The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time

  Ali's corner was a deafening mix of fear, madness and emotional dysfunction at that point, a sea of noise and violence. . .

  Total chaos; and then came the eerie roaring chant from the crowd: ". . . LEE-ONN! LEE-ONN!. . ." The chant grew louder and somehow malignant as the fifteenth round staggered on to its obvious end. . . "LEE-ONN! LEE-ONN! LEE-ONN!"

  Muhammad Ali had never heard that chant before -- and neither had Leon Spinks. . .

  Or me, either.

  Or Angelo, or Bundini, or Kilroy, or Conrad, or Pat Patterson -- or Kris Kristofferson either; who was hanging on to Rita Coolidge just a few feet away from me and looking very stricken while the last few seconds ticked off until the bell finally rang and made every one of us in that corner feel, suddenly, very old.

  Billy the Geek Calls New Orleans: Even Odds & Rancid Karma

  The Ali-Spinks rematch on September 15th will not be dull. The early rumor line has Ali a two to one favorite, but these numbers will not hold up-- or, if they do, Spinks as a two to one underdog will be a very tempting bet, even for me: and anything higher than that will be almost irresistible.

  When I arrived in Las Vegas two weeks before the last fight I told Bob Arum that I figured Leon had a twenty percent chance of winning. That translates into four to one odds, which even the nickel-and-dime "experts" said was a bad joke. The fight was considered such a gross mismatch that every bookie in Vegas except one had it "Off the Board," meaning no bets at all, because Ali was such a prohibitive favorite even ten to one was deemed a sure way to lose money. As late as the thirteenth round, in fact, freelance bookies at ringside were still laying eight to one on Muhammad. My friend Semmes Luckett, sitting in one of the $200 seats with a gaggle of high rollers, watched the round-by-round destruction of one poor bastard who lost at least $402,000 in forty-five minutes -- betting on Ali first at ten to one, then down to eight to one after the first six or seven rounds -- then four to one after eleven, and finally all the way down to two to one at the end of thirteen.

  The man was in a blathering rage by the time the fight was over. "I was betting on a goddamn legend," he shouted. "I must have been out of my mind."

  I have watched the videotape of that fight enough times to risk wondering out loud, at this point, on the subject of what may or may not have been wrong with Ali's right hand in that fight. It was totally ineffective. The jab was still there, even with five or six pounds of flab to slow it down. . . and the right was getting through Leon's guard with a consistency that would have ended the fight in ten or eleven rounds if Muhammad had been able to land it with any power at all. Spinks must have taken twenty-five or thirty right-hand shots from Ali, and I doubt if he felt more than one or two of them.

  That was the real key to the fight, and if Ali's right hand is as useless in New Orleans as it was in Las Vegas, Spinks will win by a TKO in eight or nine rounds. Both fighters understand, at this point, that Ali has already tried what he and his handlers felt was the best strategy for dealing with Leon: that was the time-tested rope-a-dope, which assumed that a frenzied, undisciplined fighter like Spinks would punch himself out in the early rounds, like George Foreman, and become a tired sitting duck for Ali by the time the bell rang for number ten.

  That was a very bad mistake, because Leon did not punch himself out -- and there is no reason to think he will in the rematch. Which means that Ali will have to fight a very different fight this time: he will have to risk punching himself out in the first five or six rounds in what Arum is calling "The Battle of New Orleans," and the odds on his getting away with it are no better than fifty-fifty. And he will have to be in miraculously top shape, even then -- because if he can't come zooming out of his corner at the opening bell and whack Leon off balance real quick, Muhammad will not last ten rounds.

  If I were a bookie I would make Leon a sixty-forty favorite, which is exactly the same way Bob Arum was seeing it, even before the fight finally found a home in New Orleans.

  There are some people in "the Fight Game" who will tell you that Arum doesn't know boxing from badminton -- but not one of them went on the record last time with anything riskier than the idea that Leon "might have a chance."

