Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [88]
“If you wanna know,” Frazier would say, “who won the three fights, well, just look at him now.” Joe, no doubt, was the major figure in the evidence of how he came to be here at Hilton Head, yet there was more, a career-long miscalculation of odds. In one way, he was superbly prepared for fights most of the time, working on his body like Duke Ellington, filling in holes and spaces, hooking his rhythm section together. In another, he was incorrigibly self-destructive, chose to ignore the physics of the brain. Gym work puts a lot of wear on a body, especially for Ali. For a show of invincibility, tossing meat into his maw of an ego, he’d hang on the ropes and let huge men have their way with him; protective headgear, when it comes to the brain, is no protection. Why did he spend round after gym round on the ropes? For the public show, yes, but he had become cavalier, bored, and his rope habit expressed a growing laziness. And, too, in the second half of his career, sexual hedonism was militating constantly against the anchorite in him.
The number of punches he took in the gym (needless) and live bouts (especially in the second half) are incalculable, but were far too many for a fighter with his style, though the volume from Frazier would have been unavoidable even by an early Ali. Above all, Ali knew the fatal extraction so common to the ring. The images never left him. Why did he have a love-ridicule feeling about Joe Louis? He flinched from Louis’s condition, his presence a too sharp reminder of the danger, a mirror of what could be. He had other examples every day in his camp at Deer Lake. Hardly a day passed without a small procession (to whom he gave a meal and money) of the ring indigent, old and broken, like medieval supplicants from a ghostly past. Never far from him were Johnny Juliano, an obscure fighter who did odd jobs, and his brother Rahman. He’d look at Johnny and see his wasted brain, and say: “I’m not gonna be Johnny Juliano. No way.” He’d look at Rahman, with his peculiar habits, and say: “My brother hardly fought at all. And not even he’s right in the head.”
Howard Bingham, his closest friend and a non-Muslim, was in the hospital room, his eyes fixed on Ali tethered to the bed, a scene as incomprehensible to him as it would seem to others who followed the champ’s radiated glow, such was the prognosis of his life after the ring. Ali had known the road away from this, the “road out” that Archie Moore had preached. He knew what the currency of earthly immortality was: get out in time on your own terms, which added an uplifting, stirring Homeric touch. If the fall was too messy, the national psyche, so hooked on the bread-and culture circus of film stars and athletes, would rush to the collision of the gifted and fate and then recoil; there was no suspense, no shot in the arm in the mundane. There was a reason why Rocky Marciano, who left undefeated, was so cherished; he was the model American winner who took it all and beat the system, and so by a curious social osmosis, those who loved him were one with him—winners all.
Ali never looked for long back on Manila, or much else, neither the deadly repetitiveness of his kind of training nor the draining frequency of his fights. The temptation is to put his carelessness into the column of commonplace greed, yet it’s not that simple. Ali had always collected people and things that seemed to reinforce his state of mind of the moment, but he dispensed much more than he gave to himself; he was not a flighty, addicted acquisitor. With money, there was something much deeper. He now had a vague fear of being broke, and a growing concern, having been so loose with his treasure, that he might not be able to provide for the well-being of his children. The other piece to his seeking life extension in the ring was his attraction to power and celebration. He had fun with his chamber