The Fight

by Norman Mailer

  “For example, you will hear everywhere you ask that the army is the base of his power, and it is. One reason is that the price of beer is kept low for soldiers, a detail, but he is meticulous about details. He knows where every officer in his army is posted — he is careful that no important officer is ever in command of troops from his own tribe. Soldiers cannot even speak each other’s languages. They must address each other in Lingala. So he insures two things. His power base is not going to be eroded by tribal rebellions, and his soldiers will tend to lose their own dialect and pick up the national tongue. Something similar is done with high government officials. He will take an important man who grew up in Kinshasa and post him as governor of Lubumbashi — this discourages thoughts of a coup. Of course, Mobutu pays a price. The efficiency of the country is not to be described. It has progressed from the intolerable to the dreadful. On the other hand, he inherited such trouble from the Belgians. The bureaucracy was always a fudge factory guaranteed to slow up every top technician the country imports. Now, with the white man out, nobody is going to leap to obey orders. Moreover, think of the kind of white man who came here from Belgium in the first place, not able to cut it in the mainland and taking it out on the Blacks down here, no, paralysis has always been the rule in the middle of the bureaucracy. Indeed, each little office tends to be a tribe. If I have my small job and need an assistant, I hire my kinsman. To avoid treachery. I do not want the new man to steal my job, and if he is in my family he is less likely to think that way. On the other hand, my kinsman is stupid so I do not delegate authority to him or he will get me in trouble. Everything has to wait until I do it. A fudge factory. Nothing moves in the middle levels of the bureaucracy. All the while there’s talent at the top, real talent, real intelligence. They are the best educated Blacks, back from Europe with good salaries, good homes, European wives — a mark of pride among top bureaucrats is to have white wives — and they are loyal to Mobutu. It’s a good country for them. They can even get things done so long as they are working among themselves. The moment, however, a project has to descend to the middle regions of the administration, we’re back in the fudge. Stasis and chaos. ‘Pas de problème,’ they will dependably say when you ask if something can be arranged. It is their way of guaranteeing that your request is next to hopeless. Since the solution does not exist, neither does the problem. ‘Pas de problème.’

  “Yet Mobutu has the country functioning. With waste one does not even wish to conceive and with an official rip-off of natural resources nobody can begin to estimate, the country is nonetheless emerging. Black power is talked about everywhere — it is in some fashion actually being practiced here. Somewhere in the middle of all this, there may even be an idea — the marriage of modern technology with elements of African tradition. This is not because Mobutu is necessarily a wise and profound man — who could begin to know the answer to that when he is not to be approached? — but there may be some instinct in the Congo that technology will never work if it cannot be connected to the African root.

  “Still, what a horror,” said the brilliant American, echoing Conrad’s terminal word. “You are going tonight to see the weigh-in. Take a good look at the stadium. It is Mobutu’s gift to the people, built out of their work and their taxes. An amazing structure. The best laborers in Zaïre have been assigned to the stadium. Mobutu has a few skilled cadres of workmen, and he moves them around from one hot spot in the construction of the economy to the next. So we know where they were working these last few months. What a stadium! Do not ignore the design. It is not just a place for receiving people but for processing them, and, if necessary, disposing of them. Late last spring, the crime wave grew so intense that thieves were posing as policemen. The wives of Americans were getting raped. A nightmare for Mobutu if foreigners should arrive for the fight and get mugged en masse. So his police round up in a hurry three hundred of the worst criminals they can find and lock them in some of the holding rooms under the stadium. Then fifty of the three hundred were killed. Right there on the stone floor under the stadium. For all we know, some of them could have been shot in the dressing rooms of the fighters. The key to the execution was that it took place at random. No one bothered to list them. No one said, “Kill this particular fifty.” No, they just eliminated the nearest fifty. The random destruction was more desirable. Fear among the criminal population would then go deeper. Good connections with the police are worthless in such an unstructured situation. For much the same reason the other two hundred and fifty criminals were let go. So they would tell their friends of the massacre. The crime rate for this brief period is down. Mobutism. Mayor, tycoon and tyrant at once. He’ll spend millions to develop off-shore oil resources where Zaïre has only twenty-three miles on the Atlantic coast, yet he’ll succeed — to everyone’s surprise, he’ll succeed, he’ll develop enough oil for his domestic requirements. Then he’ll pick up the phone and inquire about an increase in taxi fares in some town eight hundred miles east of Kinshasa and tell them they can’t have the raise. Bold, trivial and imperial — an African mind. Africa is shaped like a pistol, say the people here, and Zaïre is the trigger. Enjoy the stadium.”

