Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [63]
How do you describe a roar? Like a cataract, maybe if you had ever looked down on Niagara Falls. Otherwise, a roar is a roar, it goes no place in the mind. It is an empty word in text, it is a sensory word, it has to be heard to be given features. As soon as the fighters began their parade to the ring, there was this sonic blast of sound that seemed to bend the plinth of yellow light over them, and it would seldom drop in decibel. If the guy next to you in the press row spoke, you couldn’t hear him. The wall of sound sent a current up the back and made palms moist. The whirlpool of race politics that had for weeks spread to so much passionate exchange, the cross section of accusatory idiocy, eddied out of sight. There was just The Fight now, the pure and inescapable sorting out, and there was a twinge of sympathy for their stark aloneness and the immensity of performance, of expectations they faced. Burt Lancaster was doing the color for 340 closed-circuit outlets, Don Dunphy, graceful and spare, had the blow-by-blow, and Sinatra was shooting pictures for Life. The place was filled with the aristocracy of fame: Elvis, the Beatles, Salvador Dalí, just about everyone, all of them presumably dispatched from the limos that strung around the Garden two-deep like black pearls.
Like certain soufflés, heavyweight title fights disappoint more than satisfy. If it ends quickly, it’s a fix (an artifact from film noir and vagrant, inglorious incidents stuck too much in the lexicon of fans and press). Go the distance, and you’re a bum with no punch, or you carried him. But a fight has its own reality (similars in style equal a negative), full of snares, letdowns, inertia, and flashing drama when all the parts locked in right—just like life. It wasn’t a film with Martin Scorcese on a skateboard with a hand-held camera, with Robert De Niro being pumped like a fountain of blood, his face dissolving into a hurt built by a makeup man. No wonder the Rocky series, which pulverized every cliché in the game, has turned boxing into distorting cartoon, heightened the prospectus, the coming visuals to a level unattainable. Rarely, if ever, do two fighters with opposing styles, the long blade and the shattering rock pick, conjoin, and rarely does a fight evoke such pressing magnitude, void of the relentless smear of hype; this one had no forced marketing blare, none of the verbal offal that passes for coverage today; the Garden was sold out five weeks before the event. Scalpers were getting seven hundred dollars a pop on the sidewalk.
Ali was the first in the ring, in a red velvet robe with matching trunks, and white shoes with red tassels. He glided in a circle to a crush of sound, a strand of blown grass. Whatever you might have thought of him then, you were forced to look at him with honest, lingering eyes, for there might never be his like again. Assessed by ring demands—punch, size, speed, intelligence, command, and imagination—he was an action poet, the equal of the best painting you could find, or a Mozart who failed to die too early. If