Ghosts of Manila

by Mark Kram

  “I think it’s over, Joe,” Yank said. “Too much damage. I don’t want to play with your life. You shouldn’t either. You got a nice family.”

  “I gotta hear this from you, too?” Joe said. “That’s all I hear at home from Florence.”

  “Joe, you got enough money,” Yank said. “Look at me. Don’t turn away. You got enough money. Damn it, give it up. What’s to gain?”

  “I’m world champ,” Joe said. “You think I’m gonna walk just like that? All the work and sweat. Climb a mountain this high, pain all the way, and come down by plane. You hittin’ that juice you used to make?”

  “I’m not gonna be around forever.”

  “You wanna walk then? Walk out on me?” He thought for a second. “You sick?”

  “Naaaah, just some high blood.”

  “You takin’ the medicine? Take the pills!”

  “When I think of the shit…” Yank said.

  “Take it every day,” Joe said. “We’ll be all right, Yank. I’m in good shape. Just keep takin’ them pills. Promise, Yank?”

  “Yeah, cocksucker,” Yank said.

  Futch was puzzled by Yank’s diminishing zest for life, but he agreed about Joe. “He had lost something,” Futch said. “Ken Norton had worked with Joe for three years, and Joe always handled him, and here in Jamaica Norton was taking it to him. So I told him, ‘Ken, you’re not working with him anymore. Have a nice vacation here.’” Norton said: “He seems to have lost his drive.” Eddie nodded, for there was no intensity in Joe. Away from the gray-iron grasp of the gym and weather in Philly, he had been lulled by the soothing balm of the island. “The atmosphere,” Eddie said, “was one big party and distraction. I changed what I could.” He also had an eye on Durham. “For the last year,” Eddie said, “he’d say time after time…‘Eddie, if something happens to me, promise you’ll take over Joe. Look after him.’ I told him that he was just a young man, about fifty-two, and that I was sixty-three.”

  Ali’s fight with Joe Bugner, from England, was of considerable interest because he was now open about his dealings with women. It would be a desultory victory over the distance, significant only in that Ali had a floor full of women at his Vegas hotel the night before. It was 3 A. M. when Harold Conrad came down to the casino, shaking his head and saying, “I don’t know how he does it. He’s a cum freak.” Two nights before Norton III—a fight Ali squeaked by in a decision that angered many—he seemed to break a record of sorts when he bedded five women to win a bet. Sex was once demonized in the ring. When fighters trained near woods—hard for women to reach—managers used to check for footprints after fresh snow overnight. Fearing arousal, the handlers looked at sex talk not only as dangerous in camp, but also as subversive. The sexual act was tantamount to Samson losing his locks; worse, it mellowed out the primitive.

  After his loss to Foreman, Frazier also took on the earnest Bugner, a one-man rehabilitative stop for name fighters. Frazier had just enough to win against a heavy that traversed the ring like a trolley with scheduled stops. Yank brought up retirement again. “Damn it, Yank,” Joe said, “you too nervous. I see your eyes every day, and they say quit. Let me be. Just stay on your medicine. I’m worryin’ more about you than fightin’.” Back in South Carolina in August of 1973, Joe was working on his vast spread that resembled a plantation when he got the news. Yank was down with a stroke, and dying. He raced his Harley to Charleston, took a plane to Philly, but he was too late. As Red Smith wrote: “Those organ tones are still.” Fighters don’t find point men like Yank, who preferred the high road but, if he had to, wouldn’t back down from a game of chicken on the low road. Except for formal learning and no interest, he had the stuff to be a first-rate politician.

  “Eddie,” Joe called Futch. “He’s gone. What are we gonna do?” Eddie had been the genius behind Yank, the wizard of tactics and preparation; not even Joe was aware of how deep was his contribution. Never wanting to court press favor or shorten Yank’s shadow in any way, Eddie whispered to Yank, who passed it on to Joe. Yank took the heat and the praise and loved being out front just a shade more than the sound of his voice, a velvet treble that he sharpened with work on tape. Critics faulted Durham for Joe’s lack of evolution, for seeming to be the same fighter who first walked into the gym. That overlooked the obvious, that he was set in a mold, performed to his body type, endomorphic, and could never be other than he was. Durham straightened out his footwork, sharpened his natural rhythm, and built him into a windmill volume puncher. Without light legs and with a disposition for battle, an intractable aggressor without fear, he could have been ruined so easily in lesser hands. Joe was stunned by his passing. He stood over his body, saying: “Yank, Yank, I told you to take the medicine.” As an afterthought he added their term of endearment: “Cocksucker.” An incident later underscored their bond. After the Mathis fight, they each bought gold-plated guns, not for protection, but as a symbol between them. After Yank died, Joe’s bodyguard Tom Payne showed up with the same gun; he had married Yank’s widow. “Where you get that?” Joe asked, and then he fired Payne.

