The irony was that there had been a time when he was always in such shape. Before his second fight with Liston, you could catch him in the middle of any gymnasium session and he was superb. His body could not betray him. You would define happiness by his estimate of his own condition. But that was a decade ago. In the three years after his title was taken for refusing to go into the army — “No Viet Cong ever called me ‘Nigger’ ” — he had every kind of life but a fighter’s; he lectured, was onstage in New York as an actor, traveled, lay fallow. He had fun. Ever since, he trained with an eye for the fun he would have just so soon as training each day was done. On the night before his first Norton fight, hands aching with arthritis, his ankle injected with cortisone, he went nonetheless to a party. The next night, Norton broke his jaw. Afterward Ali forced himself to train a little harder, but it was the chore of his life. Only for the second Frazier fight and now for Foreman had he been ready to submit to the depressing grind of trying to get into top condition. How many months had he labored at Deer Lake! And even ate fish for his arthritis and avoided meat. His hands healed. He could hit the heavy bag again. But then his energy diminished. After that long season of training, his energy still diminished! Something in the cosmic laws of violence must be carnal and command you to eat meat. So he had given up fish, resumed the flesh of animals, ate desserts, and his blood sugar came back. He might even be ready at last to enter the fight which would test the logic of his life. Now the postponement must have felt like an amputation. What a danger. Every cell in his body could be ready to mutiny.
He was, however, philosophical on this morning forty-eight hours later. “A real disappointment,” he said, “a real disappointment. But Allah has revealed to me that I must look on this as my private lesson in disappointment. This is my opportunity to learn how to convert the worst of disappointment into the greatest of strength. For the seed of triumph can be found in the misery of the disappointment. Allah has allowed me to see this postponement as a blessing,” said Ali, and finger in the air, added, “The greatest surprise is always to be found in one’s own heart.”
Only Ali could make this speech at nine in the morning and lead you to believe he believed it. “Nonetheless,” said Ali, “it is hard. I am tired of training. I want to eat all the apple cobbler and drink all the sweet cream.” Then — was it because they were standing through this speech? — the interviewer was now formally introduced to Ali’s Black associates as “a great writer. No’min is a man of wisdom,” said Ali. A serious hindrance to the interview. For after such an introduction how can Ali not wish to read his poetry? In turn, a man of wisdom may wish to be courageous but obliged to face such verse, he will take up the cult of the craven. How No’min dodges Ali’s desire for a critique on the poems. Every literary principle is swallowed as Ali recites — it is equal in aesthetic sin to applauding the design of Nsele.
Once again, however, the poetry is not doggerel but derives from Ali’s mysterious source. From a sheaf of some hundred pages, each page so covered by his large handwriting that not fifty words make a page, Ali speaks of the heart. It is a curious poem. Again, it is difficult to decide how much of the language is his own, but it is certainly a poem on the nature of the heart. He declaims it like a sermon, sounding indeed like a bright thirteen-year-old admired for the ability to stand at the altar and speak as loud as a grown-up. The poem explores the categories of heart. There is the heart of iron which must be put into the fire before any change can be made in it, and the heart of gold which reflects the glory of the sun. As one’s attention begins to wander, so one only hears in passing of hearts of silver and copper and rock and the craven heart of wax which melts before heat (although it can be given any useful shape by superior intention). Then Ali speaks of “the heart of paper that flies like a kite in the wind. One can control the heart of paper as long as the string is strong enough to hold it. But when there is no wind, it drops.”
A diversion is attempted. It is suggested that Ali must have a heart of iron. Ali shows surprise. He sees himself with a heart of gold. Now silence follows the reading.
“These are fine sermons,” Norman says. “When you take up a career as a minister, they will be perfect for what you want to do.” His intestines punish him immediately for such hypocrisy. Moreover, this lack of direct comment does not improve Ali’s mood. It turns into a morning without focus. Since there will be no training later today, Ali is restless. “Maybe I will warm up a little,” he says. “These people in Africa like to see me, and the postponement has been a shock for them. Maybe it’ll relieve their feelings if they see I am still training.”
“Do you intend to stay here until the fight?”
