The Fight (7 page)

Reporter: “Your eye looks all right to me, George.”

Foreman: “Looks all right to me, too.”

Reporter: “What do you think of your weight?”

Foreman: “Once you’re a Heavyweight, your weight speaks for itself.”

Reporter: “Do you think you’ll knock him out?”

Foreman (in utter relaxation): “I would like to.”

On the ripple of humor this created, Foreman offered a smile. When the next questioner wondered what he thought of fighting at 3
A.M.
, Foreman gave a longer reply. “Once you’re in good condition,” he said, “you’re able to do a lot of things you’re not able to ordinarily. Good condition makes you more flexible. I really have no concern about the hour.”

“Ali claims he’s met more tough fighters than you have.”

“That,” said Foreman, “may be a factor for me. I got a dog who fights all the time. He comes home whipped.”

“Do you expect Ali to go for the eye?”

Foreman shrugged. “It’s good for anybody to go for anything they can as long as they can. The crow will go for the scarecrow but run away from dynamic people.”

“We hear you’re writing a book.”

“Oh,” Foreman said in his mildest voice, “I just like to keep an account of what’s going on.”

“Do you have a subject for the book?”

“It’ll be about me in general.”

“Plan to publish it?”

He was thoughtful, as if contemplating the uncharted lands of literature that lay ahead. “I don’t know,” he said, “it may be just for my kids.”

Reporter: “Do Ali’s remarks bother you?”

Foreman: “No. He makes me think of a parrot who keeps saying, ‘You’re stupid, you’re stupid.’ Not to offend Muhammad Ali, but he’s like that parrot. What he says, he’s said before.”

They asked him if he liked the country of Zaïre and he looked uneasy and said, first hint of uneasiness to his voice, “I would like to stay as long as possible and visit.” If boxers were good liars, maybe he was no boxer.

“Why are you staying at the Inter-Continental instead of here?” Foreman replied even faster, “Well, I’m accustomed to hotel life. Although I like this place in Nsele.” He was rescued by another query. “We hear President Mobutu gave you a pet lion.”

Foreman brought back his smile. “He’s big enough not to be a pet. He’s a serious lion.”

“Do you enjoy being Champ?” It was as if reporters had the license to ask any stupid question, any whatever. The trouble was that every reason existed for stupid questions. That was when the subject might reveal himself most. “You enjoy being Champ?”

“I think about it every night,” said George, and added with a rush of compressed love for himself that he could not quite throttle into that soft voice, “I think about it and I thank God, and I thank George Foreman for having
true
endurance.” The inevitable schizophrenia of great athletes
was in his voice. Like artists, it is hard for them not to see the finished professional as a separate creature from the child that created him. The child (now grown up) still accompanies the great athlete and is wholly in love with him, an immature love, be it said.

But Sadler, Moore and Saddler had been teaching him to recover from mistakes. So his voice was quiet again and he added quickly, “I don’t think I’m superior to any previous Champion. It’s something I’ve borrowed, and I’ll have to give it up.” He turned expansive. “I even love to see young cats looking at me and saying, ‘Aaah, I can take him,’ and I laugh. I used to be that way. It’s all right. That’s how it ought to be.” He looked so happy with this press conference that he had become a natural force in the room, and everyone liked him. He was a contrast to Ali who, when reporters were about, was always intent over the latest injury to his status and therefore rattled on the being of the media like a tin roof banging in the wind.

The questions continued. Foreman’s answers came back with the velvet touch of a well-worn pair of dungarees. Only once did he give a clue to what he might be like in a temper. A reporter asked what he thought of Ali’s claim that he was more militant in working for his people than Foreman.

George got stiff. The warp and woof were jamming the thread. His breath was a hint constricted. “There is no suggestion,” he said, “that can bother someone who is intelligent. In answer to Ali being more militant …” But his voice rose. “I don’t even think about things like that,” he answered, cutting off the question. It was obvious that
anger was upset in him as easily as tears from a spoiled child. There must be a massive instability to his faculties of rage, explanation in part for his rituals of concentration. Like the man who fears falling from high places, and fixes his eyes on the floor so that he need never look out a window, Foreman fixed his mind on the absence of disturbance.

