The Fight

Part II All Night Long

It was a grim dressing room. Perhaps it looked like a comfort station in a Moscow subway. A big room, all white, with round pillars tiled in white, and white wallpaper with a design of white tile. It also looked like an operating room or a small gas chamber. It was certainly a morgue. In this room, all groans were damped. White tile was everywhere. What a place to get ready!

The men gathered there had no more cheer than the decor. Dundee, Pacheco, Plimpton, Mailer, Walter Young-blood, Pat Patterson, Howard Bingham, Ali's brother Rachman, his manager, Herbert Muhammad, his business manager, Gene Kilroy, Bundini, a small fat Turk named Hassan and Roy Williams, his sparring partner, were in the room and no one had anything to say. "What's going on here?" said Ali as he entered. "Why is everybody so scared? What's the matter with you?" He began to peel off his clothes and, wearing no more than a jockstrap, was soon prancing around the room, shadowboxing with the air.

Roy Williams, dressed to go into the ring for his semifinal fight with Henry Clark, was sitting on the rubbing table. Through a miscalculation of others', he had arrived at the stadium with the convoy, too late for a ten-round semi-final. They were planning to hold it now after the main event, not the easiest delay for a fighter.

"Scared, Roy?" Ali asked as he danced by him.

"Not a drop," answered Williams in a rich and quiet voice. He was the blackest man in the room, also the gentlest.

"We're going to dance," cried Ali as he flew around, enjoying each near collision with the pillars at his back. Like a child, he had a sense of objects behind him, as if the circle of his sensations did not end at his skin. "Ah, yes," he shouted out, "we're going to stick him," and he threw jabs at the air.

With the exception of Roy Williams, he was the only cheerful presence. "I think I'm more scared than you are," said Norman, as Ali came to rest.

"Nothing to be scared about," said the fighter. "It's just another day in the dramatic life of Muhammad Ali. Just one more workout in the gym to me." He turned to Plimpton and added, "I'm afraid of horror films and thunder-storms. Jet planes shake me up. But there is no need to be afraid of anything you can control with your skill. That is why Allah is the only One who terrifies me. Allah is the only One of whom the meeting is independent of your will. He is One and has no associates." Ali's voice was building in volume and piety. As though to protect himself against too much strength being discharged into a sermon, he went on quietly, "There's nothing to be scared of. Elijah Muhammad has been through things that make this night nothing. And in a smaller way, I have been through such things. Getting into the ring with Liston the first time beats anything George Foreman ever had to do or I have had to do again. Except for living with threats against my life after the death of Malcolm X. Real death threats. No, I have no fear of tonight." He darted away from the writers as if his minute in the corner were up and shadowboxed some more, teasing a few friends with quick lancing shots that once more stopped an inch from their eyes. As he went by Hassan, the fat little Turk, he extended his long thumb and long forefinger to pinch him in the ass.

Yet for all this fine effort, the mood of the room hardly improved. It was like a corner in a hospital where relatives wait for word of the operation. Now Ali stopped dancing and took out the robe he would wear into the ring and put it on. It was a long white-silk robe with an intricate black pattern, and his first comment was, "It's a real African robe." He said this to Bundini, who gave him the full look of a child just denied a reward that had been promised for a week.

"All right," Ali said at last. "Let's see your robe."

Now Bundini displayed the garment he had brought for Ali to wear. It was also white but had green, red and black piping along its edges, the national colors of Zaïre. A green, red and black map of the country was stitched over the heart. Bundini wore a white jacket of the same material and decoration. Ali tried on Bundini's robe, looked in the mirror, took it off, handed it back. He put on the first robe again. "This one's more beautiful," he said. "It's really prettier than the one you brought. Take a look in the mirror, Drew, it's really better." It was. Bundini's robe looked a suspicion shopworn.

But Bundini did not look in the mirror. Instead, he fixed his look on Ali. He glared at him. For a full minute they scalded one another's eyes. Look! said Bundini's expression. Don't mess with the wisdom of your man. I brought a robe that matches my jacket. Your strength and my strength are linked. Weaken me and you weaken yourself. So wear the colors I have chosen. Something of that strength had to be in his eyes. Some unspoken threat as well, doubtless, for Ali suddenly slapped him, sharp as the crack of a rifle. "Don't you ever dare do that again," he cried out at Bundini. "Now take a look at me in the mirror," Ali commanded. But Bundini refused to look. Ali slapped him again.

The second slap was so ritual that one had to wonder if something like this was a well-worked ceremony, even an exorcism. It was hard to tell. Bundini seemed too furious to speak. His expression clearly said: Beat me to death, but I will not look in the mirror. The robe you describe as beautiful is not the one. Ali finally walked away from him.

It was time to decide on the trunks. He tried several. One pair was all white with no decoration at all, as pure and silver a white as the priestly robes of Islam. "Take this one, Ali," Rachman cried, "take this white one, it's nice, Ali, take it." But Ali after much deliberation before the mirror decided to wear white trunks with a vertical black stripe (and, indeed, in the photographs one would see later of the fight, there is the black stripe articulating each movement from his torso down to his legs).

Now Ali sat on a rubbing table near the middle of the room and put on his long white boxing shoes and held each foot in the air while Dundee scraped the soles with a knife to roughen them. The fighter took a comb someone handed him, the Y-shaped comb with steel teeth that Blacks use for an Afro, and worked with deliberation on his hair while his shoes were being scraped. At a signal of his finger, somebody brought him a magazine, a Zaïre periodical in French that gave the complete list of Foreman's fights and Ali's. He read the names aloud to Plimpton and Mailer, and once again contrasted the number of nobodies Foreman had fought with the number of notables he had met. It was as if he had to take still one more look at the marrow of his life. For the first time in all these months, he seemed to want to offer a public showing of the fear that must come to him in a dream. He began to chatter as though no one were in the room and he was talking in his sleep, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, you can't hit what you can't see," he repeated several times as though the words were long gone, and then he murmured, "I been up and I been down. You know, I been around." He shook his head. "It must be dark when you get knocked out," he said, contemplating the ogre of midnight. "Why I never been knocked out," he said. "I been knocked down, but never out." Like a dreamer awakening to the knowledge that the dream is only a net above one's death, he cried out, "That's strange ... being stopped." Again, he shook his head. "Yeah," he said, "that's a bad feeling, waiting for night to choke upon you," and he looked at the two writers with the blank eyes of a patient who has encountered some reality in the coils of his condition that no doctor will ever comprehend.

Then he must have come to the end of this confrontation with feelings that moved in on him like fog, for he used a phrase he had not employed in months, not since he had last given great woe to every high official in Zaïre. "Yes," he said to the room at large, "let's get ready for the rumble in the jungle," and he began to call to people across the room.

"Hey, Bundini," he cried out, "are we gonna dance?"

But Bundini did not reply. A sorrow was in the room.

"Does anybody hear me?" cried Ali. "Are we going to dance?"

"We're going to dance and dance," said Gene Kilroy sadly.

"We're going to dance," said Ali, "we're going to da-ance."

Dundee came up to tape his hands. The observer from Foreman's dressing room, Doc Broadus, now moved up to study the operation. He was a short, sturdy black man about 60 who had discovered Foreman years ago in the Job Corps and had been with George for much of his career ever since. Broadus was well known around the Inter-Continental for his prophetic dreams. In his sleep, he had picked the knockout round for both the Frazier and Norton fights. Now for Ali, he had also had a dream that George would win in two rounds, but this time he wasn't making the prediction for certain. There had been some flaw in the dream.

Ali devoted time to talking to him, as if the most valuable man in the room now might be Doc Broadus, who could take back word to Foreman of every detail in his last-minute condition.

Ali stared at him hard and Broadus shifted his feet. He was shy with Ali. Maybe he had admired his career for too (continued on page 130)All Night Long(continued from page 126) many years to be able to confront him easily now.

"Tell your man," Ali said confidentially, "he better get ready to dance."

Again, Broadus shifted.

At this moment, Ferdie Pacheco came bursting back into the dressing room. He was in a state. "I can't get in to see Foreman," he said to Broadus. "What the hell is going on? What is this?" he said in a tone of fear and considerable shock. "We're boxing tonight, not fighting World War Three!" He seemed disturbed by the fury of the other dressing room. Broadus got up quickly and went out with him.

Now Ali started talking to Bundini. "Say, Bundini, we gonna dance?" he asked. Bundini would not reply.

"I said, are we going to dance?"

Silence.

"Drew, why don't you speak to me?" Ali said in a big voice, as if exaggeration were the best means to take Bundini out of his mood. "Bundini, ain't we going to dance?" he asked again, and in a droll, tender voice, Ali said, "You know I can't dance without Bundini."

"You turned down my robe," Bundini said in his deepest, huskiest and most emotional voice.

"Oh, man," said Ali, "I'm the Champ. You got to allow me to do something on my own. You got to give me the right to pick my robe or how will I ever be Champ again? You going to tell me what to eat? You going to tell me how to go? Bundini, I am blue. I never seen a time like this when you don't cheer me up."

Bundini fought it, but a smile began to tickle his lips.

"Bundini, are we going to dance?" asked Ali.

"All night long," said Bundini.

"Yes, we're going to dance," said Ali, "we're going to dance and dance."

Broadus was back from the job of getting Pacheco admitted to Foreman's dressing room and Ali began to perform for him again. "What are we going to do?" he asked of Bundini and Dundee and Wilder.

"We're going to dance," said Gene Wilder with a sad, loving smile, "we're going to dance all night long."

"Yes, we're going to da-ance," cried Ali, and said again to Broadus, "You tell him to get ready."

"I'm not telling him nothing," muttered Broadus.

"Tell him he better know how to dance."

"He don't dance," Broadus managed to say, as if to warn: My man has heavier things to do.

"He don't what?" asked Ali.

"He don't dance," said Broadus.

"George Foreman's man," cried Ali, "says George can't dance. George can't come to the da-ance!"

"Five minutes," somebody yelled out, and Youngblood handed the fighter a bottle of orange juice. Ali took a swig of it, half a glass worth, and stared with amusement at Broadus. "Tell him to hit me in the belly," he said.

Chapter 2

George would. George was certainly going to hit him in the belly. What a battle was to follow. If the five-minute warning had just been given, it passed in a rush. There was a bathroom off the dressing room and to it Ali retired with his manager, the son of Elijah Muhammad, Herbert Muhammad, a round-faced, benign-looking man whose features offered a complete lack of purchase--Herbert Muhammad gave the impression nobody would know how to take advantage of him too quickly. He was now dressed in a priestly white robe that ran from his shoulders to his feet, a costume appropriate to his function as a Muslim minister, for they had gone into the next room to pray and their voices could be heard reciting verses of the Koran--doubtless such Arabic was from the Koran. In the big room, now empty of Ali, everybody looked at everyone and there was nothing to say.

Ferdie Pacheco returned from Foreman's dressing room. "Everything's OK," he stated. "Let's roll." In a minute, Ali came out of the bathroom with the son of Elijah Muhammad. While he shadowboxed, his manager continued to pray.

"How are things with Foreman?" someone asked Pacheco, and he shrugged: "Foreman's not talking," he said. "They got him covered with towels."

Now the word came down the line from the stadium outside. "Ali in the ring, Ali in the ring."

