“Sadler, Moore, and Saddler,” wrote Archie Moore for Sports Illustrated, “are devising new approaches to force; to coerce, fool and browbeat the sensitive Ali into a close confrontation with Foreman, who not only has TNT in his mitts but nuclearology as well.…” That was the confidence in Foreman’s camp at the Inter-Continental, he had nuclearology in his fists. The scene at the Ping-Pong table and the pool, the scene under every umbrella and before every sunbather, the mood in the lobby and on the elevator was the rich even luxuriant power of Foreman’s fist. He did not just hit hard, he hit in such a way that the nucleus of his opponent’s will was reached. Fission began. Consciousness exploded. The head smote the spine with a lightning bolt and the legs came apart like falling walls. On the night Foreman took his championship, who could forget the film of Frazier’s urgent legs staggering around the ring, looking for their lost leader?
At the Inter-Continental, there was a prevailing mood then of benign, romantic, even imperial confidence in the power and menace of Foreman. Everybody in his camp was happy. Dick Sadler played with children and flirted with the best-looking women, flirted with droll mastery, never empty of an expression that teased, “Nobody knows the evil you will see.” Archie Moore, being introduced to the wife of the American Ambassador in Zaïre, took her immediately by the hand and said, “Come, dear, I want you to meet my wife,” and led her to Mrs. Moore. Sandy Saddler, the wise and vicious equal of the great Willie Pep, Sandy still as slim as when he used to fight, would stand to one corner, his small head supporting his large horn-rimmed glasses, looking for all the world like the bitter shrunken proprietor of a pharmacy, and say, “I’m concerned for Ali. I’m afraid he’s going to get hurt.”
Foreman had a sparring partner named Elmo Henderson, once Heavyweight Champion of Texas. Elmo was tall and thin and did not look like a fighter nearly so much as like some kind of lean wanderer in motley — the long stride of a medieval jester was in his step, and he would walk through the lobby and the patio and around the pool of the Inter-Continental with his eyes in the air as if he sought a vanishing point six feet above the horizon. It gave an envelope to his presence, even a suggestion of silence but this was paradoxical, for Elmo Henderson never stopped talking. It was as if Elmo were Foreman’s unheard voice, and the voice was loud. Elmo had learned a Franco-African word, oyé (from the French oyez — “now hear this”) and at whatever hour of the day he went through the lobby or encountered you at Nsele, he was passing through the midst of a continuing inner vision. The voice he heard came from far off and out of a deep source of power — Elmo vibrated to the hum of that distant dynamo. “Oyé,” he cried to the world at large in an unbelievably loud and booming voice. “Oyé … oyé …,” each cry coming in its interval, sometimes so far apart as every ten or fifteen seconds, but penetrating as a dinner gong. Up in the corridors, and on the elevator, out on the taxi entrance of the Inter-Continental and back at the pool, through the buffet tables of the open-air restaurant and all night at the bar, Henderson’s cry would come, sometimes in one’s ear, sometimes across a floor, “oyé …” He would stop now and again, as if the signal he transmitted had failed to reach him, then, sudden as the resumption of the chorus of a field of crickets, his voice would twang through the halls. “Oyé … Foreman boma yé …” Hear this … Foreman will kill him. “Oyé … Foreman boma yé.” If an expropriation of Ali boma yé it was no longer a cry to destroy Sisley High; rather, a call to a crusade. Every time Elmo picked up that chant again, one felt a measure of Foreman’s blood beating through the day, pounding through the night in rhythm with the violence that waits through the loneliness of every psychotic aisle. Henderson walked past children and old men, moved by African princes and the officers of corporations here for copper, diamonds, cobalt; his voice took into itself the force of every impulse he passed. Wealth and violence and irritation and innocence were in his voice and to it he added the intensity of his own force until the sound twanged in one’s ear like the boom of a cricket grown large as an elephant. “Oyé … Foreman boma yé.…” and Foreman, whether near Henderson or a hundred yards away, seemed confirmed in his serenity by the power of Elmo’s throat, as if the sparring partner were the night guard making his rounds, and all was well precisely because all was unwell.