“It’s hard,” said Foreman, “to concentrate and be polite when you’re asked questions you’ve heard before.” He subscribed to the principle that repetition kills the soul. “You see, I’m preparing for a fight. That’s my interest. I don’t want distraction. I have no quarrel with the press, but I like to keep my mind working on the things I set for it. You see,” he said, “you have to be one hundred percent stable in everything you do.” And he looked about him as if to indicate he had been talking long enough.

“George, one last question. What’s your fight prediction?”

Foreman was home. It was over. “Oh,” he said, in no faint parody, “I’m the greatest fighter who ever lived. I’m a wonder. The fifth wonder of the world. I’m even faster than Muhammad Ali. And I’m going to knock him out in three … two … one.” He let his eyes laugh. “I’ll be doing one hundred percent my best,” he said. “That’s my only prediction.”

Now, Dick Sadler was asked a few questions. Short, stocky, about sixty, with a bald head, a flattened nose and a flat black beret sitting on his bald head, Foreman’s manager was rough yet roly-poly, and formidable in his features for they were a map with renovations — Sadler knew how flesh got bent in the real world. Since he was also an amalgam of all that sly wisdom of manner that comes
through the cross-fertilization of the various Black establishments: prison, boxing, music, even personal oratory, Sadler, if he had been an actor, could have played anything from a trusty on a chain gang to an aging emcee. He could have done a hoofer or a stand-up comedian, and had; could play piano or trumpet, and had. He was versatile and knew it by the age of nine, when he acted in “Our Gang” comedies. Even now his features made you think of such classic faces as Louis Armstrong or Moms Mabley; Sadler’s mouth was always looking to digest the taste on his lips of the last remark. It was often original for he never needed to say the same thing twice. All the same he made a point of saying the same thing if talking to the press: “Repetition is security for idiots,” said his sardonic look, and he developed his speeches. “George,” he now told them, “is going to keep his left foot between Muhammad’s legs. Oooh!” said Sadler in pain. “That’s where George should be. Hit you in the kidney, hit you in the heart, hit you in the kidney again. Oooh! George does more things than Muhammad. Punches better, better all around, he’s fast and more complete. George can slip, George can parry, George is going to catch you inside, spin you, hit you on the side of your head. You’ll know and maybe you won’t know.” Sadler stopped, looked down, let himself wobble like a drunken man. “Your legs will know it.”

Asked if there might be last-minute shifts in Foreman’s training or strategy, Sadler shrugged at the flatness of the question. “I’ve been doing this for a gang of years with a gang of Champs. We’re not worried. We don’t have to dip into my
intuition
at the last instant. Ali can run but he sure
can’t run for long. We’re confident. There’ll be no surprises. This ought to be the easiest fight George is going to have.” He nodded to the press and took off with his fighter. “Gangway for all this talent,” he cried out.

Something of this was clear in the way he had Foreman work next day. There was no boxing, and no fancy sparring, just the eerie sounds of Foreman’s nature music (“I Love the Lord” — Donny Hathaway) and after fifteen or twenty minutes of loosening, brooding and shadowboxing, Foreman went to work on the heavy bag. Sadler stood holding it, a rudimentary exercise usually given to beginners who first must learn to punch into a stationary object. But Foreman and Sadler were practicing something else.

It is punishing for a boxer to have a long workout on a heavy bag. It hurts one’s arms, it hurts one’s head, it can spring one’s knuckles if the hands are not wrapped. Big as a tackling dummy, the bag weighs eighty pounds or more, and when a punch is not thrown properly, the boxer’s body shudders with the shock. It is like being brought down by an unexpected tackle. One bad punch is enough. Now Foreman began to hit this bag with lefts and rights. He did not throw them slowly, he did not throw them fast, he threw them steadily, putting all of his body into each punch, which came to mean that he was contracting and expelling his force forty to fifty times a minute for he threw that many punches, not fast, not slow, but concussive in their power. Sadler leaned forward, braced to the back of the bag, like a man riding a barrel in a storm at sea. He was shaken with every punch. His body quivered from the impact. That hardly mattered, that was part of the show.
When the impact of Foreman’s fist on the other side of the bag was particularly heavy, he grunted, and said “Alors” in admiration.

