Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [6]
It was not that he didn’t want to cooperate on some contrarian whim. The mention of Frazier and Manila seemed to run into a room in his mind that he wanted to keep bare, a steamy couple of hours that took him to the center of himself as a champion and a man. What did he, eight years later, still dread about that fight? Had it not been a masterpiece, a kind of primitive art? A firestorm of passion, of promises kept and value given, of dramatic passage with an honorable end? But there was no end, and that, it seemed, was what Ali could not bear to see, the blinking exit sign for a wondrous career—through which he could not bring himself to step. He added, “Without me, Joe’s nothin’. He should stop usin’ me, them fights for his fame. It’s all over. Look at me, I’m not right, sick. He should be sick, too, all them punches I lay on his dumb head.” He stopped, then said with resignation, “Nothin’ lasts. We just flies, ain’t we?”
Nearing the end of the century, Muhammad Ali still swam inside of Joe Frazier like a determined bacillus. Despite the advice of a few friends and some of his children, Frazier was still keeping an obsessional hold on Ali, sometimes with a freefall into the void between regret and revenge; at other times his contempt just lay there hissing. Much time had passed since my visit with Ali, and if he had been a sonata of sometimes bewildered withdraw, Frazier was a brass section insistent on sending out a triumphal arch of sound not consonant with his early self. The usually remote Frazier had taken on, ironically, the attitude and coloration of the Ali that had once stuck words on him as if he were a store window dummy.
“Didja bring any money?” were his first words; these were also on the lips of all who worked around him. Did he ask me for money when he had had a half dozen fights and moved over the ring like a confused animal with a trap on its leg? “Well, for old times’ sake,” he relented. He growled about what he thought to be a lack of exposure, the neglect of the public, how his own greatness was being forgotten and how Ali was being made into a god. “A tin one,” he added. “I made him what he is.” Including his current state of health? “I made him what he is,” Joe said. “Take it any way you want.” He threw up his hands and said: “Look at him, can’t even talk and he makin’ money hand and fist.” Was he, Frazier, secure financially? “I got more money than him,” he said.
“Joe is for Joe,” said Burt Watson, a former business manager. “Everyone becomes former around Joe. He’s not a bad guy. Getting past his kids and to him without jingle ain’t gonna happen. They look for a dollar in the fog. He’s in the Joe Frazier business. Nobody mentions Ali round him. And the only picture of Ali around is Ali on his ass on the gym wall.”
A flattened Ali, caught just at the end of gravity pull, took up nearly the whole wall of an outer office, and there was more of the same down in the gym. On a bad ego day, Frazier could not turn few directions without an instant pick-me-up. Right now, he was getting a boost of another kind from a jug of rock candy, lemon and brandy; he was not an attack drinker, but a measured one who saw periodic belts as an elixir, a protection against bodily invasions. For all those pictures of a wounded Ali and his own steady assertions of singularity, Frazier was not a natural or even a self-made egotist. As a fighter, he had always had a cheerful pride and put high value on proper behavior; he was a rule-follower and, from the signs plastered on the gym walls, now a diligent rule-maker of gym etiquette and