The Fight

Part I

The Dead are Dying of Thirst

There is always a shock in seeing him again. Not live, as in television, but standing before you, looking his best. Then the World's Greatest Athlete is in danger of being the most beautiful man. The vocabulary of camp is doomed to appear. Women draw an audible breath. Men look down. They are reminded again of their lack of worth. If Muhammad Ali never opened his mouth to quiver the jellies of public opinion, he would still inspire love and hate. For he is the Prince of Heaven--so says the silence around his body when he is luminous with confidence.

When he is depressed, however, his pale skin turns the color of coffee with gouts of milky water, no cream. There is the sickly green of a depressed morning in the muddy washes of the flesh. He looks to be not quite well. And that may be a fair description of how he appeared at his training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, on a September afternoon seven weeks before his fight in Kinshasa with George Foreman.

His sparring this day was spiritless. Worse. He kept getting hit with stupid punches, shots he would normally avoid, and that was not like Ali! There was an art to watching him train and you acquired it over the years. Other champions picked sparring partners who could imitate the style of their next opponent and, when they could afford it, added a fighter who was congenial:someone they could hit at will or who was fun to box. Ali did this, too, but reversed the order. For the second fight with Sonny Liston, his favorite had been jimmy Ellis, an intricate artist who had nothing in common with Sonny. As boxers, Ellis and Liston had such different moves one could not pass a bowl of soup to the other without spilling it. Of course, Ali had other sparring partners for that fight. Shotgun Sheldon comes to mind. Ali would lie on the ropes while Sheldon hit him a hundred punches to the belly--that was Ali conditioning his stomach and ribs to take Liston's barrage. In that direction lay his duty, but his pleasure was by way of sparring with Ellis as if Ali had no need to study Sonny's style when he could speed up the dazzle of his own.

Fighters generally use a training period to build such confidence in their reflexes, even as an average skier, after a week of work on his parallel, can begin to think he will yet look like an expert. In later years, Ali would concentrate less on building his own speed and more on how to take punches. Now part of his art was to reduce the force of each blow he received to the head and then fraction it further. Every fighter does that: indeed, a young boxer will not last long if his neck fails to swivel at the instant he is hit; but it was as if Ali were teaching his nervous system to transmit shock faster than other men could.

Maybe all illness results from a failure of communication between mind and body. It is certainly true of such quick disease as a knockout. The mind can no longer send a word to the limbs. The extreme of this theory, laid down by Cus D'Amato when managing Floyd Patterson and José Torres, is that a pugilist with an authentic desire to win cannot be knocked out, provided he sees the punch coming, for then there is no dramatic lack of communication. The punch will hurt but cannot wipe you out. In contrast, a five-punch combination in which every punch lands is bound to stampede any opponent into unconsciousness, no matter how light the blows, since a jackpot has been struck. The sudden overloading of the victim's message center produces that inrush of confusion known as coma.

Now it was as if Ali carried the idea to some advanced place where he could assimilate punches faster than other fighters, could literally transmit the shock through more parts of his body or direct it to the best path, as if ideally he were working toward the ability to receive that five-punch combination (or six or seven!) yet be so ready to ship the impact out to each arm, each organ and each leg that the punishment might be digested and the mind remain clear. It was a study to watch Ali take punches. He would lie on the ropes and paw at his sparring partner like a mother cat goading her kitten to belt away. Then Ali would flip up his glove and let the other's punch bounce from that glove off his head, repeating the move from other angles, as if the second half of the art of getting hit were to learn the trajectories with which punches glanced off your gloves and still hit you. Ali was always studying how to deaden such shots or punish the glove that threw the punch, forever elaborating his inner comprehension of how to trap, damp, modify, mock, curve, cock, warp, distort, deflect, tip and turn the bombs that came toward him, and do this with a minimum of movement, back against the ropes, languid arms up. He invariably trained by a scenario that cast him as a fighter in deep fatigue, too tired to raise hisarms in the 12th round of a 15-round fight. Such training may have saved him from being knocked out by Joe Frazier in their first fight; such training had been explored by him in every fight since. His corner would scream "Stop playing!," the judges would score against him for lying on the ropes, the fight writers would report that he did not look like the old Ali, and all the while he was refining methods.

This afternoon, however, in Deer Lake, it looked as if he were learning very little. He was not languid but sluggish. He looked bored. He showed, as he worked, all the sullen ardor of a husband obliging himself to make love to his wife in the thick of carnal indifference.

The first sparring partner, Larry Holmes, a young, light-colored Black with a pro record of nine wins and no losses, boxed aggressively for three rounds, hitting Ali more often than he got hit in return, which in itself might not have been unusual--sometimes Ali would not throw a punch through all of a round--but on this afternoon it seemed as if he did not know how to use Holmes. He had the disgusted expression Sugar Ray Robinson used to get toward the end of his career when struck on the nose, a grimace of disdain for the occupation, as if you could lose your looks if you weren't careful. The afternoon was hot, the gym was even hotter. It was filled with tourists, more than 100, who had paid a dollar to get in. There was a late-summer apathy to the proceedings. Once in a while, Ali would set out to chastise Holmes for his impudence, but Holmes was not there to be instructed for nothing. He fought back with all the eagerness of a young pro who sees a maximum of future for himself. Ali could, of course, have given a lesson, but he was boxing in the depths of a bad mood. Part of Ali's strength in the ring was fidelity to his mood. If, when speaking to the press, a harsh and hysterical tone entered his voice as easily as other men light a cigarette, he was never frantic in the ring, at least not since the fight with Liston in Miami in 1964, when he won the Heavyweight Championship. No, just as Marlon Brando seemed to inhabit a role as though it were a natural extension of his mood, so Ali treated boxing as a continuation of his psyche. If he were in a bad mood, he would stay in his lethargy, box out of his very distaste for the staleness of this occupation. Often he trained all of an afternoon in such a bad spirit. The difference this day was that he was running into unexpected punches--the end of the world for Ali. In disgust, he would punish Holmes by wrapping an arm around his head. Over the years, Ali had become one of the best wrestlers in the ring. But then, if karate kicks had been introduced to boxing, Ali would also have been the first at that. His credo had to be that nothing in boxing was foreign to him. Now, however, his superiority was reduced to wrestling with Holmes. When they separated, Holmes would go back to the attack. Toward the end of three rounds, Ali started stinging him with punches. Holmes stung him back.

Ali's next sparring partner, Eddie "Bossman" Jones, was a light heavyweight, a dark, sawed-off version of George Foreman. He couldn't have been 5' 10" in height, and Ali used him as a playmate. Absolutely comfortable with Jones (a fighter reminiscent of other fighters who stood flat-footed and belted away) Ali lay on the ropes and took Bossman's punches when he chose to and blocked them when he wished. For all it demanded, Ali could have been an inspector on an assembly line, accepting and rejecting product. "This piece we pass, this one won't." To the degree that boxing is carnality, meat against meat, Ali was master when it was time to receive; he got the juice out of it, the aesthetic juice of punches he blocked or slipped, plus all the libidinal juice of Bossman Jones banging away on his gut. For all of a round Bossman belabored Ali, and Ali communed with himself. In the second of their two rounds, Ali stepped off the ropes for the last two minutes and proceeded for the first time in the afternoon to throw punches. His master's assortment leaped forth, jabs with a closed glove, jabs with an open fist, jabs with a twist of the glove to the right, jabs with a turn to the left, then a series of right-hand leads offered like jabs, then uppercuts and easy hooks from a stand-up position, full of speed off both hands. With each punch, his glove did something different, as if the fist and wrist within the glove were also speaking.

Now Ali's trainer, Bundini, came alive with cries from the corner. "All night long!" he shouted happily. But Ali did not throw anything hard; rather, he hit Bossman Jones with a pepper pot--ting, ting, bing, bap, bing, ting, bap!--and Bossman's head bapped back and forth like a speed bag. "All night long!" There was something obscene in watching, as if the head were clay on a potter's wheel and into a speed bag precisely was it being shaped. Although he had not been hit with any force, Jones (one score for the theorem of D'Amato) was wobbly when the round ended. And happy. He had been good for the boss. He had the kind of face to propose that thousands of punches had bounced off his persona, that celestial glow of a hard worker whose intelligence has been pounded out long ago.

The last three rounds were with Roy Williams, introduced to the crowd as Heavyweight Champion of Pennsylvania, and he was Ali's size, a dark, gentle, sleepy-looking man who boxed with such respect for his employer that the major passion appeared to be a terror of messing Ali's charisma. Williams pawed the air and Ali wrestled him around. He seemed to be working now more on wrestling than boxing, as if curious to test his arms against Roy Williams' strength. Three slowrounds went by with the head of the Heavyweight Champion of Pennsylvania in the crook of Ali's bicep. It looked like the terminal stage of a street fight when not much more than heavy breathing will go on.

Ali had now been boxing eight rounds, five of them easy, too easy to show this much fatigue--the green of his skin did not speak of a good liver. The tourists, a crowd in the main of white millworkers in flowered sport shirts, sprinkled with an occasional beard or biker, looked apathetic. You had to be familiar with Ali's methods to have even a remote idea of what this workout could signify. Toward the middle of the last round, Bundini began to be heard again. Hardly unknown to readers of sports columns (for he was the inventor of "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee") he had on average days a personality more intense per cubic inch than Ali's and was now screaming in a voice every onlooker would remember, for it was not only hoarse and imprecatory but suggestive of the power to slash through every insulation in the atmosphere. Bundini was summoning jinns. "Snake-whip him! Stick him! Stick mean!" he howled with his head back, his bald rocketing eyes spearing ectoplasmic ogres. Ali did not respond. He and Williams kept clinching, wrestling and occasionally thumping one another. No art. Just the heavy exertions of overtired fighters so much like the lurching of overtired furniture movers. "Get off," cried Bundini, "get off on him!" Seconds were ticking down. Bundini wanted a flurry, wanted it for morale, for Ali's good conscience tonight, for the confirming of good habit, for the end if nothing else of this wretched bad mood. "Get off on him! Stick him! Come on, baby. Let'sclose the show on him, let's close this show! Get off. Close him! Close him! Close him!" went Bundini into the final hollering seconds of the eighth and final round, and Ali and Williams, working slowly, came to the end of their day. No dervish. No flurry. The bell. It was not a happy workout. Ali looked sour and congested.

Chapter 2

Ali did not look a great deal happier one hour later when available for interview. He sprawled on a couch in his dressing room, the exertion of the workout still on him, so that he looked heavy for once and not intelligent; indeed, not even handsome. His face was a hint swollen. It offered the suggestion his head would thicken and he would look more like a pug in years to come. Most startling was his lack of energy. Usually, Ali liked to talk after a workout, as though the physical effort only teased his energies enough to confirm his passion, which was to speak. Today, however, he lay back on the couch, let others talk to him. There were a number of black men in the room and they approached as courtiers, each taking his turn to whisper in Muhammad's ear, then falling back to sit in audience. An interviewer from a black network held a microphone ready, in case Ali wished to respond, but this was one occasion when he did not.

The workout seemed to have taken too much. An absence of stimulation heavy as gloom was in the air. Of course, it is not uncommon for fighters' camps to be gloomy. The furniture is invariably every shade of dull gray and dull brown, the sparring partners beaten half into insensibility are quiet when not morose and the silence seems designed to prepare the fighter for his torture on the night of the fight. Ali's camps, however, usually offered vivacity, his own if no one else's. It was as if Ali insisted on having fun while he trained. Not today. It was like any fighter's camp. Unspoken sentiments of defeat passed through the drably furnished room.

"What do you think of the odds?" someone asked, and the question, thrown up without preparation, left Ali looking out of phase.

"I don't know about betting," he said. It was explained that man to man, the odds were 2 1/2-1 against him. "That's a lot?" he asked, and said almost in surprise, "They really think Foreman'll win!" He looked less depressed for the first time this day. "You fellows are in position to make a lot of money with odds like that." Thought of the fight, however, seemed to cheer him a faint degree, as if he were a convict thinking of the hour when his time is up. (Of course, a killer 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 pursefrom which the fighter extracted a sheaf of worked-over pages, handling this literature with the same concentration of his finger tips a poor man brings to counting off a roll of cash. Then he began to 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 300 new words a minute. Since the respect was for the (continued on page 104)The Dead are Dying of Thirst(continued from page 82) 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 Jew, Christian or Muslim, incontestable, indeed, to anyone but a Manichaean 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 Black Muslim teachers might have read to him, and Ali only changed a few of die words. Still, a certain line stayed: "On your soul you reap." Had one really heard it? In all of Ali's 12 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 new 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. Except 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 in the act of remembering he might also lay in again some of the little circuits disarranged in the brain this day. With all the joy at last of an eight-year-old child exhibiting good memory in class, Ali got it back. All patience was rewarded. "The law of truth is simple/ As you sow, you reap."

As you sow, you reap! But now 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 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 Banks knocked me down with a left hook, Norton broke my jaw, Frazier knock 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, the work was done by Ali. He was the product of his own raw material. No chance for Foreman as he stated his case. Still, memories stirred of Foreman's dismantlement of Ken Norton. That night, commenting at ringside just after the fight, Ali's voice had been shrill. When he started to talk to his TV interviewers, his first remark was, "Foreman can hit harder than me." His excuses to himself for his two long fights with Norton had just been ripped out of his ego. Because that night Foreman was a killer. 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 make him not 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 fordi 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 2 1/2-1 odds for the first time and subjected his informants to the same speech, read the same poems, stood up, flashed punches two inches short of dieir faces. If reporters brought tape recorders to capture his words, they could end up 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 for the large boulders, some painted with die names of his opponents, Liston's name on the rock you see first from the entrance road. Each return to camp has to remind Ali of these boulders. Once these names were fighters to stir panic in the middle of sleep and a chill on awakening. Now they are only names and the cabins please die eye, Ali's most of all. Its timbers are dark with the hue of the old railroad bridge from which they were removed; the interior, for fair surprise, is kin to a modest slave cabin. The furniture is simple but antique. The water comes from a hand pump. An old lady with the manners of a dry and decent life might seem the natural inhabitant of Ali's cabin. Even the four-poster bed with the patchwork quilt seems more to her size than his own. Outside the cabin, however, the philosophical residue of this old lady is obliterated by a hardtop parking area. It is larger than a basketball court, and all the buildings, large and small, abut it. How much of Ali is here. The subtle taste of the Prince of Heaven come to lead his people collides with the raucous blats of Muhammad's media sky, where the only firmament is asphalt and the stars give off glints in the static.

