Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game (24 page)

Ex-middleweight Roger Donoghue, who taught Marlon Brando the fighter’s moves in
On the Waterfront,
has explained how a boxer offers “pieces of himself,” sometimes exposing his chin and letting an opponent land glancing blows that build
false confidence. What you’re really doing is drawing your opponent into a trap. When he strikes again you are ready for the counterpunch. His mistake is your opportunity. As in tennis, it is a game of forced errors. But as exciting as McEnroe and Borg can be, no matter what the outcome at Wimbledon and Forest Hills, you know they’ll be back on the tube again and again.

Just as chess is simulated war, the Fight for the Championship is more like war itself in its impact on winners and losers and its irrevocability. When Leon Spinks upset a mentally unprepared Ali three years ago, Spinks could afford to smoke thousand-dollar bills and drive $20,000 cars against the traffic up one-way streets. Now a fickle public seems unaware that he’ll also be climbing into the ring at Vegas Thursday night, just another fighter on the card against another would-be, Bernard Mercado.

The drama of the fight game lies not so much in success stories as in failure stories. Think of “interim champ” Jimmy Ellis, who won the tournament to find a successor to Ali when the title was heisted because Ali said no to the Vietnam War. Today Jimmy works as a one-eyed sparring partner for the aging/ageless Ali.

Or remember Buster Mathis, that giant butterball with remarkable agility, who looked like a coming champion of the world until he crossed the tracks in front of oncoming trains—the Frazier Freight and the Ali Express. Today fat Buster is just another strong boy in overalls loading trucks in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I remember the night he ran out of gas in the twelfth round against Ali in the Houston Astrodome. Following fighters all my life, I had always found it more revealing to go first to the loser’s dressing room. I found Mathis sitting on a bench in a gloomy vestibule, all 260 pounds of him sobbing, “It’s all over … it’s all over …”

In the winner’s dressing room, amid the jubilation of Ali’s entourage, Ali the Compassionate was saying, “I wanted them to stop it. I didn’t want to hit him anymore. I didn’t want to hurt him.”

That was almost ten years ago, in what might be called Ali’s middle age, after he had lost the first fight of his life (Joe Frazier I), and was cranking himself up to winning his title back again.

Here in Las Vegas, this glittering, easy-come, easy-go capital of the Western world, where the losers outnumber the winners a thousand-to-one, Muhammad Ali joined the silent majority at last.

True, your average loser doesn’t walk away with eight million spondulicks (which he will share with his partners Herbert Muhammad, the Internal Revenue Service, and an entourage that will be out Monday looking for new ways to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed through the providential Mr. Ali). But losing is
losing
and, even with his record jackpot, the most theatrical and controversial of all heavyweight champions has bowed out uncharacteristically—not with a bang but a whisper.

After last night’s pathetic performance—no jab, no legs, more dope than rope—the song is ended, but no member of Ali’s believers would like to think that the memory of the Holmes fiasco will linger on. The ghetto children, who took heart from the float-and-sting of their black butterfly, and their white counterparts would like to remember the razzle and the dazzle that befuddled Liston and the heart and mind that conquered Frazier and Foreman. Not a single note of that honey melody was to be heard in Ali’s round-after-round catching as a sharp, serious, credible new champion, Larry Holmes, pitched his shutout against the battered ghost.

There are two kinds of champions, commission-appointed and popularly acclaimed. Last night, even for the last of the diehards, Larry Holmes became the heavyweight champion of
the world. Now this writer knows how Jack London felt when he picked Jim Jeffries over Jack Johnson and how the sentimentalists wept when they hung with Joe Louis against Rocky Marciano. This corner had voted against the logic and with the myth. But the moment comes when reality prevails against dreams, romance, and dancing old-fashioned two-steps with the past. It is as painful as it is healthy to admit, “The king is dead …”

Before I began writing this requiem, Joe Louis was wheeled down the aisle to ringside. The bell for Round 1 of Holmes-Ali was yet to ring. Here are my notes, verbatim: “Joe Louis wheeled in—mouth hangs open—eyes staring—what is he seeing? He holds his head in his hands. An attendant wipes spittle from his mouth. His head sags. He sees nothing. The crowd cheers as Ali comes down the aisle. Louis doesn’t see him. Doesn’t hear the cheers.”

