Nobody lost "face," as they say over in Japan, but Ali's legs were severely bruised by Inoki's kicks and soon there were dangerous blood clots. I wanted to get him back to the States to get checked out, but he had already promised to go on an exhibition tour of the Orient and foolishly went through with it. I don't know how he got through it because he could hardly walk, but he did. When he returned, still complaining about the bruises, I had him admitted to a hospital in Santa Monica to get checked out and recuperate. If those clots had traveled to his upper body, the Ali era might have ended right then and there.
With Ken Norton already scheduled for September, which was just a couple of months away, there was not much time for Ali to recuperate. Ali wanted to make it two out of three against Norton, just as he had against Frazier. He also didn't want to miss out on a paycheck worth $6 million.
Like Mark Twain who, in response to hearing he had died, said, "Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated," so, too, were the exaggerated rumors coming out of St. John's Riverside Hospital in Santa Monica. Reports had it that Ali was near death, that he had suffered hemorrhaging from ruptured blood vessels, and so on. It seemed the only thing the rumors didn't mention was a fatal case of ingrown toenails.
One man who chased the rumors down and found them to be untrue was "Unswerving" Irving Rudd, who was doing the publicity for the upcoming Ali-Norton fight. Not only did he visit Ali, he brought along Ken Norton to see the convalescing Ali—Norton saying, "I don't care what Ali is like in the ring. Sure, I'm gonna try and beat his brains out, but as far as I'm concerned, he's a helluva man and I wanna go pay my respects to him while he's sick."
Ali set out the ground rules for the visitation by Norton and Rudd, telling Irving, "Bring the sucker up here tomorrow. But I don't want no press around when you do. No press. Ya hear?" So what happened? Knowing full well that the press was downstairs, he grabbed Norton and, getting into his wheelchair, said, "Come on, let's go down and see the press. How 'bout we show those muthas we're alive." With that, Ali wheeled off toward the elevators before any of the attending doctors could stop him. Arriving downstairs where the press was waiting for word on the meeting between the two, Ali, looking bravely upbeat, got out of his wheelchair and hobbled toward Norton, throwing a punch in his direction for the cameras. Calling Norton "Mandingo"—a reference to the movie Norton starred in as "Drum" the slave—Ali told the press how he was going to "whup" Norton when they met at Yankee Stadium, how he was "gonna knock him on his ass." There was no doubt in my mind that Ali was "whuppin" himself into shape mentally for the bout.
The next thing I knew, Ali had checked out of the hospital and gone to... who the hell knew? Nobody had a clue. That is until I got a call from Ali telling me, "We're opening a training camp in Miami. That's right, Miami, Arizona." Where the hell's Miami, Arizona? I asked myself, my grasp of geography so bad that if I had been on the Lewis and Clark Expedition I wouldn't have been able to find Pittsburgh.
But wait, it got worse. It's not Miami, Arizona, it's some place called Show Low, Arizona. That's right, Show Low. Sounds like East Overshoe. Even Rand and McNally wouldn't have been able to find that on their maps, somewhere between Fughagawee and Nowheresville. Helen and I got out the atlas and began looking for anything sounding like Show Low and finally found it, a small town of 1,625 or so residents and one dog on the Main Street licking itself, about a hundred miles east of Phoenix. Great! There'll be no Italian restaurants there!
Who knew why Ali picked this remote spot to set up his training camp. Maybe it was because he had come across it a year before on a tour with Dick Gregory or maybe it was another of Ali's flights of fancy. But whatever it was, I was soon headed west to join Ali, kit bag and all. And believe me, getting there was no flight of fancy, flying a crop duster that barely made it off the ground. I think the pilot's name was Eddie Rickenbacher.
Almost before I had taken my jacket off, John F. X. Condon, the Madison Square Garden publicist, was on the phone. Figuring that the press would have as hard a time finding Show Low as I did and wanting as much ink for the fight as we could get, he wanted Ali & Co. back East where the press could see him, interview him, and write about him. So it was back East for us, back to the Concord Hotel, up in the Catskills Borscht Belt, where Ali applied himself, training as hard as he ever had, straining himself to get back into fighting shape and running up and down the mountainous terrain to get his legs back into dancing shape.
