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pace in the fourth, fifth, and sixth, down low and slinging, and he began to look like the fighter whose punches could mount to fifty-six a round. He was almost dismissive of Ali’s razoring jab, which, if you can get under it, was an invitation to a left hook, his money shot. He tagged him in the fourth with that hook, saw Ali’s eyes grow big. Ali was still getting off—but not with abandon; Joe was making him pay with an entrance fee. By the fifth and sixth, Ali was down off his toes completely as Frazier continually boxed him on the ropes and snatched at his organs, and he could feel, as he would say later, “the flower wilt” and seep its bold color. It was here that Ali tacked to a new slant. He knew his own body in a fight, knew that if he kept trying to break Frazier’s will, trade with him recklessly, he’d be bankrupt; he’d have to try to bag him in a sly game of points.

In the seventh and eighth, part defensive, part theatrical, Ali went after Joe’s spirit and the favor of the crowd and the millions watching, and tried to deactivate the ticking bomb of the fight. He wanted Joe to know that he could do nothing to hurt him, wanted him to know frustration, wanted to seize control by stealth. To that end, he became lost in comic theatrics while Frazier blasted him on the ropes. He wanted the crowd to know that the ropes were cozy to him, and Joe wasn’t delivering hurt. He’d roll off the ropes and go into mime. Noooooo contest. He’d flick disparaging waves at Joe, the king playing with his fool, especially when he’d tap, tap, tap jabs lightly to the head as if testing for termites, sign language that he could do what he wanted. Frazier kept coming. “Don’t you know I’m God!” Ali shouted at him. Ali returned to his corner, sitting for the first time, and behind 5–3. “Stop playin’,” Dundee shouted over the din in his corner. Frazier asked Yank: “What’s holdin’ him up?”

With the ninth, Ali fought one of the best rounds in history and brought the crowd to its feet with a shock and to such a roar that you couldn’t hear the bell. Joe’s head seemed stuck to Ali’s gloves as rights and lefts, cringing rounds of volley, caromed off Frazier’s head, then uppercuts, often used against low fighters, that jerked his head up as if it were being snapped up by rope. His face was melting into ruin, his eyes closing like shades being drawn ever so slowly. Joe wasn’t just being hit, he was taking beast licks. Just past the middle of the round, Ali nailed up a picture for the ages. In the center of the ring, with Joe rolling in like an angry wave, Ali got off a design of punches that can only be called incomparable, took the breath away from any student of the game. While backpedaling, the worst, most ineffectual punching position, he loosed a quartet of flush hooks like perfectly timed and blurring explosions, the kind of fire patterns talked about but never before seen; these weren’t just punches; it was dark, magnetic Goya. Joe was stopped dead in his tracks, just stood there straight up, absolutely stunned and fogged by what he had just felt and seen.

Give Frazier this: if that kind of round, that quartet of hooks, didn’t drop him headfirst into a well of despair, what in heaven or hell would—point-blank fire from a gun muzzle? But Ali had emptied his wallet in that ninth. He moved through the tenth with hesitancy, a kid on broken roller skates, and Joe rallied, ever pressing, moving him now steadily to his own right with his left hook, while Ali was far too languorous on Joe’s perimeter. He was still making Joe pay up in spurts, and Joe’s features looked as if a child had had at it with modeling clay. Joe accelerated the tempo in the eleventh. Except for the ninth, Joe was now beating Ali to the punch, 3–1 in heavy punch traffic, and in the eleventh, ahead 6–4, maybe 6–5, he sought an ending. With both feet in the air (as pictures would show), Joe sent a murderous hook to Ali’s jaw, sending him reeling along the ropes and, eyes open wide, searching for balance; had the hook been to the chin, the true, sensitive button for a knockout, Ali