Solemnly, Bundini handed Ali the white African robe that the fighter had selected. Then everybody in the dressing room was on their way, a long file of 20 men who pushed and were hustled through a platoon of soldiers standing outside the door, and then in a gang's rush in a full company of other soldiers were racing through the gray cement-brick corridors with their long-gone echoes of rifle shots and death. They emerged into open air, into the surrealistic bliss and green air of stadium grass under electric lights, and a cheer of no vast volume went up at the sight of Ali, but then the crowd had been waiting through an empty hour with no semifinal to watch, just an empty ring, and hours gone by before that with dancers to watch, more dancers, then more tribal dancers, a long count of the minutes from midnight to four. The nation of Zaïre had been awaiting this event for three months, now they were here, some 60,000, in a great oval of seats far from that ring in the center of the soccer field. They must be disappointed. Watching the fighters would prove kin to sitting in a room in a housing project, studying through a window people in another housing project on the other side of a 12-lane freeway. The fighters would work under a big corrugated-tin shed roof with girders to protect the ring and the 2500 ringside seats from tropical downpour that might come at any minute on this night so advanced already into the rainy season. Heavy rains were overdue by two weeks and more. Light rain had come almost every afternoon and dark portentous skies hung overhead. In America, that would speak of quick summer storms, but the clouds in Africa were patient as the people and a black whirling smoky sky could shift overhead for days before more than a drop would fall.

Something of the weight of this oncoming rain was in the air. The early night had been full of oppression, and it was hot for so early in the morning, 80 degrees and a little more. Thoughts, however, of the oncoming fight left Norman closer to feeling chill. He was sitting next to Plimpton in the second row from the ring, a seat worth traveling thousands of miles to obtain (although, counting two round trips, the figure might yet be 25,000 miles--a barrel of jet lag for the soul). In front of them was a row of wire-service reporters and photographers leaning on the apron of the ring; inside the ropes was Ali, checking the resin against his shoes and offering flashes of his shuffle to the study of the crowd, whirling away once in a while to throw a kaleidoscope-dozen of punches at the air in two seconds, no more--one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi--12 punches had gone by. Screams from the crowd at the blur of the gloves. He was all alone in the ring, the Challenger on call for the Champion, the Prince waiting for the Pretender, and unlike other fighters who wilt in the long minutes before the titleholder will appear, Ali seemed to be taking royal pleasure in his undisputed possession of the space. He looked unafraid and almost on the edge of happiness, as if the discipline of having carried himself through the two thousand nights of sleeping without his title after it had been taken from him without ever losing a contest--a frustration for a fighter doubtless equal in impact to writing A Farewell to Arms and then not being able to publish it--must have been a Biblical seven years of trial through which he had come with the crucial part of his honor, his talent and his desire for greatness still intact, and light came off him at this instant. His body had a shine like the flanks of a thoroughbred. He looked fully ready to fight the strongest, meanest man to come along in Heavyweight circles in (continued on page 172)All Night Long(continued from page 130) many years, maybe the worst big man of all, and while the Prince stood alone in his ring and waited out the minutes for the Champion to arrive and had his thoughts, whatever they were, and his private communion with Allah, however that might feel, while he stood and while he shuffled and while he shadowboxed the air, the Lord Privy Seal, Angelo Dundee from Miami, went methodically from ringpost to ringpost and there in full view of ringside and the stadium just as methodically loosened each of the four turnbuckles on each post that held the tension of each of the four ropes, and did it with a spoke and a wrench he must have put in his little carrying bag back at Nsele and transported on the bus and carried from the dressing room to this ring. And when the ropes were slack to his taste, loose enough for his fighter to lean way back, he left the ring and returned to the corner. Nobody had paid any particular attention to him.

Foreman was still in his dressing room. Later Plimpton learned a detail from his old friend Archie Moore. "Just before going out to the ring, Foreman joined hands with his boxing trust--Dick Sadler, Sandy Saddler and Archie--in a sort of prayer ritual they had practiced (for every fight) since Foreman became Champion in Jamaica," Plimpton wrote. "Now they were holding hands again in Zaïre, and Archie Moore, who had his head bowed, found himself thinking that he should pray for Muhammad Ali's safety. Here's what he said: 'I was praying, and in great sincerity, that George wouldn't kill Ali. I really felt that was a possibility.' " So did others.

Foreman arrived in the ring. He was wearing red-velvet trunks with a white stripe and a blue waistband. The colors of the American flag girded his middle and his shoes were white. He looked solemn, even sheepish, like a big boy who, as Archie said, "truly doesn't know his own strength." The letters GF stood out in embossed white cloth from the red velvet of his trunks. GF--Great Fighter.

Referee Zack Clayton, black and much respected in his profession, had been waiting. George had time to reach his corner, shuffle his feet, huddle with the trust, get the soles of his shoes in resin and the fighters were meeting in the center of the ring to get instructions. It was the time for each man to extort a measure of fear from the other. Liston had done it to all his opponents until he met Ali, who--then Cassius Clay at the age of 22--glared back at him with all the imperative of his high-destiny guts. Foreman, in turn, had done it to Frazier and then to Norton. A big look, heavy as death, oppressive as the closing of the door of one's tomb.

To Foreman, Ali now said (as everybody was later informed), "You have heard of me since you were young. You've been following me since you were a little boy. Now you must meet me, your master!"--words the press could not hear at the time, but Ali's mouth was moving, his head was 12 inches from Foreman's, his eyes were on the other. Foreman blinked, Foreman looked surprised, as if he had been impressed just a little more than he expected. He tapped Ali's glove in a move equal to saying, "That's your round. Now we start."

The fighters went back to their corners. Ali pressed his elbows to his side, closed his eyes and offered a prayer. Foreman turned his back. In the 30 seconds before the fight began, he grasped the ropes in his corner and bent over from the waist so that his big and powerful buttocks were presented to Ali. He flexed in this position so long it took on a kind of derision, as though to declare: "My farts to you." He was still in such a pose when the bell rang.

The bell! Through a long unheard sigh of collective release, Ali charged across the ring. He looked as big and determined as Foreman, so he held himself, as if he possessed the true threat. They collided without meeting, their bodies still five feet apart. Each veered backward like similar magnetic poles repelling one another forcibly. Then Ali came forward again, Foreman came forward, they circled, they feinted, they moved in an electric ring and Ali threw the first punch, a tentative left. It came up short. Then he drove a lightning strong right straight as a pole into the stunned center of Foreman's head, the unmistakable thwomp of a high-powered punch. A cry went up. Whatever else happened, Foreman had been hit. No opponent had cracked George this hard in years and no sparring partner had dared to.

Foreman charged in rage. Ali compounded the insult. He grabbed the Champion around the neck and pushed his head down, wrestled it down crudely and decisively to show Foreman he was considerably rougher than anybody warned, and relations had commenced. They circled again. They feinted. They started in on one another and drew back. It was as if each held a gun. If one fired and missed, the other was certain to hit. If you threw a punch, and your opponent was ready, your own head would take his punch. What a shock. It is like seizing a high-voltage line. Suddenly you are on the floor.

Ali was not dancing. Rather, he was bouncing from side to side, looking for an opportunity to attack. So was Foreman. Maybe fifteen seconds went by. Suddenly, Ali hit him again. It was again a right hand. Again it was hard. The sound of a bat thunking into a watermelon was heard around the ring. Once more Foreman charged after the blow, and once more Ali took him around the neck with his right arm, then stuck his left glove in Foreman's right armpit. Foreman could not start to swing. It was a nimble part of the advanced course for tying up a fighter. The referee broke the clinch. Again they moved through invisible reaches of attraction and repulsion, darting forward, sliding to the side, cocking their heads, each trying to strike an itch to panic in the other, two big men fast as pumas, charged as tigers--unseen sparks came off their moves. Ali hit him again, straight left, then a straight right. Foreman responded like a bull. He roared forward. A dangerous bull. His gloves were out like horns. No room for Ali to dance to the side, stick him and move, hit him and move. Ali went back, feinted, went back again, was on the ropes. Foreman had cut him off. The fight was 30 seconds old and Foreman had driven him to the ropes. Ali had not even tried to get around those outstretched gloves so ready to cuff him, rough him, break his grace, no, retreating, Ali collected his toll. He hit Foreman with another left and another right.

Still, a wail went up from the crowd. They saw Ali on the ropes. Who had talked of anything but how long Ali could keep away? Now he was trapped, so soon. Yet Foreman was off his aim. Ali's last left and right had checked him. Foreman's punches were not ready and Ali parried, Ali blocked. They clinched. The referee broke it. Ali was off the ropes with ease.

To celebrate, he hit Foreman another straight right. Up and down the press rows, one exclamation was leaping, "He's hitting him with rights." Ali had not punched with such authority in seven years. Champions do not hit other champions with right-hand leads. Not in the first round. It is the most difficult and dangerous punch. Difficult to deliver and dangerous to oneself. In nearly all positions, the right hand has longer to travel, a foot more, at least, than the left. Boxers deal with inches and half inches. In the time it takes a right hand to travel that extra space, alarms are ringing in the opponent, counterattacks are beginning. He will duck under the right and take off your head with a left. So good fighters do not often lead with their right against another good fighter. Not in the first round. They wait. They keep the right hand. It is one's authority, and ready to punish a left which comes too slowly. One throws one's right over a jab; one can block the left hook with a right forearm and chop back a right in return. Classic maxims of boxing. All fight writers know them. Off these principles they take their interpretation. They are good engineers at Indianapolis, but Ali is on his way to the moon. Right-hand leads! My God!

In the next minute, Ali proceeded to hit Foreman with a combination rare as plutonium: a straight right hand followed by a long left hook. Spring-zing! went those punches, bolt to the head, bolt to the head; each time, Foreman would rush forward in murderous rage and be caught by the neck and turned. His menace became more impressive each time he was struck. If the punches maddened him, they did not weaken him. Another fighter would be staggering by now. Foreman merely looked more destructive. His hands lost no speed, his hands looked as fast as Ali's (except when he got hit) and his face was developing a murderous appetite. He had not been treated so disrespectfully in years. Lost was genial George of the press conferences. His life was clear. He was going to dismember Ali. As he kept getting hit and grabbed, hit and grabbed, a new fear came over the rows at ringside. Foreman was awesome. Ali had now hit him about fifteen good punches to the head and not been caught once in return. What would happen when Foreman finally hit Ali? No heavyweight could keep up the speed of these moves, not for 14 more rounds.

But then the first was not even over. In the last minute, Foreman forced Ali to the ropes, was in on him, broke loose, and smashed a right uppercut through Ali's gloves, then another. The second went like a spear through the top of Ali's skull. His eyes flew up in consternation and he grabbed Foreman's right arm with his left, squeezed it, clung to it. Foreman, his arm being held, was still in a mood to throw the good right again, and did. Four heavy half-smothered rights, concussive as blows to the heavy bag went up to the head, then two down to the body, whaling on Ali even as he was held, and it was apparent these punches hurt. Ali came off the ropes in the most determined embrace of his life, both gloves locked around the back of Foreman's neck. The whites of Ali's eyes showed the glaze of a combat soldier who has just seen a dismembered arm go flying across the sky after an explosion. What kind of monster was he encountering?

Foreman threw a wild left. Then a left, a right, a left, a left and a right. Some to the head, some to the body, some got blocked, some missed, one collided with Ali's floating ribs, brutal punches, jarring and imprecise as a collision at slow speed in a truck.

With everybody screaming, Ali now hit Foreman with a right. Foreman hit him back with a left and a right. Now they each landed blows. Everybody was shaking their head at the bell. What a round!

Now the press rows began to ring with comment on those right-hand leads. How does Ali dare? A magnificent round. Norman has few vanities left but thinks he knows something about boxing. He is ready to serve as engineer on Ali's trip to the moon. For Ali is one artist who does not box by right counter to left hook. He fights the entirety of the other person. He lives in fields of concentration where he can detect the smallest flicker of lack of concentration. Foreman has shown himself a lack of quiver flat to the possibility of a right. Who before this had dared after all to hit Foreman with a right? Of late his opponents were afraid to flick him with a jab. Fast were Foreman's hands, but held a flat spot of complacency before the right. He was not ready for a man to come into the ring unafraid of him. That offered its beauty. But frightening. Ali cannot fight every round like this. Such a pace will kill him in five. Indeed he could be worried as he sits in the corner. It has been his round, but what a force to Foreman's punches. It is true. Foreman hits harder than other fighters. And takes a very good punch. Ali looks thoughtful.

