The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

  But it's the fact that he's white. . .

  [Confidentially] Did you know he called me a nigger?

  What?

  You didn't hear it? The South African. . .

  [Aghast] No!

  You was in Vegas, right?

  [Confused] Yeah. . . we talked to him. . .

  He said, "That cocky nigger, that's one nigger I want. . ."

  [Laughing] Aw, c'mon. He didn't say that. That guy was on his best behavior.

  He said: "I want that nigger."

  C'mon. . .

  [Deep laugh] I was jokin'. . .

  He was on best behavior. . . The lawyer said, "You don't understand our country. I mean, it's not like you've heard at all. . ." And Conrad was saying, "Bullshit! You got cages for those black people down there." He was rude.

  CONRAD: He gave me a big argument.

  Did he slap you?

  CONRAD: Slap me? [Laughs] I had Hunter with me!

  I had a can of mace in my pocket. . .

  [Ali, laughing and looking at his watch] Okay, now you've got five minutes.

  Let's see. . . five minutes.

  I'll give you ten minutes. . . See, see the clock?

  Yeah, don't worry, I've got my own clock -- see this magnesium Rolex? Heavy, eh?. . . And see these? After you called me a bum and a hippie last night, look what I wore for you this morning [holding up perforated wing tips].

  You're getting a good interview, man.

  Yeah [reached for one of the shoes], look at that shine too.

  Those are some good shoes -- those shoes must've cost about fifty dollars.

  Yeah. They're about ten years old.

  Are they? Same soles?

  Yeah, these are my FBI shoes. I only wear them for special occasions -- nobody's called me a bum and a hippie for a long time.

  [Laughs] You're not going to drink your beer? You an alcoholic?

  Alcoholic! Bum! Hippie! Remember I've got to write an article about you before Friday!

  Heh, heh, heh. You've got the beer. . . Heh, heh, heh. Bum and a hippie.

  Where you going?

  Right here, I'll talk louder so you can hear. . . What else you want to ask me?

  My head's, uh, I'm still on that South Africa trip, I guess there'd be no way you could go down there without beating Leon first, right?

  No, I got to beat Leon first. I will defeat Leon first. I will go down as the triple greatest of all time.

  Oh yeah, I think you might. If you train, if you get serious.

  If I get serious? I'm as serious as cancer. Is cancer serious?

  Well, yeah, I didn't realize, uh. . . if you're going to start training now that is serious, that's five months, six months.

  I'm going to be ready!

  Would you call him a fast fighter. . . Leon? It seems like a funny word to use for him.

  Fast? Yeah he was fast. Faster than I was that night. He's fast period.

  Fast hands? Fast feet?

  Fast hands. Not as fast as reflexes because of his weight. When I'm down to my weight that I would like to be I know I'm faster.

  I noticed in the third round the first time I smelled a little bit of trouble was when I saw you missing him with the jab. . . it would be about six inches.

  The one thing I did wrong, I didn't do no boxing hardly before this fight.

  Why?

  Well, my belief was at this age, too much pounding and getting hit and unnecessary training wasn't necessary.

  Well, if too much training would have been bad for that fight, how about the next one, why would it be good for the next fight?

  My timing was lost. Well, I'm going to have to box. . . I'm not saying it would have been bad to box; better for me, see, I wasn't boxing nobody and I was missing a lot of punches in that fight.

  Yeah, I noticed that, that's when I first thought, "Oh oh. . . it'll be a long fight."

  That's 'cause I wasn't boxing, I was hitting bad.

  You think you could knock Leon out?. . . I thought you could have in the fifteenth round.

  I couldn't follow him up, might knock him out and might not. . .

  Was there any time you thought maybe you might have. . . did you ever think he was going to knock you out. . . was there any time you thought, oh, oh, he might even put you down?

  No, nothing like that.

  Would it be more important next time to get faster?

  No, next time it's to be in better shape, to take him more serious, to know him.

  Why the hell didn't you this time?

  Didn't know him.

  You got some of the smartest people in the business working with you.

