by Jonathan Eig
Ali survived the round, but barely. Later, Shavers would say he regretted his decision not to fight more aggressively in the second. Still, he gave his opponent credit. “Ali took a great punch,” he said.
Against Shavers, he took many great punches. Over and over, Ali shook his head to tell everyone he wasn’t hurt, and yet he continued to let Shavers control the pace of the fight, continued to let Shavers thump him. In the thirteenth, Shavers buckled Ali’s knees again, twice, with booming punches that landed right on the chin. Ali covered up and leaned on the ropes until his head cleared.
At the end of the fourteenth round, Ali was goggle-eyed, slack-jawed, and appeared to need help getting back to his corner. In the opening moments of the final round, he cringed as Shavers piled on more punches. But in the final seconds of the round, Ali rallied, exploding with one last burst of energy. Now it was Shavers wobbling. It was astonishing, really, watching these men throw punches with every ounce of strength they possessed, back and forth for three minutes. No one ducked. No one danced. For three minutes Ali and Shavers hurled bombs at each other. Heads spun. Legs trembled. Neither man fell. The bell rang.
Ali returned to his corner, appearing exhausted and perhaps defeated. Shavers had thrown more punches. He had landed more punches. He had landed more power punches. He had landed a higher percentage of punches. He had landed a higher percentage of power punches. He had hurt his opponent more than he’d been hurt. He had reason to hope for victory. But, once again, perhaps not surprisingly, the judges gave Ali the win.
In his dressing room after the fight, Ali collapsed on a table. Someone draped a towel over his chest. Cash Clay stood by his son’s side as Ali closed his eyes and placed his right hand atop his head as if he were trying to keep it still or soothe a pain. Ali had once more escaped defeat, but he had not escaped damage. His hands hurt, as did his left knee. “Next to Joe Frazier in Manila, this was my toughest fight,” he said. “The twilight zone, it’s really coming up on me now. I can feel it in my bones.”
Boxing was becoming more dangerous than ever for the thirty-five-year-old heavyweight champ, and some of the people around Ali could see it. He was speaking more slowly, enunciating less clearly, moving less smoothly. After the Shavers fight, Teddy Brenner, matchmaker for Madison Square Garden, told reporters at a press conference that if Ali insisted on continuing his career, he would have to do it elsewhere; the Garden would never offer him another fight. It was a boxing rarity: someone putting an athlete’s health ahead of the desire to make money. And then it happened again: Ferdie Pacheco resigned as Ali’s ring doctor, saying he would no longer be a part of the fighter’s self-destruction. He obtained a lab report from the New York State Athletic Commission that showed Ali’s kidney function was failing and sent copies of the report to Ali, Veronica, and Herbert Muhammad. He got no response from any of them. Pacheco also wrote to the New York State Boxing Commission and urged them to pull Ali’s boxing license.
Did he tell Ali that he was risking brain injury? “Yes, I told him,” Pacheco said, his voice rising in anger, his body coming out of his seat as he spoke. “Every goddamn day I told him . . . He didn’t see that. He didn’t think he was brain damaged. He didn’t remember things. He was stuttering and stammering . . . I couldn’t stop him. I tried.”
Cash Clay tried, too.
“Quit, son, before you get hurt,” Cash said after the Shavers fight.
Ali couldn’t do it. He told his father in a soft voice: “I’m on the tightrope.”
48
Staggered
It was Ali’s thirty-sixth birthday, and he celebrated with cake and a sparring session at the Fifth Street Gym in Miami, where his professional career had more or less begun.
At one point, Ali had vowed to take on the winner of the Ken Norton–Jimmy Young fight. But when Norton won, Ali changed his mind, even with Don King vowing to get Ali $8 million. Instead, Ali announced he would fight the 1976 Olympic gold medalist Leon Spinks. Sportswriters called it a farce, saying Spinks, with only seven professional fights to his name, was still more or less an amateur. Ali was insulting the sport, they said. The champ, of course, didn’t see it that way. “I am the savior, the prophet, the resurrector,” he said. “I am the onliest one keeping this thing [boxing] alive, and I’m still the greatest fighter of all time.” Translation: I’ll fight whomever I want.
