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By Root 565 0

that is overstatement, disfiguring the finer arts by association with a brute game, consider the mudslide of purple that attaches to his creative lessers in other fields, past and present; Ali was physical art, belonged alone in a museum of his own. I was extremely fond of him, of his work, of the decent side of his nature, and jaundiced on his cultish servility, his thermopolitical combustions that tried to twist adversaries into grotesque shapes. It never worked, except perhaps on Liston, who came to think he was clinically insane. It did work on himself, shaped the fear for his face and general well-being into a positive force, a psychological war dance that blew up the dam and released his flood of talent. The trouble was that, like Kandinsky’s double-sided painting of chaos and calm, it became increasingly difficult for him to find his way back from one side to the other.

In a green and gold brocade robe with matching trunks, Joe Frazier almost seemed insectile next to Ali in the ring, and he was made more so as Ali waltzed by him, bumped him and said: “Chump!” Far from that slur, Joe was a gladiator right smack to the root conjurings of the title, to the clank of armor he seemed to emit. Work within his perimeter, and you courted what fighters used to call “the black spot,” the flash knockout. He was a fighter that could be hit with abandon, but if you didn’t get him out of there his drilling aggression, his marked taste for pursuit and threshing-blade punches could overwhelm you; as one military enthusiast in his camp said, “like the Wehrmacht crossing into Russia.” I was drawn to the honesty of his work, the joy he derived from inexorable assault, yet had a cool neutrality to his presence. In truth, with a jewel in each hand, I didn’t want to part with either of them, thus making me pitifully objective, a capital sinner in the most subjective and impressionistic of all athletic conflicts.

A low restless hum, a crepelike hush, and finally the releasing bell. Four inches taller, nine and a half pounds heavier, and with prehensile arms compared to Joe’s uncommonly short pistons, Ali disabused the crowd of any idea for a judicious, point-building first act. He wanted to shoot the lights out early, stop him with a cut or turn him into a groggy drifter, or at the very least discourage the jungle beat of that left hook. It surprised but made eminent sense once you saw him unfurl his plan. He couldn’t risk trying to dance Joe into dawn. His body was not built for that approach anymore. He was a blend of hitter, when legs were planted, and flyer—but for fifteen rounds? He had to conserve and blast. Time after time, Ali set and laid out an enfilade of shots, a singing sound of leather with a frequency that jolted you forward in your seat. He was working in time chunks, a miser one minute and all leg, buying the bar drinks in the next, and in one furious spree he sent a shower of spray from Joe’s face into a silvery dance up in the lights, causing Durham to bolt upward, screaming: “Goddamnit, roll that head!”

Cold and too exploratory, too tentative, but ever shoveling forward, Joe was up too straight. Durham and Futch wanted him down, gloves rotating at eye level in front of a bobbing head and a swaying torso. They had worked on it in the gym when Futch stretched a line of rope from corner to corner, an effort to force his body down and his head mobile. Over and under, over and under the rope, he swayed and popped at a quick tempo; he must have done this repetition two thousand times. They also concentrated on three areas they thought could put them over: the kind of conditioning that Ali had never seen before; a steady hammering of Ali’s deltoid high on the left arm that would ultimately drop his jab to half-mast; and a body attack where “I pull his kidneys out, make that pretty head fall into his lap,” Joe said. None of it was working. At the end of the third, Yank told him: “You gonna get us both killed the way you going.” Ali, up 3–0, returned to his corner and just stood there, declining a seat.

Frazier picked up the