Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [83]
Joe Frazier looked upon Ali’s group as an expensive, distracting grotesquerie. He was a parsimonious caretaker of his money, watched every centime, and had no need for subjects or paid validation. He knew how to sit alone in an empty room. As much as he could, he kept his space from Ali. Except for one time near the fight when Ali—where did he get the energy for such juvenalia?—waited for him to take the air, such as it was, on his hotel balcony. Down below, Ali grabbed the security guard’s gun and clicked off several rounds up at Frazier; hotel guards didn’t carry live ammo. He raved at Joe: “Go back in your hole, Gorilla! You gonna scare the people! Come out again, and I’m gonna kill ya before time!” Joe turned lazily into his room. He just shook his head toward his visitors. He then looked into a mirror. “Am I a gorilla?” he asked. “Am I? He don’t know how this hurts my kids.”
Eddie Futch confronted Don King over the selection of the referee. But King would rather face public and media jeers than the wrath of Herbert for a bungle; Herbert, through King, wanted every edge. He had three refs and some judges waiting as guests for Futch’s choice. Marcos had invited members from each camp to visit. Right off, Eddie could see the president was proud of this fight and that he wanted no hitches. Afterward, Futch collared the principal administrator of the fight and said: “Look, this event puts the Philippines in the world spotlight. You need a ref who can control the fight, or else the world will laugh at you.” He told him how Tony Perez had marred the second fight. He got a Filipino referee and judges, while King argued that Filipinos were too small to handle big men, not the best line of attack. Futch extracted even more: Ali’s trunks, per ring specifications, had to be worn below his belly button, and the ropes tightened (so Ali would have no mobility on them). “I want that belly button in plain sight,” Eddie warned again. Chalk up King’s defeat to inexperience, for he was not yet the Satan of loopholes. “Eddie fucked me,” King would moan at ringside.
The sun doesn’t just rise in the Philippines. It shoots up with discouraging abruptness, sends hot spears to the eye. The old man had declared a national holiday for the fight that was to be at 10 A.M. The streets had a disorienting emptiness, where usually there were masses of brightly colored umbrellas and tourists going to Intramuros to photograph the old Spanish fort, still nicked by bullet pings and shell fragments from World War II. It was so quiet that, through imagination, you could hear the cocks crowing on the hot breath from Tondo, home to a half million squatters whose hungry kids often foraged through garbage; could hear the beaten trudge of long gone troops across the bay at Corregidor and Bataan; the murmur of servants at the airy oligarch mansions in Forbes Park; the baby hookers giving up the night at the scented bars of Ermita.
Near fight time, bells rang out from the great and ornate cathedrals of Manila, where inside one of them the stentorian Cardinal Sin must have been meditating on the degeneracy of modern taste and the flamboyance shown with the fiscal purse by that slip of an egoist in Malacanang. Without a quiver of breeze from the South China Sea and in the glazing, jiggling heat, thousands were moving toward the Araneta Colosseum with buckets of sweet and sour adobo (chicken, pork, and rice) and containers of iced San Miguel beer. They came by tinny but dogged jeepneys (decorative, converted American jeeps from the war), known to careen the streets like Ping-Pong balls, they came by kalesa, worn, ribbed small horses and creaking wagons, and by sparkling limos. Those who didn’t have the price (two dollars to two hundred) would sit by the millions in front of old TV sets with drunken pixels. A half hour before the fight, the clamp of eerie silence fell again on the streets.
Packed tightly and sweating, the crowd of 28,000 seemed to vacuum all the air out of the arena, a rather scholarly swarm