As Ali jabbed at his birthday cake, Dundee discussed the fighter’s weight.
“He’s about 235, 236,” the trainer said. “He’ll come down about ten pounds. He’ll soon have middle-age spread and never get rid of it.”
The extra weight wasn’t Ali’s only problem. One day, the veteran boxing manager Moe Fleischer watched Ali spar and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “He lets his sparring partners bang him around,” Fleischer told the sportswriter Red Smith. “I don’t understand that. When I had a guy in training, my guy was always the boss.” Sure enough, Ali was getting hit hard by his sparring partner, through one round, two rounds, three, four. “Pump ’em!” Ali grunted, his belly overflowing the waistband of his sweatpants as his sparring mate, Michael Dokes, blasted away.
The bell rang.
“One more!” Ali insisted. “You nineteen, I’m thirty-six. This is the last round. Show me!”
As they came out for the fifth, Dokes, determined to show him, pulled off his headgear and flung it aside. Ali did the same.
Dokes began fighting like the young Ali, showing his opponent his chin and then pulling it away every time a punch flew near.
“You moving today,” Ali said.
Dokes cornered Ali and rapped him on the head.
“Keep pumpin’!” Ali said as Dokes threw punch after punch.
Ali landed a flurry of shots at the bell, but when he was done, he went straight to his dressing room. Jeremiah Shabazz announced that there would be no interviews, that Ali had adopted a new policy of silence to the press. That inspired the headline for Smith’s column the next day: “Hell Has Now Frozen Over.”
But Ali’s silence was no joke. It continued in the weeks ahead. “I’m just tired of the press and I’m tired of people,” he said.
“He’s troubled about something,” Bob Arum said, “and I think it may be because he’s having a hell of a time training to get in shape at this stage of his career.”
There were more money troubles, too.
The New York Times, in a front-page story, revealed that Ali had lost millions of dollars in a real-estate investment, had been having trouble raising enough money to pay his taxes, and had recently left behind a trail of unpaid bills. To come up with cash, according to the Times, Ali was trying to sell both his Deer Lake training camp and his home in Berrien Springs, Michigan. The newspaper said Ali had earned about $50 million over the course of his career — including $46.4 million over the past eight years — but still could not afford “to live in the style to which he and his friends have become accustomed.”
Ali accepted some of the blame for the state of his finances. “I spent a lot of it foolishly,” he said one day while bouncing one of his daughters on his knee. “When she grows up, she’s gonna say, ‘Daddy, where did all the money go?’ ”
Don King explained it this way: “Ali’s got a costly personality. I don’t think he’s got any tax shelters at all. I don’t think he’s been handled properly.”
Ali was getting about $3.5 million to fight Spinks, but it seemed not enough to cheer him up. He did his road work, taking a wake-up call every morning at five from Kilroy and hitting the road to run three or four miles around the Desert Inn golf course in Las Vegas, then wandering in, alone or with Kilroy, to the hotel coffee shop for breakfast. Reporters were mystified by his sullen disposition. He had two children now with Veronica — Hana, who was nineteen months old, and Laila, who was only six weeks. Veronica and the babies were with Ali before the fight in his penthouse suite at the Hilton in Vegas, so perhaps his sullenness was not sullenness at all but the ordinary fatigue of bein
g a new father. But most reporters covering Ali interpreted his silence as a sign of fear — fear that he might lose to this younger, hungrier man; fear that he had broken the covenant with his own body; or fear that he had done the math and concluded that he would never fight enough to dig himself out of his financial hole.
