The Second Coming of Muhammad Ali
Muhammad’s not been nailed that often.
It’s not something he’s used to. He’s gone 17 years in the ring without a scratch — not a lump, not a bump, no stitched tissue on his eyebrows, no crumpled cartilage in his nose, no errupted ganglia pushing through like gherkins under the skin. That delicate scar en his right eyelid’s from when as a kid in Louisville he ran his bicycle into a wall. Even his nipples are more like moles, no bigger than a penny. He’s still like brand new.
“Seventeen years! Unscratched! Seventeen years! This thing don’t worry me like it do you.”
His 39th pro fight and he’d never been beaten. Yet here he was, hurt and hanging on to this clumsy hog from Argentina who was trying to chop him down. About two minutes into the ninth round, that’s when Ringo was supposed to splinter and crumble like a hollow log, according to Muhammad’s prediction — and remember, he’s called the round right lots of times in the past, enough times that any fighter with his eyes open should be just a little bit more apprehensive coming into the voodoo round, watching for the bolt from the blue, challenging not just the most sensational heavyweight champ the world has ever seen but the decreed ambush of destiny.
And in case he had forgotten, surely Ringo could hear Howard Cosell agitating at ringside, reminding us all that this is the one — watch out — this is it, round nine, Bonavena’s Waterloo. But Ringo blundered cheerfully headlong into destruction — he was asking for it — paying no mind at all to Muhammad’s jive.
Then about two minutes into the round, the fates blinked, and he clobbered Muhammad with a cruel rib-cracker left. And, gasp, the champ sagged, his knees buckled. Ringo nearly had him! Already, in the fourth or fifth, Bonavena had bulled inside and belted him hard enough to slow his pace, and now. . .it can’t all end here.
Howard Cosell kept peaking. Where’s that lightning speed? Where’s that mystifying footwork? A unique kind of Japanese he speaks, with equal threatening stress on every resonant syllable. A lot of sportcasters talk like that, especially racecallers and ringsiders cool and constipated in the crossfire of living history. Walter Winchell started it, perhaps, but these days Cosell does it best — he’s the Caruso of sportstalk — and that night you could hear his sinuses vibrating. And he was right. Muhammad looked like a loafer.
Up against Jerry Quarry in Atlanta a few weeks earlier, his first fight in three and a half years, he had it pretty easy. Quarry’s a burly brute and he’s knocked out some powerful pugs. But he’s a lunkhead, and Joe Frazier cut him up so savagely it looked like the sucker’d been worked over with brass knuckles and a switchblade. Muhammad went for his eyes. Quick jabs opened up those old wounds, and within three rounds Quarry couldn’t see too well. Even if he could’ve his defense was shredded. So Muhammad hit him often, until he didn’t exactly drop but was slowed down to a blundering stumble, and they stopped it. Even so, it took too long, he escaped too often. Muhammad’s timing faltered. A lot of his punches were just pokes. He was rusty and underdone and never really hit his natural fascinatin’ rhythm.
And now, here was Ringo, that comelately upstart, soundly chastised if not almost thoroughly whupped, and the whole thing was starting up again.
The whole Muhammad Ali karmic boogaloo. The insolent goldenboy from Louisville, too beautiful to be beaten. Cassius Clay, didn’t that name have a righteous winner’s ring to it? Cassius Marcellus Clay, who put the hex on the heavies the way Joe Namath did it to the Baltimore Colts. Like when he was training for the Floyd Patterson fight, he christened Floyd “Rabbit” and went visiting with a few heads of lettuce and a bunch of carrots; and Floyd, poor bunny, had to fight for his dignity as well as his record and lost all around.
And when he fought the baddest man the pug-game ever produced — bad Sonny Liston — for the championship in Miami in 1964, Cassius appeared in a denim jacket with “Bear Huntin'” stitched on the back and kept on about how ugly Sonny was, just an ugly old bear, you so ugly you have to sneak up on the mirror so’s it won’t run off the wall, taunting and mocking, straining Liston’s lethal primeval cool which never cracked. But, sure enough, on the night, after six rounds, Sonny crumpled like a stricken grizzly.
