers wide.

  “All he could pick up, he could keep,” King said with a smile. “You know what I mean? You couldn’t scoop like that, you had to pick it up, bring it out . . . But knowing the psychological elements of humanism . . . Greed! You know what I mean? You gonna get too much in your hand, it’s gonna fall, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop.” King laughed at the memory. If Ali had taken his time, he could have looked carefully in the drawer, seen where the big wads of bills in large denominations were sitting, and plucked them out cleanly. But King assumed, correctly, that the boxer would get excited, rush, and fumble. Ali played the game every time he visited King in those early years of their relationship, and every time the boxer tried it, he rushed and fumbled. “One time, he got thirty-five thousand, and a couple times twenty-five thousand,” King said, laughing harder and harder as the story went on. “You know what I mean? But if he would’ve stopped, reconnoitered, looked around for the ten thousand (dollar bundles), he could’ve got much more. But the excitement of getting all that . . . That’s what the thrill was for me. He would wind up trying to grab so much, and he would lose it all. That teaches you a lesson. Be patient, be objective, and go out there and get it all. Get as much as you can. So it was a thrill for me.”

  The thrill for King was that he had spotted vulnerability in Ali. Greed is a kind of fear, and fear is a kind of weakness, and King was a master at exploiting weakness.

  “Ali, he wanted it all,” King said. “You go meet five or six girls or something, or two girls. Okay, you get one, I get one. No! Ali wanted ’em both. He had an insatiable appetite. You couldn’t take that away from him.”

  By flashing cash, King did more than use greed to his advantage. He also sent the message to the black men with whom he did business that he understood them, understood that black success looked different from white success in 1970s America, understood that the black man still suspected that if he struck it rich or got too much power the white man would take it all away. But cash! Cash was difficult to take away! Cash was something a man could hold in his hand, count, stash, hide, or spend, no permission required.

  “Cash is king and King is cash,” he said. “This is what it’s always been. Dealing with human nature. And dealing with those who are the downtrodden, the underprivileged, people who have been denied, those who are not accustomed to being able to deal with me, you’ve got an opportunity, because white and black alike, that green is always there, it stands out. People that think you’re gonna have some type of trickeration . . . you give ’em a check, you got to wait till they cash it . . . But if you give ’em cash, it’s instant, they can’t stop payment on that. You know what I mean? They can give you a check for two million, you know what I mean, before you get to the bank they stop payment on it. Then they got nothing to show for what they did. If they give you cash, they can’t get that back.”

  King related to black boxers in ways white promoters could not. He reminded fighters that he shared their plight. Like them, he’d been cheated and mistreated by a white power structure designed to subjugate black men. Yet in spite of racism, in spite of prison, in spite of a system built to knock him down and hold him back, he’d clawed his way to wealth and fame, as he reminded them again and again, not only with his black-is-beautiful sermonettes but also with his ostentatious displays of wealth.

  “They could not get another black to fight for them,” King said, referring to the fighters who hired him as their promoter. “They came to me because I would become this savior, that I would be able to understand and tolerate the indiscretions and disloyalty, because I resonate from slavery . . . I come and deal with them as a human being. Black success was unacceptable . . . That’s why they had to knock down Muhammad Ali, that’s why they had to knock down me.”

  But for all his intelligence, for all his powers of persuasion, and for all his cash, Don King still needed the blessings of Elijah Muhammad to do business with Ali, so he made an appointment to see the Messenger in Chicago. Ali remained formally divorced from the Nation of Islam, but the boxer continued to practice Islam and continued to believe Elijah Muhammad to be Allah’s true prophet. During their meeting, Elijah Muhammad tried to convince Don King to join the Nation of Islam. King, as he recalled years later in an interview, was open to the idea. He expressed enthusiasm for Elijah Muhammad’s brand of Islam and said he would have considered joining if not for one big problem. “I would have become a Muslim,” he said, “but I just couldn’t give up pork.” In fact, King said, he tried to convince Elijah Muhammad to drop the Nation of Islam’s ban on pork.

  Although Elijah rejected that suggestion, King was not discouraged. He went on to talk about the importance of putting black men in positions of power surrounding Muhammad Ali. Why continue to let Bob Arum promote the champ’s fights, King asked, when a black man was ready to step in and do it better?

  That was the right approach. The Messenger gave King his blessing.

  After his fight with Ali, Joe Frazier spent three weeks in the hospital recovering from dangerously high blood pressure and a bruised kidney. After that, he took a ten-month break from boxing, scored an easy victory over Terry Daniels, and then took a four-month rest. He chose to fight infrequently in part because he didn’t want to risk losing the championship but also because of the damage Ali had inflicted. His sparring partners and corner men could see that Frazier had been diminished, that he lacked some indescribable part of himself. Before facing Ali, hunger and fury had made Joe Frazier the meanest fighter on earth, not size or strength. But now some of that hunger and fury was gone — smashed, destroyed, or merely dissipated with the satisfaction of his victory — and it wasn’t clear if or when he would get it back.

