When I'm gone, boxing will be nothing again. The fans with the cigars and the hats turned down'll be there, but no more housewives and little men in the street and foreign presidents. It's goin' to be back to the fighter who comes to town, smells a flower, visits a hospital, blows a horn and says he's in shape. Old hat. 1 was the onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator.
-- Muhammad Ali, 1967
Life had been good to Pat Patterson for so long that he'd almost forgotten what it was like to be anything but a free-riding, first-class passenger on a flight near the top of the world. . .
It is a long, long way from the frostbitten midnight streets around Chicago's Clark and Division to the deep-rug hallways of the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South in Manhattan. . . But Patterson had made that trip in high style, with stops along the way in London, Paris, Manila, Kinshasa, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and almost everywhere else in the world on that circuit where the menus list no prices and you need at least three pairs of $100 sunglasses just to cope with the TV lights every time you touch down at an airport for another frenzied press conference and then a ticker-tape parade along the route to the Presidential Palace and another princely reception.
That is Muhammad Ali's world, an orbit so high, a circuit so fast and strong and with rarefied air so thin that only "The Champ," "The Greatest," and a few close friends have unlimited breathing rights. Anybody who can sell this act for $5 million an hour all over the world is working a vein somewhere between magic and madness. . . And now, on this warm winter night in Manhattan, Pat Patterson was not entirely sure which way the balance was tipping. The main shock had come three weeks ago in Las Vegas, when he'd been forced to sit passively at ringside and watch the man whose life he would gladly have given his own to protect, under any other circumstances, take a savage and wholly unexpected beating in front of 5000 screaming banshees at the Hilton Hotel and something like 60 million stunned spectators on national/network TV. The Champ was no longer The Champ: a young brute named Leon Spinks had settled that matter, and not even Muhammad seemed to know just exactly what that awful defeat would mean -- for himself or anyone else; not even for his new wife and children, or the handful of friends and advisers who'd been working that high white vein right beside him for so long that they acted and felt like his family.
It was definitely an odd lot, ranging from solemn Black Muslims like Herbert Muhammad, his manager -- to shrewd white hipsters like Harold Conrad, his executive spokesman, and Irish Gene Kilroy, Ali's version of Hamilton Jordon: a sort of all-purpose administrative assistant, logistics manager and chief troubleshooter. Kilroy and Conrad are The Champ's answer to Ham and Jody-- but mad dogs and wombats will roam the damp streets of Washington, babbling perfect Shakespearean English, before Jimmy Carter comes up with his version of Drew "Bundini" Brown, Ali's alter ego and court wizard for so long now that he can't really remember being anything else. Carter's thin-ice sense of humor would not support the weight of a zany friend like Bundini. It would not even support the far more discreet weight of a court jester like J.F.K.'s Dave Powers, whose role in the White House was much closer to Bundini Brown's deeply personal friendship with Ali than Jordan's essentially political and deceptively hard-nosed relationship with Jimmy. . . and even Hamilton seems to be gaining weight by geometric progressions these days, and the time may be just about ripe for him to have a chat with the Holy Ghost and come out as a "born-again Christian."
That might make the nut for a while -- at least through the 1980 reelection campaign -- but not even Jesus could save Jordan from a fate worse than any hell he'd ever imagined if Jimmy Carter woke up one morning and read in the Washington Post that Hamilton had pawned the Great Presidential Seal for $500 in some fashionable Georgetown hockshop. . . eyes for collateral.
Indeed. . . and this twisted vision would seem almost too bent for print if Bundini hadn't already raised at least the raw possibility of it by once pawning Muhammad Ali's "Heavyweight Champion of the World" gold & jewel studded belt for $500 -- just an overnight loan from a friend, he said later; but the word got out and Bundini was banished from The Family and the whole entourage for eighteen months when The Champ was told what he'd done.
