Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

  On the eve of my departure, I drove back to N’Sele to say goodbye to Ali, who asked me to stay for a soul-food supper. The headliners who came out to clown with him are back home in their recording studios, and a sense of loneliness hangs over the villa. He wishes I could get in touch with Sidney Poitier and other movie stars who might send him some new American flicks to pass the time. He still nurses the bitter feeling that Foreman faked the cut to give himself more time to get in the kind of shape Ali was in when he arrived.

  “But I’ll wait,” he says, “I’ll keep runnin’. Keep jumpin’ over that cactus, and it gives me a good feelin’ when the kids pop up and shout, ‘Ali, Ali, buma ye!’ (Lingolan for ‘Kill ’im, Ali.’),” a phrase heard on every street corner in Kinshasa.

  After supper I said, “Take care.” He answered, “When you comin’ back?” and then I was on my way to D’Jili Airport, with a last look at the hyacinth moving through the moonlight on the river.

  One more time I made the seemingly endless trip from Kennedy Airport to Paris to Kinshasa, and out to the Presidential Villa at N’Sele.

  There was our ever-ebullient Ali, with wife-to-be, the gorgeous Veronica. And the familiar team, the white Kilroy in a sea of black faces, the outrageous Bundini Brown, the tall serious “Blood,” the tough, stammering, dependable Pat Patterson, the dark, silent, Cuban conditioner Luis Sarria—each one a colorful stone in the complex mosaic called Muhammad Ali.

  There were other white, invaluable faces in the tumultuous black sea—Angelo Dundee, as capable a trainer as ever worked a corner, and “Fight Doctor” Ferdie Pacheco, who loved Ali as fervently as anybody in camp, but beginning to have his troubles with Black Muslim detractors.

  Ali, as always, was above the internecine jostling for position near the throne. And as always, along with the fun and games at which he excelled, Ali was approaching the fight with all the attention of a football coach for the Super Bowl, of which the impending Ali-Foreman would be the fistic version.

  Ali had discovered that despite his imposing string of knockouts, Foreman had endured two ten-rounders with an aging light-heavyweight from Argentina, Gregorio Peralta.

  Night after night Ali ran the Foreman-Peralta tapes in the spacious living room of the Presidential Villa. Night after night his impromptu comments provided a spirited narration: “Now look at that! There’s that li’l ol’ man (Peralta was about thirty-five and weighed 185) layin’ back on the ropes and Big Go’ge thinks he’s killin’ ’im but all he’s doin’ is gettin’ arm weary!

  “Oh, if that li’l ol’ man c’n do that to ’im, givin’ him shoulders and elbows ’n gloves, ’n pullin’ back from punches, what d’ya think I’ll be doin’?”

  Now Ali would jump to his feet in excitement and demonstrate his strategy. “Five, six rounds, Big Go’ge is so tired, his arms is so heavy he can’t lift ’em any more and then I come on—pow! pow! pow! and Big Go’ge is down, can’t get up he’s whupped! An’ everybody’s screamin’ Ali! Ali! Ali … ! Oh, le’s get it on!”

  And so it came to pass, on the night of October 30, 1974, or more accurately at the unlikely hour of 4 a.m., in the unlikely setting of the soccer stadium in the capital of Zaire, the “Rumble in the Jungle” ended precisely as our mercurial black prince had predicted.

  Moments after the dramatic finish, a tropical downpour flooded the ring. Back at the villa an hour later, the exuberant champion and this writer fought an impromptu match by dawn’s early light. And if I didn’t have the series of photos to prove it, I wouldn’t believe it either.

  [October 1974]

  Leonard-Duran

  ON THE EVENING OF THE battle a downpour soaks but seems not to dampen the spirits of the $500 ticket holders, who look like a strange hooded fraternity wearing black garbage bags over their heads.

  The ring is an island in a furious sea of Panamanian flags. Roberto Duran and his countrymen seem to have taken over Montreal. From my local connections, I learn that the French-speaking citizenry, still scratching their way toward independence from English Canada, identify with Duran as a flag-bearer for the aspirations of a small Latin nation.

  But Duran doesn’t need the advantage of a partisan crowd. When the bell sends him out to do what he seems to have been born for, he wastes no time imposing his will on the fight. He comes charging forward like a small but angry bull, greeting Leonard with a vicious left hook just a mite low, Duran’s way of telling this upstart opponent who is boss.