Chapter 3

Witness another black man's taste: It is the Domain of President Mobutu at Nsele on the banks of the Congo, a compound of white-stucco buildings with roads that extend over 1000 acres. A zoo and an Olympic swimming pool can be found in some recess of its grounds. There is a large pagoda at the entrance, begun as a gift from the Nationalist Chinese but completed as a gift of the Communist Chinese: We are in a curious domain: Nsele! It extends from the highway to the Congo over fields in cultivation, (continued on page 146)The dead are dying of thirst(continued from page 104) two miles to the Congo, now called the Zaïre, the enormous river here a disappointment, for its waters are muddy and congested with floating clumps of hyacinth ripped loose from the banks and thick as carcasses in the water, unromantic as turds. A three-decker riverboat, hybrid between yacht and paddle steamer, is anchored at the dock. The boat is called President Mobutu. Next to it, similar in appearance, is a hospital ship. It is called Mama Mobutu. No surprise. The posters that advertise the fight say: Un Cadeau de president Mobutu au peuple zairois (a gift of President Mobutu to the Zaïrois people) et un honneur pour L'Homme Noir (plus an honor for the black man). Like a snake around a stick, the name of Mobutu is intertwined in Zaïre with the revolutionary ideal. A fight between two blacks in a black nation, organized by blacks and seen by the whole world; that is a victory of mobutism. So says one of the government's green-and-yellow signs on the highway from Nsele to the capital, Kinshasa. A variety of such signs printed in English and French give the motorist a whiz-by-the-eye course in Mobutism. We want to be free. We don't want our road toward progress to be impeded; even if we have to forge our way through rock, we will forge it through the rock. It is better than Burma-Shave, and certainly a noble sentiment for the vegetation of the Congo, but the interviewer is thinking that after much travel, he has come to an unattractive place. Of course, the interviewer is also looking green. He has caught some viral disruption in Cairo before coming to Zaïre and has been in this country for only three miserable days. He will even leave for New York just this afternoon. The fight has been postponed. Foreman has been cut in training. Since it is over the eye, the postponement, while indefinite, can hardly be less than a month. What a bummer! The day he landed in Zaïre was the day he heard the news. His hotel reservations had, of course, been unhonored. There is nothing like failing to find a bed when you land at dawn in an African capital. Much of the morning was lost before he was finally assigned a room at the Memling, famous for its revolutionary history. A decade ago, correspondents lived on its upper stories at a time when protagonists were being executed in the lobby. Blood ran over the lobby floor. But now the Memling looked like itself once more, a mediocre hotel in a tropical town. The famous floor of the lobby was more or less equal again in cleanliness and good feeling to the floor of the Greyhound Bus station in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the natives at the desk spoke French like men with artificial larynxes. They were nonetheless as superior in their attitude toward foreigners as any Parisian. What pride in the inability to comprehend your accent! What a lobby to be executed in! The Zaïrois officials who passed through these precincts wore dark-blue lapelless jackets and matching blue pants called abacos (from the slogan "à bas le costume"--"down with formal dress") and that was the approved bureaucratic revolutionary wear. Since some of these officials even spoke English (with accents more tortured than the Japanese--words catapulting from their gut as they popped their eyes) irritation teemed in every dialog. Between white and Black, arrogance massed against arrogance. The decision of the press was that the Zaïrois had to be the rudest people in Africa. Quickly, relations between Zaïrois and visiting whites became mutual detestations. To obtain what one desired, whether a drink, a room or an airline ticket, a surly Belgian tone was the peremptory voice to offer. If, for example, you hung up the phone after waiting 20 minutes for an answer, be certain the hotel operator would call back to revile you for discommoding him. Then one had to get into the skin of a cultivateur Belgique defining reality to plantation hands. "La connexion était im ... par ... faite!" Manners became so bad that American Blacks were snarling at African Blacks. What a country of old knots and new.

Worse than that. To be in the Congo for the first time and know its name had been changed. More debilitating than cannibalism was this contribution to anomie. To reach the edge of the Heart of Darkness, here at the old capital of Joseph Conrad's horror, this Kinshasa, once evil Léopoldville, center of slave trade and ivory trade, and to see it through the bilious eyes of a tortured intestine! Was it part of Hemingway's genius that he could travel with healthy insides? Who had ever wanted so much to be back in New York? If there were charms to Kinshasa, where to find them? The center of town had all the panache of an inland Florida city of 70,000 or 80,000 people who somehow missed their boom--a few big buildings looked at a great many little ones. But Kinshasa did not have 80,000 people. It had 1,000,000, and it ran for 40 miles around a bend of the Congo, now, yes, the Zaïre. It was no more agreeable than passing through 40 miles of truck traffic and car-stained suburbs around Camden or Biloxi. If there was an inner city full of squalor and color called La Cité where natives lived in an endless tumble-down of creeks, lurching dirt roads, night clubs, wall shops and hovels, our traveler was still too queasy with the internal mismanagement of his life to pay a visit and thought only of getting home. Of course, living in such duress, the bile-producing emotions proved most satisfactory. What pleasure in the observation that this black one-party revolutionary state had managed to couple the oppressive aspects of communism with the most reprehensible of capitalism. President Mobutu, the seventh (by repute) wealthiest man in the world, had decreed that the only proper term for one Zaïrois to use in addressing another was citoyen. On his average per-capita income of $70 a year, a Zaïrois, any Zaïrois, could still say "Citizen" to the seventh wealthiest man in the world. Small wonder, then, if the interviewer detested the Presidential Domain. These little white-stucco villas (reserved for the press) and the large white Congressional Hall (reserved for the training of the fighters) were a Levittown-on-the-Zaïre. Stucco buildings painted the color of aspirin were set behind lacy, decorative open-air walls reminiscent of the worst of Edward Durell Stone, a full criticism--since even die best of Edward Durell Stone is equal to taking a cancer pill--no, this pretentious Nsele, with its two-mile drive and its hordes of emaciated workers in the watermelon fields (one could pass a thousand Blacks on the road before one glimpsed a man with the faintest suggestion of girth), was a technological confection equal to NASA or Vacaville, a minimum-security prison for the officers of the media and the visiting bureaucrats of the world. One high white-and-chromium tower with the initials of the party--MPR--stood up as a pillar to mass phallic rectitude. It was a long way from Joseph Conrad and the old horror.

At Nsele, Ali was ensconced in a villa just across the street from the banks of the Zaïre. The interior of his house had been furnished by the government in style one might anticipate. Large rooms twice the size of motel rooms but identically depressing in mood commanded the air. Long sofas and chairs were covered in green velveteen, the floor was a plastic gray tile, the cushions were orange, the table dark brown--one was looking at that ubiquitous hotel furniture known to the wholesale trade as High Schlock or Borox.

It was nine in the morning. Ali had been sleeping. If he looked better than at Deer Lake, the hint of a lack of full health still lingered. In fact, there had been news stories that his blood sugar was low and his energy poor. So he had been placed on another diet. Still, there was not a dramatic improvement in his appearance.

This morning he was twice depressed over Foreman's cut. The fight had been hardly a week away. A TV correspondent, Bill Brannigan, who spoke to Ali just after he heard the news, was to remark, "It's the first time I ever saw Ali have a genuine reaction."

How he was upset. "The worst of all times," said Ali, "and the worst thing (continued on page 192)The Dead are Dying of Thirst(continued from page 146) that could have happened. I feel as if somebody close to me just died." Could it be the developing determination of his body that had just died, his difficult approach to good condition? But even to speak of good condition is to confront the first mystery of boxing. It is a rare state of body and mind that allows a heavyweight to move at top speed for 15 rounds. That cannot be achieved by an act of will. Yet Ali had been trying. How many months had he labored at Deer Lake! And to try to cure his hands, which were aching with arthritis, he even ate fish and avoided meat. Then his energy diminished. After that long season of training, his energy still diminished! Something in the cosmic laws of violence must be carnal and command you to eat meat. So he had given up fish, resumed the flesh of animals, ate desserts, and his blood sugar came back. He might even be ready at last to enter the fight that would test the logic of his life. The postponement must have felt like an amputation. What a danger. Every cell in his body could be ready to mutiny.

He was, however, philosophical on this morning 48 hours later. "A real disappointment, a real disappointment. But Allah has revealed to me that I must look on this as my private lesson in disappointment. This is my opportunity to learn how to convert the worst of disappointment into the greatest of strength. For the seed of triumph can be found in the misery of the disappointment. Allah has allowed me to see this postponement as a blessing," said Ali, and, finger in the air, added, "The greatest surprise is always to be found in one's own heart."

Only Ali could make this speech at nine in the morning and lead you to believe he believed it. "Nonetheless," said Ali, "it is hard. I am tired of training. I want to eat all the apple cobbler and drink all the sweet cream." Then--was it because they were standing through this speech?--the interviewer was now formally introduced to Ali's black associates as "a great writer. Norman is a man of wisdom," said Ali. A serious hindrance to the interview. For after such an introduction, how can Ali not wish to read his poetry? In turn, a man of wisdom may wish to be courageous, but, obliged to face such verse, he will take up the cult of the craven. How Norman dodges Ali's desire for a critique on the poems. Every literary principle is swallowed as Ali recites--it is equal in aesthetic sin to applauding the design of Nsele.

Time passed uneventfully in the room with the Borox furniture. People came into the villa and went. Ali sat on one of the green-velveteen chairs and gave an interview, then another. He analyzed Foreman's cut, plus its effect on Foreman. "He's never been cut before. He used to think he was invincible. This has to hurt him." When analysis was satisfied, Ali went through an interview with an African reporter and expatiated on his intention to travel through the country of Zaïre after the fight. He spoke of his love for the Zaïrois people. "They are sweet and hard-working and humble and good people."

Time to go. If one would catch one's plane, it was time to go. He sat down beside Ali, waited a minute and said his farewell. Maybe it was the thought of his imminent departure that produced such an unexpected reply. Clearly, Ali muttered. "I gotta get out of this place."

Could he believe what he had heard? He leaned forward. This was as close as they had ever been. "Why don't you go on safari for a couple of days?"

With this remark, he lost the rest of his exclusive. Why hadn't he just said, "Yes it's rough." Too late would he recognize that you approached Muhammad's psyche as delicately as you walked up on a squirrel.

"No," said Ali, thrusting himself away from any temptation to scratch at the new itch, "I'll stay here and work for my people." Boxing is the exclusion of outside influence. A classic discipline.

Norman went back to the States with no happy intimations of the fight to come.

Chapter 4

If our man of wisdom was now wondering what name he ought to use for his piece about the fight, it was out of no excess of literary ego. More, indeed, from concern for the reader's attention. It would hardly be congenial to follow a long piece of prose if the narrator appeared only as an abstraction: The Writer, The Traveler, The Interviewer. That is unhappy in much the way one would not wish to live with a woman for years and think of her as The Wife.

Nonetheless, Norman was certainly feeling modest on his return to New York and thought he might as well use his first name--everybody in the fight game did. Indeed, his head was so determinedly empty that the alternative was to do a piece without a name. Never had his wisdom appeared more invisible to him, and that is a fair condition for acquiring an anonymous voice.

Back in Kinshasa, however, one month later, much was changed. Now he had a good room at the Inter-Continental, and so did every figure in Foreman's camp, the Champion, the manager, the sparring partners, the relatives, the friends, the skilled trainers--we are talking of no less than Archie Moore and Sandy Saddler--everyone in the retinue was there. A number from Ali's camp were registered, as well; most notably, Bundini, who later would have verbal wars in the lobby with Foreman's people. What wars! They must yet be described. The promoters of the fight stayed at the Inter-Continental--John Daly, Don King, Hank Schwartz. Big Black, the big conga drummer from Ali's camp, was here. Interviewed by a British reporter who asked him the name of his drum, he answered that it was a conga. The reporter wrote Congo. The Zaïrois censor changed it to Zaïre. Now Big Black could say in interviews that he played the Zaïres.

Yes, a different mood. The food was better at the Inter-Continental; so were the drinks. The lobby was moving with easy action between Black and white. Musicians left over from the festival four weeks before, operators at the fringe of the promotion, fight experts, hustlers and even a few tourists mingled with passing African bureaucrats and European businessmen. Employees, male and female, from the gambling casinos came by for a look and mingled with Peace Corps kids and corporation men from cartels. Dashikis, bush jackets and pinstripe suits passed through the lobby. Public relations was quick to speak of "Kinshasa's living room." It was most peculiarly an agreeable lobby, although the autumn brown and pastel orange in the carpets, wicker chairs, walls, lamps and sofas were not different from autumn brown at the Indianapolis Hilton or the Sheraton Albuquerque. It worked in Africa. A little creature comfort (even if High Borox) went a long way in Kinshasa. The fast elevators gave zap! The fried food was eggs! Taxis came quickly. Still, the happy action was a function of the flow in the lobby rather than the status of people gathered. Social arbiters of Heavyweight Championships would have gone blind looking for a face important enough to ignore. If on the night before the fight a few well-known names would finally arrive--Jim Brown, Joe Frazier and David Frost for three--the old celebrity of the fight crowd was absent. The fight cadre, plus George Plimpton, Hunter Thompson, Budd Schulberg and himself, made up the notables. Any notions of anonymity had to be discarded.

For these days, Norman was being welcomed by Blacks. If Ali had introduced him as "a man of wisdom"--Ali, who had seen him in a dozen circumstances over the years and never quite allowed that he was sure of the name--Foreman, in turn, said, "Yeah, I've heard of you. You're the champ among writers." Don King presented him as "a great mind among us, a genius." Bundini, lying in his teeth, assured everyone, "Nomin is even smarter than I am." Archie Moore, whom Nomin had long revered, was cordial at last. A sparring partner asked for an autograph.