  Didn't know him. . . See all of my worst fights was when I fought nobodies. Jurgen Blin, Zurich, Switzerland, seven rounds with him, didn't look too good. Al Lewis, Dublin, Ireland, a nobody, went eleven rounds. Jean-Pierre Coopman, San Juan, Puerto Rico. . . a nobody.

  Bonavena?

  He was pretty good. Alfredo Evangelista. A nobody, didn't look that hot.

  Yeah, but Leon, you saw him fight several times, didn't you?

  Amateurs, just seven. . . what can this man do with seven pro fights, never been over ten rounds. . .

  But you had about fifteen or eighteen pro fights when you fought Liston the first time.

  I don't know.

  I think I counted them up the other day. . . nineteen maybe.

  I caught him off guard too, I was supposed to have been annihilated like this boy was. But my best fights were those fights where I was the underdog: George Foreman's comeback, two Liston fights, Frazier fights, Norton. . .

  Is that something in your head?

  It makes you hungry, got something to work for. I'm doing good. Everything is going my way. I'm eating dinner. I'm living with my wife and my two children all up to the fight which ain't that good. Least six weeks before the fight I should get away from my children 'cause they make you soft. You hug 'em and you kiss them, you know, you 'round babies all day. Day before the fight, I'm babysitting 'cause my wife done some shopping. She didn't mean no harm.

  You can't blame it on her, though.

  No. I got to get away from the babies, I got to get evil. Got to chop trees, run up hills, get in my old log cabin.

  You plan to go up there to stay, at the camp, live there until the fight?

  Where. . . what fight. . . ?

  You say you're going to go up there and do a monk sort of trip?

  No, my wife and babies would be with me, but my babies they cry at night and they'll be in another cabin. . .

  What about Leon's rib, do you think you broke his rib?

  He got hurt in the fight some kind of way, and I was told after the fight he was hurt and some doctor was looking at him and that it wasn't that bad, and I guess when it looked like he was going to fight Norton they had to admit he was hurt 'cause Norton's a body puncher.

  Well, speaking of that, I don't want to bring up any sore subject, but did you see Pacheco on the Tom Snyder show when he was talking about all athletes getting old. . .? He seemed to come down pretty hard. He said physically it would just be impossible for you to get back in shape to beat Leon.

  I was fighting years before I knew Pacheco. He got famous hanging around me. They all got known. . . popular. They'd never admit it. . . and also Pacheco don't know me, he works in my corner, he's not my real physical doctor.

  So you think you can get back in ninety-eight on a scale of a hundred?

  Yeah. What I like, this is what I love. . . to do the impossible, be the underdog. Pressure makes me go. I couldn't. . . I didn't beat Frazier the first time, I didn't beat Norton the first time. I gotta beat the animal. I almost got to lose to keep going. It would be hard for me to keep getting the spirit up, what have I got to accomplish, who have I got to prove wrong?

  Speaking of that, how did you ever get yourself in the situation where you had so much to lose and so little to gain
by fighting Leon down there?

  How did I get in what?

  You got yourself in an almost no-win situation there where you had very little to win and a hell of a lot to lose. It struck me as strategically bad. . .

  That's the way it is, that's the way it's been ever since I held the crown, I didn't have nothing to gain by fighting Bugner. I didn't have nothing to gain by fighting Jean-Pierre Co-opman. I didn't have nothing to gain by fighting a lot of people.

  You sure as hell will next time by fighting Leon. That will be real pressure.

  Oh yeah, I like the pressure, need the pressure. . . the world likes. . . people like to see miracles. . . people like to see. . . people like to see underdogs that do it. . . people like to be there when history is made.

  Raw Eggs and Beer in the Top Rank Suite. . . A Sea of Noise and Violence. . . An Eerie, Roaring Chant. . . The Final Bell

  One thing that Ernest Hemingway had always told me was that it was a bad idea to get to know an active fighter and become interested in his career. Sooner or later he was going to get hurt in the ring, and beaten, and it would be an almost unbearable thing to see if he were a friend.