  Bob Arum called it sixty-forty Ali at least six weeks prior to the fight -- which stunned me at first, because I thought my own twenty percent figure was borderline madness, at best.

  But Arum stuck with his forty percent bet on Leon, all the way up to the fight. . . and after watching Leon for two weeks in Vegas my own figure went up to thirty or thirty-five percent; or perhaps even forty or forty-five percent on the day of the fight when I heard Arum screaming at Spinks on the house phone at 2:30 in the afternoon, telling him to stop worrying about getting tickets for his friends and get ready to do battle against a man that a lot of people including me still call the best fighter who ever climbed into a ring. . . and if I had known, before the fight, that Leon forced his handlers to get him a steak for lunch at 5:00, I would probably have called the fight even.

  That's how The Battle of New Orleans looks to me now: Dead Even -- and if the numbers turn up that way on September 15th, I will bet on Muhammad Ali, for reasons of my own. I hate to lose any bet, but losing on this one would not hurt that much. The last twenty years of my life would have been just a little bit cheaper and duller if Muhammad Ali had not been around to keep me cranked up, and there is no way I could bet against him this time, in what could well be his last fight. I figure I can afford to bet on him and lose; that is an acceptable risk. . . But something very deep inside me curdles at the thought of what kind of rancid karma I could bring down on myself if I bet against him, and he won.

  That is not an acceptable risk.

  The Roving Tripod, the Experts at the Hilton Bar. . . A Final Adventure in Fish-Wrap Journalism

  Muhammad Ali has interested a lot of different people for a lot of very different reasons since he became a media superstar and a high-energy national presence almost two decades ago. . . And he has interested me, too, for reasons that ranged from a sort of amused camaraderie in the beginning, to wary admiration, then sympathy & a new level of personal respect, followed by a dip into a different kind of wariness that was more exasperation than admiration. . . and finally into a mix of all these things that never really surfaced and came together until I heard that he'd signed to fight Leon Spinks as a "warmup" for his $16 million swan song against Ken Norton.

  This was the point where my interest in Muhammad Ali moved almost subconsciously to a new and higher gear. I had seen all of Leon's fights in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, and I recall being impressed to the point of awe at the way he attacked and destroyed whatever they put in front of him. I had never seen a young fighter who could get away with planting both feet and leaning forward when he hooked with either hand.

  Archie Moore was probably the last big fighter with that rare combination of power, reflexes and high tactical instinct that a boxer must have to get away with risking moments of total commitment even occasionally. . . But Leon did it constantly, and in most of his fights that was all he did.

  It was a pure kamikaze style: The Roving Tripod, as it were -- with Leon's legs forming two poles of the tripod, and the body of his opponent forming the third. Which is interesting for at least two reasons: 1) There is no tripod until a punch off that stance connects with the opponent's head or body, so the effect of a miss can range from fatal to unnerving, or at the very least it will cause raised eyebrows and even a faint smile or two among the ringside judges who are scoring the fight. . . and, 2) If the punch connects solidly, then the tripod is formed and an almost preternatural blast of energy is delivered at the point of impact, especially if the hapless target is leaning as far back on the ropes as he can get with his head ducked in and forward in a coverup stance -- like Ali's rope-a-dope.

  A boxer who plants both feet and then leans forward to lash out with a hook has his whole weight and also his whole balance behind it; he cannot pull back at that point, and if
he fails to connect he will not only lose points for dumb awkwardness, but he'll plunge his head out front, low and wide open for one of those close-in jackhammer combinations that usually end with a knockdown.

  That was Leon's style in the Olympics, and it was a terrifying thing to see. All he had to do was catch his opponent with no place to run, then land one or two of those brain-rattling tripod shots in the first round -- and once you get stunned and intimidated like that in the first round of a three-round (Olympic) bout, there is not enough time to recover. . .

  . . . or even want to, for that matter, once you begin to think that this brute they pushed you into the ring with has no reverse gear and would just as soon attack a telephone pole as a human being.