Still, Ali was a huge favorite, with the odds running at about eight to one. Ali was a hero, and his devotees were not ready to let him fade away. His 1977 biopic, along with its popular theme song, “The Greatest Love of All,” introduced a new generation of fans to his story. “It was the late 1970s, an eternity since Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement had died,” wrote Kevin Powell, who was eleven years old at the time, “and . . . Ali was one of the last shining symbols of a historic era of immense black pride and achievement . . . one of the only black heroes I had.” Spinks, on the other hand, was a raw, unknown talent, a mere boxer. The fight seemed so lopsided that at least one reporter wondered if it would score well enough in the ratings to top ABC’s popular TV show Charlie’s Angels, which would be on the air at the same time.
On February 15, 1978, at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas, as Ali climbed slowly into ring, Spinks joined with the audience in applauding the champ. The loudspeakers in the room blasted “Pomp and Circumstance.” Ali smiled gently and walked around the ring before dancing a few steps and throwing a few punches at the air. The crowd was a small one at 5,300 people. Although the arena was sold out, and millions more watched on television, the scene nevertheless seemed beneath Ali’s standards, like a low-budget movie propped up by a lone and fading star.
As the fight began, Ali went right to the ropes, letting Spinks hit him. And hit him. And hit him. There was not even the pretense of a fight from the defending champion. But the astonishing thing wasn’t Ali’s inaction; it was Spinks’s speed and energy. The twenty-four-year-old Spinks overwhelmed Ali. Spinks jabbed to keep Ali off balance and threw combinations that left Ali no time or space to respond. And it happened as soon as the fight began. Ali came off the ropes eventually and danced a little, but Spinks merely waited for him to finish his act, watched him to go back to the ropes for more rest, and whaled away again.
If you had never seen a boxing match and knew nothing about the sport and you dropped in to watch this one, and if someone told you that Spinks was getting paid about $300,000 while Ali was getting $3.5 million, you might reasonably conclude that the purpose of the competition was to measure which man could endure more violence. Only by that measure was Ali winning or justifying his enormous paycheck. In no way did Ali look like the more talented athlete or the man trying to prove he was the world’s greatest fighter.
“I know what I’m doing!” he said as he went back to his corner after not fighting in the first round.
“Yeah, you look good,” said the ever-encouraging Bundini Brown.
“I know what I’m doing,” he said again after the second, perhaps trying to convince himself after another round in which he had done little punching.
Ali seemed to think the pressure or his insults would get to Spinks. “He was crazy, so I tried to hit him,” Spinks said years later. “He talked shit all the time, so I tried to talk more shit than he did. I wanted to hit him more than he was hitting me. I wasn’t having fun. I was scared as hell.”
Ali came out dancing to start the third, but Spinks merely waited for the old man to stop. Ali soon did. Spinks was not a big heavyweight, at six-foot-one and a shade under two hundred pounds. But he was young and strong and fought like it. He wasn’t smooth, but he kept the pressure on his opponents with a high-energy attack. Good boxers had no trouble hitting Spinks, but bad or lazy boxers were often overwhelmed by his onslaught. When the champ went to the ropes to rest again, Spinks moved in and threw thirty-eight unanswered punches. Ali absorbed many of them with his arms, but not all of them, and even when Ali did block the punches with his arms, he was still being hit. Ali’s arms were being pummeled, and his gloved hands were crashing into his own head.
Through it all, Ali kept talking but not punching. His lips bled. A welt began to rise over his right eye. His punches were slow and often wide of their mark.
“Things that you see you wanna do, you can’t do it,” he explained after the fight.
Ali looked slow, dazed, like a man fighting through the fog of a bad head cold. When he wasn’t resting on the ropes, he was grabbing Spinks around the neck, trying to stop the assault. Over the first seven rounds, Spinks landed more than two hundred punches, while Ali landed roughly a third of that. Ali applied more effort in the middle rounds, but he was still losing badly, lacking the energy to fight back. In the ninth, Spinks staggered Ali with a whopping right. Pain ripped through Ali’s ribcage. The right side of his head throbbed.
“That my round?” he asked Bundini as he came back to his corner after the ninth.
Bundini lied and said it was.
