The Fight (17 page)

B
EFORE THE DRIVE
, they stopped, however at Kin’s Casino, and there each man lost a little at Black Jack. That was about the way Norman wanted it. He was feeling empty — the hour in the Press Room of the Memling had been no good for n’golo. To lose, therefore, was a confirmation of his views on the relation of vital force to gambling. Feeling low in luck, he would just as soon squander this bad luck at the Casino as visit it on Ali. There had been a temptation these last few days to take another walk around the partition on the balcony, only this time do it sober. He had resolutely refused to get into the stunt again, but knew the price: the sense of force within himself would diminish. He even felt a bit of shame at rooting for Ali if he was not ready to take this small dare with himself.

Muhammad was still sleeping when they arrived, or at least was not available to visitors. So they dropped in on Angelo Dundee at his villa and sat there for a while in the quiet boredom of men who were obliging themselves not to feel tension too early. Dundee was the perfect host for
such sentiments. He had been living for six weeks in the kuntu of boredom. A wise man from Miami, the banks of the Zaïre were not for Angelo. “I got so bored,” he said once to Bud Collins, of the
Boston Globe
, “I was teaching the lizards push-ups.” Considered one of the smartest men in boxing, he had managed a number of champions; Carmen Basilio, Willie Pastrano, Jimmy Ellis, Luis Rodriquez, and Ralph Dupas came immediately to mind, and a formidable slew of contenders and TV main-eventers like Mike De John and Florentino Fernandez. Yet Dundee was not Ali’s manager, more a glorified trainer. His relation to Ali, while long-standing and professionally intimate, could hardly be called authoritative. Ali would listen to him, but critically. Ali had been in charge of his own training for years. To Dundee, working for Ali was lucrative but could hardly prove satisfying. He was used to taking charge of a fighter. It had been more in his line to work with good fighters and get the most out of them. So, for example, had he schooled Jimmy Ellis on how to back up when fighting Jerry Quarry. “They won’t like it,” Dundee warned Ellis the night before. “They’ll boo you. But you’ll win the fight.” Dundee had won many a fight like that, and saved many. For one fight, he was famous. There was the legendary moment when Dundee got Cassius Clay back into the ring at the beginning of the fifth round of the first Championship fight with Liston. Clay had been blinded at the time. As afterward reconstructed, the caustic congealing a cut over one of Liston’s eyes stuck to Clay’s gloves, and between rounds was wiped by accident into his own eyes. Since he could not see, Cassius had a natural reluctance to
go out for the fifth round and take the chance of discovering a vision in the light of Liston’s punches. Dundee, however, was thinking of higher matters. Reputed to have friendly connections — how could an Italian manager working out of Miami not have such repute? — there would be screams if Cassius Clay refused to come out for the round when ahead on points, double screams when the world learned that Dundee had just been washing his face and the fighter couldn’t see. So, at the bell, Angelo pushed him into the ring. Wonders in the ring. Cassius got through the round. Then he went on to win the Championship in another round. His genius for recovery had been disclosed for the first time. What a setback it could have been to his career if Dundee allowed him to stay in the corner. Angelo had been with him ever since.

Now, Dundee was in an armchair watching the television set, and there was nothing on but a three-month-old interview of Ali. Dundee watched it with the animation he would give to an empty screen. A small man with dark hair, olive skin and silver-rimmed eyeglasses, Angelo’s exterior was modest. He could pass for an Italian businessman — he offered Sicilian concentricity; himself in the first circle, family in the second, friends and associates in the third.

Sitting with him was Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s doctor, a pleasant-looking man with a meaty face and a New Orleans accent. He was never particularly happy with Ali’s condition. A powerful pessimist, he obliged himself when facing reporters to speak like an optimist, but was last known to be confident about a fight the night Jimmy Ellis
fought Joe Frazier to settle the Heavyweight title between the World Boxing Association and the New York State Boxing Commission. Frazier was a 4–1 favorite, but Pacheco did not see how Ellis could lose. Frazier knocked out Ellis in five rounds. Pacheco’s natural pessimism had been allowed its space ever since. Now, he was also watching television. The TV screen looked like the definitive mandala of monotony. Sitting with them was a small old Black man, an old fight trainer perhaps, with huge somewhat arthritic knuckles. The skin of those knuckles was exceptionally scaly, and he was peeling at the back of his hands. Morose was the mood. You could think the fight had already taken place and Ali lost and they had returned to this villa empty of promise. They looked about as happy as Patterson did coming into the ring for his second fight with Liston.

