by Mark Kram
Slave history of the low country supports that view. Class distinction based on skin color was drawn almost from the beginning of the settlement. Mulattoes, the fair-skinned progeny of white slavers and African women, were the emerging group and favored by owners. They got the better jobs and a big share of the largess (such as it was) that was handed down on the whim of their masters. Purebloods from Africa, seen as nonadaptive, resented sharply the superior airs of the mulattoes, who were too eager to conform to white culture. In various rebellions that were often chronic, the mulattoes were rarely included in conspiratorial plans; the blooded didn’t trust them.
While Frazier would later call Ali a “half-breed” in Manila, the phrase was not just a passing comment of frustration; it leaped out from a tribal flash of racial memory. Always able to feel the lancing invective with which Ali assaulted him, Frazier began to see it as an orchestrated campaign to crush any respect he had in the black community. Blacks who understood the mulatto and pureblood equation winced. On display every day in the streets, it was now being played out in a large public way.
The Muslims, it should be pointed out, mirrored the age-old divide of color. Their leader, Elijah Muhammad, was “color struck.” He taught his followers that they were descended from “Asiatic blacks,” meaning that they were from Arab stock, not from the sub-Saharan Africa. Elijah was a light man, and so were a large part of the Muslim hierarchy; the so-called sub-Saharans in the movement had subordinate roles. When Malcolm X established contacts with newly independent African nations, he was admonished for associating with “these people.” Unlike Malcolm, Elijah would avoid travel to sub-Saharan Africa during his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1959. During at least two later visits to Africa, Ali himself would remark that African women would be more attractive if they had a little white blood in them.
The young Frazier and his family were on the rim of the culture, the father Rubin being too much of a pragmatist and survivalist to become lost in the world of the black art. But his mother, Dolly, was never far from it, often telling the kids stories of the always looming Dr. Buzzard. She smoked a corncob pipe and was sensitive to spirits. A swarm of crows meant death, a strange noise in a walk by a graveyard meant that “the people were buried alive.” She worked in fields, tomato canneries, and picked crabs by hand on a small assembly line, with endless hours that rarely yielded more than five dollars a day. They lived on a ten-acre farm that Joe and his father tried to work with two mules; the earth didn’t give up much except watermelon; no vegetables for the table. Hard sun and flooding rain ran easily through the wood-tin roof of the six-room house that had no phone or plumbing, only an outhouse nearly a hundred yards away.
Rubin was a one-armed man, having lost his left wing over a woman. Her full-time lover was jealous, suspected Rubin, and shredded his arm with a pistol. He was lucky, he could have been hit by what they called a “ten-cent” pistol composed of lye, human urine and honey that disfigured, a prospect not to the liking of a ladies’ man such as Rubin. He once told Joe that, in all, he had fathered twenty-six children, an attainment of high order that Joe hoped to duplicate, such was his admiration for his father. When Joe was born, his father named him Billy, after his rugged old Ford that never let him down on the dark back roads he raced through. “He gonna be my left arm,” Rubin said of the baby. By day, Rubin was an overseer on the Bellamy farm, at night he cooked up “white lightning” that he sold for seven dollars a gallon. Turned age seven, Joe began helping him with late-night liquor deliveries. “I was never little, or played little,” he would say. “I ran with my father.”
In the early fifties, Rubin bought a small television, and the high point of Joe’s week was watching the weekly fights with his father and uncles. No matter who was fighting, the talk always ended up with the name Joe Louis. His father respected Louis so much that the name blazed in Joe’s head. To show his father that he could be Louis, too, he put a bag on a tree limb filled with bricks at the center, rags, and corncobs, and he pounded the bag day after day with an audience of his two mules, Buck and Jenny, until his hands were bloody, the hand-wrapping with his father’s ties being little protection. The stern Dolly didn’t like it much, and allowed him only an hour with the bag. She tried to curb his father’s influence by taking him to church, where his main function was to hold on to his mother’s hysterical friend who would be so in rapture that she might shake herself into injury. A dedicated truant in school, Joe was soon working with his father on the Bellamy land, and he lay awake plotting how he could make his way elsewhere, away from a place where doctors treated whites first, where a white store had a parrot that sang: “Niggers teefing, niggers teefing.” Teefing meaning stealing.
