Ghosts of Manila

by Mark Kram

  To that end, he also was merciless with opponents, whom he humiliated, personalized into caricatures. Ali’s first reaction to any fighter was an instant, Holmsian visual once-over. The shape of a nose, a jawline, a tic or a mannerism, a way of speaking were amplified by him, the way many children do in a schoolyard. He created full figures, plopping on physical or mental defects, and he’d try to occupy their minds, tried to relate to them viscerally. The invasion of the other man gave him bolts of vitality from the attention it provoked, shifted the fear to another, helped him to care about the dulling repetition of training, and allowed him to jack up his low-watt attention for the hunt. In the first period of his work, it all rushed out with transparent malice, though he tried to deflect it by saying it was for the box office. In the second half, the compulsion to denigrate, except again for Joe Frazier, made him sound like a drunk who knew only one song; the habit had diluted into a weak tactic that drove smart pencils to stop taking notes. But TV cameras kept grinding; the image on the screen was all they wanted, the one-groove recording, long in the tooth, was presented as arresting news.

  “Why do you pick on black fighters?” he was asked as the jet slogged on to Manila.

  “I pick on everybody,” he said.

  “No you don’t. You didn’t have much to say about George Chuvalo, Jerry Quarry.”

  “They behaved themselves,” he said.

  “All right, I’ll give you Sonny Liston. He was open season. But Patterson, Ernie Terrell, what did they do for you to go nuts? You’re brutal with Frazier.”

  “They called me by my slave name, Clay,” he said. “That’s why I mussed them up so bad.”

  “Only after you disrespected them so much.” There was silence. “Maybe you had to show them you were the Muslim superman, the cream of the race, not just another get-along black like the rest.”

  “We’re stronger, for sure,” he said. “We let you honkies know where you stand, and the blacks with you.”

  “Why’s Frazier so personal to you? Give him a break. He’s just out there earning a buck. Never said he was the greatest anything.”

  “I don’t hate Frazier,” he said. “But I don’t like him, either. He’s got an idea he’s my equal.” Did Frazier scare him? “Not fear fear. Only ’cause he ain’t normal. That bothers me. Man takes punches to the head like him can’t be normal. Too stupid to be normal. Look at my face. I’m not stupid. I look normal. I’m way too smart for an animal like him. Nobody wants a champ like him.”

  “So why fight him again? For the money?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But mostly ’cause I got to.”

  “Herbert?”

  “No. Just me, it’s personal,” he said, sliding out of the seat and saying with a smile: “Say your prayers the rest of the way. Listen, ya hear that knock in the engine?” He stayed quiet, eyes open, then said: “Don’t worry. You’re gonna be all right.”

  To his credit, the show was always secondary to his personal evolution as a fighter. Without being really tested, pushed to the brink, a champion could never be true or great. He was in the ring with history, measuring himself against Louis, Marciano, and Sugar Ray. What he wanted were masterpieces so effulgent that relativity could not exist. The heavyweight ranks had been barren of such offerings. A champion could consider himself lucky if he ever found one opponent who could make him soar to a new, dramatic level; up to Frazier 1, Ali had been sorely lacking in authentic challenge. Louis had had his Schmeling, Marciano had had Ezzard Charles and Jersey Joe Walcott, Jack Dempsey had had Gene Tunney, and even Patterson was taken to the edge several times by Ingemar Johanssen, all dramatic successes that defined the champion. Louis and Marciano had, too, an added appeal that reinforced their pedigrees. They were extremely vulnerable, risk was palpable. Louis’s weakness was an early-round proneness to a right hand by even journeymen punchers. The open-faced Rocky was always in jeopardy; next to seeing a knockdown, the fight crowd thrills at nothing more than seeing a man get up. Rocky’s face was also irresistible, it was cinematic, meaning it was usually a mess. In many fights, he had to contend with bad cuts. Against Charles, he took the worst cut in ring history, a deep excavation in the middle of his nose, the probable work of a chain saw.