Fifty punches a minute for a three-minute round. It is one hundred and fifty punches without rest. Foreman stopped hitting the bag for the thirty-second interval Sadler allowed between each round, but Foreman did not stop moving. The bag free, he danced about it, tapping it lightly, moving his feet faster and faster, and the thirty seconds up, Sadler was back holding the bag, and Foreman was pounding punches into it. These were no ordinary swings. Foreman was working for the maximum of power in punch after punch round after round fifty or a hundred punches in a row without diminishing his power — he would throw five or six hundred punches in this session, and they were probably the heaviest cumulative series of punches any boxing writer had seen. Each of these blows was enough to smash an average athlete’s ribs; anybody with poor stomach muscles would have a broken spine. Foreman hit the heavy bag with the confidence of a man who can pick up a sledgehammer and knock down a tree. The bag developed a hollow as deep as his head. As the rounds went by, Foreman’s sweat formed a pattern of drops six feet in diameter on the floor: poom! and pom! and boom!… bom!… boom!… went the sounds of his fists into the bag, methodical, rhythmic, and just as predictably hypnotic as the great overhead blow of the steam hammer driving a channel of steel into clay. One could feel the strategy. Sooner or later, there must come a time in the fight when Ali would be so tired he could not move, could only use his arms to protect
himself. Then he would be like a heavy bag. Then Foreman would treat him like a heavy bag. In the immense and massive confidence of these enormous reverberating blows his fists would blast through every protection of Ali, smashing at those forearms until they could protect Ali no more. Six hundred blows at the heavy bag; not one false punch. His hands would be ready to beat on every angle of Ali’s cowering and self-protective meat, and Sadler, as if reading the psychic temperature of comprehension in the audience, cried out from his wise gargoyle of a mouth, “Don’t stand and freeze, Muhammad. Oh, Muhammad, don’t you stand and freeze!”

A
LI WAS
peeping in. There was not much Foreman could try that Ali did not see. The first to train each day in this same ring, Ali had all the time he needed to begin his workout at noon, talk to the press, walk the hundred yards back to his villa for a shower, and then come out again to take a squint at George. Foreman would arrive about 1
P.M.
after a forty-mile drive from the Inter-Continental and go to a dressing room to change. Often he would arrive while Ali was still talking to the press. Hearing the sounds of Foreman’s retinue passing outside Ali would shout, “Come on in, chump. I ain’t going to hurt you.”

Foreman would call back, “Don’t want to hear that.”

He would pass out of range of Ali’s voice, and Ali would declare to the reporters listening, “George Foreman wants to keep his mind undisturbed because he’s got a lot to worry about. He has to face
me
.”

These days Ali seemed more interested in talking to the press than in working. One morning he did no more than three rounds of light shadowboxing. Then he hit the heavy
bag for a few minutes. Maybe Ali had been hitting heavy bags for too many years, but he did it gingerly as if he did not wish to jar either his hands or his head. He seemed to be saving his energies for the press. He was always ready for a harangue after a workout, and there was something unchanging in his voice — the same hysteria one first heard ten years ago was still present — the jeering agitated voice that always repelled his white listeners, the ugly voice so much at odds with his customary charm. You could feel Ali shift the gears of his psyche as he went into it, as though it were a special transmission to use only for press conferences, or declaiming his poetry, or talking about his present opponent. At such times his tone would turn harsh. High-pitched hints of fear would come into his voice and large gouts of indignation. Even as what he said became more comical, so he would become more humorless. “Great as I am,” he would state, “you have made me the underdog. I, an artist, a creator, am called the underdog when fighting an amateur.” He would be kingly in disdain but it was probably for the castle of Camp since he knew that everything he said was put immediately into quotation marks. Something in his voice promised that you would never know how much he believed of what he had to say. After a while one could begin to suspect these speeches served as an organ of elimination to vent the boredom of training; he was sending his psychic wastes directly into the press. On the consequence, he was not exactly fun to be around. If he poisoned the air with his harangues, he raised the thought that he was in a continuing panic. He certainly had to be in some fear after those quick looks at
Foreman on the heavy bag. Some part of his gut had to respond to those monumental thuds. As if in reaction, he would assemble the press for still one more tirade. The voice of the tirade was, however, growing hollow, and there were occasions at Nsele when the hollow seemed to reverberate back, as if he sent out a call, “Hear, O walls, the sound of my greatness,” and the walls did not hear him.