There is a sound box in the vicinity, some small loud-speaker hooked into the closed circuit, and on it Norman can hear David Frost, Jim Brown and Joe Frazier talking between rounds, an agreeable sense of detachment thereby offered, for they are on the other side of the press rows. Listening to them offers the comfort of a man watching a snowstorm from his fireplace. Jim Brown may have said last night that Ali had no chance, but Brown is one athlete who will report what he sees. "Great round for Muhammad Ali," he comments. "He did a fantastic job, although I don't think he can keep up this pace."

Sullenly, Joe Frazier disagrees. "Round was even ... very close."

David Frost: "You wouldn't call that round for Ali?"

Joe is not there to root Ali home, not after Ali called him ignorant. "It was very close. Ali had two or three good shots to the face while George been landing body shots."

Foreman sits on his stool listening to Sadler. His face is bemused, as if he has learned more than he is accustomed to in the last few minutes and the sensation is half-agreeable. He has certainly learned that Ali can hit. Already his face shows lumps and welts. Ali is also a better wrestler than any fighter he has faced. Better able to agitate him. He sits back to rest the sore heat of his lungs after the boil of his fury in the last round. He brings himself to smile at someone at ringside. The smile is forced. Across the ring, Ali spits into the bowl held out for him and looks wide awake. His eyes are as alive as a ghetto adolescent walking down a strange turf. Just before the bell, he stands up in his corner and leads a cheer. Ali's arm pumps the air to inspire the crowd, and he makes a point of glowering at Foreman. Abruptly, right after the bell, his mood takes a change.

As Foreman comes out Ali goes back to the ropes, no, lets himself be driven to the corner, the worst place a fighter can be, worst place by all established comprehension of boxing. In the corner you cannot slip to the side, cannot go backward. You must fight your way out. With the screech that comes up from a crowd when one car tries to pass another in a race, Foreman was in to move on Ali, and Ali fought the good rat fight of the corner, his gloves thrown with frantic speed at Foreman's gloves. It became something like a slapping contest--of the variety two tall kids might show when trying to hit the other in the face. It is far from orthodox practice, where you dart out of a corner, duck out of a corner or blast out. Since Ali kept landing, however, and Foreman did not, George retreated in confusion as if reverting to memories of fights when he was ten years old and scared--yes, Ali must have made some psychological choice and it was well chosen. He got out of the corner and held Foreman once again by the head in a grip so well applied that Foreman had the pensive expression of a steer being dogged to the ground by a cowboy.

Once the referee separated them, Ali began to back up across the ring. Foreman was after him, throwing fast punches. "Show him," George's corner must have instructed, "that your gloves are as fast as his." Suddenly Foreman hit Ali with a straight hard right. Ali held on to Foreman to travel through the shock. After the fight he would say that some of Foreman's punches went right down to his toes, and this must have been one of them. When the fighters were separated, Foreman chased Ali to the ropes, and Ali pulled out a new trick, his full inch and a half of reach. He held his arm in Foreman's face to keep him off. The round was almost a minute gone before Ali got in his first good punch, another right. But Foreman charged him and pushed him, driving down on Ali's gloves with his own gloves, stalking him back and back again, knocking Ali's gloves away when he didn't like the character of their moves. Foreman was beginning to dictate how the fight should be. If a bully, he was a master bully. He did not react to the dictation of others, liked his own dictation. The force he sought in serenity had locked him on a unilinear road; it was working now. Ali kept retreating and Foreman caught him again. Hard! Once more, Ali was holding on with both hands, back of the neck, back of the biceps, half writhing and half riding with the somewhat stifled punches Foreman kept throwing. Foreman had begun to dominate the action to the point where Ali's best course seemed to be obliged to take what was left of each punch after the attempt to smother it. He kept trying to wrestle Foreman to a stop.

But then Ali must have come to a first assessment of assets and weaknesses, for he made--somewhere in the unremarked middle of the round--he must have made a decision on how to shape the rest of the fight. He did not seem able to hurt Foreman critically with those right-hand leads. Nor was he stronger than Foreman except when wrestling on his neck, and certainly he could not afford any more of those episodes where he held on to Foreman even as George was hitting him. It was costly in points, painful and won nothing. On the other hand, it was too soon to dance. Too rapid would be the drain on his stamina. So the time had come to see if he could outbox Foreman while lying on the ropes. It had been his option from the beginning and it was the most dangerous option he had. For so long as Foreman had strength, the ropes would prove about as safe as riding a unicycle on a parapet. Still, what is genius but balance on the edge of the impossible? Ali introduced his grand theme. He lay back on the ropes in the middle of the second round, and from that position he would work for the rest of the fight, reclining at an angle of 10 and 20 degrees from the vertical and sometimes even farther, a cramped near-tortured angle from which to box.

Of course Ali had been preparing for just this hour over the last ten years. For ten years he had been practicing to fight powerful sluggers who beat on your belly while you lay on the ropes. So he took up his station with confidence, shoulders parallel to the edge of the ring. In this posture his right would, have no more impact than a straight left, but he could find himself in position to cover his head with both gloves, and his belly with his elbows, he could rock and sway, lean so far back Foreman must fall on him. Should Foreman pause from the fatigue of throwing punches, Ali could bounce off the ropes and sting him, jolt him, make him look clumsy, mock him, rouse his anger, which might yet wear Foreman out more than anything else. In this position, Ali could even hurt him. A jab hurts if you run into it, and Foreman is always coming in. Still, Ali is in the position of a man bowing and ducking in a doorway while another man comes at him with two clubs. Foreman comes on with his two clubs. In the first exchange he hits Ali about six times while Ali is returning only one blow. Yet the punches to Ali's head seem not to bother him; he is swallowing the impact with his entire body. He is like a spring on the ropes. Blows seem to pass through him as if he is indeed a leaf spring built to take shock. None of his spirit is congested in his joints. Encouraged by the recognition that he can live with these blows, he begins to taunt Foreman. "Can you hit?" he calls out. "You can't hit. You push!" Since his head has been in range of Foreman's gloves, Foreman lunges at him. Back goes Ali's head like the carnival boy ducking baseballs. Wham to you, goes Ali, catapulting back. Bing and sting! Now Foreman is missing and Ali is hitting.

It is becoming a way to fight and even a way to live, but for Ali's corner it is a terror to watch. In the last 30 seconds of this second round, Ali hits out with straight rights from the ropes fast as jabs. Foreman's head must feel like a rivet under a riveting gun. With just a few seconds left, Foreman throws his biggest punch of the night, an express train of a left hook leaves a spasm for the night in its passing. It has been a little too slow. Ali lets it go by in the languid, unhurried fashion of Archie Moore watching a roundhouse miss his chin by a quarter of an inch. In the void of the effort, Foreman is so off balance that Ali could throw him through the ropes. "Nothing," says Ali through his mouthpiece. "You have no aim." The bell rings and Foreman looks depressed. There has been premature desperation in that left. Ali shakes his head in derision. Of course that is one of Ali's basic tricks. All through his first fight with Frazier he kept signaling to the crowd that Joe failed to impress him. All the while Ali was finding himself in more trouble.

Chapter 3

It seems like eight rounds have passed yet we only finished two. Is it because we are trying to watch with the fighters' sense of time? Before fatigue brings boxers to the boiler rooms of the damned, they live at a height of consciousness and with a sense of detail they encounter nowhere else. In no other place is their intelligence so full, nor their sense of time able to contain so much of itself as in the long internal effort of the ring. Thirty minutes go by like three hours. Let us undertake the chance, then, that our description of the fight may be longer to read than the fight itself. We can assure ourselves: It was even longer for the fighters.

Contemplate them as they sit in their corners between the second and third rounds. The outcome of the fight is not yet determined. Not for either. Ali has an enormous problem equal to his enormous confidence. Everybody has wondered whether Ali can get through the first few rounds and take Foreman's punch. Now the problem has been refined: Can he dismantle Foreman's strength before he uses up his own wit?

Foreman has another problem; he may not be as aware of it as his corner. There is no fear in his mind that he will fail to win the fight. He does not think about that any more than a lion supposes it will be unable to destroy a cheetah; no, it is just a question of catching Ali, a maddening frustration. Still the insult to his rage has to worry his corner. They can hardly tell him not to be angry. It is Foreman's rage, after all, which has led him to knock out so many fighters. To cut it off is to leave him cowlike. Nonetheless he must contain his anger until he catches Ali. Otherwise he is going to wear himself out.

So Sadler works on him, rubs his breasts and belly, Sadler sends his fingers into all the places where rage has congested, into the meat of the pectorals and the muscle plating beneath Foreman's chest, Sadler's touch has all the wisdom of 35 years of black fingers elucidating comforts for black flesh, sensual are his fingers as he plucks and shapes and shakes and balms, his silver bracelet shining on his black wrist. When Sadler feels the fighter is soothed, he begins to speak, and Foreman takes on the expression of a man whose head is working slowly. He has too much to think about. He spits into the bowl held before him and nods respectfully. He looks as if he is listening to his dentist.

In Ali's corner, Dundee, with the quiet concern of a sommelier, is bringing the mouth of the adhesive-taped water bottle to Ali's lips, and does it with a forefinger under the neck so the bottle will not pour too much as he tips it up. Ali rinses and spits with his eyes off on the serious calculation of a man weighing grim but necessary alternatives.

Joe Frazier: "... George is pounding that body with shots. He's hurting the body. Ali shouldn't stay on that rope.... If he don't move or cut George, George will walk him down. He need to move. He don't need to stay on that rope. For what reason's he on the rope?" Frazier sounds offended. Even the sound of the word worries him. Joe Frazier would consider himself gone if he had to work there. Rope is an ugly and miserable kuntu.

Jim Brown replies: "Ali is punishing George Foreman even though he's on the rope. He's getting some tremendous blows in and"--the wisdom of the professional football player--"at some point, that can tell."

The bell. Once more Ali comes out of the corner with a big and threatening face, as if this round for certain he will bring the attack to Foreman and once again sees something wrong in the idea, profoundly wrong, shifts his plan instantly, backs up and begins to play the ropes. On comes Foreman. The fight has taken its formal pattern. Ali will go by choice to the ropes and Foreman will chase him. Now in each round Ali will work for 30 or 40 seconds or for so much even as a minute with his back no more than a foot or two from the top rope, and he is on the rope as often as not. When the strength of the mood, or the logic of the clinch suggests that the virtue of one set of ropes has been used up, he will back off across the ring to use another set. He will spend on an average one quarter of each round on each of the four sides of the ring. He might just as well be drawing conscious strength from the burial gods of the North, the West, the East and the South. Never has a major fight been so locked into one pattern of movement. It appears designed by a choreographer who knows nothing about the workings of legs and is endlessly inventive about arms. The fight goes on in exactly this fashion round, after round, and yet it is hardly boring, for Ali appears in constant danger, and is, and is not. He is turning the pockets of the boxing world inside out. He is demonstrating that what for other fighters is a weakness can be for him a strength. Foreman has been trained to cut instinctively from side to side in such a way as to spoil Ali's ability to circle, Foreman has learned how to force retreat to the ropes. But Ali makes no effort to get away. He does not circle, neither does he reverse his circle. Instead he backs up. Foreman's outstretched arms become a liability. Unable to cuff at a dancing target, he must probe forward. As he does, Ali keeps popping him with straight lefts and rights fast as karate strokes. But then Ali's wife has a black belt in karate.

