Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest. Thomas Hauser

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СКАЧАТЬ like to say, “I retired undefeated.” I can’t say that no more. But if I could say, “I got beat, but I came back and beat him,” I’d feel better.’

      Following his loss to Frazier, Ali won ten fights in a row; eight of them against world-class opponents. Then, in March 1973, he stumbled when a little-known fighter named Ken Norton broke his jaw in the second round en route to a 12-round upset decision.

      ‘I knew something was strange,’ Ali said after the bout, ‘because, if a bone is broken, the whole internalness in your body, everything, is nauseating. I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel my teeth moving around, and I had to hold my teeth extra tight to keep the bottom from moving. My trainers wanted me to stop. But I was thinking about those nineteen thousand people in the arena and Wide World of Sports, millions of people at home watching in 62 countries. So what I had to do was put up a good fight; go the distance and not get hit on the jaw again.’

      Now Ali had a new target; a priority ahead of even Joe Frazier. ‘After Ali got his jaw broke, he wanted Norton bad,’ recalls Lloyd Wells, a long-time Ali confidant. ‘Herbert Muhammad [Ali’s manager] was trying to put him in another fight, and Ali kept saying, “No, get me Norton. I want Norton.” Herbert was saying, but we got a big purse; we got this, and we got that. And Ali was saying, “No, just get me Norton. I don’t want nobody but Norton.”’

      Ali got Norton – and beat him. Then, after an interim bout against Rudi Lubbers, he got Joe Frazier again – and beat him too. From a technical point of view, the second Ali–Frazier bout was probably Ali’s best performance after his exile from boxing. He did what he wanted to do, showing flashes of what he’d once been as a fighter but never would be again. Then Ali journeyed to Zaïre to challenge George Foreman, who had dethroned Frazier to become heavyweight champion of the world.

      ‘Foreman can punch but he can’t fight,’ Ali said of his next foe. But most observers thought that Foreman could do both. As was the case when Ali fought Sonny Liston, he entered the ring a heavy underdog. Still, studying his opponent’s armour, Ali thought he detected a flaw. Foreman’s punching power was awesome, but his stamina and will were suspect. Thus, the ‘rope-a-dope’ was born.

      ‘The strategy on Ali’s part was to cover up, because George was like a tornado,’ former boxing great Archie Moore, who was one of Foreman’s cornermen that night, recalls. ‘And when you see a tornado coming, you run into the house and you cover up. You go into the basement and get out of the way of that strong wind, because you know that otherwise it’s going to blow you away. That’s what Ali did. He covered up and the storm was raging. But after a while, the storm blew itself out.’

      Or phrased differently, ‘Yeah, Ali let Foreman punch himself out,’ says Jerry Izenberg. ‘But the rope-a-dope wouldn’t have worked against Foreman for anyone in the world except Ali, because on top of everything else, Ali was tougher than everyone else. No one in the world except Ali could have taken George Foreman’s punches.’

      Ali stopped Foreman in the eighth round to regain the heavyweight championship. Then, over the next thirty months at the peak of his popularity as champion, he fought nine times. Those bouts showed Ali to be a courageous fighter, but a fighter on the decline.

      Like most ageing combatants, Ali did his best to put a positive spin on things. But viewed in realistic terms, ‘I’m more experienced’ translated into ‘I’m getting older.’ ‘I’m stronger at this weight’ meant ‘I should lose a few pounds.’ ‘I’m more patient now’ was a cover for ‘I’m slower.’

      Eight of Ali’s first nine fights during his second reign as champion did little to enhance his legacy. But sandwiched in between matches against the likes of Jean-Pierre Coopman and Richard Dunn and mediocre showings against more legitimate adversaries, Ali won what might have been the greatest fight of all time.

      On 1 October 1975, Ali and Joe Frazier met in the Philippines, six miles outside of Manila, to do battle for the third time.

      ‘You have to understand the premise behind that fight,’ Ferdie Pacheco recalls. ‘The first fight was life and death, and Frazier won. Second fight: Ali figures him out; no problem, relatively easy victory for Ali. Then Ali beats Foreman, and Frazier’s sun sets. And I don’t care what anyone says now; all of us thought that Joe Frazier was shot. We all thought that this was going to be an easy fight. Ali comes out, dances around, and knocks him out in eight or nine rounds. That’s what we figured. And you know what happened in that fight. Ali took a beating like you’d never believe anyone could take. When he said afterward that it was the closest thing he’d ever known to death – let me tell you something: if dying is that hard, I’d hate to see it coming. But Frazier took the same beating. And in the fourteenth round, Ali just about took his head off. I was cringing. The heat was awesome. Both men were dehydrated. The place was like a time-bomb. I thought we were close to a fatality. It was a terrible moment, and then Joe Frazier’s corner stopped it.’

      ‘Ali–Frazier III was Ali–Frazier III,’ says Jerry Izenberg. ‘There’s nothing to compare it with. I’ve never witnessed anything like it. And I’ll tell you something else. Both fighters won that night, and both fighters lost.’

      Boxing is a tough business. The nature of the game is that fighters get hit. Ali himself inflicted a lot of damage on ring opponents during the course of his career. And in return: ‘I’ve been hit a lot,’ he acknowledged, one month before the third Frazier fight. ‘I take punishment every day in training. I take punishment in my fights. I take a lot of punishment; I just don’t show it.’

      Still, as Ferdie Pacheco notes, ‘The human brain wasn’t meant to get hit by a heavyweight punch. And the older you get, the more susceptible you are to damage. When are you best? Between fifteen and thirty. At that age, you’re growing, you’re strong, you’re developing. You can take punches and come back. But inevitably, if you keep fighting, you reach an age when every punch can cause damage. Nature begins giving you little bills and the amount keeps escalating, like when you owe money to the IRS and the government keeps adding and compounding the damage.’

      In Manila, Joe Frazier landed 440 punches, many of them to Ali’s head. After Manila would have been a good time for Ali to stop boxing, but too many people had a vested interest in his continuing to fight. Harold Conrad served for years as a publicist for Ali’s bouts. ‘You get a valuable piece of property like Ali,’ Conrad said shortly before his death. ‘How are you going to put it out of business? It’s like shutting down a factory or closing down a big successful corporation. The people who are making money off the workers just don’t want to do it.’

      Thus, Ali fought on.

      In 1977, he was hurt badly but came back to win a close decision over Earnie Shavers. ‘In the second round, I had him in trouble,’ Shavers remembers. ‘I threw a right hand over Ali’s jab, and I hurt him. He kind of wobbled. But Ali was so cunning, I didn’t know if he was hurt or playing fox. I found out later that he was hurt. But he waved me in, so I took my time to be careful. I didn’t want to go for the kill and get killed. And Ali was the kind of guy who, when you thought you had him hurt, he always seemed to come back. The guy seemed to pull off a miracle each time. I hit him a couple of good shots, but he recovered better than any other fighter I’ve known.’

      Next up for Ali was Leon Spinks, a novice with an Olympic gold medal but only seven professional fights.

      ‘Spinks was in awe of Ali,’ Ron Borges of the Boston Globe recalls. ‘The day before their first fight, I was having lunch in the coffee shop at Caesars Palace with Leon and [his trainer] Sam Solomon. No one knew who Leon was. Then Ali walked in, and everyone went crazy. “Look, there’s Ali! Omigod, it’s him!” And Leon was like everybody else. He got all excited. He was shouting, СКАЧАТЬ