“Oh, I have no desire to move. My place is here with my people.” There had been rumors that neither Ali nor Foreman were being allowed to leave Zaïre. It was certain at any rate that soldiers surrounded Foreman’s villa. In the hour after the Champion was cut, Mobutu’s man in Nsele, Bula Mandungu, tried to keep the story quiet, only to discover that word had already gone out to America from the one Telex machine his assistants had neglected to put out of order. Bula, whose small eyes offered the small welcome of a man who has packed a holster on his hip for twenty years, now scolded the press. “You must not publicize this,” he said. “It will be improperly understood in your country. I suggest you forget about such a story. The cut is nothing. Go for a swim. Foreman should be able to train again tomorrow.” Bula had put in three years in East Germany and four in Moscow, which may have given him his conversational style. “Americans are hysterical,” he said. “They always dramatize things.”
A brave official in the State Department now loaned his black American Embassy limousine to a few reporters so they might drive to Foreman’s villa four miles away. But, on arrival the reporters were not allowed to get out of the car. On the porch, Foreman’s manager, Dick Sadler, kept waving for them to come up and visit, but the security man who halted the car was quick to say, “You are bothering the Champion.”
“We’re not. Can’t you see that his manager is waving to us,” said John Vinocur of the Associated Press.
“You are bothering me,” said the security man, and signaled to his security guards. They now came forward with Uzi submachine guns, product of an old flirtation with the Israelis. Since Mobutu had also been known for his Nationalist and Communist Chinese pagoda, his private homes in Belgium, Paris, and Lausanne, his Swiss banks, his current Arab flirtation, and the remarkable good favor of the CIA in Kinshasa, who were reputed to have pulled off the coup which first brought him power, it was not unfair to think of the President of Zaïre as an eclectic. (Truth: he was one centerpiece of an eclectic!) The reporters paid their respects to such virtuosity by withdrawing this official American limousine with its attached American flag from the Israeli Uzis in the hands of the Black Mobutu security guard. Now the joke at press tables was that the U.S. Marines would have to bust into the Congo before Ali could be liberated.
But time passed uneventfully in the room with the High Schlock furniture. People came into the villa and went. Ali sat on one of the green velveteen chairs and gave an interview, then another. He analyzed Foreman’s cut plus its effect on Foreman. “He’s never been cut before. He used to think he was invincible. This has to hurt him.” When analysis was satisfied, Ali went through an interview with an African reporter and expatiated on his intention to travel through the country of Zaïre after the fight. He spoke of his love for the Zairois people. “They are sweet and hardworking and humble and good people.”
Time to go. If one would catch one’s plane, it was time to say good-bye to Ali. So he sat down next to him, waited a minute, and said a few words of farewell. Maybe it was the thought of anybody’s departure that produced the unexpected reply. Clearly, Ali muttered, “I gotta get out of this place.”
Could the interviewer believe what he had heard? He leaned forward. This was as close as they had ever been. “Why don’t you go on safari for a couple of days?”
br /> With this remark, he lost the rest of his exclusive. Why hadn’t he just said, “Yes, it’s rough.” Too late would he recognize that you approached Muhammad’s psyche as carefully as you would walk up on a squirrel.
“No,” said Ali, thrusting himself away from any temptation to scratch at the new itch, “I’ll stay here and work for my people.” Boxing is the exclusion of outside influence. A classic discipline.
Norman went back to the States with no happy intimations of the fight to come.
3. THE MILLIONAIRE
NOW, OUR MAN of wisdom had a vice. He wrote about himself. Not only would he describe the events he saw, but his own small effect on events. This irritated critics. They spoke of ego trips and the unattractive dimensions of his narcissism. Such criticism did not hurt too much. He had already had a love affair with himself, and it used up a good deal of love. He was no longer so pleased with his presence. His daily reactions bored him. They were becoming like everyone else’s. His mind, he noticed, was beginning to spin its wheels, sometimes seeming to repeat itself for the sheer slavishness of supporting mediocre habits. If he was now wondering what name he ought to use for his piece about the fight, it was out of no excess of literary ego. More, indeed, from concern for the reader’s attention. It would hardly be congenial to follow a long piece of prose if the narrator appeared only as an abstraction: The Writer, The Traveler, The Interviewer. That is unhappy in much the way one would not wish to live with a woman for years and think of her as The Wife.