What celebration. Being greeted this warmly on return to Africa, he felt delivered at last from the bowels of the bummer. The final traces of the miserable fever that kept him in bed for a week on his return to New York were now gone. He was happy to be back in Africa. What a surprise. Since he was not being read in this milieu nearly so much as praised, and since the Black American community, with its curious unities of opinion, so much like psychic waves, was spreading a good word on him for no overt reason--no recent published work or extraliterary relation to Blacks half so close as books and articles he had done ten or fifteen years earlier--he came to realize at last the fair shape of the irony. Months ago, a story had gotten into the newspapers about a novel he was writing. His publishers were going to pay him $1,000,000, sight unseen, for the book. If his candles had been burning low in the literary cathedral these last few years, the news story went its way to hastening their extinction. He knew that his much publicized novel (still nine tenths to be written) would now have to be twice as good to overcome such financial news. Good literary men were not supposed to pick up sums. Small apples for him to protest in every banlieu and literary purlieu that his Boston publisher had not been laid low with a degenerative disease of the cortex but that the $1,000,000 was to be paid out as he wrote 500,000 to 700,000 words, the equivalent of five novels. Since he was being rewarded only as he delivered the work, and had debts and a sizable advance already spent and fivewives and seven children, plus a financial nut at present larger than his head, so the sum was not as large as it seemed, he explained--the $1,000,000, you see, was nominal. Here in Africa, however, it was another tale. Since the word of his $1,000,000 hit the wire services, his name throughout the black community had been underlined. Nomin Million was a man who could make it by using his head. No rough stuff! He did not have to get hit in the head, nor hit on the side of your head. This man had to be the literary champ. To make $1,000,000 without taking chances--show respect! To sign for a sum that heavyweight champs had not been able to make until Muhammad Ali came along--why, the optimistic element of the black community looking now at every commercial horizon in America began to gaze at writing. Hang around this man, went the word. Something might rub off!

Once, he would have been miserable at being able to profit from such values. But his love affair with the black soul, a sentimental orgy at its worst, had been given a drubbing through the seasons of Black Power. He no longer knew whether he loved Blacks or secretly disliked them, which had to be the dirtiest secret in his American life. Part of the woe of the first trip to Africa, part of that irrationally intense detestation of Mobutu--even a photo of the President in his plump cheeks and horn-rimmed eyeglasses igniting invective adequate to a Harvard professor looking at an icon of Nixon--must be a cover for the rage he was feeling toward Blacks, any Blacks. Walking the streets of Kinshasa on that first trip while the black crowds moved about him with an indifference to his presence that succeeded in niggering him, he knew what it was to be looked upon as invisible. He was also approaching, if not careful, the terminal animosity of a Senior Citizen. How his hatred seethed in search of a justifiable excuse. When the sheer evidence of Africa finally overcame these newly bigoted senses (when a drive over miles of highway showed thousands of slim and probably hungry Zaïrois running like new slum inhabitants for overcrowded buses, and yet in some absolute statement of aesthetic, some imprimatur of the holy and final statement of the line of the human body, these Blacks could still show in silhouette, while standing in line for the bus, almost every one of those 1000 slim dark Africans, an incorruptible loneliness, a stone-mute dignity, some African dignity he had never seen on South Americans, Europeans or Asiatics, some tragic magnetic sense of self, as if each alone and all were carrying the continent like a halo of sorrow about their head) then it became impossible not to feel this life and sorrow of Africa--even if Kinshasa was to the rain forest as Hoboken to Big Sur--yes, impossible not to sense what everyone had been trying to say about Africa for 100 years, big Papa first on line: The place was so fucking sensitive! No horror failed to stir its echo a thousand miles away, no sneeze was ever free of the leaf that fell on the other side of the hill. Then he could no longer hate the Zaïrois or even be certain of his condemnation of their own black oppressors, then his animosity switched a continent over to Black Americans with their arrogance, their jive, ethnic put-down costumes, caterwauling soul, their thump-your-testicle organ sound, and black new vomitous egos like the slag of all of alienated sewage-compacted-heap U.S.A.; then he knew that he had come not only to report on a fight but to look a little more into his own outsized feelings of love and--could it be?--sheer hate for the existence of Black on earth.

No, he was hardly surprised when his illness flared on return to the States, and he went through a week and then ten days of total detestation of himself, a fever without fantasies, an illness without terror, for he felt as if his soul had expired or, worse, slipped away. It was enough of a warning to lay a deep warning on him. He got up from bed with the determination to learn a little about Africa before his return, a healthy impulse that brought him luck (but then, do we not gamble with the unrecognized thought that a return of our luck signifies a return of our health?). After inquiries, he went to the University Place Book Shop in New York, an operative definition of the word warren, up on the eighth or ninth floor ofa wheezing old office building below 14th Street--the smell of the catacombs in its stones--to find at exit from the elevator a stack and excelsior of books, cartons and dust where a big blond clerk with scraggly sideburns working alone assured the new customer that he could certainly afford these many books being laid on him, since he had, after all, been given the $1,000,000, hadn't he, a worthless excursion to describe if not for the fact that the clerk picked the books, the titles all unfamiliar. Would there be one paragraph of radium in all this geographical, political, historical sludge? His luck came in; not a paragraph but a book: Bantu Philosophy, by Father Tempels, a Dutch priest who had worked as missionary in the Belgian Congo and extracted the philosophy from the language of the tribes he lived among.

Given a few of his own ideas, Norman's excitement was not small as he read Bantu Philosophy. For he discovered that the instinctive philosophy of African tribesmen happened to be close to his own. Bantu philosophy, he soon learned, saw humans as forces, not beings. Without putting it into words, he had always believed that. It gave a powerful shift to his thoughts. By such logic, men or women were more than the parts of themselves, which is to say more than the result of their heredity and experience. A man was not only what he contained in himself, not only his desires, his memory and his personality, but also the forces that came to inhabit him at any moment from all things living and, dead. So a man was not only himself but also the karma of all generations past that still lived in him, not only a human with his own psyche but also a part of the resonance, sympathetic or unsympathetic, of every root and thing (and witch) about him. He would take his balance, his quivering place, in a field of all the forces of the living and the dead. So the meaning of one's life was never hard to find. One did one's best to live in the pull of these forces in such a way as to increase one's own force. Ideally, one would do it in harmony with the play of all forces, but the beginning of wisdom was to enrich oneself, enrich the muntu that was the amount of life in oneself, the size of the human being in oneself. Crazy. We are returned to the Calvinism of the chosen where the man with most possessions is chosen, the man of force and wealth. We are certainly in the ghetto where you do not invade another turf. We are allied to every pride of property and self-enrichment. Back to the primitive sinews of capitalism! Bantu philosophy, however, is not so primitive. It offers a more sinister vision: Maybe it is nobler. For if we are our own force, we are also a servant of the forces of the dead. So we have to be bold enough to live with all the magical forces at loose between the living and the dead. It may be equal to recognizing the messages, the curses and the loyalties of the dead. That is never free of dread. It takes bravery to live with beauty or wealth if we think of them as an existence in themselves.

An African, for example, aware of the presence of a woman who is finely dressed, might do more than grant her the reasonable increase of power that accrues to wearing an elaborate gown. To his eye, she would also have borrowed the force that lives in the gown itself, the kunlu of the gown. That has its own existence as a force in the universe of forces. It is analogousto the way an actor feels an increment of power when he enters his role, even feels the separate existence of the role as it comes up to him, as if it had been out there waiting for him in the dark. Then, it is as if he takes on some marrow of the forgotten caves. It is why certain actors must act or go mad--they can hardly live without the clarity of that moment when the role returns.

Here is a passage from The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola:

We knew "Laugh" personally on that night, because as every one of them stopped laughingat us, "Laugh" did not stop for two hours. As "Laugh" was laughing at us on that night, my wifeand myself forgot our pains and laughed with him, because he was laughing with curious voices that we never heard before in our life ... so if somebody continue to laugh with "Laugh" himself, he or she would die or faint at once for long laughing, because laugh was his profession....

If laughter presents such power, what are we to make of the African's attitude toward lust? Or the inevitable kuntu of fuck? Yes, every word can have its relation to the primeval elements of the universe. The word, says a Dogon sage named Ogotemmêli, "is water and heat. The vital force that carries the word issues from the mouth in a water vapor which is both water and word." Nornmo is at once the name of the word and the spirit of water. So nommo lives everywhere in the vapor of the air and the pores of the earth. Since the word is equal to water, all things are affected by nommo, the word. Even the ear becomes anorgan of sex when nornmo enters: "The good word, as soon as it is received by the ear, goes directly to the sex organs, where it rolls about the uterus...."

What exhilaration! This short fine book, Bantu Philosophy, and then a larger work bursting with intellectual sweetmeats, Muntu, An Outline of the New African Culture, by Janheinz Jahn, is illumining his last hours in New York, his flight on the plane--a night and a day!--his second impressions of Kinshasa. It has brought him back to a recognition of his old love for Blacks--as if the deepest ideas that ever entered his mind were there because Black existed. It has also brought back all the old fear. The mysterious genius of these rude, disruptive and--down to it!--altogether indigestible Blacks. What noise they still made to the remains of his literary mind, what hooting, screaming and shrieking, what promise of oblivion on the turn of a card.

How his prejudices were loose. So much resentment had developed for Black style, Black snobbery, Black rhetoric, Black pimps, Super Fly and all that virtuoso handling of the ho. The pride Blacks took in their skill as pimps! A wrath at the mismanagement of his own sensual existence now sat on him, a sorrow at how the generosity of his mind seemed determined to contract as he grew older. He could not really bring himself to applaud the emergence of a powerful people into the center of American life--he was envious. They had the good fortune to be born Black. And felt a private fury at the professional complacency of black self-pity, a whole rage at therhymic power of those hectoring now-insensitive voices, a resentment at last of their values, of that eternal emphasis on centrality--"I am the real rooster on this block, the most terrible cock, the baddest fist. I'm a down dude. You motherfuckers better know it."

Yet even as he indulged this envy, he felt a curious relief. For he had come to a useful recognition. When the American Black was torn out of Africa, he was ripped out of his philosophy as well. So his violence and his arrogance could be a fair subject for comprehension once more. One had only to think of the torture. Everything in African philosophy was of the root, but the philosophy had been uprooted. What a clipped and over-stimulated transplant was the American Negro. His view of life came not only from his livid experience in America but from the fragmentsof his lost African beliefs. So he was alienated not from one culture but from two. What idea could an Afro-American retain, then, of Ills heritage if not that each man seeks the maximum of force for himself? Since he lived in a field of human forces that were forever changing, and changing dramatically, even as the people he knew were killed or arrested or fell out on junk, so he had to assert himself. How else could he find life? The loss of vital force was pure loss, equal to less ego, less status, less beauty. By comparison, a white Judaeo-Christian could live through a loss of vital force and feel moral, unselfish, even saintly; an African could feel himself in balance among traditional forces. He could, for example, support the weight of his obligation to his father because his father was one step nearer in the chain to God--that unbroken African chain of lives going back to the source of creation. But the American Black was sociologically famous for the loss of his father.

No wonder their voices called attention to themselves! They spoke of a vital (if tense) force. A poor and uneducated man was nothing without that force. To the degree it lived inside him, he was full of capital, ego capital, and that was what he possessed. That was the capitalism of the poor American Black trying to accumulate more of the only wealth he could find, respect on his turf, the respect of local flunkies for the power of his soul. What a raw, searching, hustling, competitive capitalism. What a lack of profit. The establishment offered massive restraint for such massive fevers of the ego. Tribal life in America began to live among stone walls and drugs. The drug provided a magnification of the sentiment that a mighty force was still inside oneself, and the penitentiary was where the old idea of man as a force in a field of forces could return. If the African restraint had been tradition, the American Black with a political idea was obliged instead to live with revolutionary discipline. As he endured in his stone walls, it became a discipline as pulverizing to the soul as the search for condition of a boxer.

Bantu Philosophy proved a gift, but it was one a writer might not need. Not to comprehend the fight. There was now enough new intellectual baggage to miss the train. Norman would bring some of it along, and hope he was not greedy. For heavyweight boxing was almost all Black, Black as Bantu. So boxing had become another key to revelations of Black, one more key to Black emotion, Black psychology, Black love. Heavyweight boxing might also lead to the room in the underground of the world where Black kings were installed: What was Black emotion, Black psychology, Black love? Of course, to try to learn from boxers was a quintessentially comic quest. Boxers were liars. Champions were great liars. They had to be. Once you knew what they thought, you could hit them. So their personalities became masterpieces of concealment. There would be limits to what he could learn of Ali and Foreman by the aid of any philosophy. Still, he was grateful for the clue. Humans were not beings but forces. He would try to look at them by that light.

Chapter 5

Taken directly, Foreman was no small representative of vital force. He came out from the elevator dressed in embroidered bib overalls and dungaree jacket and entered the lobby of the Inter-Continental flanked by a Black on either side. He did not look like a man so much as a lion standing just as erectly as a man. He appeared sleepy but in the way of a lion digesting a carcass. His broad handsome face (not unreminiscent of a mask of Clark Gable somewhat flattened) was neither friendly nor unfriendly; rather, it was alert in the way a boxer is in some part of him alert no matter how sleepy he looks, a heightening common, perhaps, to all good athletes, so that they can pick an insect out of the air with their fingers but as easily notice the expression on some friend in the 30th row from ringside.

Since Norman was not often as enterprising as he ought to be, he was occasionally too forward. Having barely arrived in Kinshasa again, he did not know you were not supposed to speak to Foreman in the lobby and advanced on him with a hand out. In this moment, Bill Caplan, who did public relations for Foreman, rushed up to the fighter. "He's just come in, George," said Caplan, and he made an introduction. Foreman now nodded, gave a surprising smile and proceeded to make his kind remark about a champ at writing, his voice surprisingly soft, as Southern as it was Texan. His eyes warmed, as if he liked the idea of writing--the news would soon come out that Foreman was himself working on a book. Then he made a curious remark one could think about for the rest of the week. It was characteristic of a great deal about Foreman. "Excuse me for not shaking hands with you," he said in that voice so carefully muted to retain his powers, "but you see I'm keeping my hands in my pockets."