Spinks was too young and strong. Every time Ali summoned the energy to fight for thirty seconds or so, Spinks answered with an energy boost of his own. In the tenth, Spinks tried the rope-a-dope, letting Ali punch away as he covered up. It was one of only two rounds in which Ali landed more punches than Spinks. By the eleventh, Spinks was the aggressor again, loading up right hand after right hand, no longer worried about getting hit. The men went head to head in the eleventh and twelfth, Ali aware now that he had to make up for the rounds he’d given away early in the fight. Spinks would not cooperate. Ali could see the big blows coming, but he couldn’t get out of the way. All he could do was cringe and take the shots.
Spinks grinned and patted Ali on the rump several times as the fighters passed on the way to their corners. Ali’s shoulders sagged.
The final round was brutal. It was like a playground brawl, wild punches flying everywhere. Neither man bothered to duck, dodge, or block. These were gunfighters closing their eyes and firing until their weapons were emptied. For Ali, it was pure desperation. He needed a knockout. For Spinks, it was an adrenaline-fueled finish to the greatest night of his boxing life. In the final seconds of the fight, Ali, his unprotected head hammered over and over again, appeared ready to fall. The bell rang and saved him. When the judges announced Spinks the winner, the new champion threw his arms in the air; smiled an enormous, toothless smile; and floated in the air on the arms of his cornermen.
As Ali escaped quietly from the ring, an announcer for the BBC, describing the fight for television viewers in England, said, “we’ve obviously seen the last of him.”
Ali walked out of the ring, his head held high, tears in his eyes.
Although he was tired and hurt, though his face had been bruised out of shape, he said almost immediately that he intended to fight again.
“I want to be the first man to win the heavyweight championship for the third time,” he said.
49
Crown Prince
It was a warm Wednesday morning in August 1978. Ali had just dropped his daughter Hana at nursery school, and he was driving in his beige Stutz Blackhawk — “ALI78” on the Illinois license plates — to his training camp in Deer Lake. Ali had promised everyone that he would fight one more time and quit. He would beat Spinks in the rematch, reclaim the heavyweight championship, and retire. He guaranteed it. A reporter riding along asked how he felt knowing his career would be over soon and generations would grow up without seeing him fight.
“They never saw Jesus, either,” Ali answered. “Or Einstein, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But they all read about them in history books. Everybody’s going to die, everybody’s going to get old. Even after you’re dead and I’m dead, this hill is going to be here.”
In any case, he said, he would still be famous when he finished boxing. “I’m going to be ten times bigger than the heavyweight champion,” he said. “I found out fighting was just to introduce me to the world. I’m just now starting to be a man.” It wasn’t mere hyperbole, he said. He had a real plan: to launch an international organization called WORLD — the W
orld Organization for Rights, Liberty, and Dignity — to “build boys’ camps in this country, give people relief when they’re hit by floods and other disasters, build hospitals wherever they’re needed around the world, and work for better relationships between countries.” He had recently traveled to Moscow and met Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who had utterly charmed Ali and had promised to let him use an office in the Kremlin. “I’m going to be my own United Nations,” he said.
Just one more fight, he said, and his career as a humanitarian and diplomat would begin.
At about the same time, another interviewer asked Ali if he worried that brain damage from boxing might inhibit his plans for the next phase of his life.
No, Ali said, the words coming slowly. “That happens to people who get hit too much.”
But Ali was getting hit too much — more than 1,100 times in his past four fights alone. Accurate punch statistics don’t exist for Ali’s earliest fights, but this much is known: in twelve of his earliest fights (Johnson, Miteff, Banks, Moore, Jones, Cooper, Liston, Liston again, Patterson, Chuvalo, Cooper again, and London), he took fewer than 1,100 punches. In those days, young Cassius Clay really was fast and slippery enough to avoid the kind of damage inflicted routinely on other boxers. But those days were long gone. Now in sparring sessions as well as fights, Ali had come to resemble a punching bag with legs.
It should have been Ken Norton fighting Spinks. Norton was next in line for a shot at the championship. But when Ali lost, he insisted he was entitled to another shot at Spinks. It was a tradition, he said, that the fallen champ gets another go at the man who knocked him from the throne.
