Now, as New York State Boxing Commissioner Ed Dooley took his place at the head table between Ali and Frazier, trying at first to keep the two apart and then to ignore them as if he were missing the festivities still going on at the bar in the next room, a well-dressed gentleman entered the room, unnoticed by all: Jerry Perenchio.
As Perenchio attempted to address the reporters, photographers, and assembled hangers-on, he was constantly interrupted by Ali's chatter. Turning to Ali, he said with a firm voice, "For $5 million, Ali, I think I have the right to talk," pause, "uninterrupted." For a second Ali was quiet.
That silence lasted only until Perenchio began to present the bottom-line figures, rattling off numbers, all with the sound of the ka-ching of a cash register, as he vowed to "cut up and sell every part of the carcass, just like whaling." When he announced that the net would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million, Ali broke his silence to shout over to Frazier, "Joe, we've been had!"
Muhammad's jawing had just begun. He called Frazier everything from an "Uncle Tom" to a "chump" and because, as he said, Frazier "talks about he's hot, he always talks about he's gonna come out smokin'," he came up with a poem:
Joe's gonna come out smokin'.
And I ain't gonna be jokin'.
I'll be pecking and a pokin'
Pouring water on his smokin'.
This might shock and amaze ya,
But I'm gonna retire Joe Fraz-yah.
Frazier didn't get caught up in the war of words, saying only, "He calls me an 'Uncle Tom' and I call him a phony." Later, during one phone call between the two filmed by the hair tonic Vitalis as part of the prefight hoopla, the two came as close as they ever would to exchanging words. And insults. Their conversation went something like this:
Ali: "Hey Joe, will you be smokin' that night?"
Joe: "I'll be smokin' right on you."
Ali: "Well, you gonna be smokin' and I ain't gonna be jokin', I'll be a-peckin' and a-pokin' pouring water on your smokin'."
Joe: "The rest of those fighters, you jived them. You can't jive me. And you can't scare me. Hey, Clay ... hey, Clay...."
Ali: "What'd you call me?"
Joe: "Clay!"
Ali: "Why do you call me Clay?"
Joe: " 'Cause that's your name."
Ali: "You gettin' yourself in trouble with the brothers. You shouldn't call me that name. Even white people call me Muhammad now." Joe: "You ain't nothin' but a big phony."
Ali: "Well, I'm just sick and tired of it. I'm through with you. I'll see you fight night, boy! Listen, boy! I got somethin' for you and I want you to come out smokin'. You hear me. Listen to me. I'm gonna hold you to it."
Joe: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, chump. Go ahead, chump."
And with a last "shit" to punctuate his words, Frazier hung up. Click! But Ali wasn't finished. Besides, I don't think he wanted anyone to know Frazier had hung up on him. Clearly stung, Ali kept right on going. "I'm gonna talk to you when I whup you," he said. "Now you know I'm crazy. I'll see you fight night. Bye." Click!
Ali walked away from the telephone, barely managing to mask his rage. Visibly wincing at the disrespect Joe had shown him by calling him "Clay," he sputtered angrily to anyone who would listen, "It's getting serious now. If he keeps calling me 'Clay,' I'm gonna have to make him say my name! It's getting serious."
Trying to psyche out your opponent, or, as it used to be called, "getting their goat," is a sometimes thing. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.
Go all the way back, as some of the old-timers used to tell it, of how James J. Corbett got John L. Sullivan's goat before their heavyweight championship battle. Sullivan, as was his habit as well as his right, demanded to come into the ring last when he took on Corbett. But Corbett had other ideas, and as he came down the aisle and climbed the stairs to the ring, he put one foot through the ropes as if to enter the ring. Sullivan, upon seeing this, gave him a second or so and then entered the ring, only to find that Corbett had suckered him into entering first, not last, by pulling his foot back out of the ring in sort of a do-si-do fashion. Corbett had faked John L. out of his habit and his shorts. And Sullivan, so irate at the actions of Corbett, spent most of the fight just trying to take Corbett's head off with his huge right hand rather than boxing. In the process, Sullivan came out second even if he had entered first, being carried out, feet first, after twenty-one rounds.