Of course! If they were in pockets, how could he remove them? As soon ask a poet in the middle of writing a line whether coffee is taken with milk or cream. Yet Foreman made his remark in such simplicity that the thought seemed likable rather than rude. He was telling the truth. It was important to keep his hands in his pockets. Equally important to keep the world at remove. He lived in a silence. Flanked by bodyguards to keep, exactly, to keep handshakers away, he could stand among 100 people in the lobby and be in touch with no one. His head was alone. Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence. It vibrated about him in silence. One had not seen men like that for 30 years, or was it more? Not since Norman worked for a summer in a mental hospital had he been near anyone who could stand so long without moving, hands in pockets, vaults of silence for his private chamber. He had taken care then of catatonics who would not make a gesture from one meal to the next. One of them, hands contracted into fists, stood in the same position for months, only to erupt with a sudden punch that broke the jaw of a passing attendant. Guards were always informing new guards that catatonics were the most dangerous of the patients. They were certainly the strongest. One did not need other attendants, however, to tell you. If a deer's posture in the forest can say, "I am vulnerable, irreplaceable and soon destroyed," so the posture of a catatonic haunts the brain. "Provided I do not move," this posture says, "all power will come to me."

There was here, however, no question of wondering whether Foreman might be insane. The state of mind of a Heavyweight Champion is considerably more special than that. Not many psychotics could endure the disciplines of professional boxing. Still, a Heavyweight Champion must live in a world where proportions are gone. He is conceivably the most frightening unarmed killer alive. With his hands he could slay 50 men before he would become too tired to kill any more. Or is the number closer to 100?

Prize fighters do not, of course, train to kill people at large. To the contrary, prize fighting diverts a number who might otherwise commit murder in the street. The amount of violence capable of being generated in a champion like Foreman is staggering, therefore, to contemplate when brought to focus against another fighter. This violence, converted to a most special species of skill, had won him the championship by his 38th fight. He had never been defeated. On the night he won the championship, he had accumulated no less than 35 knockouts, the fights stopped on an average before the third round. What an unbelievable record that is! Ten knockouts in the first, eleven in the second, ten in the third and fourth. No need to think of him, then, as psychotic; rather, as a physical genius who employed die methods of catatonia (silence, concentration and immobility). Since Ali was a genius in wholly separate ways, one could anticipate the rarest war of all--a collision between different embodiments of divine inspiration.

For that matter, who could say Ali was without a chance in any religious war that took place in Africa? Norman had smiled when first hearing of the match, thinking of evil eyes, conjurers and black psychological fields. "If Ali can't win in Africa," he remarked, "he can't win anywhere." The paradox, however, on meeting the Champion was that Foreman seemed more black. Ali was not without white blood, not without a lot of it. Something in his personality was cheerfully, even exuberantly white in the way of a 6-foot, 2-inch president of a Southern college fraternity. At times, Ali was like nothing so much as a white actor who had put on too little make-up for the part and so was not wholly convincing as a Black, just one of 800 small contradictions in Ali, but Foreman was deep. Foreman could be mistaken for African long before Ali. Foreman was in communion with a muse. And she was also deep, some distant cousin of beauty, the muse of violence in all her complexity. The first desire of the muse of violence may be to remain serene. Foreman could pass through the lobby like a virile manifest of the walking dead, alert to everything, yet immune in his silence to the casual pollutions of everybody's vibrating handshaking hands. Foreman's hands were as separate from him as a kuntu. They were his instrument, and he kept them in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case. The last heavyweight reminiscent of Foreman had been Sonny Liston. He used to inspire fear in a man by looking at him, and his bad humor over intrusion into the aura of his person seethed like smoke. His menace was intimate--he could bury a little man as quickly as a big one.

Foreman, by comparison, was a contemplative monk. His violence was in the halo of his serenity. It was as if he had learned the lesson Sonny had been there to teach. One did not allow violence to dissipate; one stored it. Serenity was the vessel where violence could be stored. So everyone around Foreman had orders to keep people off. They did. It was as if Foreman were preparing to defend himself against the thoughts of everyone alive. If he entered the arena, and all of Africa wanted him to lose, then his concentration would become the ocean of his protection against Africa. A formidable defense.

Watching him in training, impressions were confirmed. The literary champ of Kinshasa was only a boxing expert of sorts; of sorts, for example, was his previous knowledge of Foreman. He had seen him once four years earlier in the course of winning a dubious decision in ten rounds over Gregorio Peralta. Foreman looked slow and clumsy. Then he never saw Foreman again until the second round against Norton. Having arrived late at the theater, he saw nothing but the knockdowns in the second round. It was hardly a complete picture of Foreman.

But seeing him in the ring at Nsele, it was obvious George had picked up sophistication. Everything in his training pointed toward this fight. His manager, Dick Sadler, was steeped in boxing experience. So were Moore and Sandy Saddler. Together with Sugar Ray Robinson, they had been precisely the three fighters who once offered the most brilliant examples of technique for Ali's developing gifts. Foreman was one champion, therefore, whose training was designed by other champions, and it gave an opportunity to watch how a few of the best minds in boxing might coach him.

Against the perils of Africa and mass hysteria, the antidote was already evident: silence and concentration. If Africa was not Ali's only weapon, psychology must be his next. Would he try to punish Foreman's vanity? No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no other sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated. Ali would use every effort to make Foreman feel clumsy. If, at his most fearsome, Foreman looked and fought like a lion, he had, at his worst, a resemblance to an ox. So the first object of training was to work on Foreman's sense of grace. George was being taught to dance. While he was still happy in the fox trot, and Ali was eras beyond the frug, monkey or jerk, no matter, Foreman was now able to glide in the ring, and that was what he would need. Training began with a loosening-up procedure other fighters did not employ. Foreman stood in the center of the ring and meditated as a weird and extraordinary music began to play through the public-address system. It was pop. As ambitious, however, as pop music could ever become; sounds reminiscent of Wagner, Sibelius, Moussorgsky and many an electronic composer were in the mix. Nature was awakening in the morning--so went one's first assumption of the theme--but what a piece of nature! Macbeth's witches encountered Wagner's gods on a spastic dawn. Demons abounded. Caves boiled vapors. Trees split with the scream of a broken bone. The ground wrenched. Boulders fell onto musical instruments. Into these sounds, lyrical as movie-music dew, the sun slowly rose, leaves shook themselves and the sorrowful throbs of an aching soul full of vamping organ dumps and thumps fulfilled some hollow in the din.

Foreman was wearing red trunks, a white T-shirt, reddish headgear and bright-red gloves, a bloody contrast to the sobriety of his mood. As the music played, he began to make small moves with his elbows and fists, minuscule locked-up uppercuts that did not travel an inch, small flicks of his neck, blinks of his eye. Slowly he began to shift his feet, but in awkward pivots. He looked like a giant beginning to move after a five-year sleep. Making no attempt to look impressive, he went through a somnambulistic dance. Near to motionless, he yet evoked the muffled roars of that steamy nature waking up, waking up. All by himself in the ring with a bewildered press and a wholly silent audience of several hundred Africans, he moved as though transition to the full speed of boxing would have to use up its convoluted time. Some heavyweights were known for how long it took them to get ready--Marciano used to shadowbox five rounds in the dressing room before a title bout--but Foreman's warm-up seemed to suggest that in order to become connected again to reflexes in himself, he must depart altogether from time.

Yet as the music became less of a tone poem to Hieronymus Bosch and more like hints of Oklahoma coming through Moussorgsky--what sweets and sours!--Foreman's feet began to slide, his arms to parry imaginary blows. Moving forward, he shadowboxed, cutting off the ring, throwing punches harder at the unstoppable air, working into the woe of every heavy puncher when he misses target (for no punch disturbs the shoulder more than the one that does not connect--professionals can be separated from amateurs by the speed with which their torso absorbs that instant's loss of balance). Now Sadler cut off the music and Foreman went to the corner. Remote, he stood there while Sadler carefully greased his face and forehead for the sparring to come. But he was already returned to a whole melancholy of isolation and concentration.

He sparred a round with Henry Clark, not trying to hit hard but enjoying himself. His hands were fast and he held them well out in front, picking off punches with quick leonine cuffs of his mitts, then striking quickly with lefts and rights. He had much to learn about moving his head, but his feet were nimble. He was moving well, and Clark, a cherubic-looking black heavyweight with a reputation of his own (eighth-ranking heavyweight contender) was handled with authority by Foreman. A favorite of the press (for he was friendly and articulate) Clark had been declaring Foreman's praises for weeks. "Even a punch on the arms leaves you feeling paralyzed, and that's with heavy gloves. Ali is a friend of mine, and I'm afraid he's going to get hurt. George is the most punishing human being I've ever been in with."

This afternoon, however, with the fight five days away, Foreman was not working to punish Clark (who was due to fight the semifinal with Roy Williams) but, instead, was working at wrestling. Clark would try to hold him, as Ali might, and Foreman would throw him off, or shove him back, then maneuver him to the ropes, where he would hit him lightly, back off and practice the same solution again from the center of the ring. For whatever reason--perhaps because Clark, a big man, was not elusive enough to test Foreman's resources at cutting off the ring--Sadler stopped the sparring after a round and put in Terry Lee, a slim white light heavyweight who had the rugged face of a construction worker but happened to be fast as a rabbit. For three rounds, Lee did an imitation of Ali, backing in a circle to the ropes, then quickly skipping in the other direction to escape George, who held the center of the ring. Lee was not big enough to take Foreman's punches, and Foreman did not try to punish him, merely tapping Lee when he was caught, but Terry gave an exhibition, nonetheless, bouncing off the ropes to feint in one direction, bouncing back to feint in the other, and then scooting through any escape route available, circling away from one set of ropes only to be driven almost immediately to the next, where he would duck, slide, put his hands to his head, fall back against the ropes, spring out, feint, drop his hands, dart and try to move away again, Foreman stalking him all the while with enjoyment, for his reflexes were growing faster and faster.

Meanwhile, Foreman was learning new tricks every step of the way. Once, Lee, springing off the ropes, skipped under Foreman's arms like a small boy escaping his father, and the African audience at the rear of the hall, sympathetic to Ali, roared with derision. Foreman looked unperturbed, even interested, as if he had just picked up a little trick by being fooled, and in the next round, when Lee tried it again, Foreman was there to block escape. Watching Terry's talented imitation of Ali, yet seeing how cleverly and often Foreman was eating up room on the ropes, and herding him toward a corner, it seemed certain that if Ali wished to win, he would have to take more punishment than ever before in his career.

Foreman was close to genial in a press conference that followed. Dressed in his embroidered bib overalls, he sat on a long table with the press around him and quietly refused to use a microphone. Since his voice was low, it was a direct difficulty for the 50 reporters and cameramen gathered, but he was exercising territorial rights. His mood was his property, and he did not desire a shriek from the feedback to go tearing through his senses. Instead, the mike once refused and the reporters crowded together, he responded to questions with an easy intelligence, his soft Texas voice not without resonance. His replies gave a tasty skew to die mood, as if there were more he could always say but would not, in order to preserve the qualities of composure and serenity--they were tasty, too.

As Foreman spoke, one of his 50 interviewers--it must have been our recent convert to African studies--was thinking of Conversations with Ogotemmêli by Marcel Griaule, a fine book. Ogotemmêli looked on the gift of speech as analogous to weaving, since the tongue and teeth were a warp and woof on which the breath could serve as thread. Given reflection, the idea was not so unsound. What, after all, was conversation if not a psychic material to be stitched by the mind to other psychic cloth? If most conversations ended in rags, so did most textiles.

Foreman spoke with a real sense of the delicacy of what he might be weaving, a fine tissue, strong in its economy, a true cloth to come out of an intelligent and uneducated man who happened to be Champion.

Samples:

Reporter: Your eye looks all right to me, George.

Foreman: Looks all right to me, too.

Reporter: What do you think of your weight?

Foreman: Once you're a heavyweight, your weight speaks for itself.

Reporter: Do you think you'll knock him out?

Foreman (in utter relaxation): I would like to.

On the ripple of humor this created, Foreman offered a smile. When the next questioner wondered what he thought of fighting at three A.M., Foreman said with a bigger grin, "When I was growing up in Houston, I had a lot of fights at three and four in the morning."

"Were your opponents tough?"

"Right! I wasn't undefeated then."

"Ali claims he's met more tough fighters than you have."

"That," said Foreman, "may be a factor for me. I got a dog who fights all the time. He comes home whipped."

"Do you expect Ali to go for the eye?"

Foreman shrugged. "It's good for anybody to go for anything they can as long as they can. The crow will go for the scarecrow but run away from dynamic people."

"We hear you're writing a book."

"Oh," Foreman said in his mildest voice, "I just like to keep an account of what's going on."

"Do you have a subject for the book?"

"It'll be about me in general."

"Plan to publish it?"

He was thoughtful, as if contemplating the uncharted lands of literature that lay ahead. "I don't know," he said. "It may be just for my kids."

Reporter: Do Ali's remarks bother you?

Foreman: No. He makes me think of a parrot who keeps saying, "You're stupid, you're stupid." Not to offend Muhammad Ali, but he's like that parrot. What he says, he's said before.

They asked him if he liked the country of Zaïre and he looked uneasy and said, first hint of uneasiness to his voice, "I would like to stay as long as possible and visit." If boxers were good liars, maybe he was no boxer.

"Why are you staying at the Inter-Continental instead of here?"

Foreman replied even faster, "Well, I'm accustomed to hotel life. Although I like this place in Nsele."

He was rescued by another query. "We hear President Mobutu gave you a pet lion."

Foreman brought back his smile. "He's big enough not to be a pet. He's a serious lion."

"Do you enjoy being champ?" It was as if reporters had the license to ask any stupid question, any whatever. The trouble was that every reason existed for stupid questions. That was when the subject might reveal himself most. "You enjoy being champ?"