  Cloverlay immediately put Futch in charge, with no complaint from Joe. He was a marked contrast from Yank, reserved, soft-spoken, and a ring scholar. His two interests were keeping fit and a love for the work of nineteenth-century poets that he had studied over a lifetime. He had begun as a lightweight in Detroit, became close to Joe Louis, who insisted that Eddie be a sparring partner because of his speed and cleverness. A heart ailment eventually ended Eddie’s career, not his work with fighters. Perhaps, because Ali had passed Louis in memory or because he really did see what others didn’t (including me), he broke Ali down thusly, his view differing from popular analysis: “You may not believe it, but there’s a lot of things Ali can’t do. He throws a sub par uppercut. His left hook is adequate, not that great, mainly because of his eighty-two-inch reach. He wants no part of inside fighting. On the plus side, his speed is remarkable for a heavyweight, and he is difficult to corner. He’s bold, and not afraid to change his game in a blink. His chin and heart are absolutely superb. Underestimate them and you’re in harm’s way. His jab and straight left are punishing.”

  Ali knew how smart Eddie was and often tried to lure him into his camp, motivated, perhaps to deprive Frazier or to have the security of Eddie’s presence. Why else? He surely wouldn’t have listened to him.

  As the return bout with Frazier approached, Ali had finally vacated the Fifth St. Gym in Miami for the backwoods atmosphere of Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, a seventy-two-acre spread for which he paid $200,000. Here, Ali the set-director emerged to a new, expensive level. A growing maturity, he thought, demanded a more serious man. The camp reflected to what lengths Ali would go to keep his mind fresh and interested, how deeply he could sink into a role. The production costs for this were heavy. He was a one-man economic boom in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. A three-hundred-foot artesian well was drilled, builders swarmed over the place, and antique dealers, breathing heavily in anticipation, made trip after trip up to his mountain outpost. The place became sort of a rustic salon for local merchants.

  Valid and old were two words that Ali would drop in a second. The camp had two bunkhouses for his retainers, his own cabin, a good gym, and a mess hall run by his aunt Coretta, all of them made with logs. There were no benches outside. “I decided they’re not valid,” he said. “I want my people to sit on rocks and logs, real logs.” One of his favorite items was an antique quarry wagon. “Look at that,” he said. “Steel! Wood! Soooo strong. It’s worked soooo hard.” Another was an 1896 bell (cost, $2,500) that he took joy in ringing each morning at 4:30, rousting the malingerers out of bed as he started his roadwork of four miles, cutting through the lit eyes of possums and rabbits. “It’s a valid bell, isn’t it?” he often asked. Ali’s log house was darker than the other buildings. A big boulder, painted very black, stood in front of it, and its white lettering read: JACK JOHNSON. Joe Louis had one on the grounds too, thirty-five tons of black granite
, so did Sugar Ray, and there was thirty-five tons of Rocky Marciano sandstone. “My father,” Ali explained, “painted the names.” There was even a monument to Sonny Liston.

  Cash had also painted a sign of kitchen rules for Coretta: “IF YOU must stick your finger in something stick it in the garbage disposal. DON’ T criticize the coffee you may be old and weak yourself some day. PLEASE WAITE Rome wasn’t burnt in a day and it takes awhile to burn a roaste.” Ali searched for an anchor here, far away from the usual training sites of hotels with chandeliers, pretty women, and heavy carpeting where “you get soft.” After roadwork, on some days, he’d cut down trees, eighty-five in all since he had been up there, rather proud that he had busted one ax and dulled five others. “I’m borrowin’ my strength from the trees,” he said. A curious resident was Gypsy Joe Harris, who was on hard times. Was he tutoring Ali about his pal, Joe?

