Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [72]
“I saw the Mothership last night,” Ali said one day. “Don’t go making any reservations. Black folks only. They carry three bombs. Nothing like we got. Their bombs blow a hole in the earth miles deep. It’s nothing we can fight or shoot at. They’re fast, too. Move by vibrations. Move 39,000 miles an hour. The Mothership has thousands of smaller ships.”
“They’ve been seeing UFOs for centuries,” I said.
“Elijah Muhammad discovered them forty-two years ago,” Ali said. “Give him credit for once. He’s sooo smart. Them others were fakes. Not the Mothership. I saw it.”
One night there was a faraway barking of dogs. Ali jumped to his feet, saying: “They’re here!” A security firm that specialized in attack dogs was bringing some to Ali, who planned to use them to get himself mentally ready for Frazier. “After their attacks, meeting them head-on,” he said, “it knocks a lot of fear outta you. When a man starts out steadfast, he puts the fear into the other man, and it weakens him. I’m going to grab these dogs, throw them around, rassle with them.” Three German shepherds were brought into one corner of the ring. In the other, Ali was fitted with a protective sleeve, and in the other hand he had a plastic bat. One dog after another, teeth bared and snarling, raced and leaped toward Ali, tearing his sleeve to shreds, as he screamed incoherently: “Joe Frazuh! Joe Frazuh!” The empty gym had the sound of wolves fighting over the carcass of an elk. An odd quiet then fell over the gym, with the dogs panting in one corner, and Ali saying: “Wow!” Leave it to Ali to find such an unusual mind-over-matter tool to build confidence.
Ali soon left the silence and snow of Deer Lake for Manhattan, where he was to appear with Joe and Howard Cosell. He had appeared with Frazier earlier on The Dick Cavett Show, a meeting in which Joe kept silent as Ali repeatedly called him “ignorant.” Futch did not want Joe to see Ali again and only agreed because Cosell promised (“on my heart, Eddie”) to sit between the pair. If he had a heart, it was as small as the olives in his tall martinis that stood like sentinels in front of him as he held court and rubbernecked the room for notice. He was a tinhorn poseur, a formerly dismissable amoeba in the lawyer chain who found TV and one day would think he was worthy of being a senator. Those who came after him would imitate and amplify his cheap theatrics, then liken him to the Edward R. Murrow of sports. He became the pioneer for their license to break through their puffed hair and crayon content and to be real journalists. A model who, with faux outrage and oily, uninformed syntax, could not lay the slightest claim to even the more base rudiments of the craft.
Guess where Joe and Ali sat? Right next to each other, making it a live wire of sorry possibility. Joe, still angry about the Cavett show, while they were watching Ali’s jaw swell on film, said: “That’s what he went to the hospital for.”
Ali parried: “I went to the hospital for ten minutes. You went for a month.”
“I was resting,” Frazier said.
Ali responded: “That shows how dumb you are. People don’t go to a hospital to rest. See how ignorant you are?”
Frazier erupted. “I’m tired of you calling me ignorant all the time. I’m not ignorant. Stand up, man!”
Up on his feet and glowering down at Ali, Joe said again: “Stand up!” Ali jumped up and tried to pin his shoulders back. They fell to the floor, each trying to gain a wrestling hold. Handlers, shouting at each other, pried them loose. “I had to get up,” Ali said. “The way he was standing up there it looked like he would break my jaw.” Joe, in a fury, left the set. Futch went to Cosell, who had his “television moment”—in other words one in which he would be the star, be talked about, be the presenter of unsuspected incident and drama. “You promised,” Futch told Cosell. “You are a corrupt individual, do you know that?” Eddie turned away abruptly, with Cosell claiming his separation from culpability, the canned words of a small-time eviction lawyer.
When fight night arrived, there was a tentative expectancy