"I think about it every night," said George, and added with a rush of compressed love for himself that he could not quite throttle into that soft voice, "I think about it and I thank God, and I thank George Foreman for having true endurance." The inevitable schizophrenia of great athletes was in his voice. Like artists, it is hard for them not to see the finished professional as a separate creature from the child that created him. The child (now grown up) still accompanies the great athlete and is wholly in love with him, an immature love, be it said.

But Sadler, Moore and Saddler had been teaching him to recover from mistakes. So his voice was quiet again and he added quickly, "I don't think I'm superior to any previous champion. It's something I've borrowed, and I'll have to give it up." He turned expansive. "I even love to see young cats looking at me and saying, 'Aaah, I can take him,' and I laugh. I used to be that way. It's all right. That's how it ought to be." He looked so happy with this press conference that he had become a natural force in the room and everyone liked him. He was a contrast to Ali who, when reporters were near, was always intent over the latest injury to his status, and therefore rattled on the media like a tin roof banging in the wind.

The questions continued. Foreman's answers came back with the velvet touch of a well-worn pair of dungarees.

"Do you think it'll be a good fight?"

He thought for a while, as if bringing up to date his latest assessment of Ali. "I think it'll be a rightful fight," he replied with dignity in his soft voice.

"George, you seem relaxed," a reporter said.

Now he was actually merry. The admiration of the men questioning him must have been palpable to his flesh. He looked near to sensuous in his calm. "You guys relax me," he said.

"Why?"

"Because you love me," he said.

Only once did he give a clue to what he might be like in a temper. A reporter asked what he thought of Ali's claim that he was more militant in working for his people than Foreman.

George got stiff. The warp and woof were jamming the thread. His breath was a hint constricted. "There is no suggestion," he said, "that can bother someone who is intelligent. In answer to Ali being more militant...." But his voice rose. "I don't even think about things like that," he answered, cutting off the question. It was obvious that anger was upset in him as easily as tears from a spoiled child. There must be a massive instability to his faculties of rage, explanation in part for his rituals of concentration. Like the man who fears falling from high places, and so fixes his eyes on the floor so that he need never look out a window, Foreman fixed his mind on the absence of disturbance.

"It's hard," said Foreman, "to concentrate and be polite when you're asked questions you've heard before." He subscribed to the principle that repetition kills the soul. "You see, I'm preparing for a fight. That's my interest. I don't want to go in for distraction. I have no quarrel with the press, but I like to keep my mind working on the things I set for it. You see," he said, "you have to be one hundred percent stable in everything you do." And he looked about him as if to indicate he had been talking long enough.

"George, one last question. What's your fight prediction?"

Foreman was home. It was over. "Oh," he said, in no faint parody, "I'm the greatest fighter who ever lived. I'm a wonder. The fifth wonder of the world. I'm even faster than Muhammad Ali. And I'm going to knock him out in three...two...one." He let his eyes laugh. "I'll be doing one hundred percent my best," he said. "That my only prediction."

Now Sadler was asked a few questions. Short, stocky, about 60, with a bald head, a flattened nose and a flat black beret sitting on his bald head, Foreman's manager was rough yet roly-poly, and formidable in his features, for they were a map with renovations--Sadler knew how flesh got bent in the real world.

Asked if there might be last-minute shifts in Foreman's training or strategy, Sadler shrugged at the flatness of the question. "I've been doing this for a gang of years with a gang of champs. We're not worried. We don't have to dip into my intuition at the last instant. Ali can run, but he sure can't run for long. We're confident. There'll be no surprises. This ought to be the easiest fight George is going to have." He nodded to the press and took off with his fighter. "Gangway for all this talent," he cried out.

Something of this was clear in the way he had Foreman work next day. There was no boxing, and no fancy sparring, just the eerie sounds of Foreman's nature music (I Love the Lord--Donny Hathaway) and after 15 or 20 minutes of loosening, brooding and shadowboxing, Foreman went to work on the heavy bag. Sadler stood holding it, a rudimentary exercise usually given to beginners who first must learn to punch into a stationary object. But Foreman and Sadler were practicing something else.

It is punishing for a boxer to have a long workout on a heavy bag. It hurts one's arms, it hurts one's head, it can spring one's knuckles if the hands are not wrapped. Big as a tackling dummy, the bag weighs 80 pounds or more, and when a punch is not thrown properly, the body shudders with the shock. It is like being brought down by an unexpected tackle. One bad punch is enough. Now Foreman began to hit this bag with lefts and rights. He did not throw them slowly, he did not throw them fast, he threw them steadily, putting all of his body into each punch, which came to mean that he was contracting and expelling his force 40 to 50 times a minute, for he threw that many punches, not fast, not slow, but concussive in their power. Sadler leaned forward, braced to the back of the bag, like a man riding a barrel in a storm at sea. He was shaken with every punch. His body quivered from the impact. That hardly mattered; that was part of the show. When the impact of Foreman's fist on the other side of the bag was particularly heavy, he grunted and said "Alors" in admiration.

Fifty punches a minute for a three-minute round. It is 150 punches without rest. Foreman stopped hitting the bag for the 30-second interval Sadler allowed between each round, but Foreman did not stop moving. The bag free, he danced about it, tapping it lightly, moving his feet faster and faster, and, the 30 seconds up, Sadler was back holding the bag and Foreman was pounding punches into it. These were no ordinary swings. Foreman was working for the maximum of power in punch after punch, round after round, 50 or 100 punches in a row without diminishing his power--he would throw 500 or 600 punches in this session, and they were probably the heaviest cumulative series of punches any boxing writer had seen. Each of these blows was enough to smash an average athlete's ribs; anybody with poor stomach muscles would have a broken spine. Foreman hit the heavy bag with the confidence of a man who can pick up a sledge hammer and knock down a tree. The bag developed a hollow as deep as a man's head. As the rounds went by, Foreman's sweat formed a pattern of drops six feet in diameter on the floor: poom! and pom! and boom!...bom!...boom!...went the sounds of his fists into the bag, methodical, rhythmic and just as predictably hypnotic as the great overhead blow of the steam hammer driving a channel of steel into clay. One could feel the strategy. Sooner or later, there must come a time in the fight when Ali would be so tired he could not move, could only use his arms to protect himself. Then he would be like a heavy bag. Then Foreman would treat him like a heavy bag. In the immense and massive confidence of these enormous reverberating blows, his fists would blast through every protection of Ali, smashing at those forearms until they could protect Ali no more. Six hundred blows at the heavy bag; not one false punch. His hands would be ready to beat on every angle of Ali's cowering and self-protective meat, and Sadler, as if reading the psychic temperature of comprehension in the audience, cried out from his wise gargoyle of a mouth, "Don't stand and freeze, Muhammad. Oh, Muhammad, don't you stand and freeze!"

Chapter 6

Ali was peeping in. There was not much Foreman could try that Ali did not see. The first to train each day in this same ring, Ali had all the time he needed to begin his workout at noon, talk to the press, walk the 100 yards back to his villa for a shower, and then come out again to take a squint at George.

If he was more than aware of what Foreman was up to, he seemed nonetheless more interested in talking to the press this week than in working. One day Ali did no more than three rounds of light shadowboxing. Then he hit the heavy bag for a few minutes. Maybe Ali had been hitting heavy bags for too many years, but he did it gingerly, as if he did not wish to jar either his hands or his head. He seemed to be saving his energies for the press. He was always ready for a harangue after a workout, and there was something unchanging in his voice--the same hysteria one first heard ten years before was still present--the jeering agitated voice that always repelled his white listeners, the ugly voice so much at odds with his customary charm. You could feel Ali shift the gears of his psyche as he went into it, as though it were a special transmission to use only for press conferences, or declaiming his poetry, or talking about his present opponent. Then high-pitched hints of fear would come into his voice and large gouts of indignation. Even as what he said became more comical, so he would become more humorless. "Great as I am," he would state, "you have made me the underdog. I, an artist, a creator, am called the underdog when fighting an ox." He would lie kingly in disdain, but it was probably for the castles of Camp, since he knew that everything he said was put immediately into quotation marks. After a while, one could begin to suspect these speeches served as an organ of elimination to vent the boredom of training; he was sending his psychic wastes directly into the press.

On Thursday, therefore, five days before the bout, Ali gave a typical seminar. "This fight is going to be not only the largest boxing eee-vent, but it will prove to be the largest eee-vent in the history of the world. It will be the greatest upset of which anyone has ever heard and to those who are ignorant of boxing, it will seem like the greatest miracle. The boxing public are fools and illiterates to the knowledge and art of boxing. This is because you here who write about boxing are ignorant of what you try to describe. You writers are the real fools and illiterates. I am going to demonstrate so you will have something new for your columns why I cannot be defeated by George Foreman and will create the greatest upset in the history of boxing which you by your ignorance and foolishness as writers have actually created. It is your fault," he said, mouthing his words for absolute enunciation, "that the boxing public knows so little and therefore believes George Foreman is great and I am finished. So I will demonstrate to you by scientific evidence how wrong you are. Angelo," he said to Angelo Dundee, "hand me those records, will you?" and he began to read the list of fighters he had fought. The history of heavyweight boxing over the past 13 years was evoked by the list. His first seven fights were with pugilists never well known, names like Herb Siler, Tony Esperti and Don-nie Freeman. "Nobodies," said Ali in comment. By his eighth fight, he was in with Alonzo Johnson, "a ranked contender," then Alex Miteff, "a ranked contender," Willi Besmanoff, "a ranked contender." Now Ali made a sour face. "At a time when George Foreman was having his first street fights, I was already fighting ranked contenders, boxers of skill, sluggers of repute, dangerous men! Look at the list: Sonny Banks, Billy Daniels, Alejandro Lavorante, Archie Moore! Doug Jones, Henry Cooper, Sonny Liston! I fought them all. Patterson, Chuvalo, Cooper again, Mildenberger, Cleveland Williams--a dangerous heavyweight. Ernie Terrell, twice the size of Foreman--I whupped him. Zora Folley--he saluted the American flag just like Foreman, and I knocked him out cold, a skilled boxer!" The ring apron at Nsele was six feet above the floor (thus another example of technology in Zaïre: A fighter falling through these ropes could fracture his skull on the drop to the floor). Ali sat on this apron, his legs dangling, and Bundini stood in front, as if Ali were sitting on his shoulders. So Bundini's head, rotund as a ball, close cropped and bald in the middle, rose like a protuberance between Ali's legs. While he spoke, Ali put his hands on Bundini's head, as if a crystal ball (a black crystal ball!) were in his palms, and each time he would pat Bundini's bald spot for emphasis, Bundini would glare at the reporters like a witch doctor in stocks. "To the press I say this," said Ali. "I fought twenty ranked contenders before Foreman had his first fight!" Ali sneered. How could the press, in its ignorance, begin to comprehend such boxing culture? "Now, let Angelo read the list of Foreman's fights." As the names went by, Ali did not stop making faces. "Don Waldhelm." "A nobody." "Fred Ashew." "A nobody." "Sylvester Dullaire." "A nobody." "Chuck Wepner." "Nobody." "John Carroll." "Nobody." "Cookie Wallace." "Nobody." "Vernon Clay," said Dundee. Ali hesitated. "Vernon Clay--he might be good." The press laughed. They laughed again at Ali's comment for Gary "Hobo" Wiler--"a tramp." Now came a few more called "Nobody." Ali said in disgust, "If I fought these bums, you people would put me out of the fight game." Abruptly, Bundini shouted, "Next week, we be champ again." "Shut up," said Ali, slapping him on the head, "it's my show."

When the full list of Foreman's fights had been delivered, Ali gave the summation. "Foreman fought a bum a month. In all, George Foreman fought five men with names. He stopped all five, but none took the count of ten. Of the twenty-nine name fighters I met, fifteen stayed down for the count of ten." With all the pride of having worked up a legal brief, well organized and well delivered, Ali now addressed the jury. "I'm a boxing scholar. I'm a boxing scientist--this is scientific evidence. You ignore it at your peril if you forget that I am a dancing master, a great artist."

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," shouted Bundini.

"Shut up," said Ali, slapping Bundini's bald spot. Then he looked hard at the press. "You are ignorant of boxing. You are ignorant men. You are impressed with George Foreman because he is so big and his muscles seem so big."

"They ain't," rumbled Bundini, "they ain't."

"Shut up," said Ali, rapping him.

"Now," said Ali, "I say to you in the press, you are impressed with Foreman because he looks like a big black man and he hits a bag so hard. He cuts off the ring! I am going to tell you that he cannot fight. I will demonstrate that the night of the fight. You will see my ripping left and my shocking right cross. You are going to get the shock of your life. Because now you are impressed with Foreman. But I let you in on a secret. Colored folks scare more white folks than they scare colored folks. I am not afraid of Foreman, and that you will discover."

Next day, however, Ali varied the routine. There was no press conference. Instead, a drama took place in the ring. But then, the fact that Ali was boxing today was in itself an event. In the past week and a half, he had sparred only three times, a light schedule. Of course, Ali had been training for so long his stablemates were growing old with him. Indeed, there was only one left, Roy Williams, the big, dark, gentle fighter who at Deer Lake had acted as if it were sacrilege to strike his employer. Now he was introduced by Bundini to the audience of several hundred Africans: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is Roy Williams, Heavyweight Champ of Pennsylvania. He's taller than George Foreman, he's heavier than George Foreman, his reach is longer, he hits harder and he's more intelligent than George Foreman." Bundini was the father of hyperbole.

His remarks were now translated by a Zaïrois interpreter to the black audience. They giggled and applauded. Ali now led them in a chant, "Ali boma yé, Ali boma yé," which translated as "Kill him, Ali"--an old fight cry when all is said--and Ali took his people through the chant as though they were a high school crowd crying "Slay Sisley High," a testimonial of good spirits to Ali's good spirit. He looked 18 this morning as he got ready to spar with Williams.

