Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [89]
With only the conviction of his vanity and a shave of what he once was as a fighter, he pressed on, fighting four times in 1976 against mostly deficient tradesmen, and on occasion was aided by the generosity of awed scoring; officials only seemed to watch what he did, not his opponents’ work. Ken Norton could have received the decision against him late that year in Yankee Stadium and not caused a riot. He fought twice in 1977, was severely punished by Earnie Shavers. In 1978, he lost and regained the title against an ordinary Leon Spinks. Who was going to intervene, end the self-abuse? Murmurs in his camp, behind cupped hands, suggested guilt and worry. Ali had no Yank Durham or Eddie Futch. Where was Herbert, working on his Swiss bank inventory? For years, those in close knew Ali followed Herbert, acted on his every word. Herbert, in turn, always denied he held such control, said Ali only listened to Ali; it is remarkable what a man can come to believe when his end of the take is a hundred percent. Allowing for a laggard or stunted conscience, it was patently obscene to send Ali up against Larry Holmes in 1980, his former stablemate, young with a deadeye aim, who would go 48–0 before losing. Ali was supposed to earn $8 million, but reportedly received only $4 million. What mattered was that Herbert took the fight while knowing that Ali would be sorely tempted and could not afford to pass it up.
Ali had retired in 1979, worried about his condition. He had been in the ring twenty years, and had fought roughly 15,000 rounds, live and in the gym. The average fighter’s career is less than three years, and even with success rarely does it go beyond six. Seven months into retirement, his mystery woman got a call from him. He was married to Veronica and living at Hancock Park in Los Angeles. He said he had bills of thirty to thirty-five thousand a month. “I gotta fight again,” he told her. She said: “Please don’t. You’re going to get hurt.” He knew it had been over since Manila, and he’d been caught in what Hegel called the “bad infinite” of his ring life, of repeated diminishing cycles, the torture of losing weight, the hard, hard oiling of mushy reflexes. Greatness hadn’t trickled out of that splendid caramel mold of a body, it had poured out and along with it some of his image. Worse, he had begun to slur his words, sometimes had trouble speaking. “I’m gonna fight Holmes,” he said. “No, Muhammad, don’t,” she said. He was, she worried, on the edge of debilitating injury
Fighters know how to suffer. They demagnify pain and seldom talk about it. Though some fighters have been called “bow-wows” within the sport, thresholds of pain are hard to detect in fighters. Being called a dog, while not good for business, seems a bit much, like libeling the courage of the water boy at the Charge of the Light Brigade; after all, he did show up. I have often suspected that the best fighters are sadomasochists who abjure pain in their words while they secretly warm to it. Old trainers used to tell me that they had known fighters who got hit so much that it became pleasurable, that they even ejaculated; no empirical evidence, for certain, but the history of orgasm pursuit, through Krafft-Ebing, suggests that no stone has ever been unturned.
Eyes, nose, ears, larynx, kidneys, they all take horrific beatings. But their faces tell where fighters have been, the potholes over which they had to rattle, from the small arenas with the single light bulb and a backed-up toilet in the dressing rooms to the flooding light of the big time. Or, at least, that was the route for years until the species became gunned out, and now big money is instantly at hand for the kid of reasonable talent who can be hyped into the cosmos until the cable wires sing. I have seen lips nearly sheared off, eyes so closed they would resist a pneumatic drill. But the face that truly captivated