Our Joe Louis, the greatest before “The Greatest,” destroyer of Billy Conn and Maxie Baer and Max Schmeling, slumped beside me in his wheelchair. After the early rounds of the fight last night that Louis was attending without seeing, a fight in which Larry Holmes established immediate dominance and exposed Muhammad as an old man, we found ourselves calling on the Lord of this cruel sport to spare us the sight of a wheelchair for Ali.

If the live gate was a record 6 million, with another 45 million in theaters around the world, the paying customers, many of whom felt they were rope-a-doped, were cheated of the most furious exchange of the evening.

From where I sat near Ali’s corner—by coincidence in almost the same relationship to his corner I enjoyed in his victory over Liston in Miami sixteen years ago—it looked as if Angelo Dundee wanted to stop the fight when he saw that Ali was no longer able to defend himself. Another round or two and this prideful warrior might have been as damaged as his ex-doctor Ferdie Pacheco thinks he already is. The faithful Bundini Brown backed Ali’s wish to go on with the ordeal. Bodyguard
Pat Patterson tried to separate Angelo and Bundini. Then Patterson looked down at Herbert Muhammad, sitting directly in front of me. Herbert had not been able to watch the fight for at least the previous two rounds. Herbert gave Patterson a little hand signal and then buried his head in his hands.

The Holmes-Ali fight was over and so was Bundini-Dundee.

In the silence of the crowd, subdued by the disappointing spectacle, Sylvester Stallone, a rocky-eyed optimist, found something glorious in the effort Ali made and in the glory that had come to Larry Holmes. While I pretended to agree with him, because he spoke dramatic logic, my heart still belonged to the old music. That music had stopped now. Holmes and Stallone were dancing to a different bongo. And while we look before and after, and pine for what is not, is it not time to welcome new champions who pay their dues?

[October 1980]

T
HESE WERE GLADIATORS WHO
climbed through the red, white, and blue ropes, before a star-studded crowd, in the shadows of the pretentiously, but aptly, named Caesar’s Palace. Only Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns, two welterweight champions determined that there should be only one, were gladiators with a difference.

Thanks to the technology explosion, the wonder of the satellite beaming a prize fight to almost 300 cities, 55 countries, and—they say—250 million people (grossing a possible $40 million), our modern gladiators were paid way over gladiatorial scale—$8-to-10 million for the winner and now undisputed champion Sugar Ray Leonard, with an estimated $6 million to console poor Tommy Hearns as he heads back to Detroit’s Kronk Gymnasium to nurse his wounds, rethink his mistakes, and plan his revenge.

A title once held by fighters of legend like Henry Armstrong, Barney Ross, and Ray Robinson was claimed last night by a worthy successor in a fourteen-round battle of wills and skills that ranked with the great ones we’ve seen in this division over fifty years.

As these two young men of contrasting backgrounds, styles, and personalities climbed through the ropes in a burst of energy and showmanship, the tension at ringside was almost unbearable. If there was a tension scale like a Richter, this was a 10.

Music from
Rocky
blared, Caesar’s Palace flags waved, and an expectant crowd almost evenly divided cheered their champions, tall Tommy Hearns in a robe of white satin; the graceful, now revved-up Sugar Ray, dancing around the ring. Music up. Then silence. The bell. An animal roar, and The Showdown—as it had been hyped and indeed turned out to be—was our only reality. Nothing in sports equals this moment when two perfectly matched athletes—after months of sparring, running, bag punching, calisthenics, and tactical planning that prepare young bodies and minds for this terrible test—move toward each other at last.

For round after early round, Leonard gave a credible imitation of Ali on defense in his prime. Desert heat still lingered in the dusk, and Hearns, who never had gone more than ten rounds (and only three times, at that) in his short but explosive career, tested his suspect stamina. Leonard’s strategy was dance and move away, side-to-side, in a boxing ballet meant to frustrate his tall, baleful, dangerous, but less experienced opponent. Hearns’s face—long and angular, Aztec in its impassivity, lack of expression becoming an expression to remember—was a study in combative concentration as he pursued the elusive Sugar, using his freak seventy-eight-inch reach to score with whipping jabs and occasionally crisp right crosses.