Sooner or later, however, Foreman is always on him, leaning on him, banging him, belting away with all the fury George knows how to bring to the heavy bag. Ali uses the ropes to absorb the bludgeoning. Standing on one's feet, it is painful to absorb a heavy body punch even when blocked with one's arms. The torso, the legs and the spine take the shock. One has to absorb the brunt of the punch. Leaning on the ropes, however, Ali can pass it along; the ropes will receive the strain. If he cannot catch Foreman's punches with his gloves, or deflect them, or bend Foreman's shoulder to spoil his move, or lean away with his head, slip to the side, or loom up to hug Foreman's head, if finally there is nothing to do but take the punch, then Ali tightens his body and conducts the shock out along the ropes, so that Foreman must feel as if he is beating on a tree trunk which is oscillating against ropes. Foreman's power seems to travel right down the line and rattle the ringposts. It fortifies Ali's sense of relaxation--he has always the last resort of composing himself for the punch. When, occasionally, a blow does hurt, he sticks Foreman back, mean and salty, using his left and right as jabs. Since his shoulders are against the ropes, he jabs as often with his right as his left. With his timing it is a great jab. He has a gift for hitting Foreman as Foreman comes in. That doubles or triples the force. Besides he is using so many right jabs Foreman must start to wonder whether he is fighting a southpaw. Then comes the left jab again. A converted southpaw? It has something of the shift of locus that comes from making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blonde wig. Of course, Ali has red wigs too. At the end of the round, Ali hits Foreman with some of the hardest punches of the fight. A right, a left and a right startle Foreman in their combination. He may not have seen such a combination since his last street fight. Ali gives a look of contempt and they wrestle for a few seconds until the bell. For the few extra seconds it takes Foreman to go to his corner, his legs have the look of a bedridden man who has started on a tour of his room for the first time in a week. He has almost stumbled on the way to his stool.

In the aisle, Rachman Ali began to jeer at Henry Clark. "Your man's a chump," Rachman said. "Ali's going to get him." Clark had to look worried. It was hardly his night. First his own fight had been postponed, then called off, now he was watching George from a crate in the aisle. Since he had a big bet on George, this last round offered its woes.

In the corner Sadler was massaging Foreman's right shoulder and George was gagging a bit, the inside of his lips showing a shocking frothy white like the mouth of an overgalloped horse.

Nonetheless, he looked lively as he came out for the bell. He came right across the middle of the ring to show Ali a new kind of feint, a long pawing movement of his hands accompanied by short moves of his head. It was to a different rhythm as if to say, "I haven't begun to show what I know."

He looked jaunty, but he was holding his right hand down by the waist. Fatigue must have lent carelessness to what he did, for Ali immediately answered with an insulting stiff right, an accelerating hook and another right so heavy to Foreman's head that he grabbed for a clinch, first time in the fight. There, holding on to Ali while vertigo collided with nausea, and bile scalded his breath, he must have been delivered into a new awareness, for George immediately started to look better. He began to get to Ali on the ropes and hit him occasionally, and for the first time in a while was not getting hit much himself. He was even beginning to jam a number of Ali's rhythms. Up to now, whenever Ali took a punch, he was certain to come off the ropes and hit Foreman back. A couple of times in this round, however, even as Ali started his move, George would jam his forearm into Ali's neck, or wrestle him to a standstill.

All the while Ali was talking. "Come on, George, show me something," he would say. "Can't you fight harder? That ain't hard. I thought you was the Champion, I thought you had punches," and Foreman, working like a bricklayer running up a pyramid to set his bricks, would snort and lance his arms in sudden unexpected directions and try to catch Ali bouncing on the rope, Ali who was becoming more confirmed every minute in the sinecure of the rope, but at the end of the round, Foreman caught him with the best punch he had thrown in many a minute, landing just before the bell, and as he turned to leave Ali, he said clearly, "How's that?"

It must have encouraged him, for in the fifth round he tried to knock Ali out. Even as Ali was becoming more confident on the ropes, Foreman grew convinced he could break Ali's defense. Confidence on both sides makes for war. The round would go down in history as one of the great rounds in heavyweight boxing; indeed it was so good it forged its own frame as they battled. One could see it outlined forever in lights: The Great Fifth Round of the Ali-Foreman Fight!

Like much of greatness, the beginnings were unremarked. Foreman ended the fourth round well, but expectation was circling ringside that a monumental upset could be shaping. Even Joe Frazier was admitting that George was "not being calm." It took John Daly to blurt out cheerfully to David Frost, "Ali is winning all the way for me and I think he's going to take it within another four rounds!"

Foreman didn't think so. There had been that sniff of victory in the fourth, the good punch which landed--"How's that?" He came out in the fifth with the conviction that if force had not prevailed against Ali up to now, more force was the answer, considerably more force than Ali had ever seen. If Foreman's face was battered to lumps, and his legs were moving like wheels with a piece chipped out of the rim, if his arms were beginning to sear in the lava of exhaustion and his breath come roaring to his lungs like the blast from a bed of fire, still he was a prodigy of strength, he was the prodigy, he could live through states of torture and hurl his cannonade when others could not lift their arms, he had been trained for endurance even more than execution and back in Pendleton when first working for this fight had once boxed 15 rounds with half a dozen sparring partners coming on in two-round shifts while Foreman was permitted only 30 seconds of rest between each round. He could go, he could go and go, he was tireless in the arms, yes, could knock down a forest, take it down all by himself, and he set out now to chop Ali down.

They sparred inconclusively for the first half minute. Then the barrage began. With Ali braced on the ropes, as far back on the ropes as a deep-sea fisherman is braced back in his chair when setting the hook on a big strike, so Ali got ready and Foreman came on to blast him out. A shelling reminiscent of artillery battles in World War One began. Neither man moved more than a few feet in the next minute and a half. Across that embattled short space Foreman threw punches in barrages of four and six and eight and nine, heavy hard maniacal slamming punches, heavy as the boom of oaken doors, bombs to the body, bolts to the head, punching until he could not breathe, backing off to breathe again and come in again, bomb again, blast again, drive and steam and slam the torso in front of him, wreck him in the arms, break through those arms, get to his ribs, dig him out, dig him out, put the dynamite in the earth, lift him, punch him, punch him up to heaven, take him out, stagger him--great earth mover, he must have sobbed to himself, kill this mad and bouncing goat.

And Ali, gloves to his head, elbows to his ribs, stood and swayed and was rattled and banged and shaken like a grasshopper at the top of a reed when the wind whips, and the ropes shook and swung like sheets in a storm, and Foreman would lunge with his right at Ali's chin and Ali go flying back out of reach by a half inch, and half out of the ring, and back in to push at Foreman's elbow and hug his own ribs and sway, and sway just further, and lean back and come forward from the ropes and slide off a punch and fall back into the ropes with all the calm of a man swinging in the rigging. All the while, he used his eyes. They looked like stars, and he feinted Foreman out with his eyes, flashing white eyeballs of panic he did not feel which pulled Foreman through into the trick of lurching after him on a wrong move, Ali darting expression in one direction while cocking his head in another, then staring at Foreman expression to expression, holding him in the eye, soul to soul, muntu to muntu, hugging his head, peeking through gloves, jamming his armpit, taunting him on the edge of the ropes, then flying back as Foreman dove forward, tantalizing him, maddening him, looking for all the world as cool as if he were sparring in his bathrobe, now banishing Foreman's head with the turn of a matador sending away a bull after five fine passes were made, and once when he seemed to hesitate just a little too long, teasing Foreman just a little too long, something stirred in George like that across-the-arena knowledge of a bull when it is ready at last to gore the matador rather than the cloth, and like a member of a cuadrilla, somebody in Ali's corner screamed, "Careful! Careful! Careful!" and Ali flew back and just in time for as he bounced on the ropes, Foreman threw six of his most powerful left hooks in a row and then a right, it was the center of his fight and the heart of his best charge, a left to the belly, a left to the head, a left to the belly, a left to the head, a left to the belly, another to the belly and Ali blocked them all, elbow for the belly, glove for the head, and the ropes flew like snakes. Ali was ready for the lefts. He was not prepared for the right that followed. Foreman hit him a powerful punch. The ring bolts screamed. Ali shouted, "Didn't hurt a bit." Was it the best punch he took all night? He had to ride through ten more after that. Foreman kept flashing his muscles up out of that cup of desperation boiling in all determination, punches that came toward the end of what may have been as many as forty or fifty in a minute, any one strong enough to send water from the spine to the knees. Something may have finally begun to go from Foreman's n'golo, some departure of the essence of absolute rage, and Ali, reaching over the barrage, would give a prod now and again to Foreman's neck like a housewife sticking a toothpick in a cake to see if it is ready. The punches got weaker and weaker, and Ali finally came off the ropes and in the last 30 seconds of the round, threw his own punches, 20 at least. Almost all hit. Some of the hardest punches of the night were driven in. Four rights, a left hook and a right came in one stupendous combination. One punch turned Foreman's head through 90 degrees, a right cross of glove and forearm that slammed into the side of the jaw; double contact had to be felt; once from the glove, then from the bare arm, stunning and jarring. Walls must begin to crack inside the brain. Foreman staggered and lurched and glared at Ali and got hit again, zing-bing! two more. When it was all over, Ali caught Foreman by the neck like a big brother chastising an enormous and stupid kid brother, and looked out to someone in the audience, some enemy--or was it some spiteful friend who said Foreman would win?--for Ali, holding George around the neck, now stuck out one long white-coated tongue. On the other side of the ropes, Bundini was beaming at the bell.

"I really don't believe it," said Jim Brown. "I really don't believe it. I thought he was hurt. I thought his body was hurt. He came back. He hit Foreman with everything. And he winked at me." Did he wink or stick out his tongue?

In the aisle, Rachman was screaming at Henry Clark. "Your fighter's a chump. He's an amateur. My brother is killing him. My brother is showing him up!"

Chapter 4

So began the third act of the fight. Not often was there a better end to a second act than Foreman's failure to destroy Ali on the ropes. But the last scenes would present another problem. How was the final curtain to be found? For if Foreman was exhausted, Ali was weary. He had hit Foreman harder than he had ever hit anyone. He had hit him often. Foreman's head must by now be equal to a piece of vulcanized rubber. Conceivably, you could beat on him all night and nothing more would happen. There is a threshold to the knockout. When it comes close but is not crossed, then a man can stagger around the ring forever. He has received his terrible message and he is still standing. No more of the same woe can destroy him. He is like the victim in a dreadful marriage that no one knows how to end. So Ali was obliged to produce still one more surprise. If not, the unhappiest threat would present itself as he and Foreman stumbled through the remaining ten rounds. There is agony to elucidate even a small sense of the aesthetic out of boxing. Wanton waste for an artist like Ali to lose the perfection of this fight by wandering down a monotonous half hour to a dreary unanimous decision.

A fine ending to the fight would live in legend, but a dull victory, anticlimactic by the end, could leave him in half a legend--overblown in reputation by his friends and contested by his enemies--precisely that state which afflicted most heroes. Ali was fighting to prove other points. So he said. So Ali had to dispose of Foreman in the next few rounds and do it well, a formidable problem. He was like a torero after a great faena who must still face the drear potential of a protracted inept and disappointing kill. Since no pleasure is greater among athletes than to overtake the style of their opponent, Ali would look to steal Foreman's last pride. George was an executioner. Ali would do it better. But how do you execute the executioner?

The problem was revealed in all its sluggish intricacies over the next three rounds. Foreman came out for the sixth looking like an alley cat with chewed-up brows. Lumps and swellings were all over his face, his skin equal to tar that has baked in the sun. When the bell rang, however, he looked dangerous again, no longer a cat but a bull. He lowered his head and charged across the ring. He was a total demonstration of the power of one idea, even when the idea no longer works. And was immediately seized and strangled around the neck by Ali for a few valuable and pacifying seconds until Zack Clayton broke them. Afterward, Foreman moved in to throw more punches. His power, however, seemed gone. The punches were slow and tentative. They did not reach Ali. Foreman was growing glove-shy. His fastest moves were now in a nervous defense that kept knocking Ali's punches away from his own face.