  There were weigh-ins that gave a clue to the outcome, but they usually took place the morning of the bout, and thereby could reveal how the fighters had slept. Tonight, however, was Saturday — the contest more than seventy-two hours off. The weigh-in would be no more than publicity, a swatch of electronic space for “Wide World of Sports” on late Saturday afternoon back in the States; it had to be intrinsically boring despite the thousands of Zairois invited free to the stadium.

  The expectation of the press was that the crowds would cheer wildly for Ali but there was little excitement — more a firm round of applause — and the ovation for Foreman while smaller was still comparable, perhaps half as large. When all was said, the audience seemed indifferent. What with the crowd of a hundred or more people jamming the ring, the fighters could hardly be seen. Some of the men and women in the stands had been waiting a long time. Besides, it is not precisely breathtaking for a Heavyweight to get on a scale; the greatest excitement, tonight, came from an error. Ali’s weight was announced as 206 pounds. He had not been so low in years: 216 pounds came through as the correction. A miscalculation of the kilos. A whistle from the press. He was four to eight pounds heavier than he had said he would be, a poor prospect for his ability to dance and run. In fact, he was almost as heavy as Foreman, who weighed in at 220 pounds, and stood in the ring with full concentration. He was not hearing a sound he did not wish to hear.

  Ali looked sullen again. He had come through the ropes with an ivory walking stick, and had seemed more interested in the cane than his surroundings. He handled the stick with quietly inquiring fingers — Ali had a way with new objects — something in his fingers always respected them. The response of the crowd, however, could hardly please him. He led a cheer, “Ali boma yé,” but there was nothing overpowering in the response.

  Meanwhile, music played. It was disconcertingly happy music, as rippling as Carribbean rhythms — music for the hips, no character necessary, only a loose spine. You did not hear the fell thonk of fisticuffs in the music, yes, a curious disappointment, the weigh-in, even the ring was too low. Just as they had installed it too high at Nsele, so was it now much too low. The photographers standing at the apron would block the view of the reporters at the press tables. Everybody would be standing.

  In truth, it was not a happy stadium. One’s intelligent American informant had been correct. The entrance was depressing in the extreme. It was not a place for people to enter; rather, an edifice from which it was impossible to exit if the police wished to retain you. The rate of flow suggested a beer keg with a baby’s nipple for a spigot. From the street, arches no wider than ordinary doors opened to turnstiles, which in turn allowed you to pass along through narrow corridors to the stadium seats. Off an underground passageway that ran in an oval around the stadium were rooms of cement-brick painted entirely
in gray. Steel bars and cinder block. A prison.

  The mood provided by the weigh-in was still on Norman when he joined a party in the bar on the top floor of the Inter-Continental. There Don King was celebrating the same weigh-in. For King, it had been a milestone. He was happy to announce it in just that way. “Tonight, seeing Ali and Foreman in the ring, I can believe in the reality of this fight,” he said.

  King had magical eyes. Until one met him, it was hard to understand how he could possibly have managed to bring the fighters together, for he had few financial resources to match an event of this scope. King, however, had the ability to take all his true love (which given his substantial Black presence was not necessarily small) plus all of his false love, and pour them out together through his eyes, his lambent eyes. Mailer had never believed in the real existence out in the field of the word lambent but then he had never looked before into a pair of eyes as full of love. “You are a genius in tune with the higher consciousness,” King offered as the first compliment on meeting, “yet an instinctive exponent of the untiring search for aspiration in the warm earth-embracing potential of exploited peoples.” Norman had once known a Rumanian doctor with just such a mouth-filling taste for rhetoric and pastrami. Don King was a cross between a Negro Heavyweight large as Ernie Terrell and that Jewish Rumanian doctor, nay, King was even B’nai Brith-ical. He could not say ecstatic if you did not let him add with delight. Occasions were never joyous if they could be very joyous. After a while Mailer realized that the description of himself offered with such generosity by King was in fact a way of letting you in on King’s view of himself — “a genius in tune with the higher consciousness,” et cetera.