But such baiting is not confined to the ring nor to the heat of battle. It can happen anytime. Like when the then-champion Primo Carnera and contender Max Baer appeared in the movie The Prize Fighter and the Lady. In the two boxers' first meeting, Madcap Maxie jumped to his feet to greet Carnera, hollering, "Hello, you big gigolo!" at the same time mussing the champ's hair with a none-too-gentle rub. Not used to being treated like that, Carnera never got over the snub, one he wore in the ring when the two finally battled for the title, which Baer won, doing more than merely mussing up Da Preem's hair.
Not all such goat-getting works, however. Like the time Tony Canzoneri fought Jimmy McLarnin in the Garden. "Canzi," as was his habit, always wanted to occupy his "lucky" corner—the corner on the Fiftieth Street side of Madison Square Garden—believing it to be his good luck charm. But McLarnin's manager, Pop Foster, insisted that he, too, wanted the Fiftieth Street corner, so a coin was flipped by a deputy commission for the right to have the right corner. Canzoneri won the toss and the corner as well as the fight that night with a brilliant effort. Afterward Canzoneri said, "McLarnin didn't care what corner he sat in. He just wanted to get my goat." Apparently, he lost that battle, too.
Fight writer José Torres once wrote that Ali begins "throwing psychological punches long before throwing a physical one." (Future generations of sociologists may very well identify those "psychological punches" as the beginning of trash talking.) Many opponents had fallen under the weight of those "psychological punches." But not Frazier. By hanging up, Frazier had acted as no one ever had before in the face of Ali's psyche job. It was almost as if he had not lived up to his part of the bargain of serving as a punching bag for Ali's verbal abuse, instead giving out some of his own. To Ali it was unthinkable.
In the weeks leading up to the fight, Ali continued his one-note assault on Frazier, saying things like: "The only people rooting for Joe Frazier are white people in suits, Alabama sheriffs, and members of the Ku Klux Klan. I'm fighting for the little man in the ghetto.... Joe Frazier is too ugly to be champ. Joe Frazier is too dumb to be champ. The heavyweight champion should be smart and pretty like me.... Anybody black who thinks Frazier can whup me is an Uncle Tom." He continued to salt his barbs with words like ignorant, dumb, ugly, and, worst of all, Uncle Tom when referring to Frazier.
To Ali they were only words, his "psyche" job to gain a mental edge. But to Frazier they were more than a head game, they were personal, and even though hurt by what I thought were some of Ali's below-the-belt comments, Joe wouldn't take the bait. His only response was to call Ali "a phony" and "a clown." Instead of returning Ali's "jive" he turned his intense hurt inward, taking it out on the heavy bag and on his sparring partners and vowing to do the same to Ali between what he called "the four squares" come March 8.
Meanwhile, the fight had captured the imagination not just of fight fans worldwide but even those peripheral fans who saw this as an event, one being fought on a world stage. Possessing all the elements of a great matchup, including two undefeated heavyweight champions, one a puncher, the other a boxer, fighting for the most money ever earned by an athlete, $2.5 million apiece, fought in the midst of a turbulent debate over the Vietnam conflict with one of the participants adopted by those in support of the war, the other the representative of those opposed to it, and held in the mecca of boxing, Madison Square Garden, the fight needed little ballyhoo.
Nevertheless Perenchio, saying, "What we have here is the Mona Lisa. You expect us to sell it like chopped liver?" pulled out all the stops. True to his background as a Hollywood agent, he marketed the fight like
a blockbuster movie, something "colossal," "stupendous," and "bigger-than-life," hiring superstar Burt Lancaster as a closed-circuit broadcaster, filling the airwaves with news and interviews, and getting the two participants on the cover of every major news magazine. And, not surprisingly, using Ali as his primary pitchman.
In one of the most improbable promotional schemes ever hatched to hype a fight, John F. X. Condon, who had been hired by Perenchio to handle the publicity for closed-circuit, came up with a lulu. Believing that the fight was a generational war and that Ali was "a young guy" and that "in a couple of years the young people are going to have a bigger voice in this country than they ever had before, the country needed a new leader and that new leader should be Ali," he approached Ali with an idea. Finding Ali at the 5th Street Gym after he had just returned from his roadwork, he began to lay out his idea in a train-of-thought manner. "Look," Condon said, "I'm going to tell you something. Don't talk until I get done. When I get done, we'll have a chat, but don't say a word till then." On a roll, Condon then laid out his scheme: "At twelve o'clock today, you're going to go into the lobby of the Playboy Hotel here in Miami Beach and you're going to make a formal announcement that in 1976 you're going to run for President of the United States."