  Part of Ali’s problem, aside from his defaming rhetoric and scorn of other fighters, was the lack of appreciation for his style; it hadn’t been seen before. He insolently used his head with micrometer precision to confound and dissemble the other man’s poise and confidence. Getting to it was hard labor, for you had to wade through three kinds of jabs, and if you got to the head it wasn’t there. The three jabs, as quick as light, were the probe, the irritant and point-builder on scorecards, and the trip-hammer straight left, which, seen close up, snapped a head nearly off and sent waves of shock down through the spinal column. Zora Folley had it right: “That big jab goes right to your feet, makes ’em just about cry.” Legs seldom planted, his head in constant orbit, it was a wonder how he could produce such hand speed, such complex and never awkward punching designs. The most striking part of his game was his flawless sense of ring geometry, of time and space; for each space he knew the required move and tiny fractions of time needed to move in and out of a punching window. He reminded of what drummers call a “far-apart” roll that started on time, disintegrated, then would be there at the end. Or better yet, picture Jimi Hendrix working on his sound alone in a men’s room, as he often did, those notes bouncing off the tiles, the electric storm of echo; Ali in the ring was the sound of Jimi Hendrix.

  In the gym once, the ballet master Balanchine marveled at the use of his legs, his speed. Fans didn’t; he was not what big men should be about. Legs nullified drama, hence vulnerability. He was not a dangerous fighter who portended a kind of higher malevolence that gives a rush to the standard voyeurs. His style was resisted. Art was for the lower weights, the classy little guys who never seemed to be delivering hurt on TV. Americans were a big people, they wanted considerable bang for their dollar or time. Ali at the time was too far ahead of ring consciousness—and available talent. Once, while doing a piece on the Roman Colosseum, I had occasion to talk to Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, and while commenting about theater the subject somehow landed on Ali.

  Moravia said he knew nothing about boxing, but he did know a bit about theater. He looked upon Ali as he would a Picasso. “He forces you to see in a new way,” he said. “That is one way how I see him. The other is the art of theater. Here, I have a problem. I see in him una falta de genio (fault of genius).” Which I took to mean a lack of temper, that it was too easy for Ali. “A fight should have tension, no,” he continued. “He is an action writer in his own theater. But he clowns, he fools with your patience. I want to leave the theater. He won’t let you have tension, struggle. He makes the funny faces, lounges in the ring. He baffles. Perhaps, he is bored with his own text. Or his characters, the other fighters, bore him.” He needed a hard, serious man to put him in relief, to put him at risk; without it, a fight is pantomime, drama buckles.

  Ali certainly understood the value of tension and suspense. His head was full of plot lines, from predictions to constant foreshadowing before a fight. He needed one to be a clear movie in his mind, the kind where people were taken to the edge, held there, and released by his immense command. So far he had not been able to get it right; people were talking in the seats and throwing popcorn at the screen. The outcomes were often muddled, his work too eccentric with an emotional immaturity that cost him credibility, and there was too much disfiguring afterburn of too many bouts. Five fights before the halfway mark of his career lit up his problem.

  For the press, Charles Sonny Liston was a total abyss. Fall into it, and you would not hit one solid feeling on the way down. Having been in his shadow many times, once having been rocketed by him into a Denver snowbank for questioning his age, I grew to like him, not because he was misunderstood, but because he was like an anthropological treasure. His rap sheet stopped short of homicide. It covered
muggings, stickups, muscling for St. Louis crime bosses, and suspicion of dragging beat cops into alleys and working them over. “They never liked me in that town,” Sonny once said; what a card. One black cop, a Detective Sergeant Reddick, wanted to take him downstairs and make him “fit only for Decoration Day.” Sonny said: “Yeah, Cap’n, a good idea.”

  One of twenty-five children of a sharecropper who knocked him around like a volleyball, Sonny ended up being given ten years in Jeff City. “He didn’t mind it,” said Lou Anonimo, a fellow inmate. “An awful place. But Sonny almost liked it. He liked his bath. He learned to box. He couldn’t read or write. He was just a suspicious human bein’ with an alligator voice.” One group he despised and avoided were the Black Muslims. Crime packs were not to his liking, groups were “crazy-crazy,” unpredictable, and jailhouse Muslims were quick, psychotic killers to him; they spooked him. When he rose in boxing, mobbed up to his sullen eyes, Sonny scoped the young Clay as just a big-mouthed, spoiled kid, the kind they “motha whip every day in prison.” His only interests in life were money and his sweet wife Geraldine, who treated him like a naughty child, or a recuperating, blanketed English soldier back from the front, taking the air on a seacoast. “Now, Charles,” she’d say, “don’t catch a chill today.”