  Not many fighters can handle that style of all-out assault without having to back off and devise a new game plan. But there is no time for devising new plans in a three-round fight -- and perhaps not in ten, twelve or fifteen rounds either, because Leon doesn't give you much time to think. He keeps coming, swarming, pounding; and he can land three or four shots from both directions once he gets braced and leans out to meet that third leg of the tripod.

  On the other hand, those poor geeks that Leon beat silly in the Olympics were amateurs. . . and we are all a bit poorer for the fact that he was a light-heavyweight when he won that Gold Medal; because if he'd been a few pounds heavier he would have had to go against the elegant Cuban heavyweight champion, Teofilo Stevenson, who would have beaten him like a gong for all three rounds.

  But Stevenson, the Olympic heavyweight champ in both 1972 and '76, and the only modern heavyweight with the physical and mental equipment to compete with Muhammad Ali, has insisted for reasons of his own and Fidel Castro's on remaining the "amateur heavyweight champion of the world," instead of taking that one final leap for the great ring that a fight against Muhammad Ali could have been for him.

  Whatever reasons might have led Castro to decide that an Ali-Stevenson match -- sometime in 1973 or '74 after Muhammad had won the hearts and minds of the whole world with his win over George Foreman in Zaire -- was not in the interest of either Cuba, Castro or perhaps even Stevenson himself, will always be clouded in the dark fog of politics and the conviction of people like me that the same low-rent political priorities that heaped a legacy of failure and shame on every other main issue of this generation was also the real reason why the two great heavyweight artists of our time were never allowed in the ring with each other.

  This is one of those private opinions of my own that even my friends in the "boxing industry" still dismiss as the flaky gibberish of a half-smart writer who was doing okay with things like drugs, violence and presidential politics, but who couldn't quite cut the mustard in their world.

  Boxing.

  These were the same people who chuckled indulgently when I said, in Las Vegas, that I'd take every bet I could get on Leon Spinks against Muhammad Ali at ten to one, and with anybody who was seriously into numbers I was ready to haggle all the way down to five to one, or maybe even four. . . but even at eight to one it was somewhere between hard and impossible to get a bet down on Spinks with anybody in Vegas who was even a fifty-fifty bet to pay off in real money.

  One of the few consistent traits shared by "experts" in any field is that they will almost never bet money or anything else that might turn up in public on whatever they call their convictions. That is why they are "experts." They have waltzed through that mine field of high-risk commitments that separates politicians from gamblers, and once you've reached that plateau where you can pass for an expert, the best way to stay there is to hedge all your bets, private and public, so artistically that nothing short of a thing so bizarre that it can pass for an "act of God" can damage your high-priced reputation. . .

  I remember vividly, for instance, my frustration at Norman Mailer's refusal to bet money on his almost certain conviction that George Foreman was too powerful for Muhammad Ali to cope with in Zaire. . . And I also recall being slapped on the chest by an Associated Press boxing writer in Las Vegas while we were talking about the fight one afternoon at the casino bar in the Hilton. "Leon Spinks is a dumb midget," he snarled in the teeth of all the other experts who'd gathered on that afternoon to get each other's fix on the fight. "He has about as much chance of winning the heavyweight championship as this guy."

  "This guy" was me, and the AP writer emphasized his total conviction by giving me a swift backhand to the sternum. . .

  I have talked to him since, on this subject, and when I said I planned to quote him absolutely verbatim with regard to his prefight wisdom in Vegas, he seemed like a different man and said that if I was going to quote him on his outburst of public stupidity that I should at least be fair enough to explain that he had "been with Muhammad Ali for so long and through so many wild scenes that he simply couldn't go against him on this one."

  Well. . . this is my final adventure in fish-wrap journalism and I frankly don't give a fuck whether or not it makes sense to the readers. . . especially since you chintzy greedheads tried to put a double-page, full-color H----* ad right in the middle of this story. . .

