The Fight Read Free Page A

beat me?” Ali cried aloud. As if his sense of the universe had been offended, he said with wrath, “Foreman’s nothing but a hard-push puncher. He can’t
hit!
He’s never knocked a man out. He had Frazier down six times, couldn’t knock him out. He had José Roman, a nobody, down four times, couldn’t knock him out! Norton down four times! That’s not a puncher. Foreman just pushes people down. He can’t give me trouble, he’s got no left hook! Left hooks give me trouble. Sonny Bates knocked me down with a left hook, Norton broke my jaw, Frazier knocked me down with a left hook, but Foreman — he just got slow punches, take a year to get there.” Now Ali stood up and threw round air-pushing punches at the air. “You think that’s going to bother
me?
” he asked, throwing straight lefts and rights at the interviewer that filled the retina two inches short. “This is going to be the greatest upset in the history of boxing.” Ali was finally animated. “I have an inch and a half over him in reach. That’s a lot. Even a half-inch is an advantage, but an inch and a half is a lot. That’s a lot.”
    It was not unknown that a training camp was designed to manufacture one product — a fighter’s ego. In Muhammad’s camp, however, it was not the absent manager, nor the trainers, nor the sparring partners, nor certainly thegloomy ambience of the camp itself which did the manufacturing. No, the work was done by Ali. He was the product of his own raw material. There was no chance for Foreman as he stated his case. Still, memories stirred of Foreman’s dismantlement of Ken Norton in two rounds. That night, commenting at ringside just after the fight, Ali’s voice had been shrill. When he started to talk to the TV interviewers his first remark — uncharacteristic of Ali — was, “Foreman can hit harder than me.” If Ali had made excuses to himself for his own two long even fights with Norton, such excuses had just been ripped out of his ego. In Caracas that night, directly before his eyes, he had seen a killer. Foreman had been vicious like few men ever seen in the ring. In the second round, as Norton started to go down for the second time, Foreman caught him five times, as quick in the instant as a lion slashing its prey. Maybe Foreman couldn’t hit, but he could execute. That instant must have searched Ali’s entrails.
    Of course, a great fighter will not live with anxiety like other men. He cannot begin to think of how much he can be hurt by another fighter. Then his imagination would not make him more creative but less — there is, after all, endless anxiety available to him. Here at Deer Lake, the order was to bury all dread; in its place Ali breathed forth a baleful self-confidence, monotonous in the extreme. Once again his charm was lost in the declamation of his own worth and the incompetence of his enemy. Yet his alchemy functioned. Somehow, buried anxiety was transmuted to ego. Each day interviewers came, each day he learned about the 2½–1 odds for the first time, and subjected his informants to thesame speech, read the same poems, stood up, flashed punches two inches short of their face. If reporters brought tape recorders to capture his words, they could end with the same interview word for word even if their visits were a week apart. One whole horrendous nightmare — Foreman’s extermination of Norton — was being converted, reporter by reporter, poem by poem, same analysis after same analysis — “He’s got a hard-push punch but he can’t
hit
” — into the reinstallation of Ali’s ego. The funk of terror was being compressed into psychic bricks. What a wall of ego Ali’s will had erected over the years.
    Before leaving, there is an informal tour of the training camp. Deer Lake is already famous in the media for its replicas of slave cabins high on Ali’s hill and the large boulders painted with the names of his opponents, Liston’s name on the rock you see first from the