The Fight Read Free

might be waiting on the street.) “Would you like,” he asked on the spur of this small cheer, “to hear my new poem?”
    No one in the room had the heart to say no. Ali motioned to a flunky who brought up a purse from which the fighter extracted a sheaf of worked-over pages, handling this literature with the same concentration of his fingertips a poor man brings to counting off a roll of cash. Then he beganto read. The Blacks listened with piety, their eyes off on calculations to the side.
    “I have,” said Ali, “a great one-two punch.
    “The one hits a lot, but the two hits a bunch.”
    Everybody snickered. The lyric went on to suggest that Ali was sharp as a razor and Foreman might get cut.
    “When you look at him he will make you sick,
    “Because on his face, you will see nick after nick.”
    Ali finally put the pages away. He waved a hand at the obedient mirth. The poem had been three pages. “How long did it take to write?” he was asked. “Five hours,” he replied — Ali who could talk at the rate of three hundred new words a minute. Since the respect was for the man, for all of the man including the literary talent (just as one might be ready to respect the squeaks Balzac could elicit from a flute if that would prove revelatory of one nerve in Balzac — one nerve, anyway), so came an image of Ali, pencil in hand, composing down there in the depths of Black reverence for rhyme — those mysterious links in the universe of sound: no rhyme ever without its occult reason! Did Ali’s rhymes help to shape the disposition of the future, or did he just sit there after a workout and slowly match one dumb-wit line to the next?
    Ali’s psychic powers were never long removed, however, from any critical situation. “That stuff,” he said, waving his hands, “is just for fun. I got serious poetry I’m applying my mind to.” He looked interested for the first time this day in what he was doing. Now from memory he recited in an earnest voice:
            
The words of truth are touching
    The voice of truth is deep
    The law of truth is simple
    On your soul you reap
.   
    It went on for a good number of lines, and finally ended with, “The soul of truth is God,” an incontestable sentiment to a Jew, Christian, or Muslim, incontestable indeed to anyone but a Manichean like our interviewer. But then the interviewer was already worrying up another aesthetic street. The poem could not possibly be original. Perhaps it was a translation of some piece of devotional Sufi that Ali’s Muslim teachers read to him, after which he might have changed a few of the words. Still, a certain line stayed: “On your soul you reap.” Had one really heard it? Could he have written it? In all of Ali’s twelve years of prophetic boxing doggerel — the poem as worthless as the prediction was often exact: Archie Moore/ is sure/ to hug the floor/ by the end of four — some such scheme! — this line must be the first example in Ali’s voluminous canon of an idea not resolutely antipoetic. For Ali to compose a few words of real poetry would be equal to an intellectual throwing a good punch. Inquiries must be made. Ali, however, could not remember the line out of context. He had to recall the entire poem. Only his memory was not working. Now one felt the weight of punches he had taken this afternoon. Line by line his voice searched aloud for the missing words. It took five minutes. It became in that time another species of endeavor as if the act of recollection might also restore some of the circuits disarranged in the brain that day. Withall the joy of an eight-year-old child exhibiting good memory in class, Ali got it back at last. Patience was rewarded. “The law of truth is simple. As you sow, you reap.”
    As you sow, you reap! Ali’s record was intact. He had still to write his first line of poetry.
    The exercise, nonetheless, had awakened him. He began to talk of Foreman, and with gusto. “They think he’s going to