Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [50]
As for being a liar, that has too much of a clinical whiff to it. Young just couldn’t bear his flashing change of mind on almost everything, it made him untrustworthy, his quotes useless unless you were a lazy slave to his dumb speechifying, and there were many reporters of that type. In defense, it should be said that clarity of word or theme was as foreign to Ali as the understanding of ultra-slow light pulse. He liked intrigue, mystery, to keep the mist-blowing machine functioning on the set. No true liar could have been so indifferent to technique. He was simply a spin doctor without an examining room. Any idea or thought heard from others, if it seized his attention, was put in service without the slightest rumination. It was not insignificant that Elijah had told Herbert: “Take care of him. Never leave Ali’s side. He’ll follow the last person to have his ear.” And, too, Ali had a show to keep going, often with a threadbare script through which he staggered to hit his stage marks. With a high fever, Norman Mailer judged him to be America’s greatest wit, an observation that—after the first time around—could have only been produced by a deranged funny bone or an avidity for comic cant.
He was a vamp who needed deep vats of energy to locate his muse, and he sucked it up from wherever it flowed, sometimes from the criticism of writers like Young, sometimes from within his own camp, where he would create stick-figure opposition in people like Turnbow for a while, more often in Bundini Brown, whom he would slap on any pretext or thinly perceived slight. Though others close to him liked to deny its presence as if it would compromise his stature and natural talents, fear or insecurity, we know from Joe Martin and Archie Moore, was never far from him. Even Bundini once said: “That meanness is just fear, that’s all, just another tool for him.” It helped him acquire a cutting edge that was not naturally there.
To that end, he also was merciless with opponents, whom he humiliated, personalized into caricatures. Ali’s first reaction to any fighter was an instant, Holmsian visual once-over. The shape of a nose, a jawline, a tic or a mannerism, a way of speaking were amplified by him, the way many children do in a schoolyard. He created full figures, plopping on physical or mental defects, and he’d try to occupy their minds, tried to relate to them viscerally. The invasion of the other man gave him bolts of vitality from the attention it provoked, shifted the fear to another, helped him to care about the dulling repetition of training, and allowed him to jack up his low-watt attention for the hunt. In the first period of his work, it all rushed out with transparent malice, though he tried to deflect it by saying it was for the box office. In the second half, the compulsion to denigrate, except again for Joe Frazier, made him sound like a drunk who knew only one song; the habit had diluted into a weak tactic that drove smart pencils to stop taking notes. But TV cameras kept grinding; the image on the screen was all they wanted, the one-groove recording, long in the tooth, was presented as arresting news.
“Why do you pick on black fighters?