  * The name of this manufacturer was deleted at the last minute by the publisher after angry & greedy consultations with the RS advertising department.

  Somewhere in my files I have a letter from Honda's U.S. ad agency that says they would just as soon avoid any image identification with Rolling Stone. . . and those lame/tin bastards have heaped enough abuse on me over the years to make me wonder what kind of mentality we're dealing with if they've come so far around the bend that they now want to put a gigantic Honda ad right in the middle of my article.

  Fuck those people. I wouldn't ride a Honda to Richard Nixon's funeral. . . and in fact the last person I knew who owned a Honda was Ron Ziegler; that was down in San Clemente, just before The Resignation, and I recall that Ron was eager to lend the thing to me, for reasons I never quite understood. . . but I remember a cocktail party down at Nixon's house, crazed on mescaline and bending the casual elbow with Ron, Henry Kissinger, General Haig and others of that stripe, who were all very friendly at that point in time. Even to me. . . Annie Leibovitz was there and I was negotiating with Ziegler about trading me his Honda for my Z-Datsun for a few days, while Ziegler's deputy, Gerald Warren, was laughing with Annie about how Kissinger thought I was "an Air Force Colonel in mufti. . ."

  "Tell him he's right," I whispered to Annie. "Then let's trade for Ziegler's bike and run it straight off the Laguna Beach pier tomorrow morning. I'll take the bugger out over the water at top speed while you get a few good shots, then I'll get off in midair before it hits. . . Right, and we'll give Ron an autographed photo from 'The Colonel.' "

  Whoops. . . here we go again, drifting back to the good old days, when men were men and fun was fun and a well-mannered Air Force Doctor could still have cocktails with the President without causing a scandal.

  That was "before the circus left town," as Dick Goodwin put it so starkly as we sat in a Washington peg-house on the day of Nixon's resignation. . . And, indeed, everything since then has been downhill. Hamilton Jordan is too fat to ride a motorcycle and Jody Powell is too slow.

  Jesus! How low have we sunk! Was Ron Ziegler the last free spirit in the White House? Jimmy's sister, Gloria, rides a big Honda -- but they won't let her north of Chattanooga and the rest of the family is laying low, working feverishly on a formula to convert peanuts into Swiss francs.

  Ah. . . mother of raving God! What are we into? How did we get down in this hole! And how can we get out?

  Or -- more on the point -- how can this cross-eyed story be salvaged, now that I've spent a whole night babbling about Ron Ziegler and Hondas and that crowd of flabby clubfoots in the White House?

  What about the rest of the story? What about serious journalism? And decency. . . And truth? and Beauty. . . the Eternal Verities. . . and Law Day in Georgia? Yes, that's almost on us again, and this time they want me to deliver the main address. Why
not?

  For $100,000 I'll do anything, just as long as the cash comes up front. . . What? Ye Gods! What have I said? Should we cut that last outburst? Or maybe just print the bugger and get braced for a Spinks-like assault from the Secret Service?

  No, this shit can't go on. . . it could get me in serious trouble. . . And what a tragedy it would be if I got locked up now, after ten years of abusing the White House for what were always good reasons. Ziegler said it was because I was crazy and Kissinger thought I was some kind of rogue Air Force Colonel: but my old friend Pat Buchanan called it "a character defect". . . which may or may not have been true; but if calling Richard Nixon a liar and a thief was evidence of a "character defect," what in the hell kind of defect, disease or even brain damage would cause a man to spend ten years of his life writing angry, self-righteous speeches for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew?

  "No Vietcong Ever Called Me 'Nigger.' "

  Muhammad Ali said that, back in 1967, and he almost went to prison for it -- which says all that needs to be said right now about justice & gibberish in the White House.

  Some people write their novels and others roll high enough to live them and some fools try to do both -- but Ali can barely read, much less write, so he came to that fork in the road a long time ago and he had the rare instinct to find that one seam in the defense that let him opt for a third choice: he would get rid of words altogether and live his own movie.