THE CHINESE BOXES of MUHAMMAD ALI There Are Worse Things Than Defeat in the Ring, Ali Says, and from Even Worse Trage Dies People Recover
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THE CHINESE BOXES OF MUHAMMAD ALI There are worse things than defeat in the ring, Ali says, and from even worse trage dies people recover. The Fall and Rise of Muhammad Ali is practically instant. And here is where the Lord of Boxing, whose name may also be Allah, may have allowed Ali to blow the technical decision in order to save him for the big allegorical finish. If Frazier had flat tened him in eleven, or even knocked him stiff in fifteen, he may have left too big a hole in Quixote's armor. But Ali lived to fight another day, in other, bigger rings. Yes, Joe Frazier is undisputed champion, but the allegorical Ali lives!—that's the ongoing drama. While Frazier slowly recuperates, Ali is back on television, explaining how he won nine of the fifteen rounds. He's back on the campus circuit, bringing thousands of young white students to their feet cheering poems no longer directed at Frazier but at the white man's presence in Asia. He's our black Johnny Appleseed. He's in pursuit of a buck and in pursuit of the truth, and somehow the expansiveness of his personality bridges contradictions that would undo the normal you's and me's. BY BUDD SCHULBERG Cassius Marcellus Clay was minus six like the song says. Something about lighting a dense thunder sky. We were when quietly invincible Joe Louis was the way he talked. He's learned a lot, privileged to sit with him in his intro demolishing Max Schmeling and send traveling around the world, being with spective moments, get caught with him ing him back on his shield to the land people—he really feeds off people— in the midst of crowds that threatened of the self-styled master race. The Joe little people, big people—that's his col to crush him to death with their love, Louis of Clay's childhood was another lege. He doesn't learn from books— watch him handle rival hangers-on man, a balding, overweight ex-cham truth is he never really learned to read, with the delicacy of a born diplomat, pion getting a boxing lesson from but he sucks up knowledge, informa and see him swing from playful child Ezzard Charles and a pathetic thump tion, ideas like an elephant sucks up to a man under all the pressures our ing from Marciano. Manager-trainer water. And he trumpets it all out just hyped-up sports world and superstate Angelo Dundee, a fixture in Cassius's like an elephant too." Pentagon can bring to bear on a quix corner from the first fight to the last, "Do you go along with Ali's descrip otic and sensitive nature. remembers Clay as a bubbling sixteen- tion of Ali? Is he the most unusual We have said with conceit (in the old- year-old bouncing into the Louisville fighter you ever handled?" fashioned sense) and also with convic gym and begging to put on the gloves Over the big Cuban cigar in the small tion that, just as a people get the gov with Angelo's flashy light heavyweight Groucho Marx-like face the answer ernment they deserve, so each period Willie Pastrano. Flying up from All's poured forth without a second's hesi in our history seems to create the training quarters last March for the tation. "Not just a fighter, he's the most heavyweight champion it needs to ex latest and greatest Fight of the Cen unusual human being, the most fasci press itself on the platform where body tury, Angelo reminisced about his nating person I ever met—period." language and social currents fuse. This champion. In his voice was the awe In those hectic days before and after seems to have been true of every true one reserves for first meetings with the "The Fight"—the most widely attended knight we have studied in the lists gods. single event in the history of the world from American slavery's heavyweight "There was something special about —we were to enjoy an intimate look at champion Tom Molineaux upward. But him even then," Dundee remembered. the man who created the first $20- never has there been a prize fighter who "Something about the way he moved, million rumble through the force of seemed so to our manner born as Cas two unique qualities: his physical co sius Marcellus Clay a.k.a. Muhammad Budd Schulberg's many books include ordination and his metaphysical per Ali. His career began, appropriately, What Makes Sammy Run, The Harder sonality. A personality as changeable in 1960, in the Camelot days, in the time They Fall, Waterfront, and Some Faces in as a March weather report, a psyche of the Kennedys that welcomed the the Crowd. This article is excerpted from Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali, simple one moment, complex the next, decade, promised it hope, and asked to be published by Doubleday in April. loving, suspicious, overgenerous, self- for sacrifices in exchange for solutions. Copyright © 1972 by Budd Schulberg. protective, with flashes of brilliance The New Frontier. Already antique, SR/FEBRUARY 26, 1972 21 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED the words ring with the sound of pew twenty-first, he is, in his own words, Clay defeating Sonny Liston for ter respectfully aged and polished for "the most unusual." Taunted by the the title—" "This fight is the Sunday visitors. Imagine a time before ofays. Jack Johnson taunted back. Ac truth,' Malcolm told Cassius. 'It's the Cross and the Crescent the Bay of Pigs, before Dallas, before cepted by whites who offered him the fighting in a prize ring.' " Watts, before the attempted American national laurels and social responsi ization of Indochina, before assassina bilities that came with the champion tion became an annual horror, Medgar ship, Joe Louis accepted back. Never division but the heavy social order that Evers, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Mar quite an Uncle Tom, he was the Good it entertained? tin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. Joe who knew his place. He was the Watching him dance around the best Before the credibility gap of LBJ. Be hero but never the author of his al and biggest of the amateurs on his way fore the Chicago Convention, before legory. to AAU and Golden Gloves titles, Kent State and Jackson State. Before But the Sixties were a whole differ cognoscenti of the game were more Nixon promised to get us out of the ent number. In a time of prodigies amused than impressed. A heavyweight war by invading Cambodia and Laos turning on their dads—or rather, tun who prances around the ring like a and North Vietnam. ing out their daddies—ready for the lightweight? Look at the way he bends As our only world-famous athlete of bell, ready to take on all comers in and his dancer's waist backward to avoid the Shook-Up Decade just past, C.M.C. out of the ring, was that prodigious being hit! A tough pro would move in a.k.a. M.A. received into his beautiful brown descendant of Henry Clay: Cas- and break his back when he pulled that black body every one of the poisoned sius Marcellus Clay, the Fifth Beatle. kid stuff. That just ain't the way a arrows mentioned above. Wounded by Before we were prepared for the im heavyweight fights. But this was more all those arrows of our social misfor pact—but what were we prepared for than fast tactical footwork; it was ex tune, he refused to die. Hate him for in innocent 1960?—the loud laughing cessive mobility, sometimes physically this or despise him for that, he is still mouth in the handsome Greek god of unnecessary, a new psychological our youth, our conscience, our Mark a head was shouting, "Here I come, weapon—hit and run, jab and dance, Twain of bitterness and laughter. Of ready or not!" And who except his fel befuddle, frustrate, and tire the enemy all our champions, gloved and bare- low teen-agers could have been ready before zeroing in. knuckled, from the end of the eigh for the innovative style that was to Beatle V had begun to create his own teenth century to the dawn of the revolutionize not only the heavyweight pop culture in the ring. Archetype of SR/FEBRUARY 26, 1972 PRODUCED 2005 BY UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED the young athlete in the Age of Aquar Moore will fall in four"—and the an and boxing ability and came up with ius, he bounced happily to Rome for cient light heavyweight, almost thirty the mot, "He c'n run, but he can't hide." the 1960 Olympics, dazzling foreign years older than the quickfooted bard, Bu:: when the fight was over, and the challengers who could not believe a six- suffers the prophecy. job accomplished, it simply wasn't foot-three-inch will-o'-the-wisp. Or a Next we see Clay at, of all places, The Louis's or "our" style to speak the bronze Mercury, for the eighteen-year- Bitter End, a hip Greenwich Village exuberant truth: "Look, I tried to tell old original convinced an adoring