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By Root 542 0

who recognized breeding in fighting cocks (the sporting preference) as well as in heavyweights. Manilans, so buried in American culture, leaped to the jazzy, insolent Ali, then slowly, perhaps remembering old Spain, swerved to their dolorous roots of the underdog, and half of them concluded that the much put-upon Frazier was more deserving. I oozed into a good seat in the second row, below Ali’s corner, and right behind the sparse pate of Herbert, who had a bottle of mineral water in front of him and a concealed flask of gin. In tropical haberdashery he was ready for the safari distance. But were the fighters? What would the malarial heat and cubits of human sweat that stuck to the wet patch of light like goo do to their power plants of adrenaline? Ferdinand and Imelda, the mother of “my little brown people,” looking a trifle upstaged, took their seats in roomy, studded (no, not with diamonds) monarchial chairs. Ali leaned on the ropes, looked down at Herbert, and said: “Watcha got there, Herbert? Gin! You don’t need any of that. I’m gonna put a whuppin’ on this niggah’s head.” The bell snapped Ali to attention, and he swirled to the center of the ring, his unerring launching zone.

Once more he didn’t disappoint. Arrogant and contemptuous of Joe’s worth, he planned as in their first fight to run the table early. And again for the first three rounds, Joe sought no cover, again too straight in the air, plagued by that old cussed cold motor, and he stayed in the mouth of streaming leather that had the sound of Buddy Rich on drums. Joe’s legs buckled a couple of times in the first and looked unstabilized at periods of the second. “He won’t call you Clay anymore!” Bundini boomed. With his head jerking up, Joe was seeing more of the arena rafters than Ali. He was being tagged by back-to-back lead right hands, a sin of damnation in the moldy papyrus of the ring. I surveyed the Marcoses to see if they were pleased at getting their money’s worth. The little pocket gun seemed dour; Imelda, with a languid wave of her fan to keep the mascara stiff, was as cool as if she were taking tea on the palace balcony. In front, Herbert released a cocky laugh and stayed on the mineral water; some people never learned a thing about Frazier.

A departure in tone showed up in the fourth. Joe’s motor was moving him into new terrain. Ali drew blood from Frazier’s mouth with another lead right, and Joe tossed his head like a balky horse as he kept snorting and rolling in closer, ever so closer. Joe Flaherty, not far from me and noting the blood, said: “To the lions, the sticky stuff is nectar.” Ali sensed a change, and at the end of the round he was miffed. “What you got in that niggah head?” he asked, slapping a glove angrily to his chest. “Fuckin’ rock!” He never liked rounds, when he was humming, to be in doubt; an Inca in charge of human sacrifice, upset at bungling the flow of the ritual. In the fifth, no longer tapping dangerously at the surfaces of his game, Joe began to find Ali consistently. The champ, who knew every hatch of escape, couldn’t get free of his own corner, had become a bug that couldn’t lift up out of the honey jar. Angelo’s inkspot eyes were bright with the flicker of concern. “Get back to the center of the ring!” he yelled. “That’s where you gotta live!”

Came the sixth, and here it was, that chilling moment that you always looked for when Joe Frazier was in a fight. Most of his fights had it written large: You can go just so far into that desolate, dark place where his heart pounds, you can waste his perimeters, see his head hanging in the public square, then suddenly there he is, a somber cloud mass blotting out the sun. He stayed on Ali’s chest, the blood from his mouth sticking to the champ’s light crop of pectoral hair. Joe shoveled into his kidneys, his liver, into his heart region, where fighters have observed the pain is excruciating. With nonstop digging, a wild boar going for a truffle, Joe jerked up out of the pit and sent out—Splat! Splat!—two evil left hooks to Ali’s head. Dundee said those hooks were the hardest