The Louisville Lip, they called Cassius then; he was so brash and cocky and downright loudmouth arrogant and unsporting, downright uppity, and his poetry was such glorious street lingo sweettalk japery. Everywhere he went was an event, and he was always somewhere — strutting down Broadway stirring things up and swatting moths for the crowds, gatecrashing other fighter’s pressrooms.
Or tooling up to challenger George Chuvalo’s training camp in a shocking red Greyhound with Heavyweight Champion of the World painted four amazing feet high on both sides, loaded with champ-scuffs along for the ride, his cornermen and aides and valets and cooks and photographers. (And one of them was Bundini Brown, a particular companion who made up his mantra for him. They’d sit there and stare and glare at each other, their faces perhaps two inches apart, and bellow, “Float like a butterfly! Sting like a bee!” followed by three bloodcurdling, whooping war-cries. Cassius would sit back after that, aglow like neon, his blood humming. It was like shooting up, bellowing the mantra like that.) Even old uncle Stepin Fetchitt was on the bus for a while, bugging his eyes and shuffling his dogs just for shucks. And on that trip to Chuvalo’s, didn’t the Champ run the bus right off the road somewhere up in the Catskills? Wasn’t it in all the papers? Everywhere he went was an event, an appearance. People in the street flocked to him to feed the flame and catch his act. “The only difference between me and the Pied Piper,” he said, “is he didn’t have no Cadillac.”
Made you think of Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion and the most flamboyant Southern nigger white America had ever seen back around the turn. And there’d been plenty since then — great infidels like Joe Louis and highgloss Sugar Ray and debonair Archie Moore. But the Lip was different. Here, after all, was The Greatest.
Consider his record: He fought 138 bouts as an amateur, starting when he was 12, won 130 and lost eight. In 1960, he won a Gold Medal in the 175-pound division at the Rome Olympics, which was the last anybody ever heard of the loser, Poland’s Ziggy Pietrzykowski.
It took him just four years to thrash all the ranking pros. Those he didn’t KO cold he magicked out — bewildered them with his fleet and graceful defensive choreography, forever quickstepping to his left, his left hand dangling low, inviting the other sucker to try, just try and mess his pretty puss, seductive and tempting, flirting with the sucker, daring him to get aggravated enough and foolhardy enough to wade in and try and nail him. And then, so fast the sucker never saw it coming, Cassius would unleash a combination of jabs and hooks and stingers that’d stop him in his tracks; and it was no use swinging a goodnight sledgehammer because already he’d be gone again, circling, backpeddling, devildancing, shifting his mass from foot to foot.
“I’m somethin’ new. I’m a pretty fighter. There ain’t never been a fighter as pretty as me. There ain’t never been a fighter that had my speed, and my grace.”
The fastest heavyweight ever, only twice knocked down (by English battler Henry Cooper and the late Sonny Banks, both times caught by sheer providence — lucky left hooks), never beaten, defying anybody to beat him because he was The Greatest. He said it so often it became an unproven fact in the national imagination. Then he proved it against Sonny Liston.
They called Sonny evil because he was a gangster and an ex-con and an alley-cat, and he kept unsavory company. And he mangled Floyd Patterson in Chicago in one minute flat. Sonny was, as Joe Flaherty put it, “a blatant mother in a fucker’s game.” And he was doomed, although few would’ve guessed then they’d find him face down in the garage this Christmas ten days dead of an overdose. Back then, Sonny was just the biggest and most barbaric ox ever to escape the slaughteryards, more than a match, we thought, for a loudmouth like Cassius. Well, after six rounds, Cassius had whupped Sonny so mercilessly he couldn’t get up off his chair. “A shokin’ and a dreadful night,” Cassius called it in case anybody had missed the terrible majesty of his performance.
The Second Coming of Muhammad Ali, Page 1 of 5