It was at the Bellamy farm where the kid came to the aid of a smaller black boy who was being beaten by one of the Bellamys out in the field. He told the other workers that “it wasn’t right to strap the kid,” and the word got back. The man approached Joe in a rage, saying: “Tell you what, nigger, I want you off this place before I take this belt off again.” Joe told him to keep the belt for his pants, “’cause you’re not usin’ no belt on me!” He saw the future clearly, he had to get out, and Dolly, worried, told him: “Son, if you can’t get along with white folks, then leave home’ cause I don’t want you gettin’ hurt.” Not even “the dog” (the Greyhound bus) stopped in Beaufort. Soon after, the Greyhound started making stops there, and in 1959 he took “the first dog North.” He was only 15, with not one asset to recommend a decent continuity of life.
He went to live with brother Tommy in Brooklyn, where for two years he looked for any kind of work, lay around, and then desperate that he couldn’t pay his own way he began to steal old cars with a friend and sell them for fifty dollars to a junkyard. Besides, there was his girl, Florence, by now pregnant. He decided to go and live with relatives in Philadelphia. He had blown up to 220 pounds, felt disgusted; what had happened to the kid who had attacked the bag of corncobs? He talked his way into a job at Cross Brothers slaughterhouse. He swept the floor, hosed blood down, threw the waste down a chute. Sometimes, he’d cart huge slabs of beef into the freezer, where he practiced combinations, his mouth streaming vapor. Sylvester Stallone lifted that from him for Rocky, and took some more, Joe’s later habit of doing roadwork up the famous museum steps, only there wasn’t any victorious soundtrack then.
Fed up with the size of his thighs, he went to the PAL gym to lose weight. “The more I got whipped on,” he said, “and it was often, the more I wanted it.” Duke Dugent, head of the gym, saw a serious kid who could whack if ever taught, and he told Durham about him. “Does he have any balls?” he asked. “More than I’ve seen,” Dugent told him. Under Durham, Joe became a top amateur, but he was robbed of a decision in an Olympic trial against Buster Mathis, a three-hundred-pound ballroom dancer in the ring. Joe was down, wanted to quit. “You a baby, that it,” Durham said. “Go on, then, butcher them cows the rest of your life.” He was still at Cross, often slicing his fingers with knives; his hands were showing more stitches than a baseball glove. Durham talked him into being a sparring partner for Mathis. Buster was lazy, unmotivated, and the coaches saw it. Stick around, they told Joe. If this guy catches a cold, “you’re in.” Buster came up with an injured knuckle. Joe went on to win the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.
Frazier was in bad shape economically when he returned. He was now married to Florence and had two children. Local sportswriter Stan Hochman heard of his problem, and soon gifts and money began showing up, one of them a golf bag filled to the top with five-and one-dollar bills from a collection that had been made on the street. How now to make his big move as a pro? Durham went to black business leaders. They turned him down cold, saying that Joe was too small, his arms too short for a heavyweight. “Fuck ’em,” Yank said, “we’ll do it alone.” Back to Cross and more stitches; one day a bull escaped inside and headed right for Joe; it was shot dead. With all the blood, the smell, the long hours, cut off from the gym in a ful
l-time way, he began to feel like one of those steers, shackled and hoisted, just before the rabbi slit its throat. He told Florence: “Man, I gotta get outta there.”
It has been said that every generation gets—as with presidents—the heavyweight champion it deserves. It’s an interesting observation, and handy transport for character and failures. But is it accurate, or just a claim by boxing religionists to impute to the ring more than its naked animalism should carry? On inspection, there have been some reflective conformations of champions and their times. As far back as 1805, William Cobbett, Tory reformer and journalist, brooded over Britain’s spiritual decline driven by what he perceived to be an outbreak of foppish manners, and he predicted that “when champions like Jem Belcher no longer have respect be assured that national cowardice is at no great distance.” No such stirring attachments attended the early American ring of outlawry and crudeness, a period of migratory punch-ups on gaslit barges and small islands illuminated by torches supported by the upper and lower classes and largely an expression against the moral intrusion and social airs of the middle class.