  -- George Plimpton, Shadow Box

  Well. . . I wondered why George never showed up in Las Vegas. Muhammad Ali is a friend of Norman Mailer's, too, and also Budd Schulberg's; along with most of the other big-time boxing writers who skipped the Spinks fight. I was too strung out on the simple horror of spending two weeks in the Las Vegas Hilton to understand anything more complex than fear, hunger and daytime TV, at the time, to grasp my own lack of sensitivity.

  And at first I thought it was some kind of monumental botch on my part. Sybil Arum tried to reassure me, but others said I was paranoid. Day after endless day, I would check into Top Rank Headquarters on the fifth floor "Director's Suite" and ask as casually as possible if George or Norman had showed up yet -- and the answer was always the same.

  Or perhaps I was overcompensating, somehow, for my shameful malaria freakout in Zaire by showing up for this one two weeks earlier than anybody except Arum and Leon.

  After a week or so of feeling so conspicuously alone in my role of "behind the scenes fight writer" I finally began passing myself off as the official Top Rank bartender, instead. I began to get seriously paranoid about the situation. What was wrong, I wondered? Had I chosen the wrong hotel? Were all the heavies staying somewhere else like the Aladdin or Caesar's Palace, where the real action was?

  Or maybe I was working too hard; doing unnatural things like waking up at ten o'clock in the morning to attend the daily promo/strategy meetings down in Arum's Top Rank "Director's Suite". . . taking voluminous notes on such problems as the Ghanaian featherweight challenger's baffling refusal to wear "Everlast" gloves for his fight with Danny Lopez; and whether the public should be charged one or two dollars to attend Ali's daily workouts -- if and when Ali finally showed up for any workouts at all; he was not taking the fight seriously, according to rumors out of Dundee's gym in Miami, and to make matters worse he was also refusing to talk to anybody except his wife.

  There was also the matter of how to cope with a mind-set ranging from blank apathy to outright mockery on the part of the national boxing press. The only fight writers who could be counted on for daily ink were locals such as Tommy Lopez from the Review Journal and Mike Marley from the Las Vegas Sun -- which was good for me, because they both knew a hell of a lot more about the "fight game" than I did, and between the two of them I was getting a dose of education about the technical aspects of boxing that I have never known much about. . . But the New York media continued to dismiss the fight as either a farce or a fraud -- or perhaps even a fix, as frustrated challenger Ken Norton would suggest afterward; and Arum's humor grew more and more foul as Leon absorbed more and more bum-of-the-month jokes from the national boxing press. Arum was shocked and genuinely outraged as the prefight coverage dwindled down to a one-line joke about "this upcoming mystery match between one fighter who won't talk, and another who can't."

  Spinks wandered in and out of the suite from time to time, seeming totally oblivious to what anybody in the world -- including me and Arum -- had to say about the fight or anything else. He was not even disturbed when his mother arrived in Las Vegas and told the first reporter she met that she thought it was "a shame" that her son was going to have to "get beat up on TV" just to make a bundle of money for "big business people from New York."

  Leon Spinks is not one of your chronic worriers. His mind moves in pretty straight lines, and the more I saw of him in Las Vegas, the more I became convinced that the idea of fighting his boyhood idol for the Heavyweight Championship of the World didn't bother him at all, win or lose. "Sure he's The Greatest," he would say to the few reporters who managed to track him down and ask him how he felt about Ali, "but he has to give it up sometime, right?"

  He was polite with the press, but it was clear that he had no interest at all in their questions -- and even less in his own answers, which he passed off as casually as he dropped two raw eggs in every glass of beer he drank during interviews.

  Nor did he have any interest in Arum's desperate scrambling for pre-fight publicity.

  No half-bright presidential candidate, rock star or championship boxing promoter would do anything but fire any ranking adviser who arranged for him and his wife to spend two weeks in a small bedroom adjoining the main suite/bar/war room and the base of all serious business. . . But this is what Bob Arum did in Las Vegas, and it was so entirely out of character for anybody dealing in Power & Leverage & Money on that scale that it made me suspicious. Bob and I have been friends long enough for me to be relatively certain he wasn't either dumb or crazy. But I have a lot of strange friends and I still trust my instincts in this area about niney-eight percent, despite a few glaring exceptions in the area of Southern politicians and black drug dealers wearing Iron Boy overalls, and until Arum pulls that kind of switch on me I will still call him my friend and treat him the same way.