  “He don’t ask, never,” Gypsy said. “He knows Joe like a book.”

  “How come you’re here?”

  “He gives me something to eat and a warm place to sleep. Ali’s good that way. Knows how to help.”

  And Joe?

  “I’m in and out with Smoke,” Gypsy said. “I don’t know why.”

  Ali and the members of his camp sat by kerosene lamps at night, amusing each other, talking about how right the move had been from the smog of Miami. “All them cars,” one said, “cause all that smog.” Ali said: “Is that right? Cars cause smog?” One day he had a visitor named Tombs, an undertaker from Atlanta. He wanted Ali to make an appearance for Ralph Abernathy, the movement heir to MLK, now in choppy straits. “He can’t even pay the phone bills,” Tombs said. “Well, you know how Ralph is.” Ali nodded, but preferred talking about undertaking. He asked: “Don’t you ever get scared working with all those dead people?” Tombs said he was an old hand, then got on the subject of how beautiful black was, especially black women. “Not all of ’em,” Ali said. “Some of them not so fine.” In this period, Ali was heavily into UFOlogy and spent some nights looking endlessly up at the clear, sparkling sky.

  “I saw the Mothership last night,” Ali said one day. “Don’t go making any reservations. Black folks only. They carry three bombs. Nothing like we got. Their bombs blow a hole in the earth miles deep. It’s nothing we can fight or shoot at. They’re fast, too. Move by vibrations. Move 39,000 miles an hour. The Mothership has thousands of smaller ships.”

  “They’ve been seeing UFOs for centuries,” I said.

  “Elijah Muhammad discovered them forty-two years ago,” Ali said. “Give him credit for once. He’s sooo smart. Them others were fakes. Not the Mothership. I saw it.”

  One night there was a faraway barking of dogs. Ali jumped to his feet, saying: “They’re here!” A security firm that specialized in attack dogs was bringing some to Ali, who planned to use them to get himself mentally ready for Frazier. “After their attacks, meeting them head-on,” he said, “it knocks a lot of fear outta you. When a man starts out steadfast, he puts the fear into the other man, and it weakens him. I’m going to grab these dogs, throw them around, rassle with them.” Three German shepherds were brought into one corner of the ring. In the other, Ali was fitted with a protective sleeve, and in the other hand he had a plastic bat. One dog after another, teeth bared and snarling, raced and leaped toward Ali, tearing his sleeve to shreds, as he screamed incoherently: “Joe Frazuh! Joe Frazuh!” The empty gym had the sound of wolves fighting over the carcass of an elk. An odd quiet then fell over the gym, with the dogs panting in one corner, and Ali saying: “Wow!” Leave it to Ali to find such an unusual mind-over-matter tool to build confidence.

  Ali soon left the silence and snow of Deer Lake for Manhattan, where he was to appear with Joe and Howard Cosell. He had appeared with Frazier earlier on The Dick Cavett Show, a meeting in which Joe kept silent as Ali repeatedly called him “ignorant.” Futch did not want Joe to see Ali again and only agreed because Cosell promised (“on my heart, Eddie”) to sit between the pair. If he had a heart, it was as small as the olives in his tall martinis that stood like sentinels in front of him as he held court and rubbernecked the room for notice. He was a tinhorn poseur, a formerly dismissable amoeba in the lawyer chain who found TV and one day would think he was worthy of being a senator. Those who came after him would imitate and amplify his cheap theatrics, then liken him to the Edward R. Murrow of sports. He became the pioneer for their license to break through their puffed hair and crayon content and to be real journalists. A model who, with faux outrage and oily, uninformed syntax, could not lay the slightest claim to even the more base rudiments of the craft.

  Guess where Joe and Ali sat? Right next to each other, making it a live wire of sorry possibility. Joe, still angry about the Cavett show, while they were watching Ali’s jaw swell on film, said: “That’s what he went to the hospital for.”

  Ali parried: “I went to the hospital for ten minutes. You went for a month.”

  “I was resting,” Frazier said.

  Ali responded: “That shows how dumb you are. People don’t go to a hospital to rest. See how ignorant you are?”

  Frazier erupted. “I’m tired of you calling me ignorant all the time. I’m not ignorant. Stand up, man!”