  By the second round the pattern of the fight is established. Duran will keep moving forward, full of sneaky little moves, his head bobbing, his hands feinting, slamming hard lefts to the body, or pushing Leonard back until the champion is pinned against the ropes. Leonard, unintimidated, fights back with commendable vigor and courage.

  Before the second round is over, the swarthy challenger with the scraggly beard nails the clean-shaven champion a tremendous overhand right. Leonard goes back but not down. Somehow he weathers that punch and the others that follow as Duran pursues him with the kind of primitive snarl that has gone out of fashion.

  It looks as if former light-heavyweight king José Torres’s prediction is on the mark—Duran inside of three. But Ray is answering the big prefight question—can he take a punch?— with a surprising affirmative.

  Later he will admit that his head did not clear until the fifth. He is unable to use his boxing skills because Duran simply refuses to let him fight at a distance, continually crowding him and cutting off the ring. “All right, if you won’t let me fight my fight, I’ll fight yours and beat you at it,” Leonard seems to be saying back to him with his fists.

  Leonard couldn’t jab and he couldn’t move side to side like a Jersey Joe Walcott or the first Sugar Ray, but he was proving he was no fragile Golden-Gloved wonder. He could sure as hell fight—long on bravery if short on ring savvy, actually standing there or leaning there, trading shots with Duran, something none of the experts thought he was up to.

  There had been nice boxers like Esteban DeJesus and Ray Lampkin who had been able to box their way around Duran for ten rounds, but invariably the hands of stone got to them by the eleventh and twelfth. Duran thrived on combat as his opponents wilted under late pressure.

  But with Leonard, incredibly, this was not to be. His confidence grew as the fight surged on into those dangerous double-digit rounds. It was Leonard who was coming on from the eleventh, reaching down for those mysterious extras like a true champion and almost matching Duran’s big second round with a mighty thirteenth, in which he landed a classic hook that made Duran shiver and hold for the first time.

  Leonard had the range now and was landing bombs. But Duran had a stouter chin than the Wilfred Benitez whom Ray had stopped in his other title fight. It would have been an even more decisive round for Sugar Ray if the ring-wise Duran had not met the challenges with the resolve and ferocity that have been his trademark.

  To the final bell they fought without quarter—in an ironic turnabout Duran a better boxer in his own shifty alleycat way, Leonard forced out of his style but proving a better two-handed banger than any of us would have expected him to be.

  When the decision was handed up, it was close, only a point or two on official cards and most of our unofficial ones. But at the final bell, Duran had thrown his arms in the air in an instinctive signal of victory and Leonard was looking down at the canvas as if he knew he had lost. Unaccountably, Mrs. Leonard fainted dead away. Her husband had not taken the kind of savage beating the stone hands had meted out to scores of victims. But the pressure had been relentless.

  In the immediate aftermath, young Leonard, neither bloodied nor bowed, was making sounds about retiring with his millions to safer professions. But tomorrow he will be seen on the Wide World of Sports telling Howard Cosell that he is ready to pursue Duran to any ring in the world to win back his crown.

  Of course, the Mexican left-hooker, Pipino Cuevas, who holds the WBA version of this title, would make an engrossing opponent for either o
ne if he gets by tough Tommy Hearns, if only the two international commissioners would stop their bureaucratic nonsense and unify the titles again.

  But if or when Duran and Leonard meet again, with Pipino, Hearns, and still youthful Benitez in the wings, I’ll be ready to climb on another plane, no doubt reminiscing at the bar with Norman Mailer, José Torres, Blackie Lisker, and the rest of the cognoscenti about Leonard-Duran I—when two dedicated little millionaires went at each other in a $30 million spectacle that actually measured up to its hype.

  Walking into P.J. Clarke’s after the Tuesday night “fight,” I was accosted by nonadmirers who had read my pieces on previous days, praising the alley-dog determination of Roberto Duran that had brought him seventy-two victories in seventy-three bouts.

  “Hey, Budd, you owe me money!” they challenged. “Becuz of you we bet Duran.”

  Fighting Phil Rafferty and all my friends, forgive me. If I misled you, I am ready to cut the gloves off and hang ’em up for good.

