by Mark Kram
The sun doesn’t just rise in the Philippines. It shoots up with discouraging abruptness, sends hot spears to the eye. The old man had declared a national holiday for the fight that was to be at 10 A.M. The streets had a disorienting emptiness, where usually there were masses of brightly colored umbrellas and tourists going to Intramuros to photograph the old Spanish fort, still nicked by bullet pings and shell fragments from World War II. It was so quiet that, through imagination, you could hear the cocks crowing on the hot breath from Tondo, home to a half million squatters whose hungry kids often foraged through garbage; could hear the beaten trudge of long gone troops across the bay at Corregidor and Bataan; the murmur of servants at the airy oligarch mansions in Forbes Park; the baby hookers giving up the night at the scented bars of Ermita.
Near fight time, bells rang out from the great and ornate cathedrals of Manila, where inside one of them the stentorian Cardinal Sin must have been meditating on the degeneracy of modern taste and the flamboyance shown with the fiscal purse by that slip of an egoist in Malacanang. Without a quiver of breeze from the South China Sea and in the glazing, jiggling heat, thousands were moving toward the Araneta Colosseum with buckets of sweet and sour adobo (chicken, pork, and rice) and containers of iced San Miguel beer. They came by tinny but dogged jeepneys (decorative, converted American jeeps from the war), known to careen the streets like Ping-Pong balls, they came by kalesa, worn, ribbed small horses and creaking wagons, and by sparkling limos. Those who didn’t have the price (two dollars to two hundred) would sit by the millions in front of old TV sets with drunken pixels. A half hour before the fight, the clamp of eerie silence fell again on the streets.
Packed tightly and sweating, the crowd of 28,000 seemed to vacuum all the air out of the arena, a rather scholarly swarm who recognized breeding in fighting cocks (the sporting preference) as well as in heavyweights. Manilans, so buried in American culture, leaped to the jazzy, insolent Ali, then slowly, perhaps remembering old Spain, swerved to their dolorous roots of the underdog, and half of them concluded that the much put-upon Frazier was more deserving. I oozed into a good seat in the second row, below Ali’s corner, and right behind the sparse pate of Herbert, who had a bottle of mineral water in front of him and a concealed flask of gin. In tropical haberdashery he was ready for the safari distance. But were the fighters? What would the malarial heat and cubits of human sweat that stuck to the wet patch of light like goo do to their power plants of adrenaline? Ferdinand and Imelda, the mother of “my little brown people,” looking a trifle upstaged, took their seats in roomy, studded (no, not with diamonds) monarchial chairs. Ali leaned on the ropes, looked down at Herbert, and said: “Watcha got there, Herbert? Gin! You don’t need any of that. I’m gonna put a whuppin’ on this niggah’s head.” The bell snapped Ali to attention, and he swirled to the center of the ring, his unerring launching zone.
Once more he didn’t disappoint. Arrogant and contemptuous of Joe’s worth, he planned as in their first fight to run the table early. And again for the first three rounds, Joe sought no cover, again too straight in the air, plagued by that old cussed cold motor, and he stayed in the mouth of streaming leather that had the sound of Buddy Rich on drums. Joe’s legs buckled a couple of times in the first and looked unstabilized at periods of the second. “He won’t call you Clay anymore!” Bundini boomed. With his head jerking up, Joe was seeing more of the arena rafters than Ali. He was being tagged by back-to-back lead right hands, a sin of damnation in the moldy papyrus of the ring. I surveyed the Marcoses to see if they were pleased at getting their money’s worth. The little pocket gun seemed dour; Imelda, with a languid wave of her fan to keep the mascara stiff, was as cool as if she were taking tea on the palace balcony. In front, Herbert released a cocky laugh and stayed on the mineral water; some people never learned a thing about Frazier.
