Some people will settle happily for a smile and a joke in a hotel lobby, and others will insist on crossing two or even three of his moats before they feel comfortably “private” with The Champ ... But very few people understand how many rings there really are:
My own quick guess would be nine; but Ali’s quick mind and his instinct for public relations can easily make the third moat seem like the ninth; and this world is full of sporting journalists who never realized where they were until the same “private thoughts” and “spontaneous bits of eloquence” they had worked so desperately to glean from The Champ in some rare flash of personal communication that none other would ever share, appeared word for word, in cold black type, under somebody else’s byline.
This is not a man who needs hired pros and wizards to speak for him; but he has learned how to use them so skillfully that he can save himself for the rare moments of confrontation that interest him . . . Which are few and far between, but anybody who has ever met Muhammad Ali on that level will never forget it. He has a very lonely sense of humor, and a sense of himself so firmly entrenched that it seems to hover, at times, in that nervous limbo between Egomania and genuine Invulnerability.
And now, as my cab moved jerkily through the snow-black streets of Brooklyn toward the Plaza Hotel, I was brooding on Conrad’s deranged plot that I felt would almost certainly cause me another nightmare of professional grief and personal humiliation. I felt like a rape victim on the way to a discussion with the rapist on the Johnny Carson show. Not even Hal Conrad’s fine sense of reality could take me past Moat #5—which would not be enough, because I’d made it clear from the start that I was not especially interested in anything short of at least #7 or 8.
Which struck me as far enough, for my purposes, because I understood #9 well enough to know that if Muhammad was as smart as I thought he was, I would never see or even smell that last moat.
I have known Conrad since 1962, when I met him in Las Vegas at the second Liston-Patterson fight. He was handling the press and publicity for that cruel oddity, and I was the youngest and most ignorant “sportswriter” ever accredited to cover a heavyweight championship fight ... But Conrad, who had total control of all access to everything, went out of his way to overlook my nervous ignorance and my total lack of expense money—including me along with all “big names” for things like press parties, interviews with the fighters, and above all, the awesome spectacle of Sonny Liston working out on the big bag, to the tune of “Night Train,” at his crowded and carpeted base camp in the Thunder-bird Hotel ... As the song moved louder and heavier toward a climax of big-band, rock & roll frenzy, Liston would step into the two-hundred-pound bag and hook it straight up in the air—where it would hang for one long and terrifying instant, before it fell back into place at the end of a one-inch logging chain with a vicious clang and a jerk that would shake the whole room.
I watched Sonny work out on that bag every afternoon for a week or so, or at least long enough to think he had to be at least nine feet tall . . . until one evening a day or so prior to the fight when I literally bumped into Liston and his two huge bodyguards at the door of the Thunderbird Casino, and I didn’t even recognize The Champ for a moment because he was only about six feet tall and with nothing but the dull, fixed stare in his eyes to make him seem different from all the other rich, mean niggers a man could bump into around the Thunderbird that week.
So now, on this jangled Sunday night in New York—more than fif-teen years and fifty-five thousand olive-drab tombstones from Maine to California since I first realized that Sonny Liston was three inches shorter than me—it was all coming together, or maybe coming apart once again, as my cab approached the Plaza and another wholly unpredictable but probably doomed and dumb encounter with the world of Big Time Boxing. I had stopped for a six-pack of Ballantine ale on the way in from the airport, and I also had a quart of Old Fitzgerald that I’d brought with me from home. My mood was ugly and cynical, tailored very carefully on the long drive through Brooklyn to match my lack of expectations with regard to anything Conrad might have tried to “set up” with Ali.
My way of joking is to tell the truth. That’s the funniest joke in the world.
—Muhammad Ali
Indeed ... And that is also as fine a definition of “Gonzo Journalism” as anything I’ve ever heard, for good or ill. But I was in no mood for joking when my cab pulled up to the Plaza that night. I was half drunk, fully cranked, and pissed off at everything that moved. My only real plan was to get past this ordeal that Conrad was supposedly organizing with Ali, then retire in shame to my $88-a-night bed and deal with Conrad tomorrow.