They hardly boxed, however. After weeks and months of working together, a fighter and his sparring partner are an old married couple. They make comfortable love. That is all right for old married couples, but the dangers are obvious for a fighter. He gets used to living below the level of risk in the ring. So Ali dispensed today with all idea of boxing. He wrestled through an entire round with Williams. To the beat of Big Black on the floor beating on his conga drum, one sullen throbbing rhythm, Ali grappled up and down the ring. "I'm going to tie George up and walk with him, walk with him," Ali said in a loud throttled voice through his mouthpiece. "Yes, I'm going to walk with him." Occasionally, he would fall back to the ropes and let Williams pound him, then he would wrestle some more. "We're going to walk with him." When the round was over, Ali yelled to the side of the hall, "Archie Moore, number-one spy, you tell George I'm running. I'm going to work him until he's stupid, and then the torture begins. War! War!" Ali shouted, and rushed out, swinging like an archetype of determination, only to go slack and wave to Williams to pound him on the ropes.

"Archie Moore, number-one spy," he called over his shoulder, even as Williams was hitting him.

These days, Moore looked like an orotund black professor who played a saxophone on weekends. His gray mustache curved down on each side of his mouth in a benign Fu Manchu, Dickensian mutton chops were his gray sideburns, a plump and dashing man in late middle age--what a titillation to recognize that he was close to 60 and yet had been in the ring with Ali. Not for nothing had he been the first philosopher of boxing.

Perhaps it was his presence; almost certainly, Moore's presence as the first philosopher of boxing was encouraging Ali to reveal himself as first boxing master of the occult. He proceeded to get himself knocked out. As the second round began, Ali beckoned for Williams to belabor his belly. Obediently, Williams came forward and pounded at Ali's capacity to absorb endless punches to the stomach. "Oooh, it hurts," Ali yelled suddenly. "It huuuuurts!"

Quickly, the Zaïrois interpreter said to the Blacks in the back seats: "Il frappe dur." Ali came off the ropes and wrestled again with Williams. As they walked, Ali made a speech to Moore. "Your man has no class," he cried loud and clear through his rubber mouthpiece, "no footwork. He thinks slow. The turkey is ready for the killing." Moore smiled benignly, as though to reply, "Not saying which turkey."

Ali went back to the ropes. Williams hit him in the stomach. Ali sank to one knee. A trainer, Walter Youngblood, jumped into the ring and counted to eight. Ali got up and staggered about. He and Williams now looked about equal to two sumo wrestlers with sand in their eyes. "He goin' for my gut," grunted Ali in a sad plantation voice and on the first punch to the stomach went down again. "The man been knocked down twice," cried Ali, and leaped to his feet. Sparring continued. So did more knockdowns. Each was occasion for a speech. After the fourth--or was it the fifth?--knockdown, Ali stayed down. To everybody's surprise, Youngblood counted to ten. The mood was awful. It was as if somebody had told an absolutely filthy joke that absolutely didn't work. A devil's fart. The air was ruined. From the floor, Ali said: "Well, the Lip has been shut. He's had his mouth shut for the last time. George Foreman is the greatest. Too strong," said Ali sadly. "He hit too hard. Now a defeated Ali leaves the ring. George Foreman is undisputed champion of the world."

The Africans in the rear of the hall were stricken. A silence, not without dread, was rising from them. Nobody believed Ali had been hurt--they were afraid of something worse. By way of this charade, Ali had given a tilt to the field of forces surrounding the fight. As a dead man had he spoken from the floor. Like a member of a chorus had he offered the comment: "He's had his mouth shut for the last time." Such words could excite the forces of the dead. There was hardly a Zaïrois in the audience who did not know that Mobutu, good president, was not only a dictator but a doctor of the occult, with a pygmy for his own private conjurer (distinguished must that pygmy be!). If, however, Mobutu had his féticheur, who among these Africans would not believe Ali was also a powerful voice in the fearful and magical zone between the living and the dead? The hush that fell on the crowd (like the silence in a forest after the echo of a rifle shot) was at the unmitigated horror of what Ali might be doing if he did not know what he had done. A man should not offer his limbs to sorcery any more than he would encourage his soul to slip into the mists. When every word reverberates to the end of the earth, a weak word can bring back an echo to punish the man who spoke, and a weak action guarantee defeat. A man must not play with his dignity, therefore, unless he is master of the arts of transformation. Did Ali really know what he was doing? Was he trying to burn out some weakness in his soul and thereby daring disaster, or was he purposefully arousing those forces working for the victory of Foreman in order to weaken and disturb them? Who could know?

Ali now leaped to his feet and reassured the crowd. "Tell them," he said to the interpreter, "that this is only a treat. The people will not see it ever in real life. Tell the people to cheer up. No man is strong enough or great enough to knock me out. Ali boma yé," he said. "Tell them to boma yé." The translation came. Wan cheers. The shock would demand its time for recovery. The Africans were numb. Do not try to think until thought returns, their mood may have said. Nonetheless, they cried out "Boma yé." Who had ever heard such confidence as one heard from the man in the ring? The laws of highest magic might be in his employ.

"Jive suckers," said Ali, crooning to the press, "hear what I say. When you see me rapping like this, please don't bet against me."

Big Black tapped the conga drum and one had time to think of Ali's dream announced the month before that Foreman's eye would cut, and time again to think of Bundini's boast that he was working the magic to make a cut. Then the cut came. A week too soon. If Ali and Bundini had been employing their powers, such powers proved misapplied. Were they now being laid on closer? Much to think about in the week of this fight.

Chapter 7

N'golo was a Congolese word for force, for vital force, and so could be applied to ego, status, strength or libido. Ali was one artist who felt deprived of his rightful share. For ten years, the press had been cheating Ali of n'golo. No matter if he had as much as anyone in America, he wanted more. It is not the n'golo you have but the n'golo you are denied that excites the harshest hysterias of the soul. So he could not want to lost this fight. If he did, they would write up the epitaphs for his career, and the dead have no n'golo. The dead are dying of thirst--so goes an old African saying. The dead cannot dwell in the n'golo that arrives with the first swallow of palm wine, whiskey or beer.

Ali's relations with the press were now nonstop. Never did a fighter seem to have so much respect for the magical power of the written word. His villa with the green Borox furniture was open to many a reporter, and in the afternoons at Nsele, after training was over for both men, Foreman would ride back to the Inter-Continental and Ali would lie about in his living room, legs extended from a low armchair, his valuable arms folded on his chest, and answer more questions from the reporters sitting with him, his iron endurance for conversation never in question. He ran a marathon every day with his tongue, strong, sure and never stumbling over anyone else's thought. If a question were asked for which he had no reply, he would not hear it. Majestic was the snobbery of his ear.

He was, of course, friendly to black correspondents--indeed, interviewing Muhammad was often their apprenticeship. With no other famous black man were they likely to receive as much courtesy: Ali answered questions in full. He answered them to microphones for future radio programs and to microphones for reporters with tape recorders, he slowed up his speech for journalists taking notes, and was relaxed if one did not take a note. He was weaving a mighty bag of burlap large enough to cover the earth. When it was finished, he would put the world in that bag and tote it on his shoulder.

So in the easy hours of the afternoon that followed his knockout in training by Williams, he returned to his favorite scenario and described in detail how he would vanquish Foreman. "Just another gym workout," he said often. "The fight will be easy. This man does not want to take a head whipping like Frazier just to beat you. He's not as tough as Frazier. He's soft and spoiled."

A young Black named Sam Clark working for BAN (Black Audio Network) which offered black news to black-oriented stations, now asked a good question. "If you were to advise Foreman how to fight you, what would you tell him?"

"If I," said Ali, "give the enemy some of my knowledge, then maybe he'll have sense to lay back and wait. Of course, I will even convert that to my advantage. I'm versatile. All the same, the Mummy's best bet is to stand in the center of the ring and wait for me to come in." With hardly a pause, he added, "Did you hear that death music he plays? He is a mummy. And," said Ali, chuckling, "I'm going to be the Mummy's Curse!"

Topics went by. He spoke of Africans learning the technology of the world. "Usually you feel safer if you see a white face flying a plane," he said. "It just seems like a white man should fix the jet engine. Yet here they are all black. That impressed me very much," he said. Yet when he was most sincere, so could he mean it least. In a similar conversation with friends, he had winked and added, "Of course, I never believe the bullshit that the pilots is all black. I keep looking for the secret closet where they hide the white man until the trouble starts."

"Are you going to try to hit Foreman's cut?" asked another black reporter.

"I'm going to hit around the cut," answered Ali. "I'm going to beat him good," he said out of the bottomless funds of his indignation, "and I want the credit for winning. I don't want to give it to the cut." He made a point of saying, "After I win, they talk about me fighting for ten million dollars."

"If they do, will you still retire?"

"I don't know. I'm going home with no more than one million, three hundred thousand. Half of the five million goes to the Government, then half a million for expenses and one third to my manager. I'm left with one million three. That ain't no money. You give me one hundred million today, I'll be broke tomorrow. We got a hospital we're working on, a black hospital being built in Chicago, costs fifty million dollars. My money goes into causes. If I win this fight, I'll be traveling everywhere." Now the separate conversations had come together into one and he talked with the same muscular love of rhetoric that a politician has when he is giving his campaign speech and knows it is a good one. So Ali was at last in full oration. "If I win," said Ali, "I'm going to be the black Kissinger. It's full of glory, but it's tiresome. Every time I visit a place, I got to go by the schools, by the old-folks' home. I'm not just a fighter, I'm a world figure to these people"--it was as if he had to keep saying it, the way Foreman had to hit a heavy bag, as if the sinews of his will would steel by the force of this oral conditioning. The question was forever glowing. Was he still a kid from Louisville talking, talking, through the afternoon and, for all anyone knew, through the night, talking through the ungovernable anxiety of a youth seized by history to enter the dynamos of history? Or was he in full process of becoming that most unique phenomenon, a 20th Century prophet, and so the anger of his voice was that he could not teach, could not convince, could not convince? Had any of the reporters made a face when he spoke of himself as the black Kissinger? Now, as if to forestall derision, he clowned. "When you visit all these folks in all these strange lands, you got to eat. That's not so easy. In America, they offer you a drink. A fighter can turn down a drink. Here, you got to eat. They're hurt if you don't eat. It's an honor to be loved by so many people, but it's hell, man."

He could not, however, stay away from his mission. "Nobody is ready to know what I'm up to," he said. "People in America just find it hard to take a fighter seriously. They don't know that I'm using boxing for the sake of getting over certain points you couldn't get over without it. Being a fighter enables me to attain certain ends. I'm not doing this," he muttered at last, "for the glory of fighting, but to change a lot of things."

It was clear what he was saying. One had only to open to the possibility that Ali had a large mind rather than a repetitive mind and was ready for oncoming chaos, ready for the disruptions and volcanic dislocations that would boil through the world in these approaching years of pollution, malfunction and economic disaster. Who knew what divisions the world would yet see? Here was this tall pale Negro from Louisville, born in psychic slavery to be one of a hundred species of flunky to some bourbon-minted redolent white voice, and instead had a vision of himself as a world leader, president not of America, or even of a United Africa, but leader of half the Western world, President of the Black and Arab republics. Had Muhammad Mobutu Napoleon Ali come even for an instant face to face with the differences between Islam and Bantu?

On the shock of this recognition, that Ali's seriousness might as well be rooted in the molten iron of the earth, and his craziness not necessarily so crazy, Norman came near for a word. "I know what you're saying," he said to Muhammad.

"I'm serious," said Ali.

"Yes, I know you are." He thought of Foreman's herculean training and Ali's contempt. "You better win this fight," he heard himself stating, "because if you don't, you are going to be a professor who gives lectures, that's all."

"I'm going to win."

"You might have to fight like you never fought before. Foreman has become a sophisticated fighter."

"Yes," said Ali, in a quiet voice, one line for one interviewer at last. "Yes," said Ali, "I know that, too." He added with a wry small touch, "George is much improved."

Talk went on, endless people came and went. Ali ate while photographers photographed his open mouth. Not since Louis XV sat on his chaise percée and delivered the royal stool to the royal pot to be instantly carried away by the royal chamberlain had a man been so observed. No other politician or leader of the world would leave himself so open to scrutiny. What a limitless curiosity could Ali generate.

On the strength of his own curiosity about the qualities of Ali's condition, Norman asked if he could run with him tonight. Inquiring, he learned that Ali would be going to bed at nine and setting the alarm for three. Norman would have to be there then.

"You can't keep up with me," said Ali.

"I don't intend to try. I just want to run a little."

"Show up," said Ali with a shrug.

Chapter 8

He could go back to the Inter-Continental, eat early and try to get some sleep before the run, but sleep was not likely between eight in the evening and midnight--besides, there was no question of keeping up with Muhammad. His journalistic conscience, however, was telling him that the better his own condition, the more he would be able to discern about Ali's. What a pity he had not been jogging since the summer. Up in Maine he had done two miles every other day, but jogging was one discipline he could not maintain. At 5'8" and 170 pounds, Norman was simply too heavy to enjoy running. He could jog at a reasonable gait--15 minutes for two miles was good time for him--and, if pushed, he could jog three miles, conceivably four, but he hated it. Jogging disturbed the character of one's day. He did not feel refreshed afterward but overstimulated and irritable. The truth of jogging was it only felt good when you stopped. And he would remind himself that with the exception of Erich Segal and George Gilder, he had never heard of a writer who liked to run--who wanted the brilliance of the mind discharged through the ankles?

Back in Kinshasa, he decided to have drinks and a good meal, after all, and during dinner there was amusement at the thought he would accompany Ali on the road. "You know you have to do it," said John Vinocur. "I know," said Mailer, in full gloom. "Ali isn't expecting me to show up, but he won't forgive it if I don't."

"That's right, that's right," said Vinocur. "I offered to run with Foreman once, and when I didn't get there, he never let me forget. He brings it up every time I see him."

"Plimpton, you've got to come with me," said Mailer.

George Plimpton wasn't sure he would. Mailer knew he wouldn't. Plimpton had too much to lose. With his tall thin track man's body and his quietly buried competitive passion (large as Vesuvius, if smokeless) Plimpton would have to keep on some kind of close terms with Ali or pay a disproportionate price in humiliation. Whereas it was easy for Mailer. If he didn't get a leg cramp in the first 500 yards, he could pick the half-mile mark to take his bow. He just hoped Ali didn't run too fast. That would be jogger's hell. At the thought of being wiped out from the start, a little bile rose from the drinks and the rich food. It was now only nine in the evening, but his stomach felt as if the forces of digestion were in stupor.