That heinous transgression is shrouded in a mix of jive-shame and real black humor at this point: The Champ, after all, had once hurled his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River, in a fit of pique at some alleged racial insult in Louisville -- and what was the difference between a gold medal and a jewel-studded belt? They were both symbols of a "white devil's" world that Ali, if not Bundini, was already learning to treat with a very calculated measure of public disrespect. . . What they shared, far beyond a very real friendship, was a shrewd kind of street-theater sense of how far out on that limb they could go, without crashing. Bundini has always had a finer sense than anyone else in The Family about where The Champ wanted to go, the shifting winds of his instincts, and he has never been worried about things like Limits or Consequences. That was the province of others, like Conrad or Herbert. Drew B. has always known exactly which side he was on, and so has Cassius/Muhammad. Bundini is the man who came up with "Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee," and ever since then he has been as close to both Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali as anyone else in the world.
Pat Patterson, by contrast, was a virtual newcomer to The Family. A 200-pound, forty-year-old black cop, he was a veteran of the Chicago Vice Squad before he hired on as Ali's personal bodyguard. And, despite the total devotion and relentless zeal he brought to his responsibility for protecting The Champ at all times from any kind of danger, hassles or even minor inconvenience, six years on the job had caused him to understand, however reluctantly, that there were at least a few people who could come and go as they pleased through the wall of absolute security he was supposed to maintain around The Champ.
Bundini and Conrad were two of these. They have been around for so long that they had once called the boss "Cassius," or even "Cash" -- while Patterson had never addressed him as anything but "Muhammad," or "Champ." He had come aboard at high tide, as it were, and even though he was now in charge of everything from carrying Ali's money -- in a big roll of $100 bills -- to protecting his life with an ever-present chrome-plated revolver and the lethal fists and feet of a black belt with a license to kill, it had always galled him a bit to know that Muhammad's capricious instincts and occasionally perverse sense of humor made it certifiably impossible for any one bodyguard, or even four, to protect him from danger in public. His moods were too unpredictable: one minute he would be in an almost catatonic funk, crouched in the back seat of a black Cadillac limousine with an overcoat over his head -- and then, with no warning at all, he would suddenly be out of the car at a red light somewhere in the Bronx, playing stickball in the street with a gang of teenage junkies. Patterson had learned to deal with The Champ's moods but he also knew that in any crowd around The Greatest there would be at least a few who felt the same way about Ali as they had about Malcolm X or Martin Luther King.
There was a time, shortly after his conversion to the Black Muslim religion in the mid-Sixties, when Ali seemed to emerge as a main spokesman for what the Muslims were then perfecting as the State of the Art in racial paranoia -- which seemed a bit heavy and not a little naive at the time, but which the White Devils moved quickly to justify. . .
Yes. But that is a very long story and we will get to it later. The only point we need to deal with right now is that Muhammad Ali somehow emerged from one of the meanest and most shameful ordeals any prominent American has ever endured as one of the few real martyrs of that goddamn wretched war in Vietnam and a sort of instant folk hero all over the world, except in the U.S.A.
That would come later. . .
The Spinks disaster in Vegas had been a terrible shock to The Family. They had all known it had to come sometime, but the scene had already been set and the papers already signed for that "sometime" -- a $16 million purse and a mind-boggling, damn-the-cost television s
pectacle with Ali's old nemesis Ken Norton as the Bogyman, and one last king-hell payday for everybody. They were prepared, in the back of their hearts, for that one -- but not for the cheap torpedo that blew their whole ship out of the water in Vegas for no payday at all. Leon Spinks crippled a whole industry in one hour on that fateful Wednesday evening in Las Vegas --The Muhammad Ali Industry, which has churned out roughly $56 million in over fifteen years and at least twice or three times that much for the people who kept the big engine running all this time. (It would take Bill Walton 112 years on an annual NBA salary of $500,000 to equal that figure.)
1 knew it was too close for comfort. I told him to stop fooling around. He was giving up too many rounds. But I heard the decision and I thought, 'Well, what are you going to do? That's it. I've prepared myself for this day for a long time. I conditioned myself for it. I was young with him and now I feel old with him.'