But this world does not work on “real plans”—mine or anyone else’s—so I was not especially surprised when a total stranger wearing a serious black overcoat laid a hand on my shoulder as I was having my bags carried into the Plaza:
“Doctor Thompson?” he said. “What?” I spun away and glared at him just long enough to know there was no point in denying it ... He had the look of a rich undertaker who had once been the light-heavyweight karate champion of the Italian navy; a very quiet presence that was far too heavy for a cop . . . He was on my side.
And he seemed to understand my bad nervous condition; before I could ask anything, he was already picking up my bags and saying—with a smile as uncomfortable as my own: “We’re going to the Park Lane; Mr. Conrad is waiting for you . . .”
I shrugged and followed him outside to the long black limo that was parked with the engine running so close to the front door of the Plaza that it was almost up on the sidewalk ... and about three minutes later I was face to face with Hal Conrad in the lobby of the Park Lane Hotel, more baffled than ever and not even allowed enough time to sign in and get my luggage up to the room . . .
“What took you so goddamn long?”
“I was masturbating in the limo,” I said. “We took a spin out around Sheepshead Bay and I—”
“Sober up!” he snapped. “Ali’s been waiting for you since ten o’clock.”
“Balls,” I said, as the door opened and he aimed me down the hall. “I’m tired of your bullshit, Harold—and where the hell is my luggage?”
“Fuck your luggage,” he replied as we stopped in front of 904 and he knocked, saying, “Open up, it’s me.”
The door swung open and there was Bundini, with a dilated grin on his face, reaching out to shake hands. “Welcome!” he said. “Come right in, Doc—make yourself at home.”
I was still shaking hands with Bundini when I realized where I was—standing at the foot of a king-size bed where Muhammad Ali was laid back with the covers pulled up to his waist and his wife, Veronica, sitting next to him: they were both eyeing me with very different expressions than I’d seen on their faces in Chicago.
Muhammad leaned up to shake hands, grinning first at me and then at Conrad: “Is this him?” he asked. “You sure he’s safe?”
Bundini and Conrad were laughing as I tried to hide my confusion at this sudden plunge into unreality by lighting two Dunhills at once, as I backed off and tried to get grounded ... but my head was still whirling from this hurricane of changes, and I heard myself saying, “What do you mean—Is this him? You bastard! I should have you arrested for what you did to me in Chicago!”
Ali fell back on the pillows and laughed. “I’m sorry, boss, but I just couldn’t recognize you. I knew I was supposed to meet somebody, but—”
“Yeah!” I said. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. What did you think I was there for—an autograph?”
Everybody in the room laughed this time, and I felt like I’d been shot out of a cannon and straight into somebody else’s movie. I put my satchel down on the bureau across from the bed and reached in for a beer ... The pop-top came off with a hiss and a blast of brown foam that dripped on the rug as I tried to calm down.
“You scared me,” Ali was saying. “You looked like some kind of a bum—or a hippie.”
“What?” I almost shouted.
“ ‘A bum? A hippie?’ ” I lit another cigarette or maybe two, not realizing or even thinking about the gross transgressions I was committing by smoking and drinking in the presence of The Champ. (Conrad told me later that nobody smokes or drinks in the same room with Muhammad Ali—and Jesus Christ! Not—of all places—in the sacred privacy of his own bedroom at midnight, where I had no business being in the first place.) ... But I was mercifully and obviously ignorant of what I was doing. Smoking and drinking and tossing off crude bursts of language are not second nature to me, but first—and my mood, at that point, was still so mean and jangled that it took me about ten minutes of foul-mouthed raving before I began to get a grip on myself.
Everybody else in the room was obviously relaxed and getting a wonderful boot out of this bizarre spectacle—which was me; and when the adrenaline finally burned off, I realized that I’d backed so far away from the bed and into the bureau that I was actually sitting on the goddamn thing, with my legs crossed in front of me like some kind of wild-eyed, dope-addled budda (Bhuddah? Buddah? Budda? ... Ah, fuck these wretched idols with unspellable names—let’s use Budda, and to hell with Edwin Newman) ... and suddenly I felt just fine.