  What a singular character Sonny was. When he lived in Denver, a priest named Father Murphy befriended and counseled him. He drew this conclusion: “I don’t know about Clay. Floyd Patterson wants to be reborn. Sonny just wants to be born. Period.” Before he was kicked out of Philly, he went to his manager, George Katz (behind him the goniff Blinky Palermo), for advice. The optimist told him: “Be nice, Sonny. It’s nice to be nice.” His lawyer Morton Witkin once wanted to see how long Sonny could sit without speaking. Witkin threw his hands up after forty-five minutes and said: “All right, what’s on your mind?” Sonny walked out.

  An incident that is still vivid is when Joe Flaherty, doing a piece for Life, and I were with him in Los Angeles. A young hippie approached his Cadillac, gave Sonny a medal with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph scratched on it. “Those cats are right,” Sonny said. “Don’t worry about a fuckin’ thing in the world.” We glided past the presidential campaign headquarters of Robert Kennedy. What did he want to be president for, Sonny wondered, with all that money? What would Sonny do with such a fortune? He leaned back and dwelt upon the question, Rodin’s thinker. “I’d buy me the finest pussy in the United States of America.” He cut short his reverie, by now with a dreamy look, and Charles Sonny absently thumb-flicked Jesus, Mary, and Joseph into flight formation on Wilshire Boulevard.

  No point in lingering on Liston 2 with Clay, unless you have a facility with Egyptian glyphs. Clay scratched a right hand to Sonny’s head, a light cuff if anything, not a punch that would cause him to drop like a bale of cotton almost instantly in the first round. Clay stood over him, angrily motioning for him to get up. Why not? This was the second time his play had closed in the bushes, and it brought shouts from eager reformers in Washington. People have gone cross-eyed looking for that punch on film; there is none unless you, in the interest of Ali’s legend, desperately want to see one. Liston 1 is the fight for the magnifier. It should have been the frontispiece to his greatness, the first unimpeachable challenge to his throne; it wasn’t.

  No one gave Clay a shot against Liston in Miami on February 25, 1964; he was a 7–1 dog. Overnight, Sonny became America’s cop, an idea that didn’t sit too well with him. “Sheeee-it,” he said. “I’m nobody’s good guy.” Even the fight establishment wanted Sonny to win. Clay and the Muslims would be impossible in deals. So what if Sonny was a blight? Horror plays well at the box office, too. What does Clay know about Sonny? He knew he had a crack-of-doom right hand and was no sloth on his feet. He also knew he was a mob favorite. What did Sonny know? Those Muslims again. “You see any Moooslems,” Sonny asked Willie Reddish just back from Clay’s dressing room. “You see any guys with bullet heads, dark suits?” An S.I. colleague, Bud Shrake, would later see Sonny move toward the ring with “real tears in his eyes.” There had been demented Clay psychodramas at the weigh-in (tactical con, said Muslims and entourage, “absolute fear,” remembered Sugar Ray). While dressing, Clay’s eyes stayed fixed on the water bottle; he feared being poisoned. Rudy (later Rahman) was in charge of the water. Abruptly, Clay went over, emptied the bottle.

  In the ring, Sonny was all wasted energy, stumbling moves and wild swings, not the fighter who pawed away a jab, then clubbed home a right hand; Clay jabbed him with impunity, opening a cut on Sonny’s cheek. Chaos broke out in Clay’s corner after the fifth. He was shouting that he’d been poisoned, “I’m blind!” Muslims streamed into the corner, got in Dundee’s way. Near forfeiture, the little Dundee hurled Clay toward the center of the ring. Sweat, rosin, or liniment had gotten in Clay’s eyes. With Sonny uncharacteristically tentative in his pursuit, Clay’s vision cleared. After the seventh, Sonny did not answer the bell, claiming a pulled muscle in his shoulder. The promise had been Theseus against the Minotaur. What a dreary conclusion: Liston, of all people, quitting, and Clay trying to quit.