At this point, Ali proceeded to bring out the classic left jab everyone had been expecting for the first round. In the next half minute, he struck Foreman's head with ten or eleven head-ringing jabs thrown with all the speed of a good fencer's thrust, and Foreman took them in apathy to compound the existing near apathy of his hopes. Each time his head snapped back, some communication between his mind and his nerves must have been reduced. A surgical attack.

Yet something in Foreman's response decided Ali to give it up. Perhaps no more than his own sense of moderation. It might look absurd if he kept jabbing Foreman forever. Besides, Ali needed rest. The next two minutes turned into the slowest two minutes of the fight. Foreman kept pushing Ali to the ropes out of habit, a dogged forward motion that enabled George to rest in his fashion, the only way he still knew, which was to lean on the opponent. Ali was by now so delighted with the advantages of the ropes that he fell back on them like a man returning home in quiet triumph, yes, settled in with the weary pleasure of a workingman getting back into bed after a long day to be treated to a little of God's joy by his hardworking wife. He was almost tender with Foreman's laboring advance, holding him softly and kindly by the neck. Then he stung him with right and left karate shots from the shoulder. Foreman was now so arm-weary he could begin a punch only by lurching forward until his momentum encouraged a movement of the arm. He looked like a drunk, or rather a somnambulist, in a dance marathon. It would be wise to get him through the kill without ever waking him up. While it ought to be a simple matter to knock him down, there might not be enough violence left in the spirit of this ring to knock him out. So the shock of finding himself on the floor could prove a stimulant. His ego might reappear: Once on the floor, he was a champion in dramatic danger of losing his title--that is an un measurable source of energy. Ali was now taking in the reactions of Foreman's head the way a bullfighter lines up a bull before going in over the horns for the kill. He bent to his left and still crouched, passed his body to the right under Foreman's fists, all the while studying George's head and neck and shoulders. Since Foreman charged the move, a fair conclusion was that the bull still had an excess of strength too great for the kill.

Nonetheless, Foreman's punches were hardly more than pats. They were sufficiently weak for any man in reasonable shape to absorb them. Still, Foreman came on. Sobbing for breath, leaning, almost limping, in a pat-a-pat of feeble cuffs, he was all but lying over Ali on the ropes. Yet what a problem in the strength of his stubbornness itself. Endless powers of determination had been built out of one season of silence passing into another. The bell rang the end of the sixth. Both men gave an involuntary smile of relief.

Foreman looked ready to float as he came to his corner. Sandy Saddler could not bring himself to look at him. The sorrow in Foreman's corner was now heavier than in Ali's dressing room before the fight.

In his corner, Ali looked thoughtful and stood up abstractedly before the bell and abstractedly led a cheer in the stadium, his arm to the sky.

The cheer stirred Foreman to action. He was out of his corner and in the middle of the ring before the bell rang. Ali opened his eyes wide and stared at him in mock wonder, then in disdain, as if to say, "Now you've done it. Now you're asking for it." He came out of his corner, too, and the referee was pushing both men apart as the bell rang.

Still it was a slow round, almost as slow as the sixth. Foreman had no speed, and, in return, Ali boxed no faster than he had to, but kept shifting more rapidly than before from one set of ropes to another. Foreman was proving too sluggish to work with. Once, in the middle of the round, Foreman staggered past Ali, and for the first time in the fight was literally nearer the ropes. It was a startling realization. Not since the first five seconds of the fight had Ali crossed the center of the ring while moving for ward. For seven rounds his retreating body had been between Foreman and the ropes, except for the intervals when he traveled backward from one set of ropes to another. This time, seeing Foreman on the ropes instead, Ali backed up immediately and Foreman slogged after him like an infantryman looking at the ground. Foreman's best move by now might be to stand in the center of the ring and invite Ali to come to him. If Ali refused, he would lose the luster of his performance, and if he did come forward, it would be George's turn to look for weaknesses. While Foreman waited for Ali, he could rest. Yet George must have had some unspoken fear of disaster if he shifted methods. So he would drive, thank you very much, into the grave he would determine for himself. Of course, he was not wholly without hope. He still worked with the idea that one punch could catch Ali. And with less than a minute left, he managed to drive a left hook into Ali's belly, a blow which indeed made Ali gasp. Then Foreman racked him with a right uppercut strong enough for Ali to hold on in a clinch, no, Foreman was not going to give up. Now he leaned on Ali for Ali to cling again in a clinch; no, Foreman was not going to give up. Now he leaned on Ali with one extended arm and tried to whale him with the other. He looked like he was beating a rug. Foreman had begun to show the clumsiness of a street fighter at the end of a long rumble. He was reverting. It happened to all but the most cultivated fighters toward the exhausted end of a long and terrible fight. Slowly they descended from the elegance of their best style down to the knee in the groin and the overhead punch (with a rock in the fist) of forgotten street fights.

Ali, half as tired at least, was not wasting himself. He was still graceful in every move. By the end of the round, he was holding Foreman's head tenderly once more in his glove. Foreman was becoming reminiscent of the computer Hal in 2001 as his units were removed one by one; malfunctions were showing and spastic lapses. All the while, something of the old panache of Sadler, Saddler and Moore inserted over those thousands of hours of training still showed in occasional gestures. The weakest slaps of his gloves, however, had begun to look like entreaties. Still his arms threw punches. By the end of the seventh, he could hardly stand: Yet he must have thrown 70 more punches. So few were able to land. Ali had restricted himself to 25--half at least must have gone to target. Foreman was fighting as slowly as a worn-out fighter in the Golden Gloves, slow as a man walking up a hill of pillows, slow as he would have looked if their first round had been rerun in slow motion, that was no slower than Foreman was fighting now, and thus exposed as in a film, he was reminiscent of the slow and curving motions of a linebacker coiling around a runner with his hands and arms in the slow-motion replay--the boxing had shifted from speed and impact to an intimacy of movement. Delicately, Ali would cradle Foreman's head with his left before he smashed it with his right. Foreman looked ready to fall over from exhaustion. His face had the soft scrubbed look of a child who has just had a dirty face washed, but then they both had that gentle look boxers get when they are very tired and have fought each other very hard.

Back in the corner, Moore's hands were massaging Foreman's shoulders. Sandy Saddler was working on his legs. Dick Sadler was talking to him.

Jim Brown was saying, "This man, Muhammad Ali, is unreal." When Jim used the word, it was a compliment. Whatever was real, Jim Brown could dominate. And Frazier added his humor, "I would say right now my man is not in the lead. I got a feeling George is not going to make it."

On the aisle, Rachman was still calling out to Henry Clark. "Henry, admit it, your man is through, he's a chump, he's a street fighter. Henry, admit it. Maybe I'm not a fighter, I know I'm not as good as you, but admit it, admit it, Muhammad has whipped George."

Except he hadn't. Not yet. Two rounds had gone by. The two dullest rounds of the fight. The night was hot. Now the air would become more tropical with every round. In his corner, Ali looked to be in pain as he breathed. Was it his kidneys or his ribs? Dundee was talking to him and Ali was shaking his head in disagreement. In contrast to Foreman, his expression was keen. His eyes looked as quick as the eyes of a squirrel. The bell rang for the eighth round.

Working slowly, deliberately, backing up still one more time, he hit Foreman carefully, spacing the punches, taking aim, six good punches, lefts and rights. It was as if he had a reserve of good punches, a numbered amount like a soldier in a siege who counts his bullets, and so each punch had to carry a predetermined portion of the work.

Foreman's legs were now hitched into an ungainly prance, like a horse high-stepping along a road full of rocks. Stung for the hundredth time with a cruel blow, his response was to hurl back a left hook which proved so wild he almost catapulted through the ropes. Then for an instant, his back and neck were open to Ali who cocked a punch but did not throw it, as though to demonstrate to the world that he did not want to flaw this fight with any blow reminiscent of the thuds Foreman had sent to the back of the head of Norton and Roman and Frazier. So Ali posed with that punch, then moved away. Now for the second time in the fight he had found Foreman between himself and the ropes and had done nothing.

Well, George came off the ropes and pursued Ali like a man chasing a cat. The wild punch seemed to have refreshed him by its promise that some of his power was back. If his biggest punches were missing, at least they were big. Once again he might be his own prodigy of strength. Now there were flurries on the ropes that had an echo of the great bombardment in the fifth round. And still Ali taunted him, still the dialog went on. "Fight hard," said Ali. "I thought you had some punches. You're a weak man. You're all used up." After a while, Foreman's punches were whistling less than his breath. For the eighteenth time, Ali's corner was screaming, "Get off the ropes. Knock him out. Take him home!" Foreman had used up the store of force he transported from the seventh to the eighth. He pawed at Ali like an infant six feet tall waving its uncoordinated battle arm.

With 20 seconds left to the round, Ali attacked. By his own measure, by that measure of 20 years of boxing, with the knowledge of all he had learned of what could and could not be done at any instant in the ring, he chose this as the occasion and, lying on the ropes, he hit Foreman with a right and left, then came off the ropes to hit him with a left and a right. Into this last right hand he put his glove and his forearm again, a head-stupefying punch that sent Foreman reeling forward. As he went by, Ali hit him on the side of the jaw with a right and darted away from the ropes in such a way as to put Foreman next to them. For the first time in the entire fight, he had cut off the ring on Foreman. Now Ali struck him a combination of punches fast as the punches of the first round, but harder and more consecutive; three capital rights in a row struck Foreman, then a left, and for an instant on Foreman's face appeared the knowledge that he was in danger and must start to look to his lost protection. His opponent was attacking, and there were no ropes behind the opponent. What a dislocation: The axes of his existence were reversed! He was the man on the ropes! Then a big projectile exactly the size of a fist in a glove drove into the middle of Foreman's mind, the best punch of the startled night, the blow Ali saved for a career. Foreman's arms flew out to the side like a man with a parachute jumping out of a plane, and in this doubled-over position, he tried to wander out to the center of the ring. All the while, his eyes were on Ali and he looked up with no anger as if Ali, in deed, were the man he knew best in the world and would see him on his dying day. Vertigo took George Foreman and revolved him. Still bowing from the waist in this uncomprehending position, eyes on Muhammad Ali all the way. he started to tumble and topple and fall, even as he did not wish to go down. His mind was held with magnets high as his championship and his body was seeking the ground. He went over like a six-foot, 60-year-old butler who had just heard tragic news, yes, fell over all of a long collapsing two seconds; down came the Champion in sections, and Ali revolved with him in a close circle, hand primed to hit him one more time, and never the need, a wholly intimate escort to the floor.

The referee took Ali to a corner. He stood there; he seemed lost in thought. Now he raced his feet in a quick but re strained shuffle, as if to apologize for never asking his legs to dance, and looked on while Foreman tried to rouse himself.

Like a drunk hoping to get out of bed to go to work, Foreman rolled over, Foreman started the slow head-agonizing lift of all that foundered bulk God somehow gave him and, whether he heard the count or no, was on his feet a fraction after the count of ten and whipped, for when Zack Clayton guided him with a hand at his back, he walked in docile steps to his corner and did not resist. Moore received him. Sadler received him. Later, one learned the conversation.

"Feel all right?"

"Yeah," said Foreman.

"Well, don't worry. It's history now."

"Yeah."

"You're all right," said Sadler, "the rest will take care of itself."