“Oyé … Foreman boma yé,” Henderson would cry on his tour through the hotel, and once in a while, his face lighting up, as if he had just encountered a variation of the most liberating and prophetic value, he would add, “The flea goes in three, Muhammad Ali,” and he would stick three fingers in the air. “Oyé,” shouted Henderson one morning in the back of Bill Caplan’s ear, and the publicity man for Foreman’s camp replied sadly, “Oy vay! Oy vay!” Once Elmo spoke a full sentence. “We’re going to get Ali,” he said to the lobby at large, “like a Rolls-Royce when we job it up. Oyé … Foreman boma yé.”
Yes, madness in Africa was fertile, and in this madness of Africa, two fighters would each receive five million dollars while one thousand miles away on the edge of the world-famine Blacks would die of starvation, two fighters each to make more than $100,000 a minute if the fight went the full forty-five minutes and more per minute if it went less. Natural to the madness that one of the fighters was a revolutionary and a conservative, which is to say a Black Muslim, whose ultimate aim was the cession by the United States of a large piece of the United States for the formation of a Black nation, and was, this wealthy revolutionary conservative (a marbles champion at the age of ten) fighting a defender of the capitalist system whose mother had been a cook and a barber and head of a family of seven until she collapsed into a mental hospital and the son confessed at “drunkenness, truancy, vandalism, strong-arm robbery,” became a purse-snatcher, and at that — quote Leonard Gardner — “was a total failure; undone by his victims’ cries for God’s assistance, he was compelled to run back and return all the purses.” That was at fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen. We know the rest of the story. Foreman joins the Job Corps, and wins the Heavyweight title in the Olympics before he is twenty-one. He dances around the ring with a little flag. “Don’t talk down the American system to me,” he says in full investiture of that flag, “its rewards can be there for anybody if he will make up his mind, bend his back, lean hard into his chores and refuse to allow anything to defeat him. I’ll wave that flag in every public place I can,” to which Ali would shout at a boxing writers’ dinner six years later, “I’m going to beat your Christian ass, you white flag-waving bitch, you.” They had grappled on the stage and Ali pulled out Foreman’s shirt, left him a man without a shirt wearing a tuxedo. Foreman in return ripped Ali’s jacket down the back. There were apologies next day and Ali claimed he would “never insult anyone’s religion,” but the psychological results were as inconclusive as Ali boma yé and Foreman boma yé; there was certainly no clear-cut parallel to the afternoon on TV when Ali kept telling Joe Frazier he was ignorant until Frazier attacked him physically. That was just a few days before their second bout, and Ali’s insults helped to decide the fight in his favor for Frazier had Ali in trouble through the middle rounds, and looked ready to knock him out by the beginning of the ninth, indeed Ali had just been able to last through a formidable few minutes in the eighth. So sure was Frazier by the beginning of the ninth that he rushed to the middle of the ring before the bell — ignorant, am I? The referee was pushing him back as the bell rang. It gave Ali fifteen extra seconds of rest just when he needed them most. On came the full storm of Frazier’s last big attack — ignorant, am I? — but Ali came off the ropes before the end of the ninth to turn the fight — yes, you are ignorant! — and win by a close decision. Ali had been a dean of psychology for that fight. But now such acumen had to be applied to the logic of psychotic guilt, “The flea in three, Muhammad Ali,” now the tricks would have to reach into the long vault of the asylum mind, “oyé, oyé,” and pick up on the two hundred windows in Houston that Foreman broke because he liked the sound. Was the echo of breaking glass in Foreman’s disci
pline, in the investments of his serenity, yes, estimation was equal to madness, and could Ali mobilize the two and a half million theater seats in America where followers cheering for him would have to send their cheer up the electronic route in reverse, even as time might yet travel from the future to the past? Ali, grand vizier, now had to mobilize the nation of Zaïre, inchoate nation large as Alaska, Colorado and Texas put together, crazy Kinshasa with its 280,000 eggs, 75,000 pats of butter and 115,000 lumps of sugar all moldering over the thousands of tourists who did not come to the black drum-beating “rumble in the jungle,” no sir, no tourist lays out $2000 and more for the chance of getting boiled in a pot in a country where the Belgians left in such haste in 1961 that a Time correspondent, Lee Grimes, a man with a genteel, trustworthy face, was given the keys to a house and a car by a man he never saw before and told to live