  Cries of fix were loud. Sonny and the mob had gone for the price. Was it so? Why was Liston tearing up, as seen by a good reporter like Shrake? Had he received the word? We are asked to believe that Sonny got old in a snap, was not the fighter George Foreman saw when he worked as a sparring mate at the end of Sonny’s career: “He was the only fighter who ever, ever, stopped me consistently in my tracks with one punch, backed me up like a sports car.” Sonny always refused to talk about the Miami fight. He would talk about Liston 2, saying: “Yeah, I sit down for that one. It weren’t Clay. It was them. The Moooslems. I got word, inside stuff, they were going to kill me.” Ali would never be sure if he had met the real Liston. “The Liston fights,” he said once, “were beeeeg, and he made them little, and me along with them.” Was Sonny trying to win? “If he wasn’t,” Ali said, “he’s a better actor than me.” Sonny Liston went out on a suspicious drug overdose. The theory was that he went into the drug trade, and the sophistication of that calling had been too much for him; one can almost see him trying to discern the higher calculus of crime. On a rainy morning in January 1971 with Geraldine riding point, her unruly Charles was rolled down the Strip in front of the Vegas casinos, and there wasn’t a wet eye in all of Christendom.

  Ali surveyed the field and picked Floyd Patterson to be next, once the youngest heavyweight champ in history before Clay, a two-time king of the ranks. Sonny’s attitude had lure, Floyd’s totally enveloped. In today’s TV currency, a couple of funny lines, a passing shtick, a new hairdo, an esoteric hobby turns an athlete into a priceless wit of prized individuality. But Floyd, like Sonny, was the real thing. No stranger or more interesting figure ever worked the landscape of sports; it followed that he had been discovered by the mystic Cus D’Amato, who said he often floated out-of-body on the ceiling. There was something vulpine about Floyd, and it might be said that he had the only careerist approach in boxing annals along with Archie Moore. He was dead set on lasting. While the fans and critics would kick him like a sad-eyed mutt one month and then join him the next in his personal salvation (boxing was spiritual to him), there was always the sense of Floyd sitting in an armchair and squinting through pince-nez at ring fluctuations.

  To sit and talk with him was a delight, though at times there were colliding emotions; you either wanted to put your arm around him or give him a therapeutic slap in the face. In a moment, you were adrift in the middle of a Russian novel, in a Chekhovian dacha, oppressive heat, the taste of bitter tea, in the middle of souls looking for clarity in a suffusion of grayness. Let’s pass on his childhood, it could make you cry. Leave it with adolescent Floyd slashing an X through his picture and telling his mother: “I don’t like him.” Big names, including Frank Sinatra, were drawn to him. Liberals adored him, crowned him a man of brains and race vision. His pluck was inspiring, a fighter, like a skilled repairman trying to build a skyscraper. His instant shame
baffled. After a title match, he always had two cars waiting, the victory car pointed to his hotel, the defeat car pointed out of town; he was partial to disguises.

  Physically, Floyd, lithe and small, didn’t look like a heavyweight at all. There was no promise of consequence. He fought out of D’Amato’s “peekaboo” style, gloves nearly shielding his eyes, had superb hand speed and cheap crockery for a jaw. He had the eyes of a safecracker with no nerve; quite the contrary, though. He had a stiff billow of kinky hair that seemed pasted down on his forehead. Even after winning, he could be a pointillist of damage done; no bruise, scrape, ache would escape detailed amplification. The press loved him. Floyd might be the lost child of Freud, but he dealt in specifics of the grim trade. Clay was purely thin artifice, a windy fanatic for whom boxing came second, a senseless provocateur. Clay had hand-carried a bag of carrots to Floyd and hanged the tag of “Rabbit” on him. Sinatra called Floyd to his suite. “He told me I could win,” Floyd said, “had to win. The whole country was counting on me.”

  Held in Vegas, the title fight would be the most politically exclamatory of Ali’s career. “The kid was never the same after Floyd,” Dundee said, tapping his head. “The pressure got bigger and bigger. The fun was gone.” That night, Clay looked down at the press and said: “Watch closely. I’m gonna show you real punishment.” To show his superiority, Clay did not throw a single punch in the first round. He then picked up the beat, strafing Floyd with straight lefts. He began to taunt: “Come on America, come on white America!” He did what he pleased. Floyd seemed impaired, something was wrong. He was decked in the sixth, got up quickly. After the seventh, his trainer hugged and lifted him to ease the pain in Floyd’s back. He went on gamely, and the fight turned quickly into a spectacle of cruelty, nastiness being applied to an invalid. “Get him out of there!” Dundee screamed, sensing the crowd’s anger. It wasn’t stopped until the twelfth, with Floyd, suffering mightily from the back pain, leaving the ring draped over his seconds.