Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [5]
When the young Clay finally left, the two just looked at each other and doubled over in laughter. A few months later, Dundee brought Willie back to Louisville for a main event, and he was doing his sparring in the same gym as Clay. Angelo scanned the gym for somebody to work with Willie. “There’s that kid over there…what’s his name,” Angelo said. “Wanna work with him, Willie?” Willie and Clay worked a couple of rounds, and as Angelo often liked to recount, “Willie looked so bad I laid him off. Three days before the fight, I had to lay him up. Real stale. Willie doesn’t like it and says, `Ange, it ain’t me. You got eyes. This kid’s a good-lookin’ fighter.’ And the fact was that Willie was right. I was so busy watching Willie I didn’t watch a thing the kid was doing.”
Now, Ali was suddenly back to his visitor, saying: “Hold up there. You don’t want a piece of my hair. You don’t want my autograph. You just wanna see me in person? What you want?”
“I just wonderin’…you know, like, ya know…maybe you be my manager?”
“I don’t manage,” Ali said. “Don’t even like to watch fights. Don’t want nuthin’ to do with fights. People see me in gyms, goin’ to fights, people think I miss it. People think I’m just another washed-up fighter. You get my meanin’?”
“You can get a trainer,” the kid said.
“How many fights you have?” Ali asked.
“Twenty fights.”
“What? What you need me for?”
“I need your learnin’. Your name.”
Ali moved in front of the kid, took his hands and examined them. “They ain’t twenty-fight hands. Your hands too small, too.” Ali then held his own hands up, palms facing. “Show me somethin’.”
The kid flicked several untutored combinations to Ali’s palms, and Ali turned, saying, “That’s enough. How many fights?”
“Twenty,” the kid said with less conviction. Ali just stayed silent. The kid said, looking at the floor, “I don’t have any fights. I gotta start somewhere. Even you started somewhere, right? Can you help me?”
“I’m gonna help,” Ali said. He reached into his pocket, rummaged through some bills, and stuck them into the kid’s hand. “Get the bus back to Nawwlins.”
The kid said, “I ain’t goin’ back. I’m stayin’ in L.A. I gotta dig in somewhere. I don’t want your money.”
“You wanna be diggin’ a grave?” Ali asked, then added, “You got eatin’ money?”
“For a week. I’m stayin’ with a stepbrother.”
“You keep my money, then. Eat for another week. But if you smart, you go home to your mama.” The kid turned away angrily, and Abdel showed him to the door.
“I know how he feel,” Ali said. “He gonna hate me. Tell everybody he meet Ali, and I ain’t the champ he thought, that I’m a bad man, with no helpin’ hand. One day he’ll understand, when he a ’lectrician or somethin’, doin’ good, raisin’ kids.”
As the January light slipped into evening, Ali drew up to eat in a soft chair by the fire. He had picked up considerable weight, yet still seemed hollowed out, like a big fruit shorn of its ripe interior. He labored with a chicken leg that kept quivering in his hand, and finally dropped it in disgust. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, and slipped deep into the chair. To distract him, a hypothetical was put to him. Suppose he were a manager, with all he knew and had done, and that kid from New Orleans was Joe Frazier, much older than the kid, small for a heavyweight, with hands that clunked and deadweight legs. “He be on the bus, too,” Ali said. He paused, then added, “I don’t know anything about fightin’, really. Only about me fightin’. I couldn’t stand lookin’ at that kind of style in a gym every day, no matter what the money. I’d see what I could do to him, wanna jump in and whup the sucker.” There was an edge to his voice.
It was suggested that it might be interesting to look at the Thrilla in Manila on tape, only his good rounds if he wished. “What good rounds?” he asked. His eyes became unengaged, as if he’d much prefer to pull the ace of diamonds out of his ear. Even sly persistence