  Up on his feet and glowering down at Ali, Joe said again: “Stand up!” Ali jumped up and tried to pin his shoulders back. They fell to the floor, each trying to gain a wrestling hold. Handlers, shouting at each other, pried them loose. “I had to get up,” Ali said. “The way he was standing up there it looked like he would break my jaw.” Joe, in a fury, left the set. Futch went to Cosell, who had his “television moment”—in other words one in which he would be the star, be talked about, be the presenter of unsuspected incident and drama. “You promised,” Futch told Cosell. “You are a corrupt individual, do you know that?” Eddie turned away abruptly, with Cosell claiming his separation from culpability, the canned words of a small-time eviction lawyer.

  When fight night arrived, there was a tentative expectancy in the big crowd, not like the first fight, when excitement filled the air with the smell of cordite. There was no title at stake here. Ali and Frazier had both lost, might even be on the cusp of disintegration as fighters; the “showdown” element was diminished. Their animus was sensed, though few knew the depth to which it had gone. There was the usual parade of stars, Wall Street hotshots, and the Harlem superflies dressed in ermine and rose-pink coats of rabbit fur, all of them troubadouring loyalists of Ali. Futch was certain he had renewed the energy in Frazier, got him back somewhat on the third rail of his track, had punctured the bubble of confusion that had enclosed him, placed there by Yank’s and Florence’s steady petitions for retirement. The residual thrill of their first fight accompanied them to their corners.

  They had a new referee in this one, Tony Perez, and it would prove calamitous for both, particularly Frazier. Ali came out strong again, with an economy to his moves, a fluidity to his punches. He drove Joe back on his heels and to the ropes in the second with a lead right. Joe was in trouble, then Perez, thinking he heard the bell, interrupted the action, thus giving Joe time to recover. Frazier groped and floundered through the first four rounds, appeared frustrated and unable to sustain aggression, his punching volume. A major reason for this was Perez’s action; he was allowing Ali to hold Joe around the neck. “You gotta stop this,” Futch told Perez, who said he would. By the middle rounds, Ali was slapping and straying aimlessly to the ropes, a sign of a tired fighter. Joe made his run in the eighth and ninth with some solid work, but to no avail. By holding him at every turn, Ali never let him wheel out his gunnery. No question who would get the decision. Ali, who worked largely to Bundini’s hint earlier at camp: “Champ ain’t gonna try to hose him down this time. He’s gonna pick the backdoor lock.”

  Call it ring generalship, or sly craft, or Ali making good use of what he had left. But except for bursts of excellence here and there from each, it was a referee’s fight. Perez, by giving carte blanche to Ali’s plan, h
ad robbed the fight of its drama. Even Emile Griffith, a nonpartisan and former welterweight king, was moved at ringside to keep yelling: “Let go of his head!” Said Futch: “I don’t consider it a loss. Neither does Joe, for certain.” Futch’s anger never surfaced, but each time, ten in all, that he studied the film he grew angrier. Perez, clearly, had placed Joe (who needed space) in irons. Carefully, as if combing a pet for fleas, Futch counted Ali’s stifling “holds,” tallying 133. When Perez later met Futch at a boxing dinner, he asked for Eddie’s support for a Pennsylvania license. Futch said evenly: “I’ll oppose you. Whether you’re incompetent or dishonest, either way, we don’t want you in Pennsylvania.”

  Ali attributed the victory to the “valid strength” of his Deer Lake camp. Nothing had been settled or clarified, only signs that the ravagement of their first fight had taken a sizable carving of flesh from each.

  In the ring, a mere victory is only important to a fighter and the people who bet on him or have an affinity for him. As in no other sport, how one wins is the delineator of claims to true excellence; a string of numbers behind your name, while beautifying, is only agate on the sports page, no guarantee of quality except to imbecilic statistic gnomes. Figures, like bikinis, show more than they reveal. What was the quality of his opponents? Was the big name capable of moving all chips to the center of the table, or there just to put up another digit, prized by marketing people but not by the serious followers of boxing who wanted a tingle, the legitimate prospect of no-exit encounter. Fighters like Jake LaMotta and the two Rockys, Graziano and Marciano, to name just a few of the time, were not from the ring academy, yet were plungers of high and jolting voltage.