  On January 22, 1973, in Kingston, Jamaica, Frazier fought George Foreman, winner of the gold medal in the heavyweight division at the 1968 Olympics. Foreman was the first high-ranking contender Frazier had battled since Ali. He was also perhaps the worst opponent Frazier could have selected. Foreman had no boxing style. He had no assortment of punches. He had no speed. He had nothing but power, and he had a ton of it. Foreman was a brooding, reclusive former street hooligan with a punch that could coldcock a rhinoceros. He was Sonny Liston without the personality. Foreman had fought thirty-seven men as a professional and beaten them all, thirty-four by knockout. Joe Frazier liked to work the body and stay close to his opponents, a prospect that excited Foreman. “He just comes on in,” Foreman said, “and I’ll know where to find him.”

  The press liked to make Foreman out to be a sociopath, mostly because he hit so hard. In truth, he was a pleasantly simple man. When he won gold at the 1968 Olympics, he became famous for waving a small American flag in the ring after his gold-
medal-winning match, a gesture that some saw as a rebuttal of black militancy. But Foreman, who called himself “The Fighting Corpsman” for his time in President Lyndon Johnson’s poverty-fighting Job Corps program, claimed he wasn’t trying to be political. “I just pulled out the flag,” he said. “People saw it and clapped, so I waved it. I didn’t look at it as protest or anti-protest. It was just the way I felt at the moment. I’m not interested in politics or movements. I spend so much time trying to be a good fighter I can hardly be an intellectual.” When asked how he felt about earning $375,000 for taking on Frazier, he said, “That’s real nice. But money is the least of things. It comes and goes. Pride and responsibility and association with friends, those stay. There’s more at stake in any sport than just money. Fighting just for money, you start getting all knocked down and bloodied up. I don’t want to represent the sport like that.”

  George Foreman did not get knocked down and bloodied up against Frazier. It was Frazier who took the beating. Foreman humiliated the champion, knocking him down six times in little more than four and a half minutes.

  “I got hit and hit and hit,” Frazier said, summarizing more deftly than he had fought. Frazier’s only accomplishment, really, was getting up as often as he did.

  Don King attended the fight as a guest of Joe Frazier’s, but when Foreman began to scatter Frazier around the ring, King eased his way toward Foreman’s corner, and by the time the fight was over, there was King, in the ring, embracing the winner. When Foreman left the arena in a limousine, King was sitting next to him. Over the years, King would tell the story many times as a testament to his business skills if not his loyalty. “I came with the champion,” he said, “and I left with the champion!”

  While King gloated, Ali mourned. Ali was supposed to beat Frazier. Ali was supposed to be the next heavyweight champion. Now, his path to redemption had been complicated. He would need to beat both Frazier and Foreman to prove he was truly the greatest. Still, he managed to find something positive to say: if Frazier could be so easily defeated, it proved that Frazier’s victory over Ali had been a fluke, possibly even an error by the judges. Beating Joe would be easy next time. And Foreman would be no match for him, either.

  “I’m still greater than boxing,” Ali said. “I am the best.”

  But before he could prove himself against Frazier or Foreman, Ali had another bout scheduled, on March 31, 1973, at the San Diego Sports Arena, with a man who seemed to pose little threat, a former Joe Frazier sparring partner with decent power and solid but unspectacular skills. His name was Ken Norton.

  Bundini Brown compared boxing to sex. “You got to get the hard-on,” Bundini said, “and then you got to keep it. You want to be careful not to lose the hard-on, and cautious not to come.”

  But Ali had no hard-on for Norton. He wanted Joe Frazier. He wanted George Foreman. But Norton? Norton’s most recent fight had been in front of a crowd of seven hundred and had paid only three hundred dollars. Norton didn’t belong in the same ring as Ali. That’s what Howard Cosell said, that’s what the bookmakers in Vegas said in making Ali a five-to-one favorite, and that’s what Ali believed. Norton was a quickie, an easy paycheck. Promoters tried to pitch the fight as a battle between a draft dodger and an ex-Marine, but even that wasn’t enough to generate excitement.

  America had mellowed. The war in Vietnam slogged on, along with the protest movement. Bobby Seale, one of the founders of the Black Panthers, toned down his radicalism and announced he would run for mayor of Oakland. Richard Nixon won reelection in a landslide. Even Elijah Muhammad quit calling whites “blue-eyed devils” and began stressing the importance of self-improvement within the black community. Radical groups continued to protest. During one eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings in the United States, an average of nearly five a day. But the bombings seldom took lives, and their sheer number led to a lack of interest. As the writer Bryan Burrough put it, “bombs basically functioned as exploding press releases.”

  Ali, meanwhile, had little to say about race and politics, except to point out that he hadn’t voted in the presidential election — and, in fact, that he had never voted in any election, local or national. Norton, meanwhile, refused to criticize Ali for his antiwar stance, saying he respected the man for standing up for his beliefs. The buildup to Norton v. Ali had all the drama of a church bingo contest. Interest was so soft that promoters decided to show the bout live on ABC rather than on closed circuit, marking the first time in six years than an Ali fight would be shown live on network television.