John L. Sullivan was the first to shoulder national identity, and he mirrored the Gilded Age in many ways. Loud and obnoxious, predatory by instinct, by every trait a bullhorn in tune with the national mood of expansiveness and acquisition; Teddy Roosevelt tagged him as a national treasure, convinced that American blood ran highest in his veins—not to mention usually enough whiskey to drop an elephant. After Sullivan, some champions became inseparable from their times. Jack Johnson, with his restless eyes for white women after the turn of the century, his presence and skill in the ring being like a night terror to white supremacists like Jack London, who begged the challenger Jim Jeffries to wipe that smile from that face and “restore our national place.” Joe Louis, with an exterior as silent as cathedral stone, a thirties profile of racial memory in repose so he could survive professionally while blacks dangled from trees in the South, and he was regarded as a human replica of the quaint black jockey on the lawn in the North. Until World War II approached, when he was raised to a bright symbol of patriotism and American might against Max Schmeling, Hitler’s claim to racial superiority. Rocky Marciano, with his immigrant’s desire to please and respect authority, the follower of orders for the sake of the tract home and lawn; but the sharp reminder that whites still could brawl despite his manifestation of corporate sensibility in the so-called embalmed fifties.
For the purists, the dignity of the world title, of “the office,” had been devalued by Ali. Dignity might seem here a romantic pastel as a word. How could it be assigned to a sport that produced the I.B.C., had been dragged before more Washington hearings than the Teamsters, and whose history was a film festival from a crime studio like the old Warner Brothers? But before and during many of Ali’s years, the man who wore the title belt was viewed as someone who had attained high office, and his residence was in the mythic and tribal part of us. The champ held the chair of “manhood and courage,” quaint notions now, but then heavily valued. What man, warmed by a few drinks, didn’t think he had those qualities in spades; it’s not insignificant that fighters have always been confronted loudly in public, or that John L. Sullivan had to fight his way out of saloons. And the tribalism was palpable, the way a showdown pulsed with generational memory, old tales handed down, and forced millions across a vast and impersonal land mass into a single, compressed attention and expectancy. A champion—and what he did with and to the title—was tracked as closely as the presidents and, indeed, the pictures of Joe Louis and Marciano often hung next to Franklin Roosevelt and JFK in bars and urban living rooms. When JFK called Patterson to the White House, he wanted the unworthy Sonny Liston eliminated and alliance with the constituency of the heavyweight title.
A champion also lived in the eye of hate. After a modest interlude, say a couple of defenses, loathing was soon the dominant emotion. A dethroned champion was much more likeable, defeat was more human, unless he was defending against a foreigner. By losing, he faced what the rabble felt every day, the quixotic nature of life. If he had character, he would come back—just like they would—and he would soar far beyond his original appeal. Of all the champions, only Louis and Marciano would sustain the public’s admiration. Both lacked complexity, a taste for assertion or notoriety. Rocky approached his work like a trade unionist, and if you told him it was snowing in Haiti he would agree. How, then, did a champion become virally unpopular? It took some doing; personal morals were not eyed closely by the press; scandal could impede—only to a point. Usually, it took a jolt to the tribal illusion, something that was in direct conflict to the heart of the real-man qualities expected. A good example was the mauling of Jack Dempsey (1919–1926).
Just before he won the title, Dempsey was accused of avoiding the draft in World War I. The public was pacified when he was formally acquitted and took a “war essential” job in a shipyard. The trouble was a photographer showed up for a couple of shots. There he was in his overalls, with his rivet gun—and in patent leather shoes. He was vilified as a “draft dodger” on the front page. The promoter Tex Rickard seized the chance to match him against Georges Carpentier, a handsome French war hero, who got beaten badly. The public was satisfied only when Gene Tunney beat him. Even so, his rehabilitation took time and was much helped by his opening of a Broadway restaurant where for years he would sit near the big window like a pugilistic artifact, or stand at the door and greet so many tourists and members of the press that he eventually entered the kingdom of the sanctified, patent leather shoes and all.