  Say, it would be hard to prove King was not a genius. A former nightclub owner and numbers king of Cleveland with four years in jail for killing a man in a street fight, he had approached Ali and Foreman with the splendid credentials of a fight manager whose two best fighters, Earnie Shavers and Jeff Merritt, had just both been knocked out in the first round. Still, he offered to promote Ali-Foreman. Each fighter would get five million dollars, he said. Those eyes of true love must have made the sum believable, for they glowed doubtless with the cool delights of lemonade, the fantasies of Pernod, and the golden kernels of corn — somehow, those eyes took him through barriers — he convinced Herbert Muhammad that he could produce this fight. “I reminded him of the teaching of his father Elijah Muhammad that every qualified Black man should be given a chance by his fellow Black men.” Of course, the more cynical were quick to point out that Herbert Muhammad had little to lose — King was quickly locked into a contract where he had to pay $100,000 a month every month until a letter of credit for the $10,000,000 was in the bank for both fighters, and King, to everybody’s surprise, managed to hang on long enough to raise the money through John Daly of Helmdale Leisure Corp, and Risnailia, a Swiss corporation whose heart belonged, it was said, to Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, our own Mobutu. What skills. Quantity changes quality, Engels said once, and a hustler of dimensions is a financier. How King could talk. He was a tall man, but his graying hair stood up four inches from his head, straight up, straight up — he was one Black whose Afro was electrified by a perpetually falling elevator — whoosh went the hair up from his head. Down came his words. King wore diamonds and pleated shirts, dashikis with gold pendants, powder-blue tuxedos and suits of lipstick-red; the cummerbunds of a sultan were about his waist, and the pearls of the Orient in the cloth he wore. How he could talk. He was the kuntu of full dialogue, and no verbal situation could be foreign to him. Once when one of his lesser-known fighters hinted that a contract was unsatisfactory and King could get hurt, Don leaned forward — fond was he of telling this story — and said, “Let us not bullshit each other. You can leave here, make a call, and have me killed in half an hour. I can pick up the phone as you leave and have you offed in five minutes.” That was expression appropriate to the point, but King could cut a wider path. “The fight,” he said, “will draw a trillion fans, because Ali is Russian, Ali is Oriental, Ali is Arabic, Ali is Jewish, Ali is everything that one could conceive with the human mind. He appeals to all segments of our world. Some polarize themselves with hostility and affection, but regardless he stimulates — and this is the most significant part — Ali motivates even the dead.” Yes, even the dead who were dying of thirst and waiting for beer at the altar. “The dead tremble in their graves” was what King said as Leonard Gardner reported it in Caracas on the night Foreman annihilated Norton and the last impediment to Ali-Foreman was gone. King had been happy that night, and he was happy this night with the weigh-in staged and the television satellite tested and proved. He was a man who obviously placed serious investments of faith in formal ceremony, and that same stadium which proved so sinister to his guest brought tears to King’s eyes as he spoke of it. “Tonight has been a culmination,” he said. “Tonight the history of our problems on this fight become converted to the history of our hardworking triumphs. I had a vision tonight of the event to come and it leaves me ebullient for I see an encounter that will be without compare in the relentless power of its tenacity and fury. Therefore it occasions in me the emotion that I am an instrument of eternal forces.”

  Once you became accustomed to the stately seesaw of his rhetoric it gave nourishment to your ear the way a Cossack’s horse in full stride would give drumbeats to the steppes. Still, it became evident after a while that King whipped his tongue for rhetoric when he did not have a finer reply. (As Shaw once assured Sam Goldwyn, poetry was there to write when he did not feel inspired for prose.) So King shifted gears whenever the beginnings of a small distance were sensed between himself and the person to whom he spoke; when he rapped, however, ah, then King became the other man in himself.