  The week of the fight, Ali sprained an ankle while attempting to revolutionize the game of golf. Ali was not a golfer, but he made the contention that the game would be more amusing and the ball would go a lot farther if people hit the ball on the run rather than standing over the tee and wiggling their rear ends. In offering a demonstration of his technique, Ali badly twisted his ankle. He quit running for the rest of the week, and the ankle remained tender the day of the fight. Ali didn’t think it would be a problem. He figured he could beat Norton on one leg.

  The night before the fight, Ali attended a party. Two hours before the fight, he was in bed with two hookers. They took the mirror off the dresser and propped it next to the bed so they could watch themselves. Ali used Reggie Barrett’s room at the LeBaron Hotel, hoping to escape Belinda’s attention. After an hour had passed, Barrett knocked on the door, telling Ali the fight started soon.

  “Oh, shit!” Ali said. “I gotta take a shower.”

  Norton was tall and broad, all muscle and bone, with shoulders spreading from his thick neck like redwood branches. He was in the finest shape of his life, exploding with confidence, a stunning specimen. He may not have been prettier than Ali, but he was certainly in better shape. “That night, I could have beaten Godzilla,” he said. “I was that sure of myself. And in that kind of shape, I could have fought fifty rounds, easy.”

  Norton had another edge: He had the savvy trainer Eddie Futch in his corner. While most boxing experts considered Norton no match for Ali, Futch believed that Ali had fundamental flaws in his boxing style and that Norton’s style would expose those defects. Trainers will tell you until your ears bleed that boxing isn’t merely a clash of men; it’s also a clash of styles, as Foreman versus Frazier had recently reminded people. Futch knew Ali wasn’t as fast as he used to be. He knew that Ali relied almost exclusively on the jab, not bothering to grind down his opponents with body blows. He knew Ali didn’t keep his hands up after he punched. He knew Ali backed away from blows instead of ducking or blocking them. Futch told Norton to match Ali jab for jab. When Norton jabbed, the trainer predicted, Ali would backpedal. When Ali backpedaled, Futch said, Norton would jab him into the ropes, batter his ribs until his kidneys hurt, and then, finally, when Ali got tired, take off his head.

  On the night of the fight, Ali looked like a man entirely at ease as he walked through the arena to the ring. Bundini Brown and Angelo Dundee accompanied him, as did Don King, dressed like an astronaut pimp in a shiny silver tuxedo and matching bowtie. Ali stepped slowly and smoothly through the ropes, his body wrapped in a bejeweled robe with purple satin lining that had been a gift from Elvis Presley. The robe bore the words “PEOPLE’S CHOICE” in rhinestones across the back. When he took it off, a layer of flab jiggled from Ali’s chest and belly. He weighed 221 pounds.

  At the bell, Norton followed instructions. He jabbed and stepped forward as Ali shifted into reverse, just as Futch had predicted. Norton landed roughly two jabs for every one of Ali’s in the opening rounds. In the third round, Ali showed flashes of his former self. He danced around the ring instead of backing up, kept his distance, flicked jabs, and skittered out of range, raising the hopes of fans who had come to see the dazzling fighter who had whupped Sonny Liston and outclassed Cleveland Williams. But it proved only a flash. In the fourth, Ali not only quit moving; he quit jabbing too, and he looked like he was already fatiguing.

  From
ringside, Howard Cosell, broadcasting the fight for ABC, carped about Ali’s desultory performance. “Is he now but a relic of the fighter he was?” Cosell asked. TV viewers all over the country were asking the same. Had Ali lost his edge? Was this the best he could do? Or was he merely coasting, assuming he could flick the switch, turn on the Greatness, and finish off Norton anytime he liked? Not content to ask the question rhetorically, Cosell turned to Ali’s corner and shouted at Angelo Dundee during his broadcast.

  Cosell spoke in a Brooklyn accent, with vowels that got trapped in the back of his nose and consonants that exploded from his mouth with unexpected force and speed. It was a voice that reminded listeners of a trumpet in the hands of a non-trumpeter. Like Ali, Cosell was his own greatest admirer, and, like Ali, he could get on people’s nerves. Including Angelo Dundee’s — right now!

  “Angie!” he said. “What’s wrong with your fighter?”

  Dundee yelled at Cosell, saying Ali was fine. Just watch, the trainer said, Norton would tire any minute now, and Ali would take charge.

  But Norton didn’t tire, and Ali didn’t take charge. In the sixth round, Ali injured the second knuckle on his right hand. As the eighth round began, he was scarcely using his right hand and scarcely dancing. Most unusual of all, he wasn’t talking. He wasn’t taunting Norton. It was then Cosell noticed that Ali seemed to be moving his mouth in an odd way, as if something were wrong with his jaw. Cosell turned again to Ali’s corner, this time addressing Dr. Ferdie Pacheco live on the air: Was something wrong with Ali’s mouth?

  “No,” Pacheco said, loud enough for audiences watching on TV to hear. “I think he’s loosened a tooth, but there’s no fracture, there’s no broken anything, there’s nothing, you know . . . There’s not much wrong with him right now, he’s fighting pretty good, Howard.”