Ghosts of Manila

by Mark Kram

  He was now in temporary residence at a small retreat on the ocean, a frayed place for elderly Jewish people on fixed incomes. The lobby smelled of immigrant cuisine to Ali, “recipes they must’ve brought over on the boat.” Outside, on the porch, the old people rocked back and forth, talking in Yiddish. Often, Ali would join them, get in rhythm to their rocking, and sit mutely looking out over the ocean. It was a surreal frieze, broken only when he would joke with the old women, saying, “You all come down here from New York to get away from us people. Now, here I am right next to you. Ain’t you scared? I know you’re scared.”

  The women just laughed and kept rocking. “I’m crazy with loneliness,” he said. He lived in a small apartment upstairs. Belinda was not on the scene. Bundini, sleeping on a sofa, woke him each morning for his roadwork. “But I got to get myself ready,” he added, “and I can’t have any distractions, for this is goin’ to be the biggest night in ring history, every eye in the world’s gonna be on me to see if the government beat me.” He looked at a picture of himself taped to a long mirror, one taken around the second Liston fight. He measured his sides with his hands, pinched the extra flesh on his belly, checked his jowls. “See how narrow and trim I was,” he said. “My weight’s not much different, but everything else is broader, fuller, my face, my arms, my legs.” In the gym, and now alone here in this Gregorian chant of a room, he seemed retracted, with no appetite at all for the imbecile proclamation, content to let his body, and what he could make it do, speak firmly of what he himself dared not sing prematurely.

  Muhammad Ali returned to the ring for the first time in over three years at a former opera house in Atlanta against Jerry Quarry, a pale Irishman from California, transplanted from East Texas. It was the place to be, and every con man, pimp, ragged hippie, and boxing fan in the world seemed to be there, including press from around the world, just an ocean of bodies in flamboyant thread on Peachtree Street and in the lobby of a hotel, tricked up architecturally into a vision by Arthur Clarke of a new world. Revolution was snoozing, its props of berets, field jackets, and the fixed scowl were nowhere to be seen. Capitalism reigned, with big rolls of green flashing, with mink jumpsuits and even a long convertible with an alligator-skin roof. “Where did they all come from?” a grizzled old bellhop asked. “I thought the circus was the greatest show on earth.”

  Ali was staying at LeRoy Johnson’s house, watching old fight films projected on a torn sheet. He was quiet about Quarry, didn’t try to heap race on a presence that shrunk by the day and nearly faded to black on the screen by fight time. Quarry had been a top contender for a long time until Frazier a year before had trimmed him like a bony shad in a vicious seven rounds. He might have been a champ had he not been so star-crossed as to have been in the same era as Ali, Frazier, and George Foreman. His problem was that he could never properly assemble himself, never knew precisely what to be: boxer, brawler, or counterpuncher. His instinct was to brawl, but his true skill was as a counterpuncher; he was quick and stinging when he was thinking right. He came from a tribal, Steinbeckian family, Okies who moved west, the father of which was meddlesome and never satisfied with Jerry.

  Enrico Caruso, the great tenor who once worked in this same building, surely never heard such a roar as that which greeted Ali as he entered the ring. Practically before the crowd sat down it was on its feet. Ali dazzled, and it was clear that he was beyond any optimistic reach that Quarry had entertained. Ali cut him in the third, the fight was stopped, making it inconclusive whether it had been the true reemergence of the most lurid comet in sports; for now, the sputtering tail of it was enough. As for Quarry, after so many self-deceptions in so many fights, the essayist William Hazlitt had him pegged: “He has lost nothing by the late fight but his presumption.”

  For Ali, it was on to Oscar Bonavena in December at the Garden; at this rate Oscar might get to buy all of Argentina. Ali had his hands full with Oscar; he seemed weary, punched out as Bonavena kept dropping on him like a falling safe; Ali mocked his style. Bundini Brown yelled from the corner: “Stop it! Stop that! Box like Sugar Ray. Get vicious!” Ali came back to the corner and said to Brown: “Here, take my gloves. I don’t know what to do with this clumsy fool.”

