Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [52]
In the gym once, the ballet master Balanchine marveled at the use of his legs, his speed. Fans didn’t; he was not what big men should be about. Legs nullified drama, hence vulnerability. He was not a dangerous fighter who portended a kind of higher malevolence that gives a rush to the standard voyeurs. His style was resisted. Art was for the lower weights, the classy little guys who never seemed to be delivering hurt on TV. Americans were a big people, they wanted considerable bang for their dollar or time. Ali at the time was too far ahead of ring consciousness—and available talent. Once, while doing a piece on the Roman Colosseum, I had occasion to talk to Italian novelist Alberto Moravia, and while commenting about theater the subject somehow landed on Ali.
Moravia said he knew nothing about boxing, but he did know a bit about theater. He looked upon Ali as he would a Picasso. “He forces you to see in a new way,” he said. “That is one way how I see him. The other is the art of theater. Here, I have a problem. I see in him una falta de genio (fault of genius).” Which I took to mean a lack of temper, that it was too easy for Ali. “A fight should have tension, no,” he continued. “He is an action writer in his own theater. But he clowns, he fools with your patience. I want to leave the theater. He won’t let you have tension, struggle. He makes the funny faces, lounges in the ring. He baffles. Perhaps, he is bored with his own text. Or his characters, the other fighters, bore him.” He needed a hard, serious man to put him in relief, to put him at risk; without it, a fight is pantomime, drama buckles.
Ali certainly understood the value of tension and suspense. His head was full of plot lines, from predictions to constant foreshadowing before a fight. He needed one to be a clear movie in his mind, the kind where people were taken to the edge, held there, and released by his immense command. So far he had not been able to get it right; people were talking in the seats and throwing popcorn at the screen. The outcomes were often muddled, his work too eccentric with an emotional immaturity that cost him credibility, and there was too much disfiguring afterburn of too many bouts. Five fights before the halfway mark of his career lit up his problem.
For the press, Charles Sonny Liston was a total abyss. Fall into it, and you would not hit one solid feeling on the way down. Having been in his shadow many times, once having been rocketed by him into a Denver snowbank for questioning his age, I grew to like him, not because he was misunderstood, but because he was like an anthropological treasure. His rap sheet stopped short of homicide. It covered muggings, stickups, muscling for St. Louis crime bosses, and suspicion of dragging beat cops into alleys and working them over. “They never liked me in that town,” Sonny once said; what a card. One black cop, a Detective Sergeant Reddick, wanted to take him downstairs and make him “fit only for Decoration Day.” Sonny said: “Yeah, Cap’n, a good idea.”
One of twenty-five children of a sharecropper who knocked him around like a volleyball, Sonny ended up being given ten years in Jeff City. “He didn’t mind it,” said Lou Anonimo, a fellow inmate. “An awful place. But Sonny almost liked it. He liked his bath. He learned to box. He couldn’t read or write. He was just a suspicious human bein’ with an alligator voice.” One group he despised and avoided were the Black Muslims. Crime packs were not to his liking, groups were “crazy-crazy,” unpredictable, and jailhouse Muslims were quick, psychotic killers to him; they spooked him. When he rose in boxing, mobbed up to his sullen eyes, Sonny scoped