A departure in tone showed up in the fourth. Joe’s motor was moving him into new terrain. Ali drew blood from Frazier’s mouth with another lead right, and Joe tossed his head like a balky horse as he kept snorting and rolling in closer, ever so closer. Joe Flaherty, not far from me and noting the blood, said: “To the lions, the sticky stuff is nectar.” Ali sensed a change, and at the end of the round he was miffed. “What you got in that niggah head?” he asked, slapping a glove angrily to his chest. “Fuckin’ rock!” He never liked rounds, when he was humming, to be in doubt; an Inca in charge of human sacrifice, upset at bungling the flow of the ritual. In the fifth, no longer tapping dangerously at the surfaces of his game, Joe began to find Ali consistently. The champ, who knew every hatch of escape, couldn’t get free of his own corner, had become a bug that couldn’t lift up out of the honey jar. Angelo’s inkspot eyes were bright with the flicker of concern. “Get back to the center of the ring!” he yelled. “That’s where you gotta live!”
Came the sixth, and here it was, that chilling moment that you always looked for when Joe Frazier was in a fight. Most of his fights had it written large: You can go just so far into that desolate, dark place where his heart pounds, you can waste his perimeters, see his head hanging in the public square, then suddenly there he is, a somber cloud mass blotting out the sun. He stayed on Ali’s chest, the blood from his mouth sticking to the champ’s light crop of pectoral hair. Joe shoveled into his kidneys, his liver, into his heart region, where fighters have observed the pain is excruciating. With nonstop digging, a wild boar going for a truffle, Joe jerked up out of the pit and sent out—Splat! Splat!—two evil left hooks to Ali’s head. Dundee said those hooks were the hardest he had ever seen thrown, and after them, Ali was fighting for his life. Ali’s legs searched for the floor, his body fast becoming one of Baudelaire’s lost balloons. Crying, Bundini embraced him before he got back to the corner. Herbert broke into the gin.
After much of the same in the seventh and eighth, Ali came out for the ninth with some dance, then his body sighed back to the ropes. “The center of the ring!” Dundee screamed. It takes legs and strength to keep the shop open in the middle. He had no taste or vitality for center work. Plopping on the ropes, Ali was panicked and confused, unable to time the velocity of Joe’s punches; one half of you expected Joe to request a scalpel. Between the heat and Frazier, Ali was ready for the launch pad. By the end of the round, Georgie Benton, an assistant trainer, and one of my quislings in the corner, would report later that Joe couldn’t believe his eyes, saying: “What is holdin’ this mothafuckin’ fool up!” The assault continued through the tenth. After the round, Ali sat on his stool, head bowed, nearly doubled up, his eyes rolling with exhaustion. Tears streamed down Bundini’s face as he begged: “Go down to the well once more! The world needs ya, champ!” Ali would later say he almost didn’t make it out for the eleventh, it was the “closest thing to dyin’ I know.” While he sat there, his face a forlorn long shot of Death Valley at the end of an Antonioni lens, Herbert tried to struggle up to the corner, shouting: “You a niggah like him! You gonna quit. Get your ass out there! You hear me?”
Joe trapped him in a corner in the eleventh, and blow after blow carpeted Ali’s face, sending spit popping out of his mouth. “Lawd have mercy!” Bundini shrieked. I had the fight 6-4-1, Frazier. Futch thought it was close, but figured the body attack had been so devastating, the best he had ever seen a heavyweight deliver, that he, too, found himself gasping. No words, he said, could describe the sound of the flamenco on Ali’s body. Agreed; the aural effect was horrendous. Everything had worked for Eddie, from the tightened ropes to the Filipino referee, Carlos Padilla, a brisk workman who whipped the pace to the acceleration of fatality, quickly moving Ali off every time he tried to hold and gulp for air. Going into the twelfth, for Ali the scant chips remaining would have to be shoved to the center of the table like never before. Did he even have any chips? I didn’t think so, not this time, so barren was the visual above me.
When thinking of that precise moment, it’s a sharp reminder never ever to leap to a conclusion too far out in front of the evidence. For in the twel
fth (Great Scott! By George! Great Balls of Fire! Whatever you need to register the incredible), Ali started to part the Red Sea of Frazier’s face, adding a third and fourth wind to William James’s famous psychological theory of second wind in humans. He was back in the center of the apron, sluggish but effective, and determined to win or lose it all in his favorite clime. Ali was stopping Joe with those long lead rights again, not giving him a chance to get off his shots. Now, Joe’s face began to lose definition and, like emerging islands from the sea, massive bumps rose up around his eyes, especially the left. At the end of that round, Joe said in his corner: “I can’t pick up his right.” Was it the result of that blind left eye that he claimed only gave him half a ring his whole career? Who knows?