-- Angelo Dundee, Ali's trainer
Dundee was not the only person who was feeling old with Muhammad Ali on that cold Wednesday night in Las Vegas. Somewhere around the middle of the fifteenth round a whole generation went over the hump as the last Great Prince of the Sixties went out in a blizzard of pain, shock and angry confusion so total that it was hard to even know how to feel, much less what to say, when the thing was finally over. The last shot came just at the final bell, when "Crazy Leon" whacked Ali with a savage overhand right that almost dropped The Champ in his tracks and killed the last glimmer of hope for the patented "miracle finish" that Angelo Dundee knew was his fighter's only chance. As Muhammad wandered back to his corner about six feet in front of me, the deal had clearly gone down.
The decision was anticlimactic. Leon Spinks, a twenty-four-year-old brawler from St. Louis with only seven professional fights on his record, was the new Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World. And the roar of the pro-Spinks crowd was the clearest message of all: that uppity nigger from Louisville had finally got what was coming to him. For fifteen long years he had mocked everything they all thought they stood for: changing his name, dodging the draft, beating the best they could hurl at him. . . But now, thank God, they were seeing him finally go down.
Six presidents have lived in the White House in the time of Muhammad Ali. Dwight Eisenhower was still rapping golf balls around the Oval Office when Cassius Clay Jr. won a gold medal for the U.S. as a light-heavy-weight in the 1960 Olympics and then turned pro and won his first fight for money against a journeyman heavyweight named Tunney Hunsaker in Louisville on October 29th of that same year.
Less than four years later and almost three months to the day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Cassius Clay -- the "Louisville Lip" by then -- made a permanent enemy of every "boxing expert" in the Western world by beating World Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston, the meanest of the mean, so badly that Liston refused to come out of his corner for the seventh round.
That was fourteen years ago. Jesus! And it seems like fourteen months.
Why?
Brain damage.
The Real Story: A Memo With Nails in Both Nostrils. . . by Raoul Duke, Sports Editor
This story is badly bogged down, and I think I know the reason: Dr. Thompson has been on it so long -- in the belly of the beast, as it were -- that he has lost all functional contact with his sense of humor; and where I come from they call that condition "insanity."
But there are a lot of high-powered fools where I come from, and it's been about fifteen years since I took any one of them seriously. . . And in fact it was Thompson himself who originally made that connection between humor and sanity; which changes nothing, because we come from the same place -- from the elm-shaded, white-frame "Highlands" of Louisville, Kentucky, about halfway between the Cassius Clay residence down on South Fourth Street and the homes of the men who originally launched Cassius Clay Jr. on his long wild ride on the Great Roller-Coaster of professional boxing and paraprofessional show business. They lived out in Indian Hills or on Mockingbird Valley Road near the Louisville Country Club, and they owned every bank in the city -- along with both newspapers, all the radio stations that white folks took seriously, and at least half the major distilleries and tobacco companies that funded the municipal tax base.
They knew a good thing when they saw one, and in the year of our Lord 1960 the good thing they saw was an eighteen-year-old local Negro boxer, a big, fast and impressively intelligent young light-heavyweight named Cassius Clay Jr., who had just won a gold medal for the U.S.A. in the 1960 Olympics. . . So ten of these gents got together and made the boy an offer he couldn't refuse: they were willing to take a long risk on him, they said, just as soon as he gained a few pounds and decided to fight professionally as the new morning star among heavyweights.
They would finance his move for the title in a division that Floyd Patterson and his crafty manager, Cus D'Amato, had dominated for so long -- by means of a new gimmick known as "closed-circuit TV" -- that a whole generation of what might have been promising young heavyweight challengers had died on the vine while they waited in line for a chance to fight Patterson, who didn't really want to fight anybody.
Floyd was "The Champ" and he used that fact as leverage as Richard Nixon would later learn to retreat behind the odious truth that "I am, you know, The President."
Indeed. . . and they were both right for a while; but bad karma tends to generate its own kind of poison, which -- like typhoid chickens and rotten bread cast out on the waters -- will usually come home to either roost, fester or mutate very close to its own point of origin.