It was the Ali of old as he alternated his training with vocal exercises, throwing one-liners and sound bites to the press and sneering remarks at Norton. However, those cynics in cynics' clothing, the press, still had questions about Ali's readiness: How much had the "Thrilla in Manila" taken out of him? What about his legs, could they go the scheduled fifteen rounds? And so on and so forth.
Yankee Stadium was a sight for sore eyes and sticky fingers the night of the Norton fight. The New York City police were on strike, and the few who were there stood idly by, supposedly guarding the stadium. At least the stadium wasn't stolen, but most everything else was as hordes rampaged through the stadium, splintering the seats and knocking down barriers. Roaming pickpockets couldn't help helping themselves to everything else—including Herbert Muhammad's wallet.
Many in the crowd also thought the judges had picked Norton's pocket as well by giving Ali the decision. Norton, as in their two previous fights, had come constantly forward in that strange hippity-hop style of his, hands across his face in a defensive posture, while Ali circled the ring countering his charges. This tense dance had gone on for fourteen rounds with all three judges reflecting the closeness of the battle by scoring it even going into the fifteenth and final round. However, it was not the judges, but Norton's corner that cost him the fight. Knowing how close the fight was, I exhorted Ali, "You've got three more minutes. Fight like hell.... We need this round." But over in Norton's corner, believing they had the fight in the bag (or as Red Smith wrote, "in the burlap"), his manager, Bob Biron, told his fighter to "stay away." This strategy of staying away had cost others before and after—like Jersey Joe Walcott in his first fight with Joe Louis and Oscar De La Hoya against Felix Trinidad. Now it was to cost Norton as he became strangely inactive while Ali closed the show, winning the round decisively. That one round proved to be the difference. Although Ali felt he had lost the fight, it was that last round won by Ali that had picked Norton's pocket, not the judges.
After Norton, Ali took a little R&R, which meant a series of exhibition bouts—including six on the same night in Boston against such "worthies" as Peter Fuller, the son of the former governor of Massachusetts and owner of a car distributorship who had been a fair amateur boxer in his day.
Finally, eight months after the Norton fight, Ali defended his title again, this time against Alfredo Evangelista, the eighth-ranked heavyweight in the world and one of the most famous unknown heavyweights in history. How he was ranked eighth in anything in the world I could never figure out. He had had just sixteen fights, winning fourteen of them, twelve by KO, but they all seemed to have been against fighters who weren't even household names in their own households. In fact, ABC-TV issued a disclaimer about his ranking before the fight went on the air. To say that Ali took Evangelista seriously would be like saying Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. He didn't and it showed, looking as if he had telephoned the fight in, holding his hands down, taunting Evangelista to throw punches—to throw anything—while he danced through fifteen rounds for an instantly forgettable win.
Five months later Ali was back in New York again, this time at the Garden to face Earnie Shavers. Unlike Evangelista, this was to be no easy fight and we all knew it. To say that Earnie was a hard hitter would be an understatement. He could knock down tall buildings with a single punch, as attested to by his fifty-three KOs in sixty-one fights—a slugging average (.869) to rival Rocky Marciano, who had forty-three KOs in forty-nine fights for an .878 average. But we also knew that bodacious punch or not, Shavers had a problem with hi
s stamina, forty of his fifty-three knockouts coming in the first three rounds. If we took him into the middle rounds he had a tendency to wilt.
Meeting Shavers before the fight, Ali trotted out some of his old chestnuts: "Your bald head makes you look like an acorn. That's going to be your nickname, 'Acorn,' " adding to his rogue's gallery of names. Then he threw in: "I might shine your head for you, Earnie." Still not satisfied with trying to psyche out the mild-mannered Shavers, Ali added one of his insulting barbs: "And then I'll teach you to talk. You gotta learn to talk, Shavers."
But Shavers, while a quiet gentleman outside the ring, was anything but inside, where he let his hands do his talking for him. In the second round he almost had the final word, catching Ali with an overhand right from hell. Ali's senses suddenly played hide-and-seek as he wobbled from the force of Shavers's blow. Shavers, unsure whether Ali was hurt or merely playing possum to draw him into a trap, failed to follow up. For the better part of the next ten rounds Ali covered up, staying away from Shavers's right-handed might and bing-bing-binging him with his jab, piling up points in the process.