  I wish I were a Rockefeller (or maybe a Duran) who could pay a token dollar to every believer who put his money where my mouth was—which is more than Duran did with his fists.

  As I went to sleep, instead of counting sheep, I found myself counting the number of fights I had seen since my old man started taking me to them two a week before I needed two digits to count my age. I finally fell asleep at two thousand. But with the exception of Sonny Liston quitting to Cassius Clay in Miami in 1964, I could not call back a single fight in which a champion had done an el foldo like Duran’s dump to Leonard in New Orleans.

  Was it fixed? I consider myself an expert in this unhappy field. The fight crowd never quite forgave me for writing The Harder They Fall in which a prototype of the mob-controlled Primo Carnera was limned. When Blinky Palmero’s Johnny Saxton “defeated” Kid Gavilan in the Johnny Friendly town of Philadelphia, there was a full-page ad in the New York Herald-Tribune signed by this writer headed: “Boxing’s Dirty Business Must Be Cleaned Up Now!”

  The scandal in New Orleans is not going to be cleaned up by the earnest pleas and honest writers who love the sport but loathe the boxing business. Fights can be dumped in a dozen ways. Sometimes everybody but the fighter knows. Sometimes only the fighter knows.

  Roberto Duran—the game chicken—dumped Tuesday night. Having consulted with Dr. Ferdie Pacheco and other experts in sports medicine, I am absolutely convinced that Duran was telling the truth when he cried, No mas, no mas! He was suffering from a shoulder twinge, stomach cramps, and a severe case of salsaitis. If you don’t know what that means, I suggest you find ex-campeon Roberto Duran on a private beach and ask him. Guaranteed he will punch back harder than he did against Ray Leonard Tuesday night.

  Champions have obligations to paying customers and loyal bettors. Cramp or no cramp, ex-macho Roberto, give ’em back their pesos. And in the meantime, if there is a shred of honor left in the boxing commissions, hold up and give to the poor the $7 million this pollo flucked away.

  [July and November 1980]

  Ali-Holmes

  Prefight

  WRITERS—FICTION WRITERS, dramatists, poets—have been attending and describing epic fights all the way back to Homer with his classic blow-by-blow account of Epeus vs. Euryalus. En route to Las Vegas for Muhammad Ali’s outrageous $8 million crack at usurper Larry Holmes’s heavyweight championship, I count myself a member of a hardy club that includes such nineteenth-century literati as Conan Doyle, William Hazlitt, and George Bernard Shaw, and in our own century of violence, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren, Norman Mailer, and Joyce Carol Oates.

  What draws writers to fighters? I remember Rocky Marciano asking that question in the kitchen of the old farmhouse he was using for training quarters at Grossinger’s when he was preparing his farewell appearance against Archie Moore. Like writers, fighters perform in public, and when they come out of their corners they are naked and alone. In those corners are managers, trainers, and cutmen to give advice or lend first-aid for the cuts and lumps that fighters consider fair exchange for money and glory. In lieu of the Angelo Dundees and Freddy Browns, writers have agents, editors, and publishers. The critics who score writers’ fights may cause them to cry “I was robbed” with all the outrage of a Marvin Hagler after his Vito Antuofermo fight.

  But there is another reason for the fascination that drew Hazlitt to the Gas Man, Shaw to Tunney, and Mailer and this writer to Muhammad Ali, who dominated the fight world of the sixties and seventies as had Joe Louis in the thirties and forties. Not only is the fighter in there under the lights, naked and alone when he fights for the championship of the world, but his quest is also more dramatic than the Yankees’ or the Steelers’ because it is a now-or-never, one-time thing. If the Yankees blow the pennant, they’ll be back next year. If the Steelers falter, they can always regroup.

  What gives the Fight for the Championship its epic quality is the awesome finality of the outcome. Sonny Liston goes down before young Cassius Clay and he’s really down and out. It’s all over. A one-day legend after Miami and Lewiston, he’s back in Vegas—not much better than he was on the bum in St. Louis—looking for favors from the wiseguys. Foreman blows the big one to Ali in Africa, and then what should have been an easy one to Jimmy Young, and he’s out of fighting and on the Jesus circuit. Fighting for the prize focuses down on one night, one round, a fatal second when the mind loses touch with the punches it controls or means to avoid.

