Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [7]
Frazier was fifty-five, and he sat in a dark little room, just off the main office, a bit frazzled, wearing a black feathered Borsalino hat, an insistent tie on a purple shirt against a well-worn, pinstripe gray suit, indicating that he was not getting ready to climb into the ring down below and demonstrate the virtues and intricacies of the left hook. He looked like someone who was on his way out the door to check on his stable of working women, but far from it: he and God had always been bosom-close, and he always believed that he had been selected by Him to knock the anti-Christ, Ali, down several pegs. Joe saw himself as the special issue of the Almighty; the Muslims were infidels and Ali was their serpent. “A man can’t think he’s God,” Frazier said, “and He put me on earth for one reason, made me a fighter, for when the day come I go and slay a false god.” Unlike Ali, Frazier had been a muted religionist; now he was in fervent lockstep with the rage of righteous public witness in sports.
Before 1985, it was rare to hear or see the Deity singled out, or vulgar displays (perhaps a vagrant sign of the cross, warranted if you were risking your brain), let alone attended by pious soliloquies with every fat purse, touchdown, or home run. God has become a good luck charm, a mental amulet, armor against the unforeseen, or foundering talent and the thunderbolt of injury. A divinely ignored soul in India might see it as obscenely self-centered, even amusing if he or she could laugh. God preoccupied Frazier in our chat until the subject of his health came up. “I got sugar diabetes. I got hypertension. I got headaches. Pain just about everywhere. What else you want me to have?” Scattered vials of pills suggested a longer list. It was no secret that a medical specialist friend had made at least four impromptu visits to the gym over the years, and each time personally whisked Frazier off to the hospital for convalescence. “I’ll outlive him, count on it,” Joe said. By now, him needed no further identification.
Frazier, divorced, was more pleased to report that his sexual virility was levels above merely operative. Having had eleven children, all of them grown now, he was (with his son Marvis, his constant shadow) a visible figure on the club circuit—and apparently not a bystander. His financial picture was easier to gauge, if only for the location of his gym, near an ever-expanding university that will need the land. The gym, with his name embossed with a Roman look above the front, was a well-known center in a gunned-out area. His aim was to keep it as a place of work and instruction, not to let it become a pit stop for drugs; he was vigilant for gossip, or any furtive transaction. He lived upstairs in a vast, somber loft, a tidy and favorable place for the chewing of unlimited angst.
French workers have an observation when a coworker shows signs of wear: “The trade is entering his body.” With Joe, as with Ali, it was long past entry, it had taken up firm residence. No other sport expresses its cost so starkly as boxing does. Each face and brain is a map of risky travel, revealing the length of the trip and all the bad roads. Frazier had been worn away like an old rock, helped along by a rapidly graying beard. He tried to summon up his old carefree cool, but there was a gauntness around lightless eyes, the effect being of an abstract presence. His vocal cords, commanded by the left frontal lobe of the brain, had been blasted into strands, leaving him with a voice that seemed to struggle for audibility. His words jumped here and there like balls in a lottery machine, its line of emphasis too quickly toppling into dissonance. His motor skills did not seem impaired, though you wondered how he would fare in a rudimentary clinical test of them. No dragging of a leg, either,