In the thirteenth, Frazier began to flinch and wince from Ali’s one-note slugging. Joe’s punches seemed to have a gravity drag, and when they did land they brushed lazily against Ali. The champ sent Frazier’s bloody mouthpiece flying seven rows into the audience, and nearly pulled the light switch on him with one chopping shot. “My God!” Angelo screamed, not sure if his eyes were betraying him. “He ain’t got no power.”
The fourteenth was the most savage round of the forty-one Ali and Frazier fought. It brought out guilt (not felt since Joe wrecked the face of Chuvalo) that made one want to seek out the nearest confessional for the expiation of voyeuristic lust. Nine straight right hands smashed into Joe’s left eye, thirty or so in all during the round. When Joe’s left side capsized to the right from the barrage, Ali moved it back into range for his eviscerating right with crisp left hooks, and at the round’s end the referee guided Joe back to his corner. Eddie Futch was a man in thought. “Never fade a guy who’s sneaked his own dice into the game,” Yank liked to say. But…he remembered their fifteenth round in the Garden; did Ali have another round in him? If not Joe might win it. He looked at the swollen, purple slit of Frazier’s eye. In the old days, trainers—not Eddie—would use a razor blade to pop the balloon and release the pressure. Not with this eye; it was beyond help. He remembered, too, the several fighters he had seen killed in the ring. There was a sudden commotion in Joe’s corner. The lover of the Lake Poets was signaling to stop the fight.
“No, no, no!” Joe kept shouting. “You can’t do that to me!”
“Sit down, son,” Eddie said. “It’s over. No one will forget what you did here today.”
With the only strength they had left, both fighters stumbled toward their dressing rooms to a continuous roar. When Ali hit the passage leading toward his room, he was draped around the shoulders of his handlers, his feet dragging, his face one of terminal exhaustion. The first thing they saw in the room was a dead man, part of his head blown away. The cop on duty there had been twirling and fanning his gun in front of a mirror, accidentally offed himself, and now he was in a heap below the mirror, with a Jackson Pollock scatter of blood on it. “Is he dead?” Ali asked, barely able to speak. “A dead man. Get me outta here.” An omen! His handlers moved him to a sofa in another room.
Tears trickled down Joe’s face in the other room. He was being embraced by Eddie when Bob Goodman, the press liaison, entered, asking: “Joe, can you talk to the press?” Joe agreed, and Goodman went to Ali and asked: “Champ, you up to the press?” Bundini went ballistic: “You insane? Look at him!” Ali was a clump on the sofa, his skin a gray color. “Joe’s out there,” Goodman said. With that, Ali raised his head and asked, as if incredulous: “He is?” He added: “Get me my comb.” Ali would be a long time coming out.
After the press conference, Joe retired to a private villa for rest. He had been sleeping for a couple of hours when Georgie Benton entered with a visitor. The room was dark. “Who is it?” Joe asked, lifting his head. “I can’t see. Can’t see. Turn the lights on.” A light was turned on, and he still could not see. Like Ali, he lay there with his veins empty, crushed by a will that had carried him so far and now surely too far. His eyes were iron gates torn up by an explosive. “Man, I hit him with punches that bring down the walls of a city. What held him up?” He lowered his head for some abstract forgiveness. “Goddamn it, when somebody going to understand? It wasn’t just a fight. It was me and him. Not a fight.” He dropped his head back to the pillow, wincing, and soon there was only the heavy breathing of a deep sleep slapping off the shoreline of his consciousness. He was correct. No mere fight, whatever the talent, could reach such carnal roots and produce such full-bodied greatness, the kind that Ali would maintain long years later had carried him to parts unknown in himself and had had no portfolio equal. Thoreau said: “Know your own bone.” They did—and then some.
