Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [55]
Held in Vegas, the title fight would be the most politically exclamatory of Ali’s career. “The kid was never the same after Floyd,” Dundee said, tapping his head. “The pressure got bigger and bigger. The fun was gone.” That night, Clay looked down at the press and said: “Watch closely. I’m gonna show you real punishment.” To show his superiority, Clay did not throw a single punch in the first round. He then picked up the beat, strafing Floyd with straight lefts. He began to taunt: “Come on America, come on white America!” He did what he pleased. Floyd seemed impaired, something was wrong. He was decked in the sixth, got up quickly. After the seventh, his trainer hugged and lifted him to ease the pain in Floyd’s back. He went on gamely, and the fight turned quickly into a spectacle of cruelty, nastiness being applied to an invalid. “Get him out of there!” Dundee screamed, sensing the crowd’s anger. It wasn’t stopped until the twelfth, with Floyd, suffering mightily from the back pain, leaving the ring draped over his seconds.
What the country had seen was a certain kind of bullfight, where unimaginative passes prolong the ceremony too long and subordinate the kill. Seeing Floyd in pain and outclassed, it wanted a quick, clean finish, not a class in how to pull off a butterfly’s wings. Floyd gimped to Sinatra’s suite the next night to apologize, and bumped into human nature. Frank moved to the far side of the room, away from Floyd, sat down, his back “all the way over there to me. I got the message. I left.” Public outcry was instant. Sensing his embryonic mythos once more in ruins, Clay said to the press: “Okay, what’s the excuse now? Fix? Carrying him? Give it to me! He took my best punches! My hands are swollen.” After what he had done to someone whose only mistake was being an integrator, a Martin Luther King man, he was no longer drawn as an out-of-control kid, a rhetorical belch. He became real as well as an insult to whatever integrity boxing had. He had wanted to feast on acclaim, a tour de force. In the end, he had only underlined a line from the Old West: “The vulture hates nothing more than biting into a glass eye.”
Ali was always an extremely busy fighter. He defended his title five times in 1966, once in this period in back-to-back months, and he would surpass that pace again in 1972. No champion besides Joe Louis had ever worked so often before. That meant that he was in training most of the year, and that’s a lot of gym wear. It also suggests that a fighter needs money, or he believes no one can beat him and there is too much easy prey to pass up. Ali set up shop abroad. He stopped Henry Cooper again in London in the sixth, turning him into a hose that literally squirted blood. He took on Brian London there (“boxers aren’t prawns,” Brian had a habit of saying, meaning pawns) and dropped him in the third. Then, on to Germany for Karl Mildenberger, who said, “blacks do not like left-handers.” No fighters like southpaws. But Ali did not punish him for the remark. Karl confused him; it was a dull affair, almost a slow-motion polka before Ali stopped him in the twelfth round. An understandable schedule; a man needs a holiday sometime, especially when they weren’t exactly looking for him back in the American office. It was the first of those post-Patterson bouts, against George Chuvalo in Canada, that he saw public sentiment intrude upon his economics.
“After all this is over,” he complained, “I’m lucky if I clear two thousand.” It was far too little for a long night. Ali had hardly