For the fight television had come up with a new gimmick. After each round NBC announced the judges' scores—not to the Madison Square Garden audience, just to the home television viewers. I had prepared for this in advance by putting my pal, Baltimore matchmaker Eddie Hrica, back in the dressing room where we installed a television set. After each round Eddie would run from the dressing room to the ramp where we had entered the arena and flash me a signal: a thumbs-up if we won the round, a thumbs-down if we lost, and a wave of the hand, palm down, if it was even. Well, with three rounds to go, by virtue of more thumbs-up than down, I knew that Ali had the fight in the bag, so to speak, four rounds up on the judge's scorecards. So I told Ali to "be careful," and that the fight was his if he didn't get knocked out. Maybe he was too careful, going into a defensive cocoon and letting Shavers beat the bejabbers out of him with sledgehammer shots, some the hardest he'd ever been hit with, blows that could have felled trees, but not Ali. Almost from memory Ali hung on, surviving the battering in Rounds Thirteen and Fourteen only to come back and win the fifteenth big, and the decision. But I had the feeling that some victories are harder than defeats and that Ali was, to cop a line from someone or other, a victor by victory undone.
Coming off the Shavers fight there was genuine concern for Ali. It was obvious to all, especially those close to him, that the floating butterfly whose feet had barely touched the ground in his prime was now a stationary sitting duck, absorbing punishment he never would have in his prime from the likes of an Earnie Shavers.
Ferdie Pacheco had left the corner, no longer able to watch Ali take punches he shouldn't have had to. Gene Kilroy told Ali, "You can beat everybody, but you can't beat Father Time." And Garden matchmaker Teddy Brenner, never one to pull his punches, told Ali the morning after the Shavers fight, "Sooner or later some kid that couldn't carry your jock is going to beat you. You're going to get hit, you're gonna get hurt. You've proven everything that a great champion can possibly prove. You don't need this. Get out!"
Ali heard out each and every entreaty to retire with a polite indifference, responding only with a "Wha' for?" having already decided to carry on. As he had in the past, he looked for an "easy" opponent to take on after his hard fight with Shavers. Having single-handedly decimated the division of available challengers, he finally narrowed the short list down to one name: Leon Spinks.
In Spinks, Ali had found that "kid that couldn't carry your jock" that Teddy Brenner had warned him about. Winner of the 1976 Olympic light-heavyweight gold medal—the same title Ali had won sixteen years before in Rome—Spinks had had only had seven pro fights. Ali asked of no one in particular, "How can someone with seven nothin' pro fights beat me?" He fairly salivated at the prospect of fighting a youngster he considered to be a green novice who was little more than a puffed-up light-heavyweight, so raw Ali fully expected Spinks to come into the ring still clutching his Olympic medal.
But I knew how tough Spinks was. I had had a kid named Lee Canal-ito fighting in St. Louis on the same card as Leon in Leon's hometown debut. Getting up at five in the morning of the fight to make sure Lee was doing his final roadwork I chanced to look out the hotel window and caught Leon getting out of a cab, kissing his lady friend of the evening, or morning, or whenever goodbye, and then taking a swig out of a bottle—no glass, mind you, that would have wasted a step, just straight out of the bottle. That night he went into the ring and coldcocked his opponent, Pedro Agosto, in one round. Now, that's tough!
I knew this was going to be a tough fight. Small guys always gave Muhammad trouble. But I couldn't convince him, try as I might. He was so contemptuous of Spinks, whom he called "Dracula" because of his missing front teeth, that he walked through training. He had none of the fire he had shown in preparing for Sonny Liston, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, or Ken Norton. This time Ali trained as if he was doing it from memory, thinking it unnecessary to do anything more than punch the clock for someone with just seven fights.
By the time I arrived at what laughingly could be called his training camp, Ali was shockingly unprepared, having sparred only about twenty rounds or so. His weight, which had been as high as 242, was still a problem. You could see it. His face was soft, lacking the usual fighter's tautness, and his stomach was encased in rolls of flab. Writers, noting his condition, used descriptions like "out of shape," "soft," and "paunchy" to describe him. Bill Gallo of the New York Daily News drew a cartoon of Ali lugging his belly around in a wheelbarrow. I tried to get Ali back on a rigorous regimen, but he successfully avoided doing anything more than what could best be described as walk-through exercises.