  He liked to talk about his four years in prison and his five unsuccessful appearances before a parole board. “My past was jamming me with those people, you see. I had to put in the years, had to learn how to rechannel myself, and be able to meditate in a room full of violent men. No easy task. It was sheer hell just to go to the hole. You could wake up in the middle of the night and have to take a leak. What a sight in the urinals. Prisoners sucking guards. Guards going down on prisoners. One man taking another’s ass. Hell, man, you got to get your head in order.”

  At the next table, Hunter Thompson leaned over to John Vinocur and said, “Bad Genet.”

  “I decided to study,” said King. “I got myself a list. Got my education in prison. Read Freud. He almost blew my mind. Breast, penis, anus. Powerful stuff. Then Masters and Johnson, Kinsey, and …” He hesitated. “Knee’s itch, I read a lot of him.”

  “Who?”

  “Knee’s itch. Nigh zith.”

  “Nietzsche?”

  “Yeah.” But the error had him jiving for embarrassment. “Yeah, cerebrum and cerebellum, you got to use them, that’s what I learned from that man.”

  “Who else did you read?”

  “Kant — The Critique of Pure Reason. That helped my head. And I read Sartre — fascinating! — and then the guy who wrote the book on Hitler, Shirer, I read him. And Marx, I read Karl Marx, a cold motherfucker, Marx. I learned a lot from him. Hitler and Marx — I think of them in relation to some of the things they’re doing here, you know, the country is the family. Concentrate on the young.”

  At the next table, Hunter Thompson having finished his drink, said, “Very bad Genet.”

  But King did not hear him. Why should King care? He had probably read Genet. The fatigue and happiness of the thousand perils of successfully promoting this fight sat in kindly weight upon his back. “Yes,” he said, “I look upon tonight as a classically satisfying experience.”

  9. KING OF THE FLUNKIES

  HUNTER THOMPSON was tall and had the rangy build of a college halfback from a small school. Although he was half-bald and a little over thirty, he never lost that look. He could be suffering physical agony but he never appeared in more pain than showed on his high forehead, which was usually full
of the dew of a quiet sweat. He perspired. That was the sole price he seemed to pay for swallowing more chemicals to bring him up and take him down than any good living writer. He could probably drink more beer than all but a hundred men alive. He obviously possessed a memorable constitution. By now, however, he was so strung out that he squeaked if you poked a finger near his belly. He was a set of nerves balanced on another set of nerves traveling on squeaky roller skates. Here to cover the fight for Rolling Stone, he hated the heavenly raptures of all who were here to be happy for the fight. He hated the assignment. Hunter took one look at Kinshasa and tried to charter a plane to Brazzaville.

  He could not, of course, find a plane. The national disaster of Zaïre was not speaking to the civic disaster of Brazzaville. Three days before the fight, Hunter still had the expression on his face of having already written the story from Brazzaville. He was in a state of high shock. He looked like a halfback who has just been tackled in the neck and is walking on his toes. In the bar at the top of the Inter-Continental, he said, “Bad Genet” with the ingenuous “Zowie” of a protagonist who is hearing unutterable sounds of collision in his head, throat, and gullet as beer and froth collide.

  When Mailer thought about Don King, it was with Hunter Thompson’s remark, “Bad Genet.” Never did materials seem more ready for the sensational repudiation Hunter could give to organized madness. Yet any good writer knew satire would violate too much here. It was like coming onto a goldfield and discovering your glints were not gold but foodstuff, half horse manure, half yellow manna. If King had been a white man, what a stentorian job one could do — a hustler with straight genius for the vulgar. Recognize him as Black and he was a genius with a hustle, one more embodiment of that organic philosophy walking in now, centuries late, from the savannah and the rain forest. The technological world, wandering along in the confusion of a rationality which had run the railroad off the tracks, might be in need of Black culture. “Ali even motivates the dead,” said King, and was talking of natural human powers. Some men have it more than others. Ali has it. He motivates the dead. An uncommon but not unrealistic ability.