  Frazier was sitting next to Durham, his nails up to his mouth, his eyes fixed for calamity. “If he keeps foolin’ with that bowlin’ ball,” he said to Durham, “we could lose millions.” As the fight wore on, Durham said, “Joe damn near jumped in the ring himself.” By the fifteenth, with both fighters exhausted, Ali ripped a left home. Oscar went down.

  “Now he’s mine,” Joe said, sighing.

  “Go up and shake his hand,” Yank teased.

  “I got nothin’ to say to that clown,” Joe replied.

  THRILLA

  Miles above the Pacific, on the last leg of a twenty-one-hour trip that began in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a few hours into the ten-hour slog from Honolulu to Manila, was no place for a phobic flyer. Every grumble and wheeze of the plane became a fatal signal, every nerve was a gymnast whirring through a high triple flip with uncertain outcome. Not wanting to think of the vastness below, dark water with limitless species of hungry sharks, I riffed with a vague recall of island specks where a jet in trouble could land. Micronesia? The Marshalls? Tonga? What was the mathematical probability of surviving a splash? Bundini wasn’t calculating a few rows ahead; he was deep into a Chivas Regal dream with his mouth open. The cabin was quiet, dimmed to a reassuring calm, the propitious moment (wasn’t it always?) for the plunge to disaster. Ali’s presence, somewhere in the back, comforted some; as a psychological talisman he was worth at least the presence of a dozen cardinals.

  Just as I began to flirt with the surface of sleep from nervous exhaustion, there was a loud bang to the back of the seat, then a steady vibration. The senses went into full alert, girding for a turbulent, terminal dip of the plane; the bang was a familiar sound now, since I’d heard an engine blow out once on takeoff from London. Would the contour of Saipan or Tarawa, any blessed, jungle-rot strip, be below? Breath came in gulps, brain and body honed in for the rattle of the plane. But there was none, just Ali’s sizable army scattered and as restful as clams. The source of the disturbance was soon evident—Ali, eyes popped wide, standing over the seat back. It was a relief to see him; better an untimely prank than some bungled little screws torn free somewhere.

  “You’re scared,” Ali said, “and I got you more scared.” He slipped into the seat, muffling his laughter. “I love to scare people.”

  “You torture rabbits, too?”

  “Man, this plane goes down, we don’t have a chance,” he said. “All them octopuses and man-eaters down there. Gotta be able to swim.”

  “Like you? You can’t swim.”

  “Even if I could save you,” he said, “you’d be last in line. What you call me recently? A…a…a…I can’t remember.”

  “A simpleton.”

  “That’s it! A simpleton. That’s not right to do.”

  “You missed the second part of that. A simpleton and a genius of the primitive.”

  “I don’t read,” he said. “My people tell me what’s said. All the bad things.” He paused, then said: “This plane ain’t gonna go down. Not with me on it. Besides, those pilots don’t wanna die, either.”

  “Never overestimate humanity.”

  “I used to be more scared than you,” he said. “I don’t care anymore.” He held up his hand. “See how steady. No nerves at all. I ever tell ya about the time I was going to the Olympics? They had to talk to me for days in New York. When I finally said okay, I went down to the surplus store and bought me a parachute. I sat on that plane the whole way to Rome with a parachute on. It was rough, a rough trip, too. Without that chute, I’d’ve turned white for sure.”

  “What good was it? It was worthless.”

  “How you know? Maybe I got lessons.” He laughed: “Nah, I probably didn’t even have it on right. But it felt better. Just having it with me. It’s all in the h
ead, fear.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You got no faith in nothing,” he said. “All you gotta do is keep sayin’: Ali won’t let the plane crash. Over and over. Say it. You have to beat fear with a whip. Hard.”

  “Mind if I think about it?”

  “Crash if you want to,” he said. He paused. “Know any jokes?”