The fight itself was an embarrassment. I knew, just knew, from the moment Muhammad came out in an oh-hell-let's-go-fishing posture, hands down, taunting Spinks, that we were in trouble. Hell, this guy would walk through ten scotches to get at anything. You knew that if he was so unconcerned about a fight that he could come in at five in the morning swigging liquor straight out of a bottle and then go out that night and KO his opponent in one round he wasn't going to be bothered by Ali's grandstanding. He just kept coming, coming, coming, barrel-chesting his way inside and countering Ali's punches, what few there were, throwing my guy off guard. As the fight wore on, Ali's jab became more and more a pawing motion, his speed and reflexes AWOL, and Spinks, looking anything but a 10–1 underdog, stayed right on top of him, throwing those bad-intentioned ponderous punches of his. Come the so-called "championship rounds," the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth, I expected Muhammad to pick it up, to mount one of those "close the show" rallies he had almost patented. But despite the fact I kept trying to tell him he was losing and now was the time to "close the show," he kept telling me, "I know what I'm doing." What he was doing was losing the fight—a close split decision—and his title.
Back in the dressing room, some of the faithful were hollering about Ali being "robbed." His face puffed out, his lip cut, his kidneys bruised, an exhausted Ali slowly looked up and said, "Look, we ain't gonna have any sore losers in here tonight. The boy whupped me and whupped me fair. That's it, hear? I don't wanna hear any more talk about how they 'robbed me.' " Then he shouted to his brother, the leader of the "we wuz robbed" clan, "Look, make up your mind ... first, you got me robbed, then you got me in no shape." There were no alibis, no couldas, wouldas, or shouldas as he told the press at the Las Vegas Hilton after the fight, "I'm sorry men, I messed up. I was lousy. But I don't want to take anything away from Spinks. He fought a good fight and never quit. He made fools of everybody, even me." A pause, then, "I'll win it for the third time. I'll get in better shape."
Saying, "What keeps me going is goals," his goal was now to win back the title he had "lent" to Spinks and become world heavyweight champion for an unprecedented third time. Knowing he had not been in shape the last time, he undertook a tough and dedicated conditioning program, one that started with slowly resting and gettin
g back his energy and then methodically building himself up into top physical condition for the rematch in New Orleans.
However, the rematch wouldn't be for the world heavyweight title. For the World Boxing Council (WBC) had decided in their infinite nonwisdom that inasmuch as Spinks was not defending his newly won title against their number one contender, Ken Norton, they would strip Leon of his belt and anoint Norton as their champion even though he had never won a title bout. (Did I see the heavy hand of promoter Don King behind this?) Nevertheless, that other alphabet-soup group, the WBA, or World Boxing Association, continued to recognize Leon as their champion. And since the championship that Leon held traced its lineage back to John L. Sullivan, we would be fighting for the real world heavyweight championship title no matter what those clowns in clowns' clothing, the WBC, said.
In a case of turnabout is fair play, this time it was Ali who did the hard training. The soft flab was gone, the hard edge back. He had even done 8,014 sit-ups, approximately 8,013 more than he had before the first fight. "This is the hardest I've ever trained for any fight in my career," he told newsmen who were covering the fight like the Creation of the World, Part II. "I've never suffered in my life like I have for this one. I'm sacrificing all the things I love, the pie, the ice cream, everything. I'm sacrificing so much because I can't afford to lose. This is my last chance. If I lose, it will plague me the rest of my life." Meanwhile, Leon was running around like a truant on a romp, chasing every which way in pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. So much so that only a couple of days before the fight he was MIA, with no forwarding address.
This time the fight was a one-man exhibition, the Ali of old, a dancing master again, constantly befuddling Spinks. Quick-stepping and quick-jabbing, Ali always seemed to be two steps in front of Leon, who looked as if he was only interested in catching the first train going home. No rope-a-dopes or lying on the ropes this time. Ali was perpetual motion, in and out, around, and everywhere but where Leon was. It got so that by the fifth round I couldn't help myself as I hollered, "Where did he go, Leon? Where did he go?" Spinks had no idea where Ali went or how to get to him. When Spinks did get close enough, Ali would grab him in a bear hug, pulling him off balance. By the middle rounds Ali was catching Leon with three-punch combinations, bang-bang-bang, and I hollered up at Spinks, "Goodbye, Leon." But Leon had gone "goodbye" long before and knew it, responding to my shouts with only a gap-toothed smile.
My View from the Corner Page 26
