Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [1]
Two ideologists summon up the thinking then and now—Ken Tynan and R. Emmett Tyrell. Tynan was a superb writer given to large crushes on certain showmen and insurrectionists. In his recently published Journal, he watches Ali beaten by Frazier, and etches bleakly. Frazier is Nixon’s hatchetman, and Ali’s “flair, audacity” is cut down by “stubborn, obdurate hard-hat persistence. We may come to look back on the 60s as the Indian summer of Western imagination, of the last aristocrats of Western taste.”
To the far right of Tynan is Tyrell, who regards Ali in a 1997 column as a corrupting rule breaker. Ali tore down the sport by introducing racial prejudice, and destroyed Frazier with utter nonsense and false calumny. Frazier was black. Ali remains a figure today because he is “idolized by the ignorant and by mountebanks still making money off him.” Bits of truth, minus the politics, fleck to the surface in both views.
Part 1 of this book, revisionist only to those who will not like their mythic perception jostled, begins with Ali and Frazier isolated in retirement. Part 2 deals with the emergence of both men with special emphasis on the manipulation of Ali by the Muslims. Part 3 reexamines their three bitter fights, especially the dead reckoning in Manila. More than twenty-five years later it still stands out in sharp relief as an utterly brutal, fateful affair. Fateful, because Frazier, convinced that Ali had stolen his black identity, seemed to sentence himself to victimhood; and because Ali, who soared on the wings of unsurpassed talent, spent his last ounce of it in that furnace heat—and he knew it. Men of far less abilities would peck at his remains five years beyond when his art was transcendental; sadly, it would cost him his health. I once asked his former wife Belinda how we should remember Ali. She said, “Remember him as a great fighter.”
Legacy has become a pulverized, empty word of late, rather odd considering that America is not noted for much historical memory. In particular, the word seems out of place with sports heroes. Few leave anything behind for long for the next generation—just a line of numbers. Besides the thrill of watching Ali work, whatever his lasting impact on sports might be is altogether mixed. He did lead the way for black athletes out of the frustrating silence that Jackie Robinson had to endure. On the minus side, he also changed the climate of sports, from their promotion to the atmosphere in which they are conducted. His influence in games today can be seen in the blaring, unending marketing of self, the cheap acting out of performers, the crassness of player interactions that even informs our broader culture. Life, culture, and sports as pro wrestling. His was an overwhelming presence that came at a high price, ultimately to himself and the character of sports. Worse, far beyond Joe Louis, he continues to be guided in a mindless display like a sightless man feeling his way through the empty rooms of his remaining history.
PATHOLOGIES
Only his face remained as I remembered it. Eight years had elapsed since I had seen him spiral through the final, perilous years of his career, and even at age forty-two it still held at bay any admission of destruction. There was no zippered flesh, no blistered or pulpy ears, nor eye ridges that drop into sagging eaves; the nose remained agreeably flat without distended bone or hammered spread. Always the centerpiece of vanity—this face, so instantly transportable into world consciousness—it was betrayed only by his eyes, his words. Where once his eyes publicly spilled with tumbling clowns, they were now a dance hall at daybreak. Where once the words streamed in a fusillade of octaves, they were now sluggish and groping.