  His oblique effort to calm and distract was telling. It showed Odessa’s side of him, as well as someone who intimately knew this fear in particular, and fear in general; that side was gaining on him. Gone, for the most part, except for lame filler material in public, was the insufferable drone of self-love; it had become by now, to the press and himself, the shrill whir of a mosquito drilling into a dead horse. Gone, too, except when Frazier was in his sights, was the dog-bite ugliness of the first half of his career, when he seemed to be trying to match an official attitude of the Muslims. Walk into a room, and there was the icy hostility of, say, Ali in bed, covers up to his chin, his face crusted with determined, silent rudeness. “They’ve changed my boy,” his father, Cash, would lament until it became a mantra.

  Friction ground on a long time between father and son. Besides meddling, Ali saw him as too proprietary, too critical, too eager for bows, and the son fired at him once, saying: “Lot of people say they made me. Who made me is me!” Ali often grabbed the front of his shirt and supposedly whopped him with an open hand one time. “Nooooo way,” Cash said. “For damn sure. He got me by the shirt sometimes. But I told him outright, you do that again and I’m gonna pop you real good.” To Cash, denied and misadventurous all his life, his son meant proof of his own genetic greatness, what he should have been, perhaps, as a painter. His son’s accomplishments were his own. He’d look at the Muslims lounging around the house like beached sea lions and lose it. He saw each having yachts one day supplied with Dom Perignon, or Herbert with an armful of women throwing bacchanal feasts while his punched-out son was busing tables at a resort hotel. “This Herbert,” he yelled, “he and the old man gonna steal you dumb. Where’s your money? You care? Where’s your money?” Now, in these days, Cash just drifted with the perks, content with the ceremonial role of the father, always to be found, with a drink in his hand, singing “My Way” at hotel piano bars.

  Angelo Dundee wasn’t immune, either, to Ali’s pique. He walked a narrow line with Ali throughout his career. There was an unspoken understanding between them, sharply felt and never abridged. Often, he seemed to serve merely as a statue in the camp and fight corner, a handy and much respected conduit for the press, a producer of excuses and chatter that filled notebooks. Given that exterior, it was not hard for his few doubters to exclude him from the company of Ray Arcel, Eddie Futch, Freddie Brown, and Charlie Goldman, the latter having been the sculptor of the once ragged Marciano. Dundee simply never had any material to shape. Ali never listened to anyone in the ring, he trained himself, and Dundee was never able, for all his pleading, to get Ali to stop engaging in masochism during gym sessions, hanging on the ropes where he took much punishment. And if Angelo announced that Ali was going to work six rounds, the champ would just shadowbox, knowing that it would annoy the press and also show who was boss.

  In one sparring session, Dundee shouted instructions, and Ali turned and yelled: “Shut up!” Among the press near the ring apron was Dick Young, columnist for the New York Daily News. “Can you imagine?” Young said, loud enough for Ali to hear. “Here’s the guy that saved his ass against Liston, stole the fight for him against Cooper, and he tells him to shut up. What a jerk!” Ali moved toward the ropes, looked down and said: “I can treat you even worse.” Young asked him if he was going to fire Angelo. “How can I fire him?” Ali shot back. “He’s blacker than me.”

  Nothing, though, caught his crudity at the time more than his steady treatment of the giant Mel Turnbow, a gentle sparring partner, a man of slow gait and even slower speech. Ali was usually good with his gym men. He paid well, bought them clothes when they seemed in need, and he never worked them over in the sessions. “I feel sorry for Turnbow,” Dundee said. Turnbow seemed to bring out a cruel streak in Ali. Was it because he was a non-Muslim? Not likely; there were others like Jimmy Ellis, though harassed by the Muslims, who never felt the champ’s sting. Or, was it because he despised being around a backward black who disturbed his vision of his race? Ali once went down under a Turnbow barrage. He wobbled to his feet, went down again, this time with his eyes shut and his mouth open. Turnbow stood there, confused and embarrassed. Having been faking, Ali reached out and grabbed Turnbow and spilled him to the canvas while the crowd laughed. From then on, day by day, Ali would torment and batter the giant. A camp member explained: “Mel lives back there with the rest of us. But he doesn’t take part in anything. He doesn’t look at the television with Ali. He doesn’t laugh at Ali’s jokes or tell him how great he is. He just sits and eats, and never talks. And this is the one thing that bugs the champ. Being ignored. He’ll dislike anybody he thinks is ignoring him.”

