On Boxing

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Other title defenses of Ali’s, however, were hard-fought and legitimately won by the champion; brilliant displays of boxing to reach their zenith in November 1966 in a match with the veteran Cleveland Williams, as Ali, ever in motion, ever flicking his unerring left jab at his frustrated opponent, moving head and shoulders with the seemingly casual aplomb of a dancer, unleashing the Ali shuffle, knocked Williams down several times with multiple punches before knocking him out in the third round. What deadly grace, what lethal beauty in motion! And what a mystery Ali’s quicksilver ring style would have been without slow-motion replays! In great displays of boxing, as in few other sports, the unaided eye is simply inadequate to catch, let alone register and interpret, crucial moves. If there is a single fight of Ali’s that best exhibits his “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” style, it’s this fight with Cleveland Williams. And, unlike the great fights to come in the 1970s, this fight is short.

  Soon afterward, Ali’s early dazzling career would come to an abrupt end. Increasingly controversial as a result of his public commitment to the Nation of Islam (which was regarded by many whites and some blacks as a black-racist cult), Muhammad Ali drew a maelstrom of censure when, in April 1967, he refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army and, besieged by the media, uttered one of the classic, incendiary remarks of that incendiary epoch: “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” He would be found guilty of “knowingly and unlawfully refusing induction” in a Federal court in Houston, Texas, and given, by an elderly white judge, the stiffest possible sentence: five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. (Ali’s mentor Elijah Muhammad served just three years for urging his followers to resist the World War II draft.) There would be years of appeals, enormous legal bills and continued controversy, but Ali would spend no time in jail. Neither would he be allowed to box in the prime of his fighting life, a melancholy loss acknowledged by Angelo Dundee—“We never saw Muhammad Ali at his best.” Not only did boxing commissions refuse to sanction the undefeated heavyweight champion to box, but the State Department, in a repressive tactic bringing to mind the persecutions of Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson in the 1950s, revoked Ali’s passport so that he couldn’t fight abroad.

  1971-78. The Return. The Superfights. Then, with fairy-tale logic, as the Vietnam War wound down, a bitter and yet unresolved episode in our history, and the tide of public opinion shifted against the military, the U.S. Supreme Court overthrew Ali’s 1967 conviction and he was reinstated as a boxer. Like a rogue elephant exiled to the periphery of his world yet always conscious of, and always uneasily observed by, that world, Ali returned in triumph—almost!—to reclaim his title. In this seven-year period belong Ali’s greatest fights, and to say that they were unanticipated is not to disparage the younger boxer but to extol the older. In the intensely fought, physically exhausting fights with Joe Frazier and George Foreman, Muhammad Ali proved himself a great, and not merely a gifted and charmed athlete. After three and a half years of not boxing, though only twenty-nine, Ali was conspicuously slower and knew better than to dance away from his opponent; he would have to compensate for his lost agility with sheerly boxing (and punching) technique; he would have to train to take, and not exclusively give, punishment. That this was a deliberate strategy is important to note. As Ali said in an interview in 1975:

  I don’t train like other boxers. For instance, I let my sparring partners try to beat up on me about eighty percent of the time. I go on the defense and take a couple of hits to the head and the body, which is good: You gotta condition your body and brain to take those shots, ’cause you’re gonna get hit hard a couple of times in every fight. Meanwhile, I’m not gonna beat up on my sparring partners…If I kill myself punching at them, it’ll take too much out of me. When you’re fightin’ as much as I have lately, you’re supposed to be boxin’ and doin’ something every day, but I can’t dance and move every day like I should, because my body won’t let me. So I have to stall my way through.