in them and use them as the last words spoken by the Belgian before jumping on the ferry that would buck the clumps of hyacinth to cross the Congo to Brazzaville, safe Brazzaville, safe for this day, and Lee Grimes lived in the Belgian’s house, and drove the Belgian’s VW until there were sixty-four bullet holes in its skin and the VW would drive no more. Grimes would get past Black sentries in checkpoints on the road by waving his plastic credit cards, Zaïre! a country yet equal in size to all of Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, East Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and West Germany, two hundred groups of languages — two hundred groups! — and a literacy rate of thirty-five percent, some said less, a country large as the U.S. east of the Mississippi and with a river now twenty-nine hundred miles long coming down from the most impenetrable mountains and jungle to the sea at Matadi, the Kungo, called the Congo — “Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost/ Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host” — the Congo, now the Zaïre. Vachel Lindsay would have wept at the harsh sounds of the vowels in Zye-ear:
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE JUNGLE WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust son
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong.
And “BLOOD!” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,
“BLOOD!” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors;
“Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,
Harry the uplands,
Steal all the cattle,
Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, Bing!
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM!”
A roaring, epic, rag-time tune
From the mouth of the Congo
To the mountains of the Moon.
Yes, Congo, now the Zaïre; money of the country, Zaïres; gasoline of the country, Petrol Zaïre; even the cigarettes, Fumez Zaïres. “One Zaïre — one great Zaïre,” country that fighters and press and thirty-five fight tourists (out of an expectation of five thousand) would visit after inoculations for cholera, smallpox, typhoid, tetanus, hepatitis — take gamma globulin — not to speak of shots for yellow fever and pills for malaria and Kaopectate in the breach of Leopold’s galloping ghost, all titles like “Excellency” or “Most Honorable” abolished, Mobutu known only and modestly as The Guide, The Chief, The Helmsman, The Redeemer, The Father of the Revolution and The Perpetual Defender of Property and People, Mobutu born Joseph Désiré, who now in the deeps of authenticity is called Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga — “all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake” — effective translation: “The cock who leaves no chicken intact. Wa Za Banga is up your hole” — yes, Mobutu with his personal 747 and DC-10, his radiotelephone that can call any official in the country and his political past — in 1961, Mobutu transferred Patrice Lumumba to a prison in Katanga where everybody knew they would kill him, and afterward built the monument to martyred Lumumba, highest monument in all of Kinshasa, yes, Le Guide, Le Chef, Le Timonier, Le Rédempteur, and Le Père de la Révolution “is greeted as a savior (everywhere he goes) by squads of gyrating dancers swinging and stamping, waving and winnowing, and all the time singing the President’s praises,” writes J. J. Grimond for the New York Times, and the rich details of his piece will not be quoted in a hurry by the Ministry of National Orientation. “Foreman boma yé,” cries Elmo Henderson passing by the patio of the open-air restaurant, and Norman smiles at his guest, a most intelligent American living in Kinshasa for years, adept at several occupations, who has agreed to try to explain this incomparable country (which Ali will seek to mobilize, all collective n’golo and Nommo, all kuntu and muntu — in all the variations of the two hundred groups of languages plus Lingala), yes, will seek, our Muhammad Ali, to bend all forces of the living and dead into the arena of his great hantu, that fearful place and time which will come together on four o’clock Wednesday morning in 62,800-seat Stadium of the 20th of May with ten points to the winner of a round and nine or less to the loser, fifteen rounds, with 2000 premier ringside seats at $250 each, not sold, not nearly, but wait for closed circuit to 425 locations in the U.S. and Canada, together with home television live or delayed to 100 countries — our promoters: the Government of Zaïre, Video Techniques, Helmdale Leisure Corporation and Don King Productions, no fewer. Yes, Norman will listen to his guest and smile apologetically (or is it half proudly at Elmo’s incantation of God knows what fraction of these African facts and forces — Elmo spelled backwards is Omle: Oyé Omlé) and the insanity of mood which is also properly part of every Heavyweight Championship stirs in the hot midday air before the reasonable words of his intelligent guest.