  The plane still cruised above the clouds. If air travel didn’t scare him anymore, what did?

  He thought for a moment and said: “Dead people. I touched one once. So cold. Besides, they become ghosts. They don’t know where they are, see. So if you see them and they like you, then they’re with you forever. Gives me the creeps. Don’t it scare you? I know it does.”

  “Some talk right now. Dead people. Wouldn’t take much to join them.”

  “You’re right there,” he said. “The pilot could have a hangover.” He couldn’t resist the needle. “Somebody didn’t do a job on the engine. Bye-bye.”

  “I wish I knew some jokes.”

  “Just like fighting,” he said. “Don’t take much. Those little veins snake in ya head go pop, and that’s all she wrote, ain’t it? Scary. This is goin’ to be my last fight. I’m tired of it all, worn out. Too much danger, ain’t it? It’s always been there in my head.” He pondered, then said: “I got sixteen million in fights lined up after this one. Can you imagine?”

  This instant contradiction, quitting in one breath, looking toward the money in the other, drove some reporters wild: it made him seem transparently false, and a challenge to their own sustained interest in him. Ali’s last real critic left was Dick Young, for most of the veterans had given up trying to explain him, and the majority of new ones were deep into hero worship. Young was a tough conservative, a conscientious reporter who was not timid with opinion. The Muslims believed he was racist; Ali never thought so, sort of liked him as the last contrarian in the midst of all the treacle ladled on him, and he treated him convivially throughout. Ali liked writers and reporters who dueled with him, they snapped him out of a chronic boredom that could reveal itself in a flash. Young kept him awake; there was so much he disliked about Ali, let alone the growing idea that he was transcendental and a social martyr.

  “He insults the little intelligence I have,” Young said. He saw him as a panhandler, a liar, and a moral cheat. The first was because Ali used to like to put the touch on reporters for five and ten dollars when they made rounds with him, especially during exile. It was viewed as Ali’s exercise in “getting over.” Whites were to be tricked, to be misled, and a few bucks were part of some pallid, snickering little game played by him and the Muslims. Yet Ali seldom carried a wallet. Money as a concept never fastened unless it was in orbital sums: it was ephemeral, uncelestial, just paper. A moral cheat? To Young, Ali broke every tenet of real Muslim law, from whoring to being a truant at Temple service; he was a religious fake who abdicated his personal worth to the Black Muslims for their expediency and draft evasion, therefore counterfeit down to his socks. Was he sincere in faith? Who knows; in retirement he would prove to be a zealot.

  As for being a liar, that has too much of a clinical whiff to it. Young just couldn’t bear his flashing change of mind on almost everything, it made him untrustworthy, his quotes useless unless you were a lazy slave to his dumb speechifying, and there were many reporters of tha
t type. In defense, it should be said that clarity of word or theme was as foreign to Ali as the understanding of ultra-slow light pulse. He liked intrigue, mystery, to keep the mist-blowing machine functioning on the set. No true liar could have been so indifferent to technique. He was simply a spin doctor without an examining room. Any idea or thought heard from others, if it seized his attention, was put in service without the slightest rumination. It was not insignificant that Elijah had told Herbert: “Take care of him. Never leave Ali’s side. He’ll follow the last person to have his ear.” And, too, Ali had a show to keep going, often with a threadbare script through which he staggered to hit his stage marks. With a high fever, Norman Mailer judged him to be America’s greatest wit, an observation that—after the first time around—could have only been produced by a deranged funny bone or an avidity for comic cant.

  He was a vamp who needed deep vats of energy to locate his muse, and he sucked it up from wherever it flowed, sometimes from the criticism of writers like Young, sometimes from within his own camp, where he would create stick-figure opposition in people like Turnbow for a while, more often in Bundini Brown, whom he would slap on any pretext or thinly perceived slight. Though others close to him liked to deny its presence as if it would compromise his stature and natural talents, fear or insecurity, we know from Joe Martin and Archie Moore, was never far from him. Even Bundini once said: “That meanness is just fear, that’s all, just another tool for him.” It helped him acquire a cutting edge that was not naturally there.