  If this sounds like a recipe for disaster it was also, for Ali, in the short run at least, a recipe for success. Indeed, it is the game-plan for the remainder of Ali’s career, the strategy that would win him two of his epic fights with Joe Frazier and the legendary Foreman fight in which, miraculously, or so it seems, the younger, stronger and seemingly more dangerous Foreman would punch himself out on Ali’s stubborn body in eight rounds, to relinquish the heavyweight title another time to Ali. As Ali’s doctor at that time, Ferdie Pacheco, said:

  Ali discovered something which was both very good and very bad. Very bad in that it led to the physical damage he suffered later in his career; very good in that it eventually got him back the championship. He discovered that he could take a punch.

  And take punches Ali did, for the next six years.

  The great, extravagantly publicized matches of this period of Ali’s career belong with the great sports events of all time. Frazier-Ali I (1971) (which attracted more viewers than any boxing match in history), Ali-Frazier II (1974), Ali-Frazier III (1975), and Ali-Foreman (1974) would seem to inhabit an archetypal realm of the spirit that transcends most sports events. The perilous, cathartic heights of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy come to mind when we consider these draining fights in which even the winners are irrevocably altered. (After fourteen rounds of the “Thriller in Manila” with Frazier in 1975, Ali, the winner, nonetheless described the experience as “The nearest thing to death.”) Not surprisingly, these epic boxing matches excited media interest and drew to Ali’s camp numerous commentators, some of them famous in themselves (like George Plimpton, Norman Mailer), who would spend more than a month in Zaire for the Ali-Foreman fight. (See the Academy Award-winning documentary When We Were Kings, and Norman Mailer’s highly stylized coverage The Fight.) Not just Ali’s stoical courage as an athlete, but Ali’s ingenuity drew such attention. For even the aging Ali was a meta-athlete who conceived of his public appearances as theater, not merely, or wholly sport; Ali was a superb athlete, but he was also a superb actor, exhibiting “Ali” to the acclaim of millions. Watching Ali in what we might call his aging prime, we are reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s remark Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances. There is something of the con-man in Ali, and his game is to make us want to believe in his indestructibility, even as, perhaps, Ali doesn’t, or can’t, believe in it without qualification himself. Consider the Foreman fight. In When We Were Kings, Foreman is repeatedly “dissed”; he is the opponent whom we are invited to scorn, because he is not Ali, our hero. (In a sense, there is room for only one boxer in the ring, if that boxer is Ali. He won’t play fair in seeking an audience’s attention.) As in a fairy tale of heroes and villains, Foreman, for all his gifts, is the villain. Even as we watch this astonishing fight between an aging Muhammad Ali and a young and vigorous George Foreman, reputedly one of the hardest-hitting heavyweight punchers of all time, we are mystified: how did Ali do it? Granted even his superhuman will, how did his body withstand such repeated, relentless blows? The Rope-a-Dope strategy is the very triumph of purposeful masochism; yet such triumph inevitably carries with it irretrievable loss. (Would Ali have wished to win over Foreman had he been able to anticipate his physical and mental deterioration—his “Parkinsonianism”—of later years?) Wittily titled the “Rumble in the Jungle,” as if it were but a cartoon or comic-book event, this fight which returned his title to him surely contributed to Ali’s taking into his body the “nearest thing to death.”

  Following these remarkable fights, Ali would exult in being again “King of the World”—“The Greatest.” He had secured his position as the most famous athlete of the 1970s, and perhaps of all time. He had traded his health, it would develop, but such a trade would perhaps have seemed worth it, at the time. Unlike the only undefeated heavyweight champion in history, Rocky Marciano, Ali fought worthy opponents, most of them younger than himself. He would defend his hard-won title several times, against such opponents as Chuck Wepner, Ken Norton
(who would break his jaw), Jimmy Young (who would break his eardrum), and Ernie Shavers; unexpectedly, he would lose on points to the young Leon Spinks (with only seven pro fights to his credit) in 1978. Though Ali would beat Spinks in their rematch, and announce his retirement, he would be unable to resist returning to the ring; two years later he would be beaten decisively, and painfully, by his former sparring partner Larry Holmes. By this time Ali was thirty-eight and long past his prime; his career had in effect ended with the 1978 loss to Spinks.