“You see, it’s hardly a question of liking Mobutu. No American is going to feel enthusiastic about a man whose head appears out of a cloud every night on national television while the Zaïre anthem is played, but he’s not the man to be embarrassed by himself — if you look closely on TV you’ll see his tribal staff is in his hand, a man and woman intertwined. It’s highly conscious. Africans place emphasis on humans, cosmically speaking — a tribal staff with a man and woman intertwined is an expression of cosmic completeness like Yin and Yang. Mobutu is there to embody men and women in one Zaïre, one consciousness, one source of power — he’s already allocated sixty-four million Zaïres, well over one hundred million dollars, for a TV complex that is going to link up every village and hidden tribe he can reach. You know whose face will be on that TV. Why, until recently, Mobutu was the only official name you’d ever see in the papers. When a photo was taken of the President with a few bureaucrats, only his face would be identified. Two weeks ago, the first ambassador to come to Zaïre from Cuba arrived. The papers didn’t even mention his name. That, of course, was a relapse to the old methods, but there is no question: Mobutism is Mobutu with all that means, and one thing it certainly means is that unpleasant news won’t get out. They had a bad crash with an Air Zaïre plane a few months ago. No word of it in the papers for several days. Then Mobutu indicated that while the accident need not be described, it would be permissible to list the funerals, an indirect species of press freedom if you will.
“Take the name of the country. Why they picked it, we’ll never know. Doubtless, our Helmsman liked the sound. He would tend to trust his ear. Besides, Z is the last letter of the alphabet. The last shall be first. So it is announced that is what the country will be called. Then they discover that Zaïre is not an African word. It happens to be Old Portuguese. Be certain, he’s not about to admit the error and open himself to ridicule. On the contrary that’s probably the moment he decides not only the country but the money and the gasoline and the cigarettes and, for all I know, the contraceptives are going to be called Zaïre. The first rule of dictatorship is reinforce your mistakes.
“It is the same with his prerogatives. He does not need houses in half the capitals of Europe, nor a 747 when his family wants to fly from Brussels to Londo
n; to us his incredible display of wealth seems wrong, but for Africans it’s another matter. He’s the chieftain of the country and a king should wear his robes. It’s part of vital force to be resplendent. They would respect him less if his expenses were not larger than life. He’s the leader of the nation and so a modern equivalent of president, dictator, monarch, emperor, the chosen of God and le roi soleil all in one. Give him the benefit, however, of assuming the chosen of God needs such clout. His problems are beyond measure. Here in Kinshasa itself, the town had three hundred thousand people in 1959, a year before the Belgians left, now the secret figure is a million and a half. The unemployment in this city is forty-eight percent and still people flock in. The reason? Unemployment in rural areas is up to eighty percent. There’s a dreadful drought and a fearful shortage of agricultural equipment. Count on it, no Zairois bureaucrat is going to call this country undeveloped. Rather, it’s ‘underequipped.’
“Add to this unemployment the psychological unrest of thousands of languages, and ten of thousands of tribes among twenty-two million people. All the old traditional ties are breaking up. Everybody is now off the land and off the family. Mobutu becomes the only substitute for the old tradition, the remaining embodiment of the great chief. That is why he won’t appear in the stadium on the night of the fight but will see it on closed circuit in his home. Not only because he does not wish to show the world how massive police protection would have to be, but because physically he’s not going to be seen under the probe of a TV camera next to Ali and Foreman. God does not stand next to his sons when they are taller.
“But that is the smallest example of his particular sense of how to present himself to his people — if you add up the details, it’s not short of genius. On the one hand he is everywhere, the boldest presentation of ego one can conceive; on the other, he is endlessly cautious. He produces the fight and the stadium as gifts to his people, but will not appear himself. So you will see him on television every night, you will never get a private interview. His pride is to control his details.
The Fight Page 9