  Contrary to popular conception, boxing is a mental sport. While quarterbacks, pitchers, and infielders making the double play have to see a game in their heads before they can execute it on the field, the fighter—we’re talking about champions, not the Ron Standers of this world—must be chess players who make their moves according to strategic plans of action. Try to think of a prizefight as a chess game and you are a little closer to it than if you try to compare it to a bloody brawl in an alley.

  Ex-middleweight Roger Donoghue, who taught Marlon Brando the fighter’s moves in On the Waterfront, has explained how a boxer offers “pieces of himself,” sometimes exposing his chin and letting an opponent land glancing blows that build false confidence. What you’re really doing is drawing your opponent into a trap. When he strikes again you are ready for the counterpunch. His mistake is your opportunity. As in tennis, it is a game of forced errors. But as exciting as McEnroe and Borg can be, no matter what the outcome at Wimbledon and Forest Hills, you know they’ll be back on the tube again and again.

  Just as chess is simulated war, the Fight for the Championship is more like war itself in its impact on winners and losers and its irrevocability. When Leon Spinks upset a mentally unprepared Ali three years ago, Spinks could afford to smoke thousand-dollar bills and drive $20,000 cars against the traffic up one-way streets. Now a fickle public seems unaware that he’ll also be climbing into the ring at Vegas Thursday night, just another fighter on the card against another would-be, Bernard Mercado.

  The drama of the fight game lies not so much in success stories as in failure stories. Think of “interim champ” Jimmy Ellis, who won the tournament to find a successor to Ali when the title was heisted because Ali said no to the Vietnam War. Today Jimmy works as a one-eyed sparring partner for the aging/ageless Ali.

  Or remember Buster Mathis, that giant butterball with remarkable agility, who looked like a coming champion of the world until he crossed the tracks in front of oncoming trains—the Frazier Freight and the Ali Express. Today fat Buster is just another strong boy in overalls loading trucks in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I remember the night he ran out of gas in the twelfth round against Ali in the Houston Astrodome. Following fighters all my life, I had always found it more revealing to go first to the loser’s dressing room. I found Mathis sitting on a bench in a gloomy vestibule, all 260 pounds of him sobbing, “It’s all over … it’s all over …”

  In the winner’s dressing room, amid the jubilation of Ali’s entourage, Ali the Compassionate was saying, “I wanted them to stop it
. I didn’t want to hit him anymore. I didn’t want to hurt him.”

  That was almost ten years ago, in what might be called Ali’s middle age, after he had lost the first fight of his life (Joe Frazier I), and was cranking himself up to winning his title back again.

  The Fight (The King Is Dead)

  Here in Las Vegas, this glittering, easy-come, easy-go capital of the Western world, where the losers outnumber the winners a thousand-to-one, Muhammad Ali joined the silent majority at last.

  True, your average loser doesn’t walk away with eight million spondulicks (which he will share with his partners Herbert Muhammad, the Internal Revenue Service, and an entourage that will be out Monday looking for new ways to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed through the providential Mr. Ali). But losing is losing and, even with his record jackpot, the most theatrical and controversial of all heavyweight champions has bowed out uncharacteristically—not with a bang but a whisper.

  After last night’s pathetic performance—no jab, no legs, more dope than rope—the song is ended, but no member of Ali’s believers would like to think that the memory of the Holmes fiasco will linger on. The ghetto children, who took heart from the float-and-sting of their black butterfly, and their white counterparts would like to remember the razzle and the dazzle that befuddled Liston and the heart and mind that conquered Frazier and Foreman. Not a single note of that honey melody was to be heard in Ali’s round-after-round catching as a sharp, serious, credible new champion, Larry Holmes, pitched his shutout against the battered ghost.

  There are two kinds of champions, commission-appointed and popularly acclaimed. Last night, even for the last of the diehards, Larry Holmes became the heavyweight champion of the world. Now this writer knows how Jack London felt when he picked Jim Jeffries over Jack Johnson and how the sentimentalists wept when they hung with Joe Louis against Rocky Marciano. This corner had voted against the logic and with the myth. But the moment comes when reality prevails against dreams, romance, and dancing old-fashioned two-steps with the past. It is as painful as it is healthy to admit, “The king is dead …”