  1978-1981 The Twilight Epilogue. Yet like many another former champion (Louis, Ezzard Charles, Ray Robinson, Ray Leonard, Roberto Durán et al.) Muhammad Ali would continue to fight, if not to box with any degree of his former talent. His final match, sanctioned not in the United States but in the Bahamas in crude, unprofessional surroundings (a cowbell was used in place of a defective ring bell) was with a mediocre twenty-eight-year-old Trevor Berbick who easily outscored a slow, heavy, plodding Ali on points. For there is a point at which even the ingenuity of desperation fails. (Berbick would have the distinction in 1986 of being spectacularly floored in the second round of his title defense by boxing’s new prodigy, Mike Tyson, who would formally end the “post-Ali era.”) As the English sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney noted, “Graceful exits are rare in professional boxing but few great champions have gone out more miserably than Muhammad Ali.”

  In 1981, this time permanently, Ali would retire with a record of 56 wins, 5 losses. But even in the waning years of his career he would be an emblem of the courage and stoicism of the aging athlete, so much a part of our contemporary scene. (Ironically, it would be Ali’s old opponent George Foreman who would return to the ring as a “mature” boxer and captivate, in another era, the attention, and affection, of millions of viewers.)

  He who was once the icon-breaker is now an icon.

  Interview quotations and other material used in this essay have been drawn from The Muhammad Ali Reader edited by Gerald Early (Ecco Press, 1998); In This Corner: Great Boxing Trainers Talk About Their Art edited by Dave Anderson (Morrow, 1991); and McIlvanney on Boxing by Hugh McIlvanney (Beaufort Books, 1982).

  IN THE RING AND OUT

  JACK JOHNSON

  God, it would be good to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.

  —MIKE TYSON, New York Times, May 2002

  It was a scandalous and historic American spectacle yet it took place in Sydney, Australia. It had the elements of a folk ballad set to an accelerated Scott Joplin tempo. It might have been a silent film comedy or a Chaplinesque farce for its principal actors were a wily black Trickster and a blustering white racist Hero: heavyweight contender Jack Johnson versus heavyweight champion Tommy Burns for the world title in December 1908. Though the arena in which the boxers fought reverberated with cries of “coon”—“flash nigger”—“the hatred of twenty thousand whites for all the negroes in the world,” as the Sydney Bulletin reported, yet the match would prove to be a dazzling display of the “scientific” boxing skills of the thirty-year-old Johnson, as agile on his feet and as rapid with his gloves as any lightweight. The setting for this historic encounter was Australia and not North America for the long-shunned Negro contender had had to literally pursue the white champion to the ends of the earth—to England, Ireland, France, and at last Australia—in order to shame him into defending his title. The bloody outcome of the fight, Johnson’s victory over Burns in the fourteenth round, the first time in history that a Negro defeated a white man for the heavyweight title, was an astonishment in sports circles and seems to have provoked racial hysteria on several continents. Immediately, it was interpreted in apocalyptic terms:

  Is the Caucasian played out? Are the races we have been calling inferior about to demand to us that we must draw the color line in everything if we are to avoid being whipped individually and collectively?

  [Detroit Free Press, January 1,1909]

  If as John L. Sullivan famously declared, the heavyweight champion is “the man who can lick any son of a bitch in the world,” what did the ascendency of the handsome and stylish “flash nigger” Jack Johnson portend for the white race? Jack London, at that time the most celebrated of American novelists and an ostensibly passionate socialist, covered the fight for the New York Herald in the most sensational race-baiting terms, as Geoffrey C. Ward notes in this compelling new biography of Johnson, transforming a sporting event into a “one-sided racial drubbing that cried out for revenge”:

  It had not been a boxing match but an “Armenian massacre”…a “hopeless slaughter” in which a playful “giant Ethiopian” had toyed with Burns as if he’d been a “naughty child.” It had matched “thunderbolt blows against butterfly flutterings.” London was disturbed not so much by the new champion’s victory—“All hail to Johnson,” he wrote; he had undeniably been “best man”—as by the evident glee with which he had imposed his will upon the hapless white man: “A golden smile tells the story, and that golden smile was Johnson’s.”