Richard Nixon abused karma, chickens and even bread for so long that they all came home at once and totally destroyed him. . . And Floyd Patterson's neurotic, anal-compulsive reluctance to get into the ring with anything at all with two arms and legs under thirty was what eventually created the vacuum that hatched Sonny Liston, an aging ex-con who twice turned poor Floyd to jelly, just by climbing into the ring.
. . . Hot damn! We may be approaching a heinous new record for mixed metaphors in this thing; the rats have swarmed into the belfry, and anything sane that survives will be hurled out to sea and stomped down like a dwarf in a shitrain. . .
Why not?
It was never my intention to make any real sense of this memo. The Sports Desk has never loved logic; mainly because there is no money in it -- and pro sports without money is like a Vincent Black Shadow with no gas. Dumb greed is the backbone of all sports, except maybe college wrestling -- which may or may not be a good & healthy thing for some people, in places like Kansas and Idaho, but not here. Those knotty little monsters can write their own stories, and toss them in over the transom. . . If we have enough room or maybe a bad check for a half-page ad from the Shotgun News or the "Billy Beer" people, that's when we'll focus the whole twisted energy of the Sports Desk on a college wrestling feature:
UTAH CHAMP DROGO PINS THREE-ARMED COWBOY
FOR WEST SLOPE TITLE IN NINE-HOUR CLASSIC
How's that for a stylish headline?
Well. . . shucks; let's try it again, from the other side of the fence:
CRIPPLED COWBOY CHALLENGER FALLS SHORT IN MAT FINALS;
ANGRY FANS MAUL REF AS MATCH ENDS;
HUGE DROGO GAINS SPLIT WIN
Jesus! I could get a job writing sports heads for the Daily News with that kind of feel for the word count. . . Right, with a big salary too, in the core of the Big Apple. . .
But that is not what we had in mind here, is it?
No. We were talking of Sport, and Big Money. Which gets us back to pro boxing, the most shameless racket of all. It is more a Spectacle than a Sport, one of the purest forms of atavistic endeavor still extant in a world that only big-time politicians feel a need to call "civilized." Nobody who has ever sat in a front-row, ringside seat less than six feet just below and away from the sickening thumps and cracks and groans of two desperate, adrenaline-crazed giants who are whipping and pounding each other like two pit bulls in a death battle will e
ver forget what it felt like to be there.
No TV camera or any other kind will ever convey the almost four-dimensional reality of total, frenzied violence of seeing, hearing and almost feeling the sudden WHACK of Leon Spinks' thinly padded fist against Muhammad Ali's cheekbone so close in front of your own face that it is hard to keep from flinching and trying to duck backward -- while a whole row of $200-a-seat ringsiders right behind you are leaping and stomping and howling for more showers of flying sweat to fall down on them, more droplets of human blood to rain down on the sleeves and tailored shoulders of their tan cashmere sport coats. . . and then, with Leon still pounding and the sweat and blood still flying, some fist-flailing geek screaming over your shoulder loses his balance and cracks you between the shoulder blades with a shot that sends you reeling into a cop hanging on to the ring apron -- who reacts with a vicious elbow to your chest, and the next thing you see is shoes bouncing inches in front of your face on a concrete floor.
"The horror! The horror!. . . Exterminate all the brutes!"
Mistah Kurtz said that but the smart money called him a joker. . . Ho, ho, good ole Kurtz, that Prussian sense of humor will zing you every time.
I said that. We were sitting in a sauna at the health spa in the Las Vegas Hilton -- me and my friend Bob Arum, the sinister promoter -- when all of a sudden the redwood door swung open and in comes Leon Spinks.
"Hi there, Leon," said Arum.
Leon grinned and tossed his towel across the room at the stove full of hot rocks. "What's happenin', jewboy?" he replied. "I heard you was too stoned to be foolin' around down here with us health freaks."
Arum turned beet red and moved off toward the corner.
Leon laughed again, and reached for his teeth. "These damn things get hot," he snarled. "Who needs these goddamn teeth, anyway."