In the ring, Ali was seized by Rachman, by Gene Wilder, by Bundini, by a host of black friends old, new and very new, who charged up the aisles, leaped onto the apron, sprang through the ropes and jumped near to touch him. Norman said to Plimpton in a tone of wonder like a dim parent who realizes suddenly that his child is indeed and indubitably married, "My God, he's Champion again!" as if one had trained oneself for years not to expect news so good as that.

In the ring, Ali fainted.

It occurred suddenly and without warning and almost no one saw it. Angelo Dundee, circling the ropes to shout happy words at reporters, was unaware of what had happened. So were all the smiling faces. It was only the eight or ten men immediately around him who knew. Those eight or ten mouths that had just been open in celebration now turned to grimaces of horror. Bundini went from laughing to weeping in five seconds.

Why Ali fainted, nobody might ever know. Whether it was a warning against excessive pride in years to come--one private bolt from Allah--or whether the weakness of sudden exhaustion, who could know? Maybe it was even the spasm of a reflex he must have refined unconsciously for months--the ability to recover in seconds from total oblivion. Had he been obliged to try it out at least once on this night? He was, in any case, too much of a champion to allow an episode to arise and was back on his feet before ten seconds were up. His handlers, having been lifted, chastened, terrified and uplifted again, looked at him with faces of triumph and knockdown, the upturned mask of comedy and the howling mouth of tragedy next to each other in that instant in the African ring.

Frost was crying out: "Muhammad Ali has done it. The great man has done it. This is the most joyous scene ever seen in the history of boxing. This is an incredible scene. The place is going wild. Muhammad Ali has won." And because the announcer before him had picked the count up late and was two seconds behind the referee and so counting eight when Clayton said ten, it looked on all the closed-circuit screens of the world as if Foreman had gotten up before the count was done, and confusion was everywhere. How could it be other? The media would always sprout the seed of confusion. "Muhammad Ali has won. By a knockdown," said Frost in good faith. "By a knockdown."

Back in America, everybody was already yelling that the fight was fixed. Yes. So was The Night Watch and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Chapter 5

For reporters, the fight had just begun. They had to get into Ali's dressing room. It became Norman's exclusive, his first. How he got in he was never able to calculate later, but a considerable amount of timely pushing through the squad of soldiers at the door had something to do with it. You had to shove hard enough to make progress, but not so hard that you would promote a rifle butt in your ribs--his final grand effort got one leg through just back of a fat man he had never seen before.

In the dressing room they were trying to slam the door to protect Ali from an inundation of flesh, so there was a minute when Norman was happy for every muscle he had. When someone made a lunge to get in behind him, the vanguard came down to parts of three bodies coming through the door at once. Since he was in the middle, and the other torsos were soft, he was ensconced. What a timeless squeeze.

Pat Patterson, with a chrome-plated pistol on his hip and a cop's rage at the assault on his bastion, finally gave a hand to drive the others out and pull Norman in. To his surprise, he was the only reporter in the room. Never did a man proceed to do less with his exclusive. Of course, he would have months to write his piece and half a year to see it printed--there was hardly the need to rush to a telephone in the next ten minutes. But even if a man had been waiting thousands of miles away at a city desk, he might well have done no more. He didn't want to ask Ali questions, he wanted to pay his respects. There are not that many occasions in life, after all, when the sense of irony has clearly departed.

Ali sat on the rubbing table with his hands on his knees, looking like a happy and tired host after a good party. His face was unmarked except for a small red bruise on one cheekbone. Maybe he never appeared more handsome. He stared out like a child. "I have stolen the jam," said his eyes, "and it tastes good." Lights twinkled in those eyes all the way back to the beginning. Truth, he looked like a castle all lit up.

"You did everything you said you were going to do," Norman offered in simple tribute.

"Yeah. It was a good night." Neither mentioned that he had not danced. That must have been the surprise he promised.

"Fantastic fight." Norman said. "You're going to like looking at the films."

Ali drew a breath. "Maybe they'll admit," he said softly, "that now I am the professor of boxing."

The door to the dressing room was opened again to admit Belinda Ali. In Muslim dress, with a skirt that came to her ankles and a white cloth turban close to her head, she was a statuesque woman--precisely the word. Over six feet tall, as well proportioned as her husband, she had features sufficiently classic for the head of a Greek statue. She came forward and husband and wife looked at each other silently, as if a question of long standing had at last been resolved. They kissed. The object of love would prove for once deserving of love. He gave her a smile as open as the sweetness of his feelings. There was something so tender in Ali's regard, so mocking and so calm that the look appeared to say, "Honey, my ways got to be curious to you, and we both know I am crazy, but please believe me when I try to tell you that I am, my darling, by all scientific evidence, a serious fellow." (Or is that the way Norman would have spoken if he had ever won anything that well?)

Belinda now moved around the room to exchange congratulations. She made a point of going up to Roy Williams, who had waited through this long night without a fight. "I want to thank you, Roy, for all you've done," she said. "We couldn't have won this fight if you hadn't gotten Ali ready the way you did."

"Thank you." he said with pleasure, "it was sure a good night."

"I'm sorry you didn't have your fight."

"Oh," said Roy in his deep voice. "Ali won and that counts."

If Norman had been keeping his journalistic wits, he would now have gone to the other dressing room, but he wanted to discuss the fight with Ali, a feeble practical judgment. Other reporters were getting in to see the new Champion, and so many surrounded the rubbing table and Ali spoke in so low a voice that no more rations for the literary mill were going to be collected. By the time he left. Norman would discover to his unhappiness that he had missed George Foreman in his dressing room, a sore loss, for Foreman had things to say. Other reporters filled him in, notably Plimpton and Bob Ottum of Sports Illustrated. Given the essential generosity of reporters to one another, it was all too easy to form atrocious habits and cover one's stories from the telephone in the bathtub; yes. even as reconstructed, Foreman had things to say. Yet, what a loss not to feel the battered aura of the ex-champion's mood. Every wound has its revelation.

The dressing room Norman never saw had red walls, and the fighter after the fight was covered with towels in gold lamé. "I got to beat this guy." Ali had said once. "I saw him at Salt Lake City. He was wearing pink-and-orange shoes with platforms and high heels. I wear brogans. When I saw his fly shoes, I said to myself, 'I'm going to win.' "

Yes, red and gold might be for fallen kings. Foreman lay beneath ice packs. According to Plimpton, he first asked Dick Sadler if he had been knocked out, then he counted backward for a while from 100, 99, 98, etc., to see if his head was clear, and he called out the names of the 20 people in his camp one by one. "I felt secure," said Foreman. "I had a true feeling I was in control of this fight. I was surprised when the people jumped into the ring." He said everything in a quiet, calm voice. "I was counted out." he said, "but I was not knocked out."

Let us quote Plimpton's account here:

He repeated, at times so slowly that it seemed as if he were stumbling through a written text, what he had so often said in dressing-room statements following his victories: "There is never a loser. No fighter should be a winner. Both should be applauded."

The reporters stood around uncomfortably, knowing that it would finally sink in that for the first time in his professional career his generous words for a loser referred to himself.

Then Foreman spoke of Ali. "A fine American." he said, "great gentleman. A wonderful family man." The reporters were counting how many times Foreman had been hit in the head over eight rounds.

He was still talking as the winner. There is all the temporary insanity of loss. One knows that there is a reality to which one can return, at least the odds are great that it will still be there, but reality does not feel real. It is too insubstantial. Reality has become a theory introduced into one's head by other people. It does not seem as natural as what one feels. George Foreman still felt like the Champion.

He took the ice pack off his face. "I have a statement to make. I found true friendship tonight," he said. "I found a true friend in Bill Caplan."

That was Bill Caplan who beat Foreman at ping-pong every day. Sturdy Bill Caplan, with his round face, his eyeglasses and a hundred reporters always mad at him because Foreman was uncooperative about interviews. With what eyes of Jewish compassion must Caplan have looked at Foreman after the fight. George's own people would not be so kind. By black measure, defeat is as bad as disease.

"I imagine," said George, "that the punch that knocks a man down he doesn't really see. I suspect he doesn't know about it."

There were crowds on the street outside the stadium and Blacks celebrating in the dawn. It was as if they had not dared to feel too much hope for Ali in advance of the fight. Yet just as there are men who reach their rightful historical stature only in the hour of assassination, so others do it on the morning of their victory. Outside the stadium, at six A.M., there was a crazy air of liberation all over the boulevards and back streets of Kin shasa. People were drunk, people were bowing to one another, people extended their arms and legs in the long moves appropriate to a basketball court. That seemed the way to float down the road. There was laughter, and people waving to one another two blocks away. Catcalls at the sight of him. A white man. Must certainly be for Foreman. Yes, the sweet spirit of revolution was back, not all sweet, let us say it is the spirit of change, and lions, cockroaches and philosophers are all awake. Nommo (if we remember) is the Word, and the word is in the water, and life is in the air. The damp air on this dawn is full of the n'golo of the living and the thirst of the dead. It is a weird morning. Under these heavy clouds, there is a dawn that does not lift. The light is reminiscent of the pallor of the earth in an eclipse.

On the street, Norman has run into a gambling friend he knows at the casino and the two debate whether to try to walk all the way home, but it is eight miles and more. Finally, they get a cab. His friend promotes it. His friend sees a whore he knows passing in a cab and calls to her and offers to pay the fare if she will share it with them. She is a young and lovely whore with a dark-bronze skin, a body as lithe as a climbing vine and an abundance of dark-bronze hair in her armpits. She is at this hour in love with Muhammad Ali--one does not wish to change places with her pimp at this hour. She will not appear again in our account and since Africans, according to good Father Tempels, believe "the name is not a simple external courtesy, it is the very reality of the individual," let us give to print the full value of the reality she chooses for herself--which is Marcelline. They leave her soon at her house, a hovel with a tin roof on a humped dirt road with oil stains, tropical puddles and dead foliage. Marcelline has been as beautiful as a movie star.

At the Inter-Continental, everybody is drinking in the timeless dawn. At the bar and on the patio, people are celebrating, people are toasting the morning in champagne. Norman runs into Jim Brown and cannot resist asking, "Think the fight was fixed?" Jim Brown grins ruefully, he shakes his head. He is happy to feel in error. "Man," he says, "I never been more wrong in all my life."

One by one, Foreman's people were there to talk to. Maybe it is the mark of a good man that defeat does not leave more than one good sentence in the mouth. Henry Clark, having lost his big bet, merely said, "The better fighter won."

Elmo, encountered in the lobby, was not saying a word. Norman said at last, "George met the man at his best."

Elmo gave a silent nod. He smiled. "Working on it," he said. "Oyé."

Archie Moore let a few words drop: "Boxing is syllables. You learn them one by one." Still his eyes had a light. He was loyal to George, but Ali was the triumph of his own tradition.

Dick Sadler talked at length. If he was a good man, then defeat gives speech to some. "It wasn't what Muhammad did," Sadler said, "it was what George didn't do. He didn't move. He didn't listen. I don't know what was going on. George don't let anybody hold him. He let Muhammad. We told him Muhammad was going to hold. George knew before the fight what Muhammad was going to do. But he punched himself out. George can punch all day. How does he punch himself out? I'm going crazy. Big bad George Foreman, known to be a brutal fighter, hits people back of the head, hits men when they're sitting on the ropes, hits them when they're down, bombs them in the kidney, a rough, mean fighter, and he lets Muhammad hold him. I showed him what to do. If Muhammad's got his gloves up protecting his head, then he can't see, so, George, poke him where he's blind. If he's down protecting his gut, let him hear it in the ear. Set him up with the left, George, give it to him with the right. He wouldn't do it, he couldn't do it."

"Maybe Ali is different from other fighters." Norman was tempted to broach his idea that this was the first major fight that bore serious resemblance to chess. Such comparisons were always sentimental conceits, and this was hardly the time. Still!