A little later, they all went to a casino and played blackjack. The thought that he would run with Ali was beginning to offer its agreeable tension, a sensation equal to the way he felt when he was going to win at blackjack. Gambling had its own libido. Just as one was ill-advised to make love when libido was dim, so was that a way to lose money in gambling. Whenever he felt empty, he dropped his stake; when full of himself, he often won. Every gambler was familiar with the principle--it was visceral, after all--few failed to disobey it in one fashion or another. But never had he felt its application so powerfully as in Africa. It was almost as if one could make a living in Kinshasa provided one gambled only when one's blood was up.

Naturally, he drank a little. He had friends at this casino. The manager was a young American not yet 21 and in love with the taste of his life in Africa; the croupiers and dealers were English girls, sharp as birds in their accents, the keen vibrating intelligence of the London working class in their quick voices. He was getting mal d'Afrique, the sweet infection that forbids you to get out of Africa (in your mind, at least) once you have visited it. What intoxication to gamble and know in advance whether one would win or lose. Even orange juice and vodka gave its good thump. He was loving everything about the evening but the sluggishness of his digestion. Pocketing his money, he went back to the hotel to put on a T-shirt and exercise pants.

The long drive to Nsele, 45 minutes and more, confirmed him in the first flaw of his life. He was a monster of bad timing. Why had he not paced himself so that the glow he was feeling at the casino would be with him when he ran? Now his n'golo was fading with the drinks. By the time they hit the road, he would have to work off the beginnings of a hangover. And his stomach, that invariably reliable organ, had this night simply not digested his food. My God. A thick fish chowder and a pepper steak were floating down the Congo of his inner universe like pads of hyacinth in the clotted Zaïre. My God, add ice cream, rum and tonic, vodka and orange juice. Still, he did not feel sick, just turgid--a normal state for his 51 years, his heavy meals and this hour.

It was close to three in the morning as he reached Nsele, and he would have preferred to go to sleep. He was even ready to consider turning around without seeing Ali. By now, however, that was hardly a serious alternative.

But the villa was dark. Maybe Ali would not run tonight. A couple of soldiers, polite but somewhat confused by the sight of visitors at this hour--Dick Drew, a cameraman from the A.P., was also waiting--asked them not to knock on the door. So they all sat in the dark for a quarter of an hour, and then a few lights went on in the villa and Howard Bingham, a young Black from Sports Illustrated who had virtually become Ali's private photographer, came by and brought them in. Ali was still sleepy. He had gone to bed at nine and just awakened, the longest stretch of sleep he would take over 24 hours. Later, after running, he might nap again, but sleep never seemed as pervasive a concern to him as to other fighters.

"You did come," he said with surprise, and then seemed to pay no further attention. He was doing some stretching exercises to wake up and had the surliness of any infantryman awakened in the middle of the night. They would make four for the run. Bingham was coming along and Pat Patterson, Ali's personal bodyguard, a Chicago cop, no darker than Ali, with the solemn even stolid expression of a man who has gone through a number of doors in his life without the absolute certainty he would walk out again. By day, he always carried a pistol; by night--what a pity not to remember if he had strapped a holster over his running gear.

Ali looked sour. The expression on his face was not difficult to read. Who wanted to run? He gave an order to one of the two vans that would accompany them, telling it to be certain to stay well behind, so that its fumes would not bother them. The other had Dick Drew inside to take photographs and it was allowed to stay even.

Norman may have hoped the fighter would want to walk for a while, but Ali right away took off at a slow jogger's gait and the others fell in. They trotted across the grass of the villas set parallel to the river and, when they came to the end of the block, took a turn toward the highway two miles off and kept trotting at the same slow pace past smaller villas, a species of motel row where some of the press was housed. It was like running in the middle of the night across suburban lawns on some undistinguished back street of Beverly Hills, an occasional light still on in a room here and there, one's eyes straining to pick up the driveways one would have to cross, the curbings and the places where little wire fences protected the plantings. Ali served as a guide, pointing to holes in the ground, sudden dips and slippery spots where hoses had watered the grass too long. And they went on at the same slow steady pace. It was, in fact, surprisingly slow, certainly no faster than his own rate when jogging by himself, and Norman felt, everything considered, in fairly good condition. His stomach was already a full soul of heated lead, and it was not going to get better, but to his surprise, it was not getting worse--it seemed to have settled in as one of the firm discontents he would have on this run.

After they had gone perhaps half a mile, Ali said, "You're in pretty good shape, Norm."

"Not good enough to talk," he answered through closed teeth.

Jogging was an act of balance. You had to get to the point where your legs and your lungs worked together in some equal state of exertion. They could each be close to overexertion, but if one was not more fatigued than the other, they offered some searing and hard-working equivalent of the tireless; to wit, you would feel no more abominable after a mile than after the first half mile. The trick was to reach this disagreeable state without having to favor the legs or the lungs. Then, if no hills were there to squander one's small reserve, and one did not lose stride or have to stop, if one did not stumble and one did not speak, that steady progressive churning could continue, thoroughgoing, raw to one's middle-aged insides, but virtuous--one felt like the motors of an old freighter.

After a few weeks of steady running, one could take the engines of the old freighter through longer and longer storms, one could manage hills, one could even talk (and how well one could ski later in the year with the legs built up!) but now his body had been docked for two months and he was performing a new kind of balancing act. It was not only his legs and his lungs but the gauges on the bile in his stomach he had to watch and the pressure on his heart. If he had always run before breakfast, and so was unaccustomed to jogging with food in his stomach, he was having an education in that phenomenon now. It was a third factor, hot, bilious, and working like a bellows in reverse, for it kept pushing up a pressure on his lungs, yet. to his surprise, not nauseating, just heavy pressure, so that he knew he could not keep up with a faster pace more than a little before his stomach would be engorging his heart and both pounding in his ears.

Still, they had covered what must be three quarters of a mile by now and were long past the villas and formal arrangement of Nsele's buildings, and just padded along on a back road with the surprisingly disagreeable exhaust of the lead van choking their nostrils. What a surprising impediment to add to the run--it had to be worse than cigar smoke at ringside, and to this pollution of air came an intermittent freaking of a photographic flash pack from Dick Drew's camera.

Still, he had acquired his balance. What with food, drink and lack of condition, it was one of the most unpleasant runs he had ever made, certainly the most caustic in its preview of hell, but he had found his balance. He kept on running with the others, the gait most happily not stepped up, and came to recognize after a while that Ali was not a bad guy to run with. He kept making encouraging comments: "Hey, you're doin' fine, Norm," and, a little later, "Say, you're in good condition," to which the physical specimen could only grunt for reply--mainly it was the continuing sense of a perfect pace to Ali's legs that helped the run, as if his own legs were somehow being tuned to pick their own best rate, yes, something easy and uncompetitive came off Ali's good stride.

"How old are you, Norm?"

He answered in two bursts, "Fifty--one."

"Say, when I'm fifty-one, I won't be strong enough to run to the corner," said Ali. "I'm feeling tired already."

They jogged. Wherever possible, Ali ran on the turf. Patterson, used to pounding concrete, ran on the paving of the road and Bingham alternated. Norman stayed on the turf. It was generally easier on the feet and harder on the lungs to jog over grass, and his lungs with the pressure of his stomach were more in need than his legs, but he could not keep the feel of Ali's easy rhythm when he left the turf.

On they went. Now they were passing through a small forest, and by his measure, they had come a little more than a mile. He was beginning to think it was remotely possible that he could cover the entire distance--was it scheduled for three miles?--but even as he was contemplating the heroics of this horror, they entered on a long slow grade uphill, and something in the added burden told him that he was not going to make it without a breakdown in the engines. His heart had now made him prisoner--it sat in an iron collar around his neck, and as they chugged up the long slow grade, the collar tightened every 50 feet. He was breathing now as noisily as he had ever breathed and recognized that he was near to the end of his run.

"Champ," he said, "I'm going--to stop--pretty soon," a speech in three throttled bursts. "I'm just--holding you--back," and realized it was true--except how could Ali put up with too slow a gait when the fight was just four nights away? "Anyway--have good run," he said, like the man in the water waving in martyred serenity at the companions to whom he has just offered his spot in the lifeboat. "I'll see you--back there."

And he returned alone. Later, when he measured it by the indicator on his car, he found that he had run with them for a mile and a half, not too unrespectable. And enjoyed his walk. Actually, he was a little surprised at how slow the pace had been. It seemed unfitting that he had been able to keep up as long as he had. If Ali were going to run for 15 rounds, there should, he thought, be something more kin to a restlessness in his legs tonight. Of course, Ali was not wearing sneakers but heavy working shoes. Still. The leisureliness of the pace made him uneasy.

There is no need to follow Norman back on his walk, except that we are about to discover a secret to the motivation of writers who achieve a bit of prominence in their own time. As the road continued through the forest, dark as Africa is ever supposed to be, he was enjoying for the first time a sense of what it meant to be out alone in the African night, and occasionally, when the forest thinned, knew what it might also mean to be alone under an African sky. The clarity of the stars! The size of the bowl of heaven! Truth, thoughts after running are dependably banal. Yet what a teeming of cricket life and locusts in the brush about him, that nervous endless vibration seeming to shake the earth. It was one of the final questions: Were insects a part of the cosmos or the termites of the cosmos?

Just then, he heard a lion roar. It was no small sound, more like thunder, and it opened an unfolding wave of wrath across the sky and through the fields. Did the sound originate a mile away, or less? He had come out of the forest, but the lights of Nsele were also close to a mile away, and there was all of this deserted road between. He could never reach those lights before the lion would run him down. Then his next thought was that the lion, if it chose, could certainly race up on him silently, might even be on his way now.

Once, sailing in Provincetown harbor on nothing larger than a Sailfish, he had passed a whale. Or rather, the whale passed him. A frolicsome whale that cavorted in its passage and was later to charm half the terrified boats in its path. He had recognized at the moment that there was nothing he could ever do if the whale chose to swallow him with his boat. Yet he felt singularly cool. What a perfect way to go. His place in American literature would be forever secure. They would seat him at Melville's feet. Melville and Mailer, ah, the consanguinity of the Ms and the Ls--how critics would love Mailer's now discovered preoccupations (see Croft on the mountain in The Naked and the Dead) with Ahab's Moby Dick.

Something of this tonic sang-froid was with him now. To be eaten by a lion on the banks of the Congo--who could fail to notice that it was Hemingway's own lion waiting down these years for the flesh of Ernest until an appropriate substitute had at last arrived?

They laughed back at Ali's villa when he told them about the roar. He had forgotten Nsele had a zoo and lions might as well be in it.

Ali looked tired. He had run another mile and a half, he would estimate, three miles in all, and had sprinted uphill for the last part, throwing punches, running backward, then all-out forward again, and was very tired now. "That running," he said, "takes more out of me than anything I ever felt in the ring. It's even worse than the fifteenth round, and that's as bad as you can get."

Like an overheated animal, Ali was lying on the steps of his villa, cooling his body against the stone, and Bingham, Patterson and Ali did not talk too much for a while. It was only four a.m., but the horizon was beginning to lighten--the dawn seemed to come in for hours across the African sky. Predictably, Ali was the one to pick up conversation again. His voice was surprisingly hoarse: He sounded as if a cold were coming on. That was all he needed--a chest cold for the fight! Pat Patterson, hovering over him like a truculent nurse, brought a bottle of orange juice and scolded him for lying on the stone, but Ali did not move. He was feeling sad from the rigors of the workout and talked of Jurgen Blin and Blue Lewis and Rudi Lubbers. "Nobody ever heard of them," he said, "until they fought me. But they trained to fight me and fought their best fights. They were good fighters against me," he said almost with wonder. (Wonder was as close as he ever came to doubt.) "Look at Bugner--his greatest fight was against me. Of course, I didn't train for any of them the way they trained for me. I couldn't. If I trained for every fight the way I did for this, I'd be dead. I'm glad I left myself a little bit for this one." He shook his head in a blank sort of self-pity, as if some joy that once resided in his juices had been expended forever. "I'm going to get one million three hundred thousand for this fight, but I would give one million of that up gladly if I could just buy my present condition without the work."

Yet his present condition was so full of exhaustion. As if anxiety about the fight stirred in the hour before dawn, a litany began. It was the same speech he had made a day and a half ago to the press, the speech in which he listed each of Foreman's opponents and counted the number who were nobodies and the inability of Foreman to knock his opponents out cold. Patterson and Bingham nodded in the sad patience of men who worked for him and loved him and put up with this phase of his conditioning while Ali gave the speech the way a patient with a threatening heart will take a nitroglycerin pill. And Norman, with his food still undigested and his bowels hard packed from the shock of the jogging, was blank himself when he tried to think of amusing conversation to divert Ali's mood. It proved up to Ali to change the tone and by the dawn he did. After showering and dressing, he showed a magic trick and then another, long cylinders popping out of his hands to become handkerchiefs, and, indeed, next day at training, still haranguing the press, Ali ended by saying, "Foreman will never catch me. When I meet George Foreman, I'll be free as a bird," and he held up his hand and opened it. A bird flew out. To the vast delight of the press. Ali was writing the last line of their daily piece from Kinshasa today. Nor did it take them long to discover the source. Bundini had captured the bird earlier in the day and slipped it to Ali when the time came. Invaluable Bundini, improvisatory Bundini.

Still, as Norman drove home to the Inter-Continental and breakfast, he measured Ali's run. He had finished by the Chinese pagoda. That was two and a half miles, not three! Ali had run very slowly for the first mile and a half. With an empty stomach and the fair condition of the summer in Maine, he thought he could probably have kept up with Ali until the sprint at the end. It was no way for a man fighting for a heavyweight title to do roadwork. Norman did not see how Ali could win. Defeat was in that air Ali alone seemed to refuse to breathe.