That night Ali was led by Imelda Marcos up the winding, red-carpeted staircase as the guest of honor at Malacanang Palace. Soft music drifted in from the terrace. She led him after a while to the buffet table, flared by huge candelabra that threw an eerie light across his face and a body that had survived the ultimate inquisition. The two whispered as she filled his plate. Never before had he seemed so pitiably unmajestic. He lifted the food slowly up to his bottom lip, scraped raw and pink. His right eye was half closed, purple going to black. His skin was dull and blotched. He chewed his food painfully, then suddenly moved away from the spray of light as if he had become aware of the mask he was wearing, as if an inner voice were laughing. He shrugged, and the moment was gone.
If ever there was going to be an epiphanous moment in his life, his body might now be the profound courier. It was evening, the next day, in his Hilton suite, his body bent and listing to the right, so badly had his organs been seared; he had been urinating blood since the fight. “Everything in me is on flame,” he said. “He stood there gazing at the sun bleeding a dark, tragic red (no sun so fits a land, its dramatic sunsets unrivaled), eased down over the brown water of Manila Bay. His right hand hurt and was swollen, his eyewhites streaked with blood. He looked at his right hand, tried to make a fist but couldn’t. “What this man do to me?” he asked with a rasp as he guided my hand over a ridge of bumps on his forehead. “Why I do this?” He searched the horizon as if looking for an answer. “It was insane in there,” he said. “Couple of times like I was leaving my body. The animal could’ve killed me. That man weren’t human in there. I must be crazy. For what?” He took in the sunset again, then said: “This is it for me. It’s over.” Had the body, at long last, trounced the ego?
NOCTURNES
Six years earlier, in 1983, when that chicken leg jiggled like a baton in his hand, it was still possible to exclude him from brain damage. No one knew for sure, and those from the old entourage loudly brushed off his condition (as if they could not face that they had been so close to an interstate pileup) as a thyroid problem or hypoglycemia. Now, in 1989, there was no turning away from it, though his current doctor was trying. There was the feel of a damp offshore mist to the hospital room, a life-is-a-bitch feel, made sharp by the hostile ganglia of medical technology, plasma bags dripping, vile tubing snaking in and out of the body, blinking monitors leveling illusion, muffling existence down to a sort of digital bingo. Propped up slightly, Ali lay there with a skim of sweat above his lip and on his forehead, with a tremor to his arms and head; one of his metaphorical, helpless flies caught on a melting sugar cube.
Images and echoes filled the room, diffuse and speeding, shot through with ineluctable light and the mythopoeic for so long that no one (enemy or friend) could have guessed on the dizzying arc of the ride that he would land here in a little hospital on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Sonny Liston once said, while gnawing on some ribs, “He way up there now. Like an eagle. Where he gonna land, how he gonna land?” Leave it to Sonny to insinuate, in his own way, the law of probability to Ali’s streaming contrail. He was, after all the social fuss, a fighter, not stone shaped by a Medici court sculptor. Keep your eye on the wear and tear, Sonny was saying, not the ancient poets singing Greek verse to him. Ali knew the margins of dominance had compressed perilously. But his talent was so persuasive, his ring wisdom so minutely cataloged
. As he often said, all he would ever do is grow old. What was he doing here? After so many realities, it was not easy to inhabit this final one, this blinking out of neurons so precious that they were called the “butterflies of the soul” in early brain science.
The fights with Frazier had done true damage to Ali, and Manila had been the last life-altering choice of his long, long trip in a game where longevity is a killer. Every organ, every centimeter of bone in his body wanted mercy. Looking at him on the hospital bed, I was reminded of his face during the latter rounds in Manila, his eyes closed with the pain of exhaustion, his whole frame coming down like one of those old buildings erased by implosions. No one will ever know how he was able to revivify himself; he didn’t even know. William James’s second wind, though valid, won’t do for that kind of effort. A guess: somewhere in the twelfth round, not expecting it, by now barely capable of noticing it, he must have picked up a faint signal from Frazier, maybe a sudden and dramatic give to Joe’s body that had not been there before, that startled him into a semblance of freshness and urged him to shoot the moon with his last fragments of resolution.