It is fortunate that he kept his mouth shut, for Sadler next remarked, "I'm just as stupid on the fight as you are. I got to think about it."

A six-year-old girl, down for early breakfast, early as could be, passed by and Sadler went to give her a hug. "Bon jour, ma petite," he said. "Bon jour."

The conversation still bothered him, however. He came back to Norman and said, "I ain't got the answer."

Then the rainy season, two weeks late and packed with the frenzy of many an African atmosphere and many an unknown tribe, came at last to term with the waters of the cosmos and the groans of the Congo. The rainy season broke and the stars of the African heaven came down. In the torrent, in that long protracted moon-green dawn, rain fell in silver sheets and silver blankets, waterfalls and rivers, in lakes that dropped like a stone from above, and with a slap of contact louder than the burst of fire in a forest. It came in buckets, a tropical rain right out of the heart overhead. Norman had not seen a rain so bad in 30 years, not since he sat under a pup tent in the Philippines.

Later he heard what the storm did to the stadium. It poured onto the seats and poured through the aisles, it flowed down in jungle falls and streamed through the stairs and narrow entry halls, flooded the soccer field and washed beneath the ring carrying for its message the food and refuse of the 60,000 souls once sitting in the seats. Foreman's dressing room was a dark pool with old towels floating in a foot of water, and kids were prowling the stadium by the end of the deluge. Orange peels and fight tickets drifted into collection beneath the canvas and batteries were drenched, generators gave out. Half the telex machines broke down in the storm and the satellite ceased to send a picture or a word. What a debacle if the storm had come while the fight was on.

Ali would laugh next day and offer to take credit for holding back the rain.

Chapter 6

On that next day (which is the same day just after sleeping from nine to noon) Norman had lunch and decided to go out to Nsele one last time and say goodbye to Ali.

Out there, the new Champion is giving a press conference to a hundred African reporters and media men, who gather around him with the solemnity and respect they might once have offered to Gandhi. It is three in the afternoon, not ten hours since he won, and he has probably not slept for half of that time--nonetheless, his tongue is unflagging and he must talk on fifty subjects, telling the Third World press in just the short time Norman is there how "the long dresses of your women impress me more than your jet planes and your Lumumba monument." A little later, he compliments them on changing their names to African. "On the occasion of his investiture," writes Father Tempels, the chief "receives a [new] name. ... His former name may be no longer uttered, lest by so doing his new vital force may be harmed." Muhammad Ali, nee Cassius Clay, knew where of he spoke, and talked of the emergence of peoples and the disciplines of victory and the need for goals outside the vanity of the self. "These things George Foreman did not recognize," he intoned. "But I know that beating George Foreman and conquering the world with my fists does not bring freedom to my people. I am well aware that I must go beyond all this and prepare myself for more. I know," said Muhammad Ali, "that I enter a new arena."

My God! All of it! He was going after all of it. And why not, given the rate of increase at which he mastered the whole of whatever he was given. Norman was thinking of the first time he met him, there at a crap table in The Dunes, Cassius Clay in Vegas in the summer of 1963, a tall, skinny, nervous young fighter with an undefeated record and a mortal fear of Sonny Liston, whom soon he was going to meet. The boy was un happy with the half-recognition of the name, "Norm Mailer, I heard of you. You're in the movies or something"--the boy did not like to be unsure--and later throwing the dice, so ignorant of craps he hardly knew when he won, yet still lucky as the vein of his ongoing fortune, Cassius complained when they passed him casino counters after a winning roll. "What are these things?" he cried.

"Chips."

"Don't gimme none of that stuff," he bawled. "Gimme some more of those silver dollars!" Just another mad-hat lout from Louisville. Now he was entering a new arena. "He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life," he told the representatives of the black media. "That is why I love and respect Africa. It is the land of risks and"--he looked for the word--"endeavor. The people have respect, yet they are brave to new notions. They are the force of the future." With what an immensity of anxiety must Ali live at the size of his world role and his intimate knowledge of his own ignorance.

Later, Norman and Budd Schulberg were alone with Ali for a few minutes and started to have a good talk about the fight. Ali was getting ready to expatiate. He was in the full enjoyment of analyzing his own fight. "George, you see," he said, "has got a breathing problem." But they were interrupted. John Daly and a group of his friends had come to visit the villa. Ali, with the happiest spirit, was soon charming the ladies. "Oh," he said in response to a query, "my mother never worries. I could be getting killed in the ring, but she wouldn't worry. 'My baby's all right,' she'd be saying." And he winked at Tom Daly, John Daly's father, with his 300 fights, to whom he had just been introduced. The phone rang. It was a reporter in New York, and Ali talked to him and made faces with his guests. "Yes, I will rest a few months and let you look at me as the Champ and him as the tramp." Laughter from the people near him. "No, I have no plans. They're talking of giving me ten million dollars"--a straight look at John Daly--"but that's ahead. No, I have no plans to visit the White House. I'm going to visit the Black House right here and see the President of Zaïre again and get my pet gorilla and take my little Joe Frazier home." He waited for the laughter and the next question. "You're asking if I was happy to get the title back in Africa, which is the home of my ancestors? Yes, I was happy, a good feeling, but it don't mean too much. I'd rather have done it in Madison Square Garden, because that's where the real nonbelievers are, that's the real fight crowd."

Later, after company left and evening was falling on the Congo, Ali went out for a short walk, but was followed by so many black people waiting outside the villa for a look at him that he soon came back. The red bruise on his cheek had subsided and his face was unmarked. The only sign he had been in a fight is that he moved with an extra subtlety of anticipation, like a man who has been in a wreck and does not know where pains will yet disclose themselves. He has taken a pounding to the side of his body and the top of his kidneys. In the privacy of his bathroom, doubtless he will wince and piss blood. That is the price after many a fight.

It was his pride, of course, to show none of this. Feeling good, it was his happiness not to fail to offer happiness. So he paused at the door to his villa, as if he wanted to give the Africans waiting outside more adequate recompense for the time they had devoted, and he roared, "I can lick anybody you got. Give me your best. I will fight your best fighter."

The thin Blacks giggled. Those who understood a little English giggled immediately and the others took it up in ripples of laughter as his words were translated.

"Don't give me nothing but your best," said Ali.

A 12-year-old boy came out and started shadowboxing the air five feet in front of him. "You think you got a chance, huh?" said Ali. "You're in trouble. You're in a lot of trouble." He began to spar with the 12-year-old, who was fast and knew a little about boxing, and Ali slowly sank to his knees and cried out, "I'm the one in trouble. He's too much for me."

Everybody roared. Ali got up and said to the boy, "You whupped me today, but watch out. I'm going to go home and practice, and then I'll come back and whip you." He saluted the crowd and returned inside.

Once more it was time to leave and say goodbye and get ready to leave Africa. Norman made his farewells to Ali and Belinda and had a last look of Ali stretched out on the green-velveteen Borox sofa, his bare feet up on the coffee table, while Belinda, sitting across from him, was now in her turn giggling and tickling the bare soles of his famous flying feet with a small ivory back-scratcher. Farewell to Ali.

Driving on the road back to the hotel for the last time, Norman kept passing groups of young boys jogging on the shoulder. He did not know if it was a brand-new phenomenon, but squad after squad of young adolescents were out there on the dark roads, and once he almost hit a few, they came up so suddenly in the lights. On the night he jogged with Ali--was it five nights ago?--Ali said afterward, "It'll be a great experience for you remembering that you ran with the Champion just a few days before the fight." and he thought it a peculiarly heavy remark at the time but had the recognition now that it was just possible Ali was going to be right once more--already Norman was beginning to think of it fondly.

Chapter 7

There was trouble getting home. It would come at Dakar, where a mob, convinced Muhammad Ali was on board, would tear over the runways of the airport and surround the plane. There was, however, no sense of this on departure from Kinshasa. Rather, there was relief. Rumors had been passing that Ali and his camp would commandeer the flight. It was nice to find out at the airline desk that one's First Class seat was still intact. No small boon. To be trapped in the middle of three seats in Economy on the 19-hour flight from Kinshasa to New York with stops at Lagos, Accra, Monrovia and Dakar had to be one of the intimate clues life offered of suffering after death. It was one of the longest flights left in the world, and sometimes one of the worst. Still, Norman liked it. A share of the action of Africa, legal and illegal, seemed to get on and off the plane: hunters and smugglers, engineers and tribal chiefs, black babies, and a mysterious white man in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, who traveled First Class with a black-leather satchel in the empty seat next to him. The seat had been purchased for the satchel and it was the only empty seat in the compartment. Who in First Class could take his eyes off the black bag? It would later develop that the owner was a King's Messenger, and when a British official met him to give escort off the plane, the man in the black suit exclaimed in a fine high-service English voice, "Thank God, you're here on time." Were the contents fissionable material or secrets of state? Were they crooks in costume and the real crop prove to be diamonds? It was the only flight Norman knew that on any routine night could offer the visual impact of a Hitchcock film.

Besides, there was time to think. Hours to think and hours to read. The boredom of a long flight could turn inside out again and boredom give way to epiphany. He had a few on the trip back. Events of the week enlarged the space he had prepared for them in his brain and he realized he might as well come to grips at last with something he had wanted to avoid from the start--which was what to think of Ali and the Muslims. He had implicitly kept waiting for some evidence that Ali was not a Black Muslim, not really, and that was absurd. It was time to recognize that being a Black Muslim might be the core of Ali's existence and the center of his strength. What was one to do about that? So he turned to the transcript of a speech made by Louis Farrakhan, national representative of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad on Black Family Day, May 27, to an audience of over 100,000 Blacks in the spring of this same year in which Ali would fight Foreman in the fall. He had listened to the speech once on a record late at night and since it was an hour in length, he had fallen asleep right after and remembered it not too well in the morning, more as a cogent, hard-driving piece of oratory than for its content. So he thought to have a transcript made.

The transcript was what he now studied, and it was clear. When he finished, he thought he might have learned a little more about Ali.

All of the black leadership that rose up in the last ten years has died down. And one great leader and one great group is now emerging on the black scene for the whole of black America to look at. And that leader ... is the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

Louis Farrakhan spoke of the black people as a family that must take care of themselves. They had to be on guard against the efforts of the white man to turn them on one another, he said. Louis Farrakhan began to list some Black martyrs. First was Marcus Garvey, then Adam Clayton Powell. We may as well take a full section from his speech. It is not hard to read:

Adam Clayton Powell didn't tell you he was Jesus. He told you he was a friend of yours that wanted to do good for black people. But once they had isolated us from Adam Clayton Powell ... they castrated him while we stood idly by, just looking. And it was only after Adam Clayton Powell was dead that you and I said, you know something, Clayton Powell sure was a great man. How come we can't recognize the greatness of men while they live? How come we have to wait until a man is dead and gone before we recognize what kind of man we have?

Oh, my beloved black brothers and sisters, I appeal to you this afternoon to reason. Look at Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Many of you loved the Panther philosophy. You loved to see a young black brother stand up and challenge the system. They were beautiful brothers. Beautiful men who wanted liberation for black people. But Whitey there again infiltrated the Panther movement, and while many of the brothers and sisters were saying, "Right on, right on, baby! Right on!" within the crowd was an agent of the United States Government planning the destruction of the Panther party. You lived to see them put Huey and Eldridge against one another, bust the movement down the middle, and then break it up. And now they can talk about the Panther party because they destroyed it. Now they can talk about CORE and SNCC because they destroyed it. Now they can talk about Rap Brown because my beautiful black brother's in prison. Now they can talk about Stokely Carmichael because Stokely is out of the picture. But, oh, there's a black man in America who has been in the picture for 40 years, there's a black man in America that time has not destroyed. There's a black man in America who was here in the Thirties, here in the Forties, here in the Fifties, here in the Sixties, and now in the Seventies Elijah Muhammad is still on the scene and still going strong. (Rousing applause)...