With that Ali jumped up, slapped his thighs, and yelled, "Man, oh man, that's just what I need ... that's just what I need!" Then, as an afterthought, he said, "But you've got to do one thing, you've got to check it out with Herbert Muhammad."
Condon hollered "fine" over his shoulder as he raced out the door of Ali's private little gym room in search of a telephone. First he called Perenchio and, after repeating his warning not to interrupt, went through the idea again. "Hello, hello ... are you there?" A long pause and finally Perenchio came back on the wire. "Yeah, I'm here," he said softly. "Jesus Christ, John, if you can pull this off it's the greatest goddamn thing that could happen to us!"
Next Condon called Herbert Muhammad. Unable to get through, he reached John Ali at Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago. After hearing Condon out, John Ali merely said, "He can't do it, John. No Muslim is allowed to run for public office." And even though Condon argued it was merely a "publicity stunt," the verdict stood. Still, in exchange for having his stunt vetoed, Condon was able to extract a promise that Ali would present one of his drawings of what he called "Predictions Before a Fight" on the closed-circuit telecast just before the bout.
But even though that promotional scheme hadn't, as they say on Madison Avenue, "flown," obviously several had as on-site tickets at the Garden—ranging up to $150 ringside, and soon to be scalped anywhere from $750 to $1,000 apiece—sold out in little more than a day. And closed-circuit ticket sales were bringing SRO signs at almost all theater box offices.
For me, the promotional goings-on were somebody else's business. My job, pure and simply, was to get Muhammad ready for "The Fight," which was no easy task. For Muhammad was taking it easy, not training, convinced that his stoppage of Bonavena—something Frazier had failed to do in their two meetings—was a sure "sign" he was fated to win. Ali also read into the fact that most writers, just as they had before the first Sonny Liston fight, had picked his opponent to win as yet another "sign" he would "whup" Frazier just as he had Liston.
Knowing that fights are won and lost in the gym, not in "signs," I finally got him back in the gym. From what I had seen in his two comeback fights, he was not the Ali of old; he was a little rusty around the edges. His frame had been thickened by age and his brilliant moves diminished by his three-and-a-half-year layoff. Now, instead of evading punches by merely moving away from them, he blocked them with his arms and gloves. He no longer danced on his toes but was more flat-footed. And his stamina was in question. He had become, in the words of one writer, "less an artist than a fighter," one who had gone from "superhuman to extraordinary."
Even with a natural ten-pound pull in weight and a 4-inch advantage in height and reach, Ali was going to be facing a fighter who would be willing to take everything Ali had to offer just to be able to land that thunderous left hook he possessed, probably one of the best in the history of boxing. And it was my job to prepare him, both mentally and physically, to take on the fighter who was described as fighting like "a wild beast caught in a thicket."
But by now Ali had become the darling of the press. And every training session was attended by—or should I say, interrupted by—both a horde of members of the press as well as a roundup of celebrities, all coming to talk to him. Never one to miss an opportunity to get his name in the papers or his face on TV, Ali took valuable time off from training to accommodate their every question and comment, making it more difficult to fully prepare him for "The Fight."
Still, as we broke training camp in Miami Beach and headed to New York I thought we were ready. Or at least as ready as we were ever going to be.
In New York we faced another problem. Somehow during his exile Muhammad had became more than just a boxing celebrity. He now had an aura, call it a mystique. And even though we were housed at a hotel across the street from the Garden, we couldn't go anywhere without crowds following him, wanting to see him, touch him, just walk in his footsteps. Everyone, or so it seemed, from the casual celebrity spotter just wanting to catch a glimpse of him to the most devoted fan wanting to get near him, fell in lockstep behind him, almost as if he were a Pied Piper heading up his own parade with a band of admirers in his wake as he walked the streets of Manhattan. Not only couldn't we walk the streets for our daily constitutional, it became difficult to do roadwork in Central Park. All of which gave us a feeling of claustrophobia, what with hordes of fans following us everywhere, even into restaurants interrupting our daily meals.
