Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [61]
“You’d better be for this one.”
“I know somethin’,” he said.
“I hope so.”
“No, I mean I really know somethin’.” He waited for a reaction, then said: “But I’m not tellin’.”
“Something in the films of Frazier?”
“Not that,” he said. “Don’t you want to know?”
“I’m not going to twist your arm.”
There was silence, then he motioned me down by his ear. “Frazier,” he whispered, “has high blood.”
“How do you know?”
“I got spies.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Suit yourself,” he said.
“Suppose you’re right. The fight’s going to be canceled?”
“Naaaah,” he said, “he’s too stupid for that. If it’s me with high blood, forget it.”
“How bad is it?”
“Bad enough,” he said. “And it’s gonna get badder come fight night. He’s gonna explode with tension. Blow up. Right there in the ring. When he sees the whole world behind me. All my people. All my young people out there pulling for me. And there he is. Lonely little Joe. All by himself. Whoeee! That’s scary.”
In the gym during workouts, Ali produced a scripted set piece. Only the gym itself remained free of tinkering. It was always the same: thick, steaming air heavy with sweat; fading fight posters and the counterpoint of sound from gloves working speed bags and heavy bags; the gabby old retired milliners and beach wanderers as aspish as theater critics; the creak of the ring apron sighing under the desperate footwork of prelim boys; sun lasering through dirty windows turning the dusty, whitewashed walls into a dull yellow; spit buckets forming a gruel that could spawn tadpoles. Plants, Ali’s straight men, popped out of the crowd on cue, faces wreathed with cigar smoke and anger, predicting doom for him at the hands of Frazier, what Joe was going to do to that face. He’d stop sparring, engage in fake vitriol. “You there,” he’d shout, pointing to a guy with no teeth who was getting five bucks for his lines. “You lay off my pretty face! I’ll come down there and turn your face into raw meat! Like I’m gonna do to Frazier. Throw that old beggar out!” And his aides would rush into the crowd. Dressed and showered, he’d then take, say, Burt Lancaster on a tour of the Miami ghetto. “A real show,” he said to Burt. “But wait till New York, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
His mother, Odessa, stopped by on her way to the Bahamas. She couldn’t bear to watch the fight.
“Baby,” she said, “don’t underestimate this Frazier. Work hard. I’m too nervous.”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Ali said. “I’ll be in top shape. He’s a bum.”
“Sonny…he’s no bum,” she said, kissing his cheek.
Not like the zoos of Philly, Fifth Street was priceless as a one-dollar look into the entrails of boxing, and it would vanish in time, its history gone as suddenly as the old Garden that now conducted boxing in a new high-rise above Penn Station. But the old Garden, a slattern of a building, was irreplaceable as a venue. Where for decades so many inflamed rallies had been held by American Nazis and flaying evangelists. Where Marilyn Monroe sang to JFK, where ballroom dancers and ice queens and clowns seemed endless. Mainly the old Garden had been the temple of world boxing. Kids doing roadwork in the half-light of a Nigerian or Bangkok morning, or kids listening by a radio, like Ali himself, knew it as a dreamlike place of torn flesh and majesty.
The move of Garden boxing signaled, too, an environmental change. The old-style managers, with lunch on their ties, had their patch for doing business, a couple of blocks on Eighth Avenue smeared with grimy windows filled with old school rings, dusty Army greatcoats, of long and stained shot-and-a-beer bars with an Edward Hopper kind of lighting. No more doing business on a sticky phone in a booth, no more dropping in on a matchmaker, flopping down and putting your feet up on his desk. No more characters like Al Weill, who concealed his cigars and never carried more than seven dollars in mortal fear of being “touched up” by indigent managers and fighters. The whole feel was gone. Rapscallions and double-crossers to the bone, the old power now saw their haphazard stealth to be