Five rounds with Leonard hardly throwing a punch—was he giving the fight away? His answer was abrupt and violent in the sixth round. In a dramatic shift of gears, he was on the offensive now, reverting to the style of the first Duran fight in Montreal, catching Hearns with furious left hooks and left-right combinations. Big rounds for Ray. It is Hearns who is going backward now, eyes weary and worried. He’s ahead in
rounds, but Leonard the boxer is outslugging him. Hearns is jarred and staggered.

You could almost hear the frantic instruction from Hearns’s corner. “Now
you
dance and box, don’t let him nullify the physical advantage. Make distance your ally. Jab, jab, time the distance, shoot the right to the bruised left eye.”

Thus the battle swings back to Hearns. There are brilliant, brutal exchanges, but Tommy has the range and has regained poise and confidence. With only three rounds to go, he’s at least two points ahead, possibly three, and the damaged eye of Sugar Ray Leonard is beginning to offend the squeamish.

And then, just as in the movies (maybe they hadn’t played that
Rocky
theme for nothing), a desperate but self-composed—make that
self-possessed
—Sugar Ray reaches down as all the great ones do and comes up with an explosive rally that turns the tide one more time. Vicious lefts to the jaw and body, combinations that buzz-saw a tiring Hearns into the ropes. Terrible punches that make us tremble. Valiant but overwhelmed, Tommy Hearns is falling out of the ring. When he climbs back, the eyes are glazed.
Queer Street
they call it in the cruel vocabulary of pugilistica. Hearns fights back, but the air is out of the balloon. Leonard smells blood, smells victory, moves in. Hearns is about to fall when a referee more merciful than most moves in to grab the wounded Cobra. When he turns to raise the hand of the best welterweight in the world today, those in the $500 seats knew they had gotten their money’s worth.

Old-timers were comparing it with Robinson-Basilio. New-timers were looking forward to Leonard-Hearns II. It could be World War III.

[September 1981]

W
HEN I FIRST MET GERRY
Cooney, he was a kid, an overgrown twenty-four-year-old who had won his battle with adolescent acne and knock-kneed awkwardness. He was an odd mix of shyness and teenage prankishness, with a dark Irish ambivalence toward the public recognition thrust upon him after he cast a white shadow on the black world of heavyweight champions.

Since the Joe Louis-Ezzard Charles-Joe Walcott days, there have been only two Caucasian interruptions to the steady march of Afro-American heavies—the indestructible Rocky Marciano and the not-so-indestructible Ingemar Johansson. Along came Patterson, Liston, Ali, Foreman, Frazier, Norton, Holmes, Weaver, Spinks, and Tyson. Even the contenders, the overweights, the momentary champions were black—Page and Thomas, Witherspoon and Tubbs, Berbick, Tucker, and Dokes.

For a generation, honkies have been relegated to trial horses and rugged losers like Jerry Quarry and George Chuvalo. White Hopers barely had time to learn his name before Duane Bobick was exposed in less than a round by Ken Norton.

So, in a sports/business that has never outgrown its traditional ethnic rivalries, there is still an appeal to primitive emotions most fans have overcome in baseball and football.
Cooney, in the early eighties, was a very hot ticket. On the eve of the Norton fight in the Garden, sensing the left hook would do to this aging Kenny what it had already accomplished with two other prestigious senior citizens—Jimmy Young and Ron Lyle—we talked about the fame and fortune that was about to descend upon him like a flash storm.

One day he’s just a big kid commuting from what was then blue-collar Huntington to the traditional grime of Gleason’s Gym in downtown Manhattan. But before his fast-talking manager could say “God bless America,” Gerry is training in posh Palm Springs, with movie stars taking the place of the beery aficionados who had seen the good ones come and go at the old gym that stank so sweetly of blood and sweat and dead cigars.

Almost before he knew what hit him—because he hadn’t been hit that hard or that often in an upwardly mobile career that had never taken him beyond Round 8, with nineteen of his twenty-five fights not even going four—the six-foot-seven-inch boy-next-door was in there for a mere nine million bucks with Larry Holmes, a true heavyweight champion. Holmes had gone fifteen with a vintage Norton, a punishing twenty-three in two bouts with Shavers, who had been left for dead by both Weaver and Snipes, and had proved himself a fistic Lazarus who could not only rise from the dead but bury them in his place.