Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [13]
Didn’t Joe once say while recuperating on a bed after Manila, “Lawdy, lawdy he’s great”? He replied that he had said no such thing, and if he had he must have been out of his head with dehydration, or saying what he was taught. “Like bein’ a good sport,” he said. “For the public, that’s why I say that. I never felt them words inside.” He suddenly wanted to know who I thought were the top five heavyweights in history; I did not have enough insensitivity to tell him that his old trainer, Eddie Futch, had left him off his list. I told him: Ali, Joe Louis, Marciano, Jersey Joe Walcott, and Frazier—with Sonny Liston a very close sixth. “Well,” Joe said, “right from the top you got that all wrong.” Where would he place Ali? “Not in the top five, for certain. I beat him three times.” He waved away the public record, saying, “I don’t care about that. I know in my heart! He do, too.” Of the latter, it is a lock bet that such an admission by Ali would never be forthcoming—even in a delirium.
Having dismissed Ali as a man and a fighter, indeed tossed him into a pile of subalterns, Frazier did not seem to have any place farther to go with him—yet held on to him as if he was there and would disappear in a second, and in doing so would take him along. “When a man gets in your blood like that,” Frazier said, “you can’t never let go. No matter. Yesterday is today for me. He never die for me.” Ali in mist, Frazier in shadow walled in by heavier shadow. So unmoored from what they were and did, the ghosts of Manila.
PASSAGES
On March 22, 1967, Sugar Ray Robinson drove to Loew’s Midtown Motor Inn, across from the old Madison Square Garden. It was 2 A. M., cold with piles of dirty snow on the street, and nothing could have got him out of bed, not even the throaty summons of a woman. Those days were behind him as well as his career, twenty years of casting the longest shadow it was possible to do then in a sport. Because he always needed money to sustain a glamorous social life, he fought frequently against names that still bring a shudder: LaMotta, Turpin, Fullmer, and so on. There were few breathers, even the journeymen were tough then and required serious intent. The middleweight division of this period, postwar on through some of the sixties, was the preeminent in all of boxing history, and with aristocratic bearing and the style of Fred Astaire and Duke Ellington, Sugar was its master. No one admired Robinson more than Clay-Ali, who set out to be just like him.
Except in the ring, Ali would never fit his model. Ray was a prince of the night, lighting down wherever the champagne flowed and girls whispered in his ear, a smooth boulevardier in Saville Row suits with a small entourage in his wake and a manner that lit up London and Paris. He once said after a lengthy stay in the latter: “I left my legs in Paris.” Until the second half of his career, Ali never left his legs anywhere. Early on, he saw women as temptation, was uneasy in their presence, to the point that many of the old hustlers in boxing thought he was homosexual. He was generous to family and friends, frugal with his own spending, dressed usually like a timekeeper on a construction job, black shirt and pants and heavy boots. He would far surpass Sugar’s entourage; he ended up with one the size of those old unemployment lines.
The two first met in 1960 prior to Clay’s trip to the Olympics in Rome. He had been waiting outside of Sugar’s Harlem nightclub for hours. When Ray finally stepped out of a flamingo pink Cadillac, such was the maestro’s glitter that the young Clay thought of beating it down the street. But he suddenly pounced, picking Sugar up at the curb and ringing his ears with a nonstop