“Where is Bundini?” Norman asked.

“The star,” Angelo answered, “will make his grand entrance in the dressing room. The rest of us will go by bus.” It was impossible to tell if this was an old feud, or Dundee’s fury was local. Bundini, after all, can live in the Inter-Continental while Angelo is stuck in the mass phallic rectitude of Mobutu.

As good reporters, they inquired of Angelo how Ali had spent his day and were surprised at the news that he jogged out to the pagoda at three-thirty in the afternoon. Was it restlessness? Then he ate, slept, and spent time writing his name on fight tickets being given to friends and guests. Later he watched a movie: Joseph Cotten in
Baron Blood
, a horror film.

“Did he enjoy it?”

“He said he did. He seemed to.”

How did Dundee spend his day?

“I was fixing the ring. It was in terrible shape. They didn’t have enough resin, and we also firmed up the ring posts. Bob Goodman and I even had to put shims under the floor to tighten the canvas.”

One could interpret such details. A tight canvas would be good for Ali’s footwork. Dundee was famous for collecting small advantages. Whether he was born with the philosophy or acquired it, his faith was that no advantage could prove too small to take. He even changed a new reporter’s money at the official rate of fifty Zaïres for one hundred dollars, when you could get up to eighty on the black market. It was a philosophy that could apply itself to ring posts and resins.

At two in the morning, word came that Ali was ready to leave for the stadium. Plimpton and Mailer got up with the others and walked out to the bus. A small caravan was being set up. Something like five cars and two buses were going to travel in convoy to the stadium. Ali, dressed in a dark shirt and dark pants, was striding about on the grass looking first at one vehicle and then another. He was deciding which one to ride. For a moment he entered the bus, then jumped out again, went to a black Citroën, which he got into with his brother Rachman. He looked nicely keyed up, ready at last for the fight. His careful study of each vehicle did not seem odd to Norman, who had long had the idea that some vehicles promise more luck than others. What is Bantu philosophy ready to say if not that? Luck is the first kuntu.

The convoy set out and proceeded only half a mile. Then it stopped. Word came back along the line. Ali had forgotten his robe. So the vehicles waited at the exit from the press compound of Nsele until the robe was picked up, then set out again.

Mailer and Plimpton were riding in the big bus with Dundee and ten or twelve other people. Few sat together. The loneliness of Ali’s camp was evident again. So many of his people were white or pale black. It was the continuing irony of his career. In contrast to Foreman’s camp, where Dick Sadler was Black, Sandy Saddler was Black, Henry Clark was Black, Elmo was Black, where the marrow of the mood was Black, Bundini had to be the blackest man in Ali’s camp and he was a converted Jew and not even on the bus, and a space existed on the bus between each member of Ali’s entourage — how could that not be? Ali’s friends and assistants were spokes and Ali was the hub. Take away the hub, and you had a rim with loosened spokes.

There was fear of the fight to come. The mood of the bus was like a forest road on a wet winter day. Only one person seemed cheerful, Aunt Coretta, Ali’s cook, whom he had brought from Deer Lake to Nsele. Taking care of his stomach she had the keys to his confidence. She was a big woman, who could have been sister to Ali’s mother for they looked something alike, but she was in fact his father’s sister, and in her finery tonight, and proud and more than conspicuously careful of her hair, which had been straightened and marcelled and worked upon by an artist who must have been the equivalent of a high pastry chef, yes, there had been collaboration between subject and artist
for Aunt Coretta’s hairdo, and she had exactly that sense of the worth of her own physical bulk which big hardworking Negro women invariably present when they are dressed and on their way to a special evening. She worked hard enough to enjoy a good time when she had a good time, her life on occasion must be as simple as that, and she was looking forward to the fight. She was confident.

Ali’s wife, Belinda, sat at the front of the bus. In Muslim dress with a skirt that came to her ankles, and a white cloth turban close to her head, she was a
statuesque
woman — precisely the word. Over six feet tall, as well proportioned as her husband, she had features sufficiently classic for the head of a Greek statue. In fact if these features were not one chiseled touch smaller than Ali’s she could have been his sister in appearance or, better, his female surrogate. They would not have to live together for forty years to look alike. She was also a black belt in karate. She was also shy with strangers. She had the stiffness Black Muslims exhibit in the company of whites. During the trip she spoke only once to the bus at large. “There is,” she said, “an ESP psychiatrist in Vegas who said Foreman is going to win. He’s going to be psyched tonight.” A pause followed in which she may have heard the uncertainty of the silence for she added, “I hope.” Yes, that was the mood: hollow, I am nonetheless here to hope.

