Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [49]
In one sparring session, Dundee shouted instructions, and Ali turned and yelled: “Shut up!” Among the press near the ring apron was Dick Young, columnist for the New York Daily News. “Can you imagine?” Young said, loud enough for Ali to hear. “Here’s the guy that saved his ass against Liston, stole the fight for him against Cooper, and he tells him to shut up. What a jerk!” Ali moved toward the ropes, looked down and said: “I can treat you even worse.” Young asked him if he was going to fire Angelo. “How can I fire him?” Ali shot back. “He’s blacker than me.”
Nothing, though, caught his crudity at the time more than his steady treatment of the giant Mel Turnbow, a gentle sparring partner, a man of slow gait and even slower speech. Ali was usually good with his gym men. He paid well, bought them clothes when they seemed in need, and he never worked them over in the sessions. “I feel sorry for Turnbow,” Dundee said. Turnbow seemed to bring out a cruel streak in Ali. Was it because he was a non-Muslim? Not likely; there were others like Jimmy Ellis, though harassed by the Muslims, who never felt the champ’s sting. Or, was it because he despised being around a backward black who disturbed his vision of his race? Ali once went down under a Turnbow barrage. He wobbled to his feet, went down again, this time with his eyes shut and his mouth open. Turnbow stood there, confused and embarrassed. Having been faking, Ali reached out and grabbed Turnbow and spilled him to the canvas while the crowd laughed. From then on, day by day, Ali would torment and batter the giant. A camp member explained: “Mel lives back there with the rest of us. But he doesn’t take part in anything. He doesn’t look at the television with Ali. He doesn’t laugh at Ali’s jokes or tell him how great he is. He just sits and eats, and never talks. And this is the one thing that bugs the champ. Being ignored. He’ll dislike anybody he thinks is ignoring him.”
The plane still cruised above the clouds. If air travel didn’t scare him anymore, what did?
He thought for a moment and said: “Dead people. I touched one once. So cold. Besides, they become ghosts. They don’t know where they are, see. So if you see them and they like you, then they’re with you forever. Gives me the creeps. Don’t it scare you? I know it does.”
“Some talk right now. Dead people. Wouldn’t take much to join them.”
“You’re right there,” he said. “The pilot could have a hangover.” He couldn’t resist the needle. “Somebody didn’t do a job on the engine. Bye-bye.”
“I wish I knew some jokes.”
“Just like fighting,” he said. “Don’t take much. Those little veins snake in ya head go pop, and that’s all she wrote, ain’t it? Scary. This is goin’ to be my last fight. I’m tired of it all, worn out. Too much danger, ain’t it? It’s always been there in my head.” He pondered, then said: “I got sixteen million in fights lined up after this one. Can you imagine?”
This instant contradiction, quitting in one breath, looking toward the money in the other, drove some reporters wild: it made him seem transparently false, and a challenge to their own sustained interest in him. Ali’s last real critic left was Dick Young, for most of the veterans had given up trying to explain him, and the majority of new ones were deep into hero worship. Young was a tough conservative, a conscientious reporter who was not timid with opinion. The Muslims believed he was racist; Ali never thought so, sort of liked him as the last contrarian in the midst of all the treacle ladled on him, and he treated him convivially throughout. Ali liked writers and reporters who dueled with him, they snapped him out of a chronic boredom that could reveal itself in a flash. Young kept him awake; there was so much he disliked about Ali, let alone the growing idea that he was transcendental and a social martyr.
“He insults the little intelligence