Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [3]
Casually flipping the Amin photo back into the crate, Ali discovered another set of pictures, all of fighters who formed big and small pieces of his career. Here was the forever penitential Floyd Patterson; the picaresque Jack Johnson, still defiant with his grin; the champagne smile of Sugar Ray Robinson, whom Ali admired the most; Joe Louis, with his spare grimness; his true mentor Archie Moore, with the silky ease and nonchalance of a horn player; the scuffed face of the doomed Jerry Quarry; the sharply ridged prominences of George Chuvalo, who, with an asphalt jaw and nothing else, first tapped into the attitude necessary to beat Ali. He lingered over George Foreman, back then the dark at the top of the stairs, then passed without comment until he came to the squatting gargoyle Sonny Liston. He pointed an accusatory finger at Sonny, and said with conviction: “He the devil. Not enough fire in hell for him.” Contrary to the impression that has come down through the years—that Sonny had caved in psychologically under the hysteria that Ali had whipped up—Ali had feared Liston always as a small child might a strong night wind in the trees.
One jarring absence existed in the gallery of photographs: Joe Frazier. The Ali legend had been galvanized by their personal, spend-it-all fights. Where was Joe? Was it just an oversight, or did it speak to the wariness with which he still held Frazier, the deep division that existed between the two to this day? Ali had always viewed Frazier as if he were an inferior item on a menu, and always said so publicly: “What he do? He showed up. That’s all.” But deep down Ali always looked upon Frazier as a enveloping presence with a black hood over his head and an ax in his hand.
What Ali said in public was far less revealing than what he said in private. Audiences of more than one person were generally justification for a flashing, highly allusive, and ensnarled rodomontade, depending on the theme of the day; it was the pro wrestler rap long before it arrived, the spin retailer way ahead of his day. You had to get Ali alone to delve beneath the rhetoric, and even then there was just so far that Ali would go when it came to Frazier, of whom he could be starkly dismissive and altogether evasive in giving him his just provenance. Privately, Ali would be spare in his comment, given to long silences and sudden observation: “Boxin’ just a short time, my brain is his forever.” Or: “People don’t want art, they wanna see war. I ain’t leavin’ my face in that ring.” Publicly, he would always stray into long and convoluted sermons of showy redundancy, which had been adapted from Muslim gospel with a disregard for even a speck of originality. His easily most famous line, “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong,” was slyly dropped into his presentation by Sam Saxon, an early Muslim watchdog and headbanger more warmly known as Cap’n Sam. The Cap’n himself told me years later of a conversation he once had with Ali.
“You got nothin’ ’gainst them Vietcong, right?” the Cap’n said.
“No, not a thing,” said Ali.
“Then say it,” said the Cap’n. “We behind you. We ain’t fightin’ no honkie war.”
“Yeah. I ain’t got nothin’ ’gainst them Vietcong.”
“Now, now you’re talkin’,” said Sam.
Ali led the way to the floor below, by an open door to the bedroom where wife Veronica slept, a space arrayed with expensive white linens and fragile black dolls set up along the windowsills. Acolytes who had run with Ali during the