Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [85]
After much of the same in the seventh and eighth, Ali came out for the ninth with some dance, then his body sighed back to the ropes. “The center of the ring!” Dundee screamed. It takes legs and strength to keep the shop open in the middle. He had no taste or vitality for center work. Plopping on the ropes, Ali was panicked and confused, unable to time the velocity of Joe’s punches; one half of you expected Joe to request a scalpel. Between the heat and Frazier, Ali was ready for the launch pad. By the end of the round, Georgie Benton, an assistant trainer, and one of my quislings in the corner, would report later that Joe couldn’t believe his eyes, saying: “What is holdin’ this mothafuckin’ fool up!” The assault continued through the tenth. After the round, Ali sat on his stool, head bowed, nearly doubled up, his eyes rolling with exhaustion. Tears streamed down Bundini’s face as he begged: “Go down to the well once more! The world needs ya, champ!” Ali would later say he almost didn’t make it out for the eleventh, it was the “closest thing to dyin’ I know.” While he sat there, his face a forlorn long shot of Death Valley at the end of an Antonioni lens, Herbert tried to struggle up to the corner, shouting: “You a niggah like him! You gonna quit. Get your ass out there! You hear me?”
Joe trapped him in a corner in the eleventh, and blow after blow carpeted Ali’s face, sending spit popping out of his mouth. “Lawd have mercy!” Bundini shrieked. I had the fight 6-4-1, Frazier. Futch thought it was close, but figured the body attack had been so devastating, the best he had ever seen a heavyweight deliver, that he, too, found himself gasping. No words, he said, could describe the sound of the flamenco on Ali’s body. Agreed; the aural effect was horrendous. Everything had worked for Eddie, from the tightened ropes to the Filipino referee, Carlos Padilla, a brisk workman who whipped the pace to the acceleration of fatality, quickly moving Ali off every time he tried to hold and gulp for air. Going into the twelfth, for Ali the scant chips remaining would have to be shoved to the center of the table like never before. Did he even have any chips? I didn’t think so, not this time, so barren was the visual above me.
When thinking of that precise moment, it’s a sharp reminder never ever to leap to a conclusion too far out in front of the evidence. For in the twelfth (Great Scott! By George! Great Balls of Fire! Whatever you need to register the incredible), Ali started to part the Red Sea of Frazier’s face, adding a third and fourth wind to William James’s famous psychological theory of second wind in humans. He was back in the center of the apron, sluggish but effective, and determined to win or lose it all in his favorite clime. Ali was stopping Joe with those long lead rights again, not giving him a chance to get off his shots. Now, Joe’s face began to lose definition and, like emerging islands from the sea, massive bumps rose up around his eyes, especially the left. At the end of that round, Joe said in his corner: “I can’t pick up his right.” Was it the result of that blind left eye that he claimed only gave him half a ring his whole career? Who knows?
In the thirteenth, Frazier began to flinch and wince from Ali’s one-note slugging. Joe’s punches seemed to have a gravity drag, and when they did land they brushed lazily against Ali. The champ sent Frazier’s bloody mouthpiece flying seven rows into the audience, and nearly pulled the light switch on him with one chopping shot. “My God!” Angelo screamed, not sure if his eyes were betraying him. “He ain’t got no power.”
The fourteenth was the most savage round of the forty-one Ali and Frazier fought. It brought out guilt (not felt since Joe wrecked the face of Chuvalo) that made one want to seek out the nearest confessional