That became a major problem the night of the fight. Right after the weigh-in, the powers-that-be at the Garden asked us to stay inside rather than return to our hotel so that the crowd, which by now had blocked off the streets surrounding the Garden, wouldn't become a major traffic problem—the city's police already straining to maintain order. Ordinarily I get the commission's okay to bring Ali to the arena an hour before the fight rather than the normal three. See, some guys can relax in their dressing room before a fight, like Joe Louis, who always took a wake-me-if-there'sa-fire catnap before his fights. But Ali had so much nervous energy he would have worn himself out. Now we were stuck in the Garden the entire afternoon before the fight. And what do you think Ali did to pass the time? He counted the seats in the Garden, one by one!
The fight was as much an event as it was a fight. Bored to tears by having to stay in the Garden, I would occasionally go outside to look at what was going on. It had the look of Mardi Gras. Hours before the doors officially opened at 7:30 P.M., thousands, with or without tickets, milled around outside, there to be seen if they were celebrities, or unseen if not. Among the crowd you could see scalpers offering $150 tickets for up to $1,000 a pop. What was going on was pure excitement. There were limos backed up from in front of the Garden all the way uptown—some said as far away as 110th Street.
When the doors finally opened many went through hell just to get inside. Even those with tickets had to wait an hour as the crowd surged toward the doors, many of those dressed to the nines in full-length white mink coats—and those were the men; the women were in tight-fitting extreme clothes with slit skirts and low-cut blouses. One woman in tears had just held up her ticket for the ticket taker when a hand emerged out of nowhere to snatch it from her. The doorman, a witness to what had happened, was powerless to help.
As the twenty-thousand-plus slowly began to fill the arena, you could see the celebrities of the day, all creating a stir as they were recognized by the fans. All the while we were back in the dressing room, going over our last-minute preparations: the strategy, the taping of the hands, the placing of the red robe over the shoulders of Ali as we stood ready and anxious for that knock on the door telling us, "You're on!"
Finally the knock came, and we made our entry into the main arena. The house lights had
dimmed, and the people were on their feet screaming, "Al-li! Al-li," as they caught a glimpse of Ali, dressed in white with red stripes and a mini-robe, his shoes red tasseled with red bow-like laces. He threw punches in the air and waved to the people he recognized. Climbing through the ropes, Ali extended his arms into the air and did his "Ali Shuffle" as the crowd roared in appreciation and picked up the volume of their "Al-li! Ali-li!" chorus.
The arena momentarily quieted. Then there was another roar as the familiar form of Joe Frazier emerged from the shadows, clad in velvet-brocade green and gold trunks with matching robe. Contrasted with Ali, Joe was throwing punches, looking down, not seeing the crowd, all business.
The crowd, which only seconds before had been on their feet cheering the two fighters, quieted just enough to hear the two fighters announced, bursting into wild applause with each name. During the introductions I looked down at ringside and saw Frank Sinatra on one side of the ring, camera in hand, taking pictures; on the other side, Burt Lancaster was at a microphone. Other too-numerous-to-mentions were seated ringside. It was exciting, even to me.
Referee Arthur Mercante then brought the two fighters to the center of the ring for their last-minute instructions, and as I escorted Muhammad back to the corner before the opening bell, I gave him some final "words of wisdom" and Bundini Brown supplied some final exhortations. Then the fight was on!
Frazier immediately walked right in on Muhammad while Muhammad came out in a circle, both meeting in the center of the ring. Ali feinted with a jab, and Frazier threw one of his own, missing. As advertised, Frazier kept coming straight in at Muhammad, his head bobbing, his hands moving, his chin buried in his chest. But Ali, true to his word, was "a-peckin' and a-pokin'," throwing quick jabs at the approaching Frazier and then moving away, out of trouble. For two rounds the same pattern continued with Ali circling, feinting, and then throwing his jab at the ever-pursuing Frazier who was following my guy but unable to cut off the ring. And when Frazier came close enough for Muhammad to grab, he did, smiling and nodding at the crowd, even talking to Frazier.
My View from the Corner Page 19
