Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [90]
The Victorians, of all people, can be thanked for the concentration on the head in boxing, namely the Marquis of Queensbury. The Marquis, preoccupied with all questions of manhood, got Oscar Wilde sent up for a homosexual fling with his son, and on the side invented the padded glove for boxing. The days of the bare-knuckle fighter were over. They fought a lot of rounds in those days (seventy-five sometimes) but had long rests at their whim and did far less damage than today. Queensbury thought gloves would spare knuckles, quicken the pace of fights, often marred by grappling. With the easily damaged pterodactyl wires of the hand given a cushion, the gloves put all the focus on the head as a target and elevated sharpshooting, though the Gothic buttresses, Doric columns, and Baroque portals of the skeleton would remain under siege. If you think of the body as a Renaissance cathedral, then its cupola is the brain, where the simple art of touching your nose is a complicated process.
What happens to the brain when foot-pound pressure descends on it? Neurons are little batteries that conduct billions of electrical transactions, essential to thinking, remembering, walking, all motor skills. It used to be thought of, the brain, as a dull meat machine, now it is seen by brain science as a magnificent computer that is the frontier of everything, this being far from what the Egyptians saw; in mummification, they scooped it out, thought it was worthless; the heart was the center of magic. The brain floats in a cerebrospinal fluid. When the head is hit, the brain oscillates, wearing down much in its path, twisting the brain stem and swiping out neurons. A deft brain science writer, David Noonan, once queried an annoyed Larry Holmes on the subject. Holmes said, “Call a doctor. Anything can happen in life.”
Holmes did not want to fight Ali. He had nothing to gain from the bout, except widespread censure for cutting down a legend; his large end of the purse forced him to it. Time after time, members of Ali’s entourage would corner him in a restaurant or in an elevator, and the deep-felt request was always the same: “Don’t hurt him, Larry.” Holmes had no belly for the job, promised he would try his best, and you can almost see him, a great precision puncher, pondering his tray of scalpels for the one that would get the job done and allow him to remain a humanitarian. Ali seemed stuck to the ropes, where, with his creaky reflexes, he could get hurt bad. Below him, looking up, was Joe Louis in a wheelchair, drawn and weak and soon to die. Returning to his corner, Holmes complained: “What’s wrong with him? He’s like he’s doped. He won’t fall. I’m hitting him with everything and he won’t fall.” And he never did; Ali could not answer the bell for the eleventh, just sat there exhausted, his head dangling like the broken head of a child’s action figure.
One year later, December of 1981, just when you believed sanity had claimed all parties for good, Ali came back once more for a small-change bout against Trevor Berbick, an earnest plug, in the Bahamas. By now, there was a distinct tremor to Ali’s hands; it had begun after the Holmes fight. He stepped into the ring, goaded by ego or money, who knows, fat jellied on his middle, his hand speed sighing and wheezing like a busted old fan; tropic rot on the trade winds, and the knell for ten rounds came from the counterfeit sound of a cowbell. As Dave Anderson of the Times wrote: “He needed a trip to Nassau to learn that he was forty.” The end result reminded of the discovery by a young scholar early in the century of an Etruscan warrior. When he opened the sarcophagus,