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for the expiation of voyeuristic lust. Nine straight right hands smashed into Joe’s left eye, thirty or so in all during the round. When Joe’s left side capsized to the right from the barrage, Ali moved it back into range for his eviscerating right with crisp left hooks, and at the round’s end the referee guided Joe back to his corner. Eddie Futch was a man in thought. “Never fade a guy who’s sneaked his own dice into the game,” Yank liked to say. But…he remembered their fifteenth round in the Garden; did Ali have another round in him? If not Joe might win it. He looked at the swollen, purple slit of Frazier’s eye. In the old days, trainers—not Eddie—would use a razor blade to pop the balloon and release the pressure. Not with this eye; it was beyond help. He remembered, too, the several fighters he had seen killed in the ring. There was a sudden commotion in Joe’s corner. The lover of the Lake Poets was signaling to stop the fight.

“No, no, no!” Joe kept shouting. “You can’t do that to me!”

“Sit down, son,” Eddie said. “It’s over. No one will forget what you did here today.”

With the only strength they had left, both fighters stumbled toward their dressing rooms to a continuous roar. When Ali hit the passage leading toward his room, he was draped around the shoulders of his handlers, his feet dragging, his face one of terminal exhaustion. The first thing they saw in the room was a dead man, part of his head blown away. The cop on duty there had been twirling and fanning his gun in front of a mirror, accidentally offed himself, and now he was in a heap below the mirror, with a Jackson Pollock scatter of blood on it. “Is he dead?” Ali asked, barely able to speak. “A dead man. Get me outta here.” An omen! His handlers moved him to a sofa in another room.

Tears trickled down Joe’s face in the other room. He was being embraced by Eddie when Bob Goodman, the press liaison, entered, asking: “Joe, can you talk to the press?” Joe agreed, and Goodman went to Ali and asked: “Champ, you up to the press?” Bundini went ballistic: “You insane? Look at him!” Ali was a clump on the sofa, his skin a gray color. “Joe’s out there,” Goodman said. With that, Ali raised his head and asked, as if incredulous: “He is?” He added: “Get me my comb.” Ali would be a long time coming out.

After the press conference, Joe retired to a private villa for rest. He had been sleeping for a couple of hours when Georgie Benton entered with a visitor. The room was dark. “Who is it?” Joe asked, lifting his head. “I can’t see. Can’t see. Turn the lights on.” A light was turned on, and he still could not see. Like Ali, he lay there with his veins empty, crushed by a will that had carried him so far and now surely too far. His eyes were iron gates torn up by an explosive. “Man, I hit him with punches that bring down the walls of a city. What held him up?” He lowered his head for some abstract forgiveness. “Goddamn it, when somebody going to understand? It wasn’t just a fight. It was me and him. Not a fight.” He dropped his head back to the pillow, wincing, and soon there was only the heavy breathing of a deep sleep slapping off the shoreline of his consciousness. He was correct. No mere fight, whatever the talent, could reach such carnal roots and produce such full-bodied greatness, the kind that Ali would maintain long years later had carried him to parts unknown in himself and had had no portfolio equal. Thoreau said: “Know your own bone.” They did—and then some.

That night Ali was led by Imelda Marcos up the winding, red-carpeted staircase as the guest of honor at Malacanang Palace. Soft music drifted in from the terrace. She led him after a while to the buffet table, flared by huge candelabra that threw an eerie light across his face and a body that had survived the ultimate inquisition. The two whispered as she filled his plate. Never before had he seemed so pitiably unmajestic. He lifted the food slowly up to his bottom lip, scraped raw and pink. His right eye was half closed, purple going to black. His skin was dull and blotched. He chewed his food painfully,