Chapter 9

Foreman had a sparring partner named Elmo Henderson, once Heavyweight Champion of Texas and not too recently released from Nevada State Hospital for the insane. Elmo was tall and thin and did not look like a fighter nearly so much as like some kind of lean wanderer in motley--the long stride of a medieval fool was in his step, and he would walk through the lobby and the patio and around the pool of the Inter-Continental with his eyes in the air, as if he sought a vanishing point six feet above the horizon. It gave an envelope to his presence, even a suggestion of silence, but this was paradoxical, for Elmo Henderson never stopped talking. It was as if Elmo were Foreman's unheard voice, and the voice was loud and demented. Elmo had learned a Franco-African word, oyé (from the French oyez--now hear this), and at whatever hour of the day he went through the lobby or encountered you at Nsele, he was passing throughthe midst of a continuing inner vision. The voice he heard came from far off and out of a deep source of power--Elmo vibrated to the hum of that distant dynamo. "Oyé," he cried to the world at large in an unbelievably loud and booming voice. "Oyé ... oyé ..." each cry coming in its interval, sometimes so far apart as every ten or fifteen seconds, but penetrating as a dinner gong to all the corners of the hotel. Up in the corridors, and from the elevator when the doors opened, out on the taxi entrance of the Inter-Continental and back at the pool, through the buffet tables of the open-air restaurant and all night at the bar, Henderson's cry would come, sometimes in one's ear, sometimes across a floor, "Oyé. ..." He would stop now and again, as if the signal he transmitted had failed to reach him, then, sudden as the resumption of the chorus of a field of crickets, his voice would twang through the halls. "Oyé...Foreman boma yé...." Hear this ... Foreman will kill him. "Oyé...Foreman boma yé." It had been an expropriation of Ali boma yé but was no longer a cry to destroy Sisley High; rather, a call to religious war, and every time Elmo picked up that chant again, one felt a measure of Foreman's blood beating through the day, pounding through the night in rhythm with the violence that waits through the loneliness of every psychotic aisle. Henderson walked past children and old men, he moved by African princes and the officers of corporations here for copper, diamonds, cobalt; his voice took into itself the force of every impulse he passed--wealth and violence and imitation and innocence were all in his voice--and he added to it the intensity of his own force, until the sound twanged in one's ear like the boom of a cricket grown large as an elephant. "Oyé...Foreman boma yé..." and Foreman, whether near Henderson or 100 yards away, seemed confirmed in his serenity by the power of the other's voice, as if Elmo were the night guard making his rounds and all was well precisely because all was unwell.

"Oyé ... Foreman boma yé," Henderson would cry on his tour through the hotel, and once in a while, his face lighting up, as if he had just encountered a variation of the most liberating and prophetic value, he would add, "The flea goes in three, Muhammad Ali," and he would stick three fingers in the air. "Oyé," shouted Henderson one morning in the back of Bill Caplan's ear, and the publicity man for Foreman's camp replied sadly, "Oy, vay! Oy, vay!" Once Elmo spoke a full sentence. "We're going to get Ali," he said to the lobby at large, "like a Rolls-Royce when we job it up. Oyé...Foreman boma yé."

•

Downstairs, in the lobby, on Sunday morning, Bundini was having a war with Elmo. "Oyé ... Foreman boma yé ..." had been dominating the lobby. So Bundini was in the lists for his boss. A crowd had most certainly gathered. Bundini and Elmo stood three feet apart, sure measure that it was unwise to come nose to nose. Each man kept talking all the while. It was not a flurry but a melee of sound. "Your fighter is untutored, can't move his head. My man is going to stick him till he's bleeding and dead," shouted Bundini. His logic slammed the message from rhyme to rhyme. "God is going to leave him infirm, walking like a worm, feed him a cabbage leaf, sucker!"

Elmo, unperturbed, held up three fingers. Now he kept them in Bundini's face, as though to spear a thrice-noxious orifice (two nostrils and a big mouth). "The flea," said Elmo in solemnity, "goes in three. Muhammad Ali."

In the circle about the two men, nearly everybody was working for Foreman. So they laughed. "Foreman boma yé, Foreman boma yé, Foreman boma yé," Henderson kept repeating to everything Bundini said but at a volume just larger than the voice that shouted back. Bundini's voice grew hoarse, his language was obscured. Much pressure was certainly upon him. Back of Henderson, six feet back, his head in a book, was Foreman. His huge police dog, Daggo, raised in his own kennels, stood next to him. On every side were sparring partners and members of the retinue. Each time Bundini started to speak, they would shout the man down. "Bullshit," they would cry out. Then Henderson's tongue would snake whip: "The flea in three."

It was getting too expensive for Bundini to pause. "Ali, the flea, he dead in three. Oyé!" boomed Elmo, "oyé!"

"Oyé? You call that a sound?" roared Bundini, his eyes bulging out of his head. Those eyes looked ready to be extruded from the skull. Plop would they fall to the floor.

"Foreman hits Ali and Muhammad is dead," said Elmo.

"He'll never hit him. My man will dance. My man knows how to prance. He's a genius, he's a god, your man's a pug. He'll be looking for the rug. We'll let him squirm," said Bundini, his voice getting thinner. "Ali boma yé." Catcalls and whistles.

"The flea in three," Elmo said solemnly.

"Put your money where your mouth is," Bundini screamed, whipping the last of his vocal cords. "I got a man in my corner ready to fight. I'm ready to go with him. Who do you have? Your man's got a dog for a pet and a nut for a companion."

Foreman looked up for the first time and the dog looked up with him. Then Foreman put his face back resolutely in the book. A wave came off. It was succinct. "Kidding is kidding, but get your ass off my pillow," said the look he gave Bundini.

There were too many people working for Foreman and something tireless in the voice of Elmo Henderson. Maybe he was attached to that invisible line which runs on high voltage from every mental asylum to every bank and government. Maybe that is the voltage of them all. Bundini, scolding, reviling, jeering, bruising the air with his eyeballs, started heading, nonetheless, for the elevator. He was finally extracting himself from the wrong turf. It must have felt like an electric carpet. Elmo stuck with him, the sparring partners stuck, they all stuck with him. About ten large black men piled into the elevator with Bundini. His voice slammed shut in the clanging of the gate. Images of mayhem arose in the mind--shreds and splinters of Bundini. Whose imagination was adequate to the dialog in the elevator? Did they laugh at the put-on in the lobby or did they now exhort Bundini to contemplate their collective dick?

Still, in the evening, there he was, there was Bundini, eating in the restaurant on the open-air patio with his wife, Shere, a white girl from Texas with red hair, green eyes, a stubborn upturned nose and a down-home accent. Shere (pronounced Sherry or Cherie) looked as American as the boy with freckles whose face is on the box of breakfast food; why, Shere looked even more American than Marilyn Chambers. Bundini kept calling her Mother. She called him by his first name, Drew, for Drew "Bundini" Brown.

Mailer was confused. The last time he had seen much of Bundini was years ago, and Bundini was married then to a Jewish girl. His son, he was proud to tell everyone, had been bar mitzvah. A tall, good-looking young black boy with curly Jewish hair, Drew Brown, Jr., used to greet Bundini's Jewish friends with "Sholem, aleychem sholem." To black friends, the boy would remark, "Start running, motherfucker."

Once, almost ten years ago, in Las Vegas for the Ali-Patterson fight, Mailer and Bundini had done some drinking together. At the time, Bundini had been fired by Ali for some undescribed misdeed. Since he was capable of buying a gross of athletic supporters, muddling them in garlic, onion and cream cheese, bleaching them in vinegar and selling them in leather shops for $25 a rag as bona-fide used Ali jockstraps, who could ever find out why Bundini had been ousted? At any rate, he was at this time trying to reach Patterson before the fight. It was obvious he still had much feeling for Ali, but it is a firm rule of hustling that if your man has chosen to reject you, you must work against him. So Bundini kept looking for a connection who could lead him to Patterson. He knew, after all, every one of Ali's weaknesses. Patterson, however, would not let Bundini near. Patterson did not trust him. Bundini, with the aid of George Plimpton, therefore wrote a neat piece for Life that gave open advice on the best tactics available to Patterson. Since Floyd's back went out in the second round and he fought bravely but hopelessly in all the pain of a slipped disk and a muscle spasm, a wholly disappointing and miserable fight, Bundini's tip--that Patterson should crowd Ali as in a street fight: just what Frazier was to do six years later--proved academic. But then, Bundini was invariably down on his luck that year--there was nobody to whom he didn't owe money and the crap tables never took care of his debts; to the contrary.

In compensation, Bundini was never more likable. Bundini could neither read nor write--so he claimed--but he could speak with any street poet. It was rare for him to make a remark void of metaphor. On the Ali-Foreman fight, he would comment to the press, "God set it up this way. This is the closing of the book. The king gained his throne by killing a monster and the king will regain his throne by killing a bigger monster. This is the closing of the book." Of training, he would propose, "You got to get die hard-on, and then you got to keep it. You want to be careful not to lose the hard-on and cautious not to come." Of George Plimpton, who lent him money in the period when he was banished from Ali's camp, Bundini would say, "I'll always be loyal to George, because he took care of me when my lips was chapped."

Norman and Bundini might have become friends--the writer respected the style with which Bundini could lose money. At a time when dragons were preparing to break his legs, Bundini would drop his last $400 on eight rolls of the dice and walk away with a sad wise smile. Like most hustlers, he was sweet. He could cry like a child--indeed he cried whenever Ali boxed with beauty, cried at the bounty of the Lord to provide such athletic bliss--and his eyes beamed with love at any remark by Norman that excited his own powers of metaphor. Then his big round face would show the simple happiness of Aunt Jemima, his big husky voice would croon in admiration at such wonders of wisdom. That was half of him: Bundini was just as proud of his other soul. If he was all emotion, he was hustler's ice; if he had class, he could show no class; he'd give his life for a friend and you might believe him, but "he would," said a critic, "take the dimes off a dead man's eyes and put nickels back." He had a build like nobody else. Over six feet, with his big crystal ball for a head, he had small shoulders, a small protruding stomach that seemed to center its little melon on his diaphragm, and spindles for legs--it was the body of a space man who grew up in a capsule. Yet he had fought in Navy competitions as an adolescent, and even now nobody would take him on for too little (except Ali, of course, who slapped away at will, as though dealing with an unregenerate child). Bundini was as plain as a mouthful of gold teeth and handsome as black velvet; if he called his young wife Mother, he had been about as fatherly in his day as any other player--a magazine story once spoke of his desire to be a "marketable pimp" but then he sold interviews of himself that told it all, and gave metaphors away for nothing; he could not spell a word and had a dozen movie scripts he was trying to sell; his own, he claimed. Recall us to "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," Bundini was the walking definition of the idea that each human is born with two souls--two distinct persons to inhabit each body. If Africans did not have the concept, one would have to invent it. What a clash of nommo and n'golo! He was all spirit and all prick. And the two never came together.

Or almost never. On this night, eating dinner with his wife, Bundini let Norman in on one fine confidence. "I'm sharpening the spike. I'm going to give Foreman's people the needle tonight."

"How do you do that?"

"Oh, I'm going to go up to them and put money down on Ali. But I won't ask for three to one. I'm going to put two thousand dollars against their three. That got to worry them. They be wondering where I get the confidence. It go right back to George Foreman."

"You have a real two thousand dollars?"

"Better be real!"

They laughed.

And so in the middle of the same lobby where Bundini had been outshouted by Elmo Henderson on Sunday morning, Bundini returned to joust on Sunday night. Elmo was not about. For certain, Bundini must have picked a time when Elmo was not about.

Having attracted some of Foreman's people, the sparring partner Stan Ward among them, Bundini began to jeer. "I don't want three to one, I don't need three to one. My man is three to one."

"Then give us three to one," said Stan Ward.

"I would. If God was here, I would. But He ain't. He don't associate with flunkies who work for George Foreman, that big man, that big white man. I don't give you three to one because I don't give no advantage to people who work for the White Man."

"Then why you asking three to two instead of three to one?" someone said suspiciously.

"Because you the bullies. Anybody works for the White Man is a bully. A bully needs advantage. I'm giving you advantage. You go out in the casinos and try to get your bet. You have to lay three to get one. You people are too fucking scared to do that. 'Cause you know the White Man upstairs. You know his faults. You know you going to lose."

"Foreman ain't going to lose," said Stan Ward.

"Give me your bet," said Bundini.

"How much you laying?"

"My two thousand dollars is in my hands," said Bundini, pulling out a roll. "Now show me, nigger, where your three thousand dollars is."

"I can't get it right away," said Ward. "But I'll have it in the morning. I'll meet you here at eleven in the morning."

"Yeah, if the White Man tells you to go ahead and pee, then you can piss," said Bundini.

"He ain't the White Man."

"Shit, he ain't. There he is in the Olympics, a big fat fool dancing around with an eentsy American flag in his big dumb fist. He don't know what to do with a fist. My man does. My man got his fist in the air when he wins. Power to the People! That's my man. Millions follow him. Who follows your man? He's got nobody to follow him," said Bundini, "that's why he keeps a dog." The followers of Foreman suddenly roared with happiness. The kuntu was audacity and they paid their respects to the spirit of audacitry embodied in Bundini. "What are you ready to die for?" asked Bundini. He answered them, "Nothing. You ain't ready for nothing. But I'm ready to die for Muhammad. I put my bread on the line. I don't have to consult and come back here at eleven in the morning with my dick in my hand, permission to piss. I put my bread on the line. If I got no bread, I'm dead. If I got no loaves, I'm cold stone in the oven," crooned Bundini. "That's what it's all about. Muhammad Ali has Bundini ready to die, and what does the White Man have? Twenty-two niggers and a dog."

Foreman's people roared with all the happiness of knowing that Foreman would win and that the spirit of audacity was nonetheless not dead. A very heavy-set Negro with a cane for his game leg and heavy horn-rimmed glasses for his game eyes gave a peal of shrill laughter high as a spurt of water shooting up, and held out his palm.

Bundini struck it, showed his own palm, the man struck it back. Happiness. If words were blows, Bundini was champ of the kingdom of flunkies. Long live nommo, spirit of words.

This is the first of a two-part series. The conclusion will appear next month.