And why not?
I was, after all, the undisputed heavyweight Gonzo champion of the world—and this giggling yoyo in the bed across the room from me was no longer the champion of anything, or at least nothing he could get a notary public to vouch for ... So I sat back on the bureau with my head against the mirror and I thought, Well, shit—here I am, and it’s definitely a weird place to be; but not really, and not half as weird as a lot of other places I’ve been ... Nice view, decent company, and no real worries at all in this tight group of friends who were obviously having a good time with each other as the conversation recovered from my flakey entrance and got back on the fast-break, bump-and-run track they were used to . . .
Conrad was sitting on the floor with his back to the big window that looks out on the savage, snow-covered wasteland of Central Park—and one look at his face told me that he was finished working for the night; he had worked a major miracle, smuggling a hyena into the house of mirrors, and now he was content to sit back and see what happened . . .
Conrad was as happy as a serious smoker without a serious smoke could have been right then ... And so was I, for that matter, despite the crossfire of abuse and bent humor that I found myself caught in, between Bundini and the bed.
Ali was doing most of the talking: his mind seemed to be sort of wandering around and every once in a while taking a quick bite out of anything that caught his interest, like a good-humored wolverine ... There was no talk about boxing, as I recall: we’d agreed to save that for the “formal interview” tomorrow morning, so this midnight gig was a bit like a warmup for what Conrad described as “the serious bullshit.”
There was a lot of talk about “drunkards,” the sacred nature of “unsweetened grapefruit,” and the madness of handling money—a subject I told him I’d long since mastered: “How many acres do you own?” I kept asking him whenever he started getting too high on his own riffs. “Not as many as me,” I assured him. “I’m richer than Midas, and nine times as shrewd—whole valleys and mountains of acres,” I continued, keeping a very straight face: “Thousands of cattle, stallions, peacocks, wild boar, sloats . . .” And then the final twist: “You and Frazier just never learned how to handle money—but for twenty percent of the nut I can make you almost as rich as I am.”
I could see that he didn’t believe me. Ali is a hard man to con—but when he got on the subject of his tragic loss of “all privacy,” I figured it was time for the drill.
“You really want a cure for your privacy problem?” I asked him, ripping the top out of another Ballantine Ale.
He smiled wickedly. “Sure, boss—what you got?”
I slid off the bureau and moved toward the door. “Hang on,” I told him. “I’ll be right back.”
Conrad was suddenly alert. “Where the hell are you going?” he snapped.
“To my room,” I said. “I have the ultimate cure for Muhammad’s privacy problem.”
“What room?” he asked. “You don’t even know where it is, do you?”
More laughter.
“It’s 1011,” Conrad said, “right upstairs—but hurry back,” he added. “And if you run into Pat, we never heard of you.”
Pat Patterson, Ali’s fearfully diligent bodyguard, was known to be prowling the halls and putting a swift arm on anything human or otherwise that might disturb Ali’s sleep. The rematch with Spinks was already getting cranked up, and it was Patterson’s job to make sure The Champ stayed deadly serious about his new training schedule.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I just want to go up to the room and put on my pantyhose. I’ll be a lot more comfortable.”
The sound of raucous laughter followed me down the hall as I sprinted off toward the fire exit, knowing I would have to be fast or I’d never get back in that room—tonight or tomorrow.
But I knew what I wanted, and I knew where it was in my parachute bag: yes, a spectacularly hideous full-head, real-hair, $75 movie-style red devil mask—a thing so fiendishly real and ugly that I still wonder, in moments like these, what sort of twisted impulse caused me to even pack the goddamn thing, much less wear it through the halls of the Park Lane Hotel and back into Muhammad Ali’s suite at this unholy hour of the night.
Three minutes later I was back at the door, with the mask zipped over my head and the neck-flap tucked into my shirt. I knocked twice, then leaped into the room when Bundini opened the door, screaming some brainless slogan like “Death to the weird!”