  Indeed. . . and now that we've settled that, let's get back to this twisted saga and my feeling in Las Vegas, as the day of the fight approached and my lonely perceptions with regard to its possible meaning and in fact my whole understanding of professional boxing as either a sport or a business came more and more into question. . . Well, I began to feel very isolated, down there in the huge Vegas Hilton, and when even my good friends smiled indulgently when I said on the phone that I was having a hell of a hard time getting a bet on Leon Spinks at ten or even eight to one, I had a few nervous moments wondering if perhaps I really was as crazy as so much of the evidence suggested.

  This was, however, before I'd read Plimpton's book and found out that I was the only writer in America so cold-hearted as to show up in Las Vegas to watch Muhammad Ali get beaten.

  Whatever else I might or might not have been, I was clearly no friend of The Champ's. . . Which was true on one level, because I not only showed for the fight, but wallowed so deep in the quicksands of human treachery as to bet against him.

  At ten to one.

  Let's not forget those numbers -- especially not if the difference between ten and five is really the difference between a friend and an enemy.

  When the bell rang to start number fifteen in Vegas, Leon Spinks was so tired and wasted that he could barely keep his balance for the next three minutes -- and now, after watching that fight on videotape at least twenty times, I think that even World Lightweight Champ Roberto Duran could have taken Leon out with one quick and savage combination; a hard jab in the eyes to bring his hands up in front of his face just long enough to crack him under the heart with a right uppercut -- then another left into the stomach to bring his head forward again, to that target point in the cross hairs of Ali's brittle but still murderous bazooka right hand, at twenty or twenty-one inches. . .

  No fighter except Joe Frazier had ever survived one of Muhammad's frenzied killer-combinations in a round as late as the fifteenth; and, until those las
t, incredibly brutal three minutes in Las Vegas, Leon Spinks had never gone more than ten rounds in his life. When he shuffled half-blindly out of his corner for number fifteen against The Champ, who was obviously and terminally behind on points after fourteen, Leon Spinks was "ready to go," as they say in that merciless, million-dollar-a-minute world of "the Squared Circle."

  . . . But so was Muhammad Ali: fight films shot from a catwalk directly above the ring, looking straight down from the high ceiling of the Hilton Pavilion, show both fighters reeling off balance and virtually holding on to each other at times, just to keep from falling down in that vicious final round.

  There was no more strategy at that point, and the blood-lust-howl of the small crowd of 5000 or so white-on-white pro-Spinks high rollers who had made the fight a cynical and almost reluctant sellout in a town where a shrewd promoter like Arum or Don King or even Raoul Duke could sell 5000 tickets to a World Championship Cock Fight, told Muhammad Ali all he needed to know at that point in time. The same people who'd been chanting "All-eee! All-eee!" just a few minutes ago, when it looked like The Champ had once again known exactly what he was doing, all along, as Leon looked to be fading badly in the late rounds. . . These same people were now chanting, as if led by some unseen cheerleader: but they were no longer saying "All-eee!"

  As it became more and more obvious that Muhammad was just as dead on his feet as Spinks seemed to be, the hall slowly filled with a new sound. It began late in the fourteenth, as I recall, and since I was by that time engulfed in the hell-on-earth chaos that had overtaken the fifty or so close friends and Family members in The Champ's corner where people like ex-Heavyweight Champ Jimmy Ellis and Ali's hot-tempered brother, Rachaman had been clawing at the ring ropes and screaming doomed advice at Muhammad ever since Bundini had become sick and collapsed right next to Angelo Dundee in the corner at the end of round number twelve, causing Kilroy and Patterson to start yelling into the mob for a doctor. Patterson, right in front of me, was holding Bundini with one arm and waving at Kilroy with the other. "Drew's had a heart attack," he shouted. "A heart attack."