Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [31]
Archie was a man of many parts. His diction was precise, his manner effortless and worldly. He played piano, was an expert pistol shot, a splendid cook who needed three wardrobe sizes as he chased the money well over twenty-six hard, hard years in something like four-hundred fights. He was the first to look different as a fighter, stepping into the ring in blazing colors or looking like a Moorish king. He was the first to make predictions (usually wrong) and to create rhyme. In London he walked the streets in a top hat, striped pants, and tapping a cane. Clay would later make all the papers and the cover of S.I. doing the same. On Fifth Avenue he could often be seen wearing a white dinner jacket and white Bermuda shorts. The Syndicate thought Archie would give the kid some maturity, cultivate discipline and presence.
Clay turned up on the Moore grounds outside San Diego in 1960. Archie joked that the place was more suitable for indigent managers. He’d supply them with cheap cigars, get them out of bed “with a black snake whip,” and give them an hour to lie and boast after five miles of roadwork. He’d have a common name for them—bum; that’s what they called the “kids they lived off of.” It was a hot, desolate camp, suitable for Archie, who thought deprivation and isolation cleansing; the place was called the Salt Mine, and the gym was the Bucket of Blood, all of it on a rocky ridge of hills, up which Clay would have to run daily. “The place was hell,” he’d say. He had expected a retreat, perhaps a shaded oasis where he and Archie would sit around eating grapes and contemplating the kid’s infinite future. He instead saw an Archie Moore, divested of his plumery, who looked like a tenant farmer. Archie handed him some blue overalls. Sometimes, during a break, they sprawled on the rocks, and the old campaigner would discuss ring craft as if he were probing quasars. They talked about comportment, the need to have character, bowing to no man. They didn’t talk about race except when Archie told him about his role in the movie Huckleberry Finn, how he resented the word “nigger” in the script and quietly went around the director to get it excised.
He told Clay: “Remember this. People don’t see. They hear what others tell them to hear, others shape their opinion. It’s called public relations.” Clay pondered: “You mean I ain’t got nothin’ to say ’bout it!” Sure, Archie said, “with your character. Listen. Ever see a big-name fighter take a beating and the public goes around talking like they didn’t see any beating? You or somebody gets the public on your side. They only see their good idea of you that’s been driven into their minds.”
“I wanna stand straight and high as a champ,” Clay said.
“So does an oak tree,” Archie said. “But you have to bend and sway. Oak makes good coffins, too.”
Once an ex-fighter, not too old, came by, and Archie slipped him some money and gave him a meal. “He lives out in the desert here,” Moore told Clay, “like a prairie gopher. You can see he’s not well mentally. The trick, son, is not to end up in any kind of desert, to be smart, know the road out.”
“Took too many punches, huh?” Clay said. “Well, I don’t take punches. That’s for sure.”
“The ring isn’t play,” Archie said.
“Don’t be worryin’ ’bout me.”
“Well, with that attitude, I’ll tell you where you’re going to end up. With people laughing at you in the gym, or people feeling sorry for you. People dropping a buck on you, and if they remember, and you were good enough, maybe a benefit to help you, and then they’ll forget. There