Of course, Belinda had just returned to Zaïre. She had arrived with Ali six weeks before, but after the postponement she flew back to America. If Ali had a training problem, it was not hard to find. Ever since Joe Namath spent a night with a girl and then went out next afternoon to beat
the Baltimore Colts in the Superbowl, next proceeded to tell the world about The Method, the training world of an athlete had been tickled to its root. The impact on sports of Namath’s feat was equal to the shock on Henry Luce’s American Century when
Sputnik
went up. Every athlete was up against the old question — could the refinement of your best reflexes which sex offered be worth the absence of rapacity it might also leave? At the beginning of his career Ali trained so virtuously that before the time of the first Liston fight, Sonny’s people tried to suggest he had never known a woman.

That may have changed. Before the first fight with Frazier, Ali could hardly wait for training to conclude each day — he was known to replace Fiesta or Royal Crown Cola with champagne for supper. Before the first engagement with Norton he was up all night. Doubtless he calculated to sleep all day. Next night, finding himself in the ring, jaw broken, reflexes missing their synapses, he succeeded in dancing his hardworking way through the stupor. He looked awful, he aged that night, but considering his shape, some would argue it was Ali’s greatest fight. Days later, jaw wired, orange juice coming through a straw, he must have determined on changing his routine. Training had been less enjoyable since. Nonetheless, Ali’s methods remained Ali’s own. Belinda had just come back.

Weeks before, boasting to friends in Kinshasa on how he would beat Foreman, Ali said, “He’s going to fall on his ass.”

“You,” Belinda murmured, “better take lessons on how to fall on your ass.”

“What did you say?” said Ali.

“I said you better take lessons on how to fall on
your
ass.”

“Oh,” said Ali, “I thought you said ‘fall in love.’ ”

Led by the blue blinking light of a police car, the convoy continued, but at a slow frustrating pace. Used to going at eighty miles an hour on that stretch of deserted superhighway between Nsele and the airport, they moved along now at half the rate. The empty landscape offered few distractions in the dark. Occasionally, they would pass a few Blacks who were ready to demonstrate at the sight of the convoy, but speed was slow and the mood was slow.

Even as they passed the airport and entered the far outskirts of Kinshasa, there were still not many people. It was getting near to three in the morning. Whoever was up for the fight had gone to the stadium hours ago. So there was time to meditate on one’s own relation to the fight, time to think over the peculiarities of a passion for boxing which could take a man away from his own work for months and more. He even wondered at his loyalty to Ali. A victory for Ali would also be a triumph for Islam. While Norman was hardly a Zionist, and had never gone to Israel, he had been to Cairo and the collision of overflowing new wealth with scabrous poverty, teeming inefficiency, frantic traffic and cripples walking on sores, left him sympathetic to Israel’s case. Countries as gargantuan, fascinating, and godawful as Egypt did not deserve to dictate terms to one beleaguered Hebrew idea in the desert. Since he knew little of the politics of the Near East, his politics were as straightforward as that. And conflicted with his loyalty to Ali. Of course he would not be alone in such paradox. It was striking how
many of the Jewish writers at Nsele had affection for Ali, a veritable tropism of affection, as if, ultimately, he was one of them, a Jew in the sense of being his own creation. Few things would inspire more love among Jews than the genius to be without comparison.

That could account for much. It could certainly explain why he liked Foreman, and yet was not bothered for an instant in his loyalties. It was as if contradictions fell away with a victory for Ali. That would be a triumph for everything which did not fit into the computer: for audacity, inventiveness, even art. If ever a fighter had been able to demonstrate that boxing was a twentieth century art, it must be Ali. It would certainly come off as a triumph for the powers of regeneration in an artist. What could be of more importance to Norman? He knew some part of him would have to hate Ali if the fighter lost without dignity or real effort, even as a part of him could not forgive Hemingway because of the ambiguity of his suicide — if only there had been a note. The absence of a note left a void in anyone who loved the work and the man.