Muhammad Ali brought a tangible thunder with him
In sports journalist James Lawton narrates his experiences of covering the golden age of boxing and establishes why we will never again witness the sport in its true glory.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Pages: 296 Price: Rs 440
When Muhammad Ali came into the ring everyone agreed there was more than the usual thunder in the air. It was apprehension, so tangible you could almost touch it. I felt it first on the Eighth Avenue sidewalk when I stepped out of the yellow cab. I could see it on the faces and hear it on the lips of the throng pressing into Madison Square Garden.
It warned me that maybe I had come to see not my first Ali fight but his last rite of survival.
Either way, I had one certainty as I took my seat at ringside. I had never known before, and might never again, such a heightened sense of being present at a moment so filled with impending drama.
Ali had once defined the fascination of a big fight in the simplest terms. He said that for a little while the world was obsessed with the question, “Who’s gonna win? Who’s gonna win?” and then it would move on. In one way, it was like the pursuit of a beautiful girl: a driving imperative one moment, a passing whim the next. Here though, as Ali faced the menacing power of Earnie Shavers of Ohio, the implications ran deeper and, potentially, with permanence.
At 35, Ali had in front of him nothing less than a visceral examination of his will to go on, to take blows that might prove as destructive—sooner or later—as any he had received down the years, and announce yet again not only his ability to withstand them but to add still more luster to his name. Two years earlier he had fought Joe Frazier to a standstill in Manila in a third fight so elemental, so invasive of both men’s body and psyche, that some extremely seasoned observers could hardly bear to watch.
The Thrilla in Manila was stopped only when, at the end of the 14th round, the superb veteran trainer Eddie Futch concluded that another round might irreparably damage, if not kill, his man Frazier. Frazier was near blind, with one eye closed and the other the merest bloodied slit, when Futch reached a decision that would always be resented by the fighter and much of his family.
Twenty years later, Futch, then in his eighties and recently the winner of a unanimous decision over an abusive racist in a Las Vegas car park, would tell me how a young woman came to him in a shopping mall, embraced him and thanked him for what he did in Manila. “I have wanted to say this for a long time,” she said. “Thank you for the courage you showed, thank you for saving my father’s life. My father may still resent you for what you did, and some of my family may hate you. But What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America’s foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. TaNehisi Coates provides a foreword to Toni Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date. The Origin of Others is a compelling read. down the years I’ve come to realise you were right.”
Futch was touched by this sentiment of one of Frazier’s daughters but no man who ever influenced a significant fist fight was in less need of reinforcement. When he died in 2001, at the age of 90, he was widely celebrated as one of the most astute educators and tacticians boxing had ever known.
He moved with his family from Mississippi to Detroit as a five-year-old as part of the vast migration of the former slave population swapping the toils of sharecropping and cotton picking for the industrial mills of the north. His family lived in the Black Bottom section of Detroit and his early life in a fight gym included sparring with Joe Louis.
Futch was an able lightweight fighter but a heart problem thwarted his hopes of a professional career. He went to Los Angeles, en route, he thought, to work on the Alaska pipeline, but he lingered there after be- ing drawn into the local fight milieu. In his time he tutored a small army of world champions. Astonishingly, he trained four of the five men to beat Ali—Ken Norton, Frazier, Larry Holmes and Trevor
But then Ali’s genius was to find a way to win, and he did that in Manila, as he had in Africa against Foreman. I never had any doubts about my decision to stop the fight in Manila—Joe needed saving from himself.
Berbick, though Berbick’s triumph was less a victory than an act of plunder amid the ruins of the great man’s career.
When Futch was asked to take over the training of Riddick Bowe, the world heavyweight champion of great talent but questionable commitment, he issued demands on the fighter that had to be met unequivocally if he was to proceed. They included the need for serious road work, starting the following morning. He took the assignment, but only after rising before dawn and stealthily parking his car in woods beside a mountain road outside Reno, Nevada.
When he saw Bowe pounding up the hill, Futch, as trim and as vital in his eighties as he had been in his Detroit youth, decided Bowe might be worth the trouble. One consequence was that Bowe delivered the first defeat of Evander Holyfield in a superb battle for the undisputed heavyweight crown.
In a Las Vegas coffee shop Futch told me, “I always believed there was a way to beat Ali, and I gave Shavers a good shot that night at the Garden, but that had nothing to do with any thought that Ali wasn’t a great fighter, maybe the greatest of them all. My doubts about him were not to do with his fighting ability, his skill or his imagination or, least of all, his courage.
No, the vulnerability I saw was in part of his nature, his urge to show off, to express himself in a new way. He loved to intrigue the world. That, and Joe Frazier’s strength and determination and great hooking brought that first win at Madison Square Garden in what they called the fight of the century.
“But then Ali’s genius was to find a way to win, and he did that in Manila, as he had in Africa against Foreman. I never had any doubts about my decision to stop the fight in Manila—Joe needed saving from himself. I had a duty to him and his family, even if he didn’t see it, quite literally. Ali was hitting him freely in the 14th round, landing head shots which Joe just couldn’t pick up.” Excerpted with permission from A Ringside Affair, by James Lawton, published by Bloomsbury Publishing