Nonetheless, Norman was certainly feeling modest on his return to New York and thought he might as well use his first name — everybody in the fight game did. Indeed, his head was so determinedly empty that the alternative was to do a piece without a name. Never had his wisdom appeared more invisible to him and that is a fair condition for acquiring an anonymous voice.
Back in Kinshasa, however, one month later, much was changed. Now, he had a good room at the Inter-Continental and so did every figure in Foreman’s camp, the Champion, the manager, the sparring partners, the relatives, the friends, the skilled trainers — we are talking of no less than Archie Moore and Sandy Saddler — everyone in the retinue was there. Some of Ali’s camp were registered as well, most notably Bundini, who later would have verbal wars in the lobby with Foreman’s people. What wars! They must yet be described. The promoters of the fight stayed at the Inter-Continental, John Daly, Don King, Hank Schwartz. Big Black, the big conga drummer from Ali’s camp, was here. Interviewed by a British reporter who asked him the name of his drum, he answered that it was a conga. The reporter wrote Congo. The Zairois censor changed it to Zaïre. Now Big Black could say in interviews that he played the Zaïres.
Yes, a different mood. The food was better at the Inter-Continental, so were the drinks. The lobby was moving with easy action between Black and white. Musicians left over from the festival four weeks before, operators at the fringe of the promotion, fight experts, hustlers, and even a few tourists mingled with passing African bureaucrats and European businessmen. Employees, male and female, from the gambling casinos came by for a look and mingled with Peace Corps kids and corporation men from cartels. Dashikis, bush jackets, and pinstripe suits passed through the lobby. Public Relations was quick to speak of “Kinshasa’s living room.” It was most peculiarly an agreeable lobby, although the autumn brown and pastel orange in the carpets, wicker chairs, walls, lamps and sofas were not different from autumn brown at the Indianapolis Hilton or the Sheraton Albuquerque. It worked in Africa. A little creature comfort went a long way in Kinshasa. The fast elevators gave zap! The fried food was eggs! Taxis came quickly. Still, the happy action was a function of the flow in the lobby rather than the status of people gathered. Social arbiters of Heavyweight Championships would have gone blind looking for a face important enough to ignore. If on the night before the fight a few well-known names would finally arrive, Jim Brown, Joe Frazier and David Frost for three, the old celebrity of the fight crowd was absent. The fight cadre plus George Plimpton, Hunter Thompson, Budd Schulberg and himself made up the notables. Any notions of anonymity had to be discarded.
For these days Norman was being welcomed by Blacks. If Ali had introduced him as “a man of wisdom” — Ali who had seen him in a dozen circumstances over the years and never quite allowed that he was sure of the name — Foreman, in turn, said, “Yeah I’ve heard of you. You’re the champ among writers.” Don King presented him as “a great mind among us, a genius.” Bundini, lying in his teeth, assured everyone, “No’min is even smarter than I am.” Archie Moore, whom No’min had long revered, was cordial at last. A sparring partner asked for an autograph.
What celebration. Being greeted this warmly on return to Africa, he felt delivered at last from the bowels of the bummer. The final traces of the miserable fever that kept him in bed for a week on his return to New York were now gone. He was happy to be back in Africa. What a surprise. Since he was not being read in this milieu nearly so much as praised, and since the Black American community with its curious unities of opinion, so much like psychic waves, was spreading a good word on him for no overt reason — no recent published work or extraliterary relation to Blacks half so close as books and articles he had done ten or fifteen years earlier — he came at last to realize the fair shape of the irony. Months ago, a story had gotten into the newspapers about a novel he was writing. His publishers were going to pay him a million dollars sight unseen for the book. If his candles had been burning low in the literary cathedral these last few years, the news story went its way to hastening their extinction. He knew that his much publicized novel (still nine-tenths to be written) would now have to be twice as good as before to overcome such financial news. Good literary men were not supposed to pick up sums. Small apples for him to protest in every banlieu and literary purlieu that his Boston publisher had not been laid low with a degenerative disease of the cortex but that the million was to be paid out as he wrote five to seven hundred thousand words, the equivalent of five novels. Since he was being rewarded only as he delivered the work, and had debts and a sizable advance already spent and five wives and seven children, plus a financial nut at present larger than his head, so the sum was not as large as it seemed, he explained — the million, you see, was nominal.