What has made Elijah Muhammad survive? What has caused Elijah Muhammad to maneuver through the mountains of hate and propaganda? Don't you remember when they said we taught hate? Don't you remember when they said we were violent? Don't you remember when they said we were anti-White, and anti-Christian? And don't you remember when you didn't want nothing to do with the Muslims? Don't you remember? Don't you remember the time when you wouldn't be caught dead at anything given by a Muslim? Don't you remember? Oh, don't act like you don't remember! 'Cause it wasn't that long ago! Just a few years ago. Here seated before me are ambassadors from the United Nations. Here seated before me are scholars and scientists, educated people who would never come near Elijah Muhammad! I ask you, what brought about a change in you? What made you come here this afternoon? It is because Elijah Muhammad has skillfully guided his followers through the maze of confusion and propaganda, Elijah Muhammad with wisdom never took up the gun. He told his followers, don't carry so much as a penknife. He said, do like I tell you and you will be successful. Elijah Muhammad took the dope needle out of our arms. Elijah Muhammad took the wine bottle out of our hands. Elijah Muhammad stopped us from throwing away our money on horse races and gambling. And he told us, Pool that money, brother. Pool that money, sister. And let's do constructive things. So now that all of the other black groups and organizations have been destroyed by white power, by white deceit, by white chicanery coming out of Washington, D.C., now there is only one leader left, there's only one group left. And that one leader and that one group represents the hope of the black man of America.

Louis Farrakhan did not, of course, mention Malcolm X nor Martin Luther King. The Black Muslims had hardly mended every fence. Nonetheless, what a power had emerged in Black America. If they had long been the single largest force in the prisons, so might they yet be the greatest civil force in black relations with America--farewell to the NAACP. Ali's mind might not be built on whims and contradictions, as Norman had thought for so long, but on the firm principles of a collective idea.

Whether it was an idea that would yet prevail and, if it did, bring more of good than damage, who could begin to estimate? Factors pushed up against one another like playing cards in a game of poker. Norman remained enough of a Marxist to think that the movement of the Black Muslims was first and foremost a historical offensive to forge for Blacks in America their own middle class. "A black man," Farrakhan said, "who only knows how to make a baby but does not know how to protect that child, who does not want to feed and secure that child, is an enemy to the rise of the black man. ... Until you and I learn to love our children enough to want to protect them with our lifeblood, then we can never be respected as a people. ... Until the black man learns to take his mouth out of the white man's kitchen, we will never be free. ... We've got to feed our selves ... clothe ourselves ... shelter ourselves." One of his phrases could have served 150 years ago as the future credo of the bourgeoisie--"The marriage of wealth and wisdom equals power."

If encouraged in their aims by the establishment, the Black Muslims would bring the Blacks their share of the middle-class emoluments of the white, including the white sense of order. The contradiction was that the Muslims might yet find themselves willy-nilly a revolutionary vanguard. Especially if they were denied. Besides, their movement was hardly free of many a complex alliance with the Arab world. What an unpredictable pot. No scenario would be too surrealistic to simmer in it. Let us peep in on Ali bringing peace to the Near East: "My dear Arab colleagues and my old Jewish friends," we can hear Ali say. Black Kissinger.

No, Norman had the uneasy intuition that sooner or later, his admiration for Ali could change to the respect one felt for a powerful and dedicated enemy. No turn was too sinuous for the tricks of history and no dimension necessarily too small for the future growth of Muhammad Ali. They had bestowed upon him, after all, a name with a great weight upon it. The original Ali was the adopted son of the prophet Muhammad. Now a modern Muhammad Ali might become the leader of his people. It was well for Muhammad Ali that he believed in predestination and surrender to the will of God.

Norman's thoughts were too general and he was full of champagne, misery, pleasurable recollections and lack of sleep. He slept. His dreams he did not remember. When he awoke, it was to the my-plane-is-sure-my-turf Southern tone of the pilot saying through the public-address system that he wished to assure his Pan American passengers there would not be any trouble at Dakar, but just in case, " 'cause, folks, I don't know where they got the idea, it was just a rumor in Kinshasa, but the good people of Dakar are convinced that the Heavy-weight Champion is on the plane, and they want to see Muhammad Ali in person, so a bunch of them are out at the airport now. It's one in the morning in Dakar, but out there on the runway they are sure he's here on board. We're going to come in on one of the back runways and then maybe we can discharge our outgoing and take on our incoming passengers via the airport bus. In any case, we're sorry for the delay."

But when they landed in that far-off secret place at the other end of the airport, the secret had been discovered. Even as they taxied, there was the sight of hundreds of people running toward them. The pilot cut his lights, gunned his motors and the plane trundled across the airport to another runway. Other people came running toward them. The pilot cut the motors. "Folks," he said, "we've been instructed to sit tight for a while. If we keep taxiing, somebody out there might get hurt. So we'll just remain here for a spell. Everything will be all right."

In no time, the plane was surrounded. It was the most peculiar situation. Police cars with red flashers on top and police cars with blue flashers kept driving slowly into the crowd, and patterns of revolving red and blue light flared in S turns and spirals beneath the wings, and fire trucks drove up and hosed the crowd. And the plane got wet as well. Drops ran down the windows. Sitting on the ground, all doors closed, the cabin was getting hot. The police cars had given up. The plane stood at the end of a runway surrounded by near to a thousand people and every spotlight in the airport was beamed upon them. Now the plane could not start its motors without incinerating a part of the population of Dakar.

More people kept flowing out of the (concluded on page 196)All Night Long(continued from page 193) terminal building toward the plane, streaming across the endless asphalt acres of the airport. Cars with loud-speakers drove up to address them and then drove away. Now a passenger bus arrived and parked and waited. Outside, the crowd shifted with rumors. Individuals broke off and ran when police cruisers would start their motors. Sometimes, like an elephant thrashing in its sleep, the crowd would shift a few feet in one direction or another, as if one of the rumors had moved through their legs.

"I think," said the pilot's voice, "we've worked out a modus vivendi. The people out there don't believe us when we tell them Muhammad Ali isn't on board. So we've agreed to let a delegation come on and search the plane. They won't incommode anybody and it may enable us to get going. Incidentally, we're going to disembark all departing passengers and take on the new ones right after the visit of the delegation."

A cheer went up from the passengers. The stewardesses brought drinks, an emergency dispensation.

Now the delegation came through. It was a fair sampling of the crowd, officers in uniform, airport officials, workers, one woman, one cutthroat, maybe twelve black people in the delegation. They started in Economy by looking under seats and in the bathrooms, and by the time they reached the front were becoming unhappily convinced that maybe the Heavyweight Champion was not on board. In First Class, Bob Goodman, a public-relations man for the fight, put a couple of pillows on his belly and covered them with a red blanket, "Muhammad Ali is hiding here," he whispered to the delegation, and the sight of his pink round face delighted the first two black representatives to come up the aisle, and they made a large play of peeing delicately under the blanket before they began to laugh.

After the delegation left, passengers for Dakar got off and new passengers for New York got on, all of them walking through an aisle of police at the bottom of the mobile stairs that went up to the door of the plane. Announcements on the negative findings of the delegation were made periodically over loudspeakers and a part of the crowd started to leave. A considerable number remained. They had been tricked too many times over the last 20 years, and over the last 2000 years, to believe a delegation. They knew Muhammad Ali was on the plane.

A stewardess went out on the platform at the top of the mobile stairs and began to talk to the crowd in French. "We would be proud to have him here," she said through an electric bullhorn. "We would want him aboard. But he is not on board. Je vous jure. Muhammad Ali n'est pas sur l'avion."

The crowd looked at her. They hardly moved. She was tall and thin, with a quintessential American face, honest, good-featured, strong, a hint stingy, and she would never reveal a sense of humor too quickly to strangers. The crowd heard her out in distrust. She was a representative of the powers of vested white deceit. Catcalls came to her, but not too many. Black ears hung on the revelation of American character to be heard in the vowels and consonants of her French. Besides, she was the only actor left.

Norman had gone out on the platform at the top of the stairs to get some air. Since it was even hotter outside than in the cabin and smelled of old oil and jet exhaust, he stayed only to listen to the girl. She looked at him and shrugged. "It doesn't seem to work," she said, looking down on the waiting faces below.

"May I make a suggestion?"

"I wish you would."

"Say to them that whether they believe you or not, they must know that the Champion of the world, Muhammad Ali, would never hide from his own people in a bathroom."

"That's good," said the stewardess. "That might work. How do you say bathroom?"

"Try lavabo."

"Lavabo. Lavabo." She picked up the bullhorn and delivered his thought, working gallantly at her French. He listened for a while. "Muhammad Ali ne veut pas cacher dans la lavabo," said the girl. "Il est trop grande pour cela. Un homme trop large pour avoir peur. La Champion du monde qui avait le courage de battre avec George Foreman ne cache pas dans un lavabo quand il y a opportunité pour dire bon jour à son peuple. Il vous aime. Vous êtes son peuple."

No, nothing much seemed to be going on. There was an air of dead disappointment in the crowd. The evening had promised much and now they were damp from their own sweat and the fire trucks' hosing. After a while, Norman went back into the plane.

Some few minutes later, he saw that the crowd was, indeed, beginning to disperse. In another quarter of an hour, the stewardess came in and the stairs were removed, the airplane hatch was shut, the motors started up. Cheerfully, the captain shouted through the P. A. to the stewardesses, "Down, girls, we're about to roll."

They taxied and took off. Back in the air again, the stewardess who had been at the bullhorn came by and told Norman that she thought his idea had helped. He was sufficiently pleased to ask her name and explain that he was a writer and might wish to put this episode in his piece. She replied, "I think I've got to ask the captain for permission." In a little while, she returned and said, "He says it's all right to tell you. My name is Gail Toes. Mrs. Richard Toes from Schenectady, based in New York. Toes like feet," she added, with a slight stiffening of her diaphragm, as if her husband might never know how much a girl loved him to take the name. One of the other stewardesses passing by now stopped and said to her, "Gail, I was proud of you. Your French is getting real good."

"Well, you got to work at something," said Gail Toes. She had much time on layovers in parts of Africa she knew little about, she explained, so she studied French.

A little later, on the high trip over the Atlantic, with the lights out and most of the passengers asleep, Norman played a game with the stewardesses in their forward compartment. It was something with five dice and many ways of counting bonuses, and he was not very good at it and lost by thousands of points, much to their amusement. Finally, he went to sleep and had a few hours before they put down in New York, and did not remember the game until some weeks later, when, thinking of it, he sent each of the girls an autographed copy of the soft-cover edition of Marilyn and expressed the hope they would think his ability to write was somewhat greater than his flair for dice.

Chapter 8

Would you like more of an ending? Here is an African tale. A tribal chief lent a sheep to a friend of Father Tempels'. One morning, the sheep was found dead. A dog belonging to the friend was found eating it. There was no evidence the dog had killed the sheep; indeed, it probably died in its sleep. Still, the friend, whose name was Kapundwe, happened to be a chief himself, and he made reparations to the first chief. The animal, after all, had been in his care. So he gave back not one sheep but three and added 100 francs. This large repayment was to compensate the first chief properly, since that man felt he had suffered something more than the mere loss of an animal. The shocking disappearance of his possession had disturbed his vital force. "His peaceful enjoyment of life" had been "wounded." The payment, therefore, was to recognize his natural rights to a "restoration of being." Both chiefs understood the transaction perfectly.

We are speaking of the economy of mood. Maybe it is the only economy in the play of forces between those who are living and those who are dead. Of course, we will hardly know until an African becomes emperor of the moon.

This is the conclusion of a two-part series.