For a second or two there was no sound at all in the room—then the whole place exploded in wild laughter as I pranced around, smoking and drinking through the molded rubber mouth and raving about whatever came into my head.
The moment I saw the expression on Muhammad’s face, I knew my mask would never get back to Woody Creek. His eyes lit up like he’d just seen the one toy he’d wanted all his life, and he almost came out of the bed after me . . .
“Okay,” I said, lifting it off my head and tossing it across the room to the bed. “It’s yours, my man—but let me warn you that not everybody thinks this thing is real funny.”
(“Especially black people,” Conrad told me later. “Jesus,” he said, “I just about flipped when you jumped into the room with that goddamn mask on your head. That was really pushing your luck.”)
Ali put the mask on immediately and was just starting to enjoy himself in the mirror, when we all went stiff to the sound of harsh knocking through the door, along with the voice of Pat Patterson. “Open up,” he was shouting. “What the hell is going on in there?”
I rushed for the bathroom, but Bundini was two steps ahead of me ... Ali, still wearing the hideous mask, ducked under the covers, and Conrad went to open the door.
It all happened so fast that we all simply froze in position as Patterson came in like Dick Butkus on a blood scent ... and that was when Muhammad came out of the bed with a wild cry and a mushroom cloud of flying sheets, pointing one long brown arm and a finger like Satan’s own cattle prod straight into Pat Patterson’s face.
And that, folks, was a moment that I’d just as soon not have to live through again. We were all lucky, I think, that Patterson didn’t go for his gun and blow Muhammad away in that moment of madness before he recognized the body under the mask.
It was only a split second, but it could easily have been a hell of a lot longer for all of us if Ali hadn’t dissolved in a fit of whooping laughter at the sight of Pat Patterson’s face ... And although Pat recovered instantly, the smile he finally showed us was uncomfortably thin.
The problem, I think, was not so much the mask itself and the shock it had caused him—but why The Champ was wearing the goddamn thing at all; where had it come from? And why? These were serious times, but a scene like this could have ominous implications for the future—particularly with Ali so pleased with
his new toy that he kept it on his head for the next ten or fifteen minutes, staring around the room and saying with no hint of a smile in his voice that he would definitely wear it for his appearance on the Dick Cavett show the next day. “This is the new me,” he told us. “I’ll wear it on TV tomorrow and tell Cavett that I promised Veronica that I won’t take it off until I win my title back. I’m gonna wear this ugly thing everywhere I go—even when I get into the ring with Spinks next time.” He laughed wildly and jabbed at himself in the mirror. “Yes indeed!” he chuckled. “They thought I was crazy before, but they ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
I was feeling a little on the crazy side myself, at that point—and Patterson’s accusing presence soon told us it was time to go.
“Okay, boss,” Ali said to me on the way out. “Tomorrow we get serious, right? Nine o’clock in the morning. We’ll have breakfast, and get real serious.”
I agreed, and went upstairs to my room for a bit of the good smoke.
I was up at eight thirty the next day, but when I called Ali’s suite, Veronica said he’d been up since seven and “was wandering around downstairs somewhere.”
I found him in the restaurant, sitting at one end of a table full of cut glass and silver, dressed almost as formally as the maitre d’ in a dark blue pin-striped suit and talking very seriously with a group of friends and very earnest black businessmen types who were all dressed the same way he was. It was a completely different man from the one I’d been sparring and laughing with the night before. The conversation around the table ranged from what to do about a just-received invitation to visit some new country in Africa, to a bewildering variety of endorsement offers, to book contracts, real estate, and the molecular structure of crabmeat.
It was midmorning before we finally went upstairs to his suite “to get serious.” ... And what follows is a 99 percent verbatim transcript of our conversation for almost the next two hours. Muhammad was stretched out on the bed, still wearing his “senator’s suit,” and balancing my tape recorder on his stomach while he talked. I was sitting cross-legged right next to him on the bed, with a bottle of Heineken in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and my shoes on the floor beside me.