Romance, idealism, nationalism, it all seems trivial against what was down in the dark boiler works of the ring. “There is so much hate,” Patterson said after the Vegas fight with Ali, “so much contempt inside people…that they hire prizefighters to do their hating for them.” He wasn’t talking about catharsis for people who’ve had too many bad days at work, or resented rising prices. He was talking about the snake of race hatred, race pride, and dominance that had been the engine of boxing since Jack Johnson. When critics were aghast at Ali’s racial thrust, they were being either disingenuous or stupid, at the very least inattentive to history. The ring had always been a test tube for race politics and amateur eugenics (go to the belly of a black man, “they don’t feel nothin’ in the head”; and it was said the black was lazy, unreliable, and would run like a scalded hound in the late rounds).
But it was the champion Jack Johnson who was the bold preface to racial lash. He was an unshuffling, confronting giant, a picaro whose go-to-hell presence and “armfuls of white women” incited white America to fear and a sense of inferiority. Jim Jeffries, just about threatened out of retirement, was selected to remove the “bad nigger.” Calling him Master Jeff, Jack whipped Jeffries on July 4,1910. Afterward, there was social chaos. Blacks took over a town in West Virginia for hours. In Georgia, three blacks were killed in a gun battle. Two more were attacked in Oklahoma by a man with a knife who claimed he was the second cousin of John L. Sullivan. Marines were sent to Norfolk, Virginia, and anger combusted in Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, Maryland, and other places. The toll was 19 dead, 249 injured, and nearly 5,000 arrested. Big Jack was then pursued “legally.” Accused of everything but incest, he was later arrested under the Mann Act, a “white slaving” law so obscurely written to include any man who motored a woman across a state line (wives excluded) and had sex with her. He was never caught in the act; sex was presumed since he had made countless trips with a woman named Belle Sheiber. An all-white jury convicted, and he drew a year in prison. Johnson jumped to Europe, where he dissipated his body and money. In 1915, he agreed to meet a new white hope, Jess Willard, in Cuba, where he was counted out in the twenty-sixth round—one hand shielding his eyes from the sun, a hint for experts years later that Jack had come up with his own plea bargain and that, rather than true defeat, he had wearily resigned from office.
Imagination had been vital to the ring’s popularity; look at the old newsreels and study t
he eyes by the radio bringing a big fight. A man could go out and hit a ball, catch a pass; he could relate physically to these things. To hit or be hit in the face, to have your masculinity so nakedly tested, that was something else; visualized, yes, but still incomprehensible, a mystery. The great fighter was distant, a man to be invented and shaped by the fan’s imagination. The less you knew about him the better; it added immensely to the suspense, their expectations, to a ritual of instant reckoning, made important and deadly by the nonverbal hostility that ran through it; words only diluted that starkness and aloneness of the ritual that most men felt and few wanted to enter.
As a radio fighter, Ali would have been far less inciting. Words were not ready for his act, could never have fixed him in the public mind or accurately brought his talent to life. Seeing him as a radio fighter, though, is time-machine fantasy. Given the racial climate of the radio days, Ali as we know him could never have been—not even as the pre-Muslim Clay. Imagine the young Clay listening to instructions the way Joe Louis did in his early days; his handlers tutored him often with regard to public table manners and inoffensive commentary. But with TV, Ali had the good fortune to have a medium that seemed to be invented for him. He didn’t pervade it, he invaded, demanding that you become a participant in his career, a rapt listener to his egoistic mantra. If your mind was still on Louis or Marciano, the old matrix for the hero, get it off there and start moving; this, he was the new age. He seemed to know instinctively what it was about, the shameless selling of self, breakfast cereal and audience. “Be pretty, be loud,” he’d say, “and keep their black hatin’ asses in the livin’ room.” Going into exile, Clay had defamed “the office” for white Americans; he might be “the new man” as he claimed, but not one with manhood or courage and, worse, with no mind of his own.
