Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [8]
It was not idle curiosity, for there was much rumor that he was going blind. Most startling, by his own confession, he had said he had fought his whole career, from the Olympics on, blind in his left eye, and it was presumed that the other was fading too. He said that during prefight physicals he had memorized the charts, or used his good eye. His manager, Yank Durham, was the only one who knew, yet it seems hard to imagine his longtime trainer, Eddie Futch, was kept from the secret. How could Futch, an honest man with a subtle antenna for defects and tactics in the game, not know? Was he relieving himself of responsibility, not his usual way, long after the fact, or was he as genuinely baffled as he said? “The claim beats me,” he said not long ago. “Hard to believe.” The revelation had come in his autobiography and received no attention whatsover from a media that can spend days reporting and analyzing the dimmest of banana-peel slips.
Yet, if it was true that Frazier had done it all with one eye, what an extraordinary achievement of will and tactical cunning. Close your left eye, and you instantly understand how you would be dangerously at a loss: the left side of the ring suddenly becomes a netherland, your bearings unbalanced. Working with only half a ring—if that was indeed true—Frazier became the most skillful, devastating inside puncher in boxing history, so effective that he has to be ranked in the lower tier of the top five heavyweights of the century. How did he manage it? It required a true belly for fire, a good chin, a diamond-hard concentration, no panic, and a subtle choreography of feet to keep the opponent from taking him to the dark side where he was open to being destroyed. He could never relax and had to retain his rhythm of attack-manipulation, simultaneous and relentless. Against an Ali, say, he had to keep him flowing to his own right side, away from his bad eye. Only one punch could do this, and it had to be punishing and steady: a left hook, to the body and to the head. “When I looked up to the lights,” Frazier said now, “all I ever saw was milky glare. I had to get in on his chest, follow his breath, damn near his heartbeat.”
“How is your eye now?” he was asked. “Or eyes?”
“In good shape.”
“Show me.”
“Put up some fingers,” he said. He looked, looked again, then laughed, saying, “Which hand?” When he stopped laughing, he said, “That’s four on your left hand…one on the right…five on the right. See. I got an operation some years ago. See good now.”
“Suppose I move across the room?”
“Don’t have to do that,” he said, quite annoyed. “I can see.”
Suspicion still lingered over whether his vision had been totally corrected; he had diabetes. Frazier stood up from his chair, half bent, and bumped into furniture, yelling out for someone to help him find “my pain pills.” Otherwise, he walked well enough through the gym. Who knows? Of his claim to a one-eyed career, there is a solid inclination to believe him. Philadelphia fighters and managers knew all the tricks in prefight physicals, and were helped by a supple, if not duplicitous Boxing Commission; out-of-town bodies were no less so. And, too, Philly gyms were notorious rendering plants that left few fighters intact. The wars there, amid shafts of dusty sunlight, were better than most main bouts. “We trim the fat to the heart down here,” Yank Durham used to say. “In a serious way.”
Like Frazier a showstopper in the gyms, Gypsy Joe Harris was also a star of those exchanges. A stablemate and good friend of Frazier’s, Gypsy was a scuffed marble of a welterweight, five five with a shaved head, and close to a title shot. The crowds loved him. No fighter, including Ali, had his speed, agility, and creativity; not a puncher, he was a point-building, skittering electron that released a volume of leather from any angle. Under Durham he, too, had reached the top with only one eye.