Well, the literary world was built on bad cess. For good cause. If no one would be in a hurry to forgive him unless his novel proved immense, then maybe that would force his work closer to such scope. He might have time, at least to parse it out.
Here in Africa, however, it was another tale. Since the word of his million hit the wire services, his name throughout the Black community had been underlined. No’min Million was a man who could make it by using his head. No rough stuff! He did not have to get hit in the head, nor hit on the side of your head. This man had to be the literary champ. To make a million without taking chances — show respect! To sign for a sum that Heavyweight champs had not been able to make until Muhammad Ali came along — why, the optimistic element of the Black community, looking now at every commercial horizon in America, began to gaze at writing. Hang around this man went the word. Something might rub off!
Once, he would have been miserable at being able to prosper from such values. But his love affair with the Black soul, a sentimental orgy at its worst, had been given a drubbing through the seasons of Black Power. He no longer knew whether he loved Blacks or secretly disliked them, which had to be the dirtiest secret in his American life. Part of the woe of the first trip to Africa, part of that irrationally intense detestation of Mobutu — even a photo of the President in his plump cheeks and horn-rimmed eyeglasses igniting invective adequate to a Harvard professor looking at an icon of Nixon — must be a cover for the rage he was feeling toward Blacks, any Blacks. Walking the streets of Kinshasa on that first trip while the black crowds moved about him with an indifference to his presence that succeeded in niggering him, he knew what it was to be looked upon as invisible. He was also approaching, if not careful, the terminal
animosity of a Senior Citizen. How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse. When the sheer evidence of Africa finally overcame these newly bigoted senses (when a drive over miles of highway showed thousands of slim and probably hungry Zairois running like new slum inhabitants for overcrowded buses, and yet in some absolute statement of aesthetic, some imprimatur of the holy and final statement of the line of the human body, these Blacks could still show in silhouette, while standing in line for the bus, almost every one of those thousand slim dark Africans, an incorruptible loneliness, a stone mute dignity, some African dignity he had never seen on South Americans, Europeans, or Asiatics, some tragic magnetic sense of self as if each alone and all were carrying the continent like a halo of sorrow about their head) then it became impossible not to feel the unique life of Africa — even if Kinshasa was to the rain forest as Hoboken to Big Sur — yes, impossible not to sense what everyone had been trying to say about Africa for a hundred years, big Papa first on line: the place was so fucking sensitive! No horror failed to stir its echo a thousand miles away, no sneeze was ever free of the leaf that fell on the other side of the hill. Then he could no longer hate the Zairois or even be certain of his condemnation of their own Black oppressors, then his animosity switched a continent over to Black Americans with their arrogance, jive, ethnic put-down costumes, caterwauling soul, their thump-your-testicle organ sound and black new vomitous egos like the slag of all of alienated sewage-compacted heap U.S.A.; then he knew that he had not only come to report on a fight but to look a little more into his own outsized feelings of love and — could it be? — sheer hate for the existence of Black on earth.
No, he was hardly surprised when his illness flared on return to the States, and he went through a week and then ten days of total detestation of himself, a fever without fantasies, an illness without terror, for he felt as if his soul had expired or, worse, slipped away. It was enough of a warning to lay a message on him. He got up from bed with the determination to learn a little about Africa before his return, a healthy impulse that brought him luck (but then, do we not gamble with the unrecognized thought that a return of our luck signifies a return of our health?). After inquiries, he went to the University Place Book Shop in New York, an operative definition of the word warren, up on the eighth or ninth floor of a wheezing old office building below Fourteenth Street — the smell of the catacombs in its stones — to find at exit from the elevator a stack and excelsior of books, cartons and dust where a big blond clerk with scraggly sideburns working alone assured the new customer that he could certainly afford these many books being laid on him, since he had after all been given the million, hadn’t he, a worthless excursion to describe if not for the fact that the clerk picked the books, the titles all unfamiliar. Would there be one paragraph of radium in all this geographical, political, historical sludge? His luck came in; not a paragraph but a book: Bantu Philosophy by Father Tempels, a Dutch priest who had worked as missionary in the Belgian Congo and extracted the philosophy from the language of the tribes he lived among.