  Summing up the collective anxiety of his race, the poet Henry Lawson gloomily prophesied:

  It was not Burns that was beaten—for a nigger has smacked your face. Take heed—I am tired of writing—but 0 my people take heed. For the time may be near for the mating of the Black and the White to Breed.

  As if to fan the flames of Caucasian sexual anxiety, the new Negro heavyweight champion returned in triumph from Australia with a white woman as his companion, whom he introduced to reporters as his wife. (She wasn’t.) Through his high-profile career Johnson would flagrantly consort with white women ranging from prostitutes to comfortably well-off married women; in all, he would marry three. The first, Etta Duryea, who may have left her husband for Johnson, became so socially ostracized that she attempted suicide repeatedly and finally succeeded in killing herself with a revolver. Johnson’s other liaisons were equally publicized and turbulent. In the prime of his career as the greatest heavyweight boxer of his time Johnson had the distinction of being denounced by the righteous Negro educator Booker T. Washington for “misrepresenting the colored people of this country” even as he was denounced at a National Governors’ Conference by, among vehement others, the North Carolina governor who pleaded for the champion to be lynched: “There is but one punishment, and that must be speedy, when the negro lays his hand upon the person of a white woman.” (Since 1900, nearly seven hundred Negroes had been lynched in the United States, for allegedly “sexual” reasons.) In 1913, Johnson had the further distinction of being the catalyst for the introduction of statutes forbidding miscegenation in the legislatures of numerous states; at this time, interracial marriage was officially outlawed in thirty of the forty-six states. (None of the proposed statutes of 1913 passed into law and fifty-four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared all such laws unconstitutional.) It would seem that Jack Johnson was simultaneously the most famous and the most notorious Negro of his time, whose negative example shaped the low-profile public careers of his Negro successors through nearly five decades.1 Only in the 1960s, with the emergence of the yet more intimidating Sonny Liston and the brash, idiosyncratic Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, was Johnson vindicated. The massive Liston, hulking and scowling and resistant to all white liberal efforts to appropriate him, was Jack Johnson revived and reconstituted as a blackness ten times black. Ali, as viciously reviled in the 1960s as he is piously revered today, was a youthful admirer of Johnson: “‘I grew to love the Jack Johnson image. I wanted to be rough, tough, arrogant, the nigger white folks didn’t like’” [King of the World, David Remnick, p 224].

  Ali had the distinct advantage of being born in 1942, not 1878. He had the advantage of a sports career in the second half of the twentieth century, not the first. And, by instinct or by principle, he seems to have avoided white women entirely.2

  Of great American heavyweight champions, Jack Johnson (1878-1946) remains sui generis. Though his dazzling and always controversial career reached its zenith in 1910, with Johnson’s spectacular defense of his title agai
nst the Great White Hope former champion Jim Jeffries, Johnson’s poised ring style, his counterpunching speed, precision, and the lethal economy of his punches, seem to us closer in time than the more earnest and forthright styles of Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Larry Holmes, Gerry Cooney, et al. That inspired simile “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” coined to describe the young Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali in his early dazzling fights, is an apt description of Jack Johnson’s cruelly playful dissection of white opponents like Tommy Burns.3 Ali, a virtuoso of what was called in Johnson’s time “mouth-fighting,” a continuous barrage of taunts and insults intended to undermine an opponent psychologically, and the inventor of his own, insolently baiting “Ali shuffle,” can be seen as a vengeful and victorious avatar of Jack Johnson who perfected the precarious art of playing with and to a hostile audience, like a bullfighter who seduces his clumsy opponent (including the collective “opponent” of the audience) into participating in, in fact heightening, the opponent’s own defeat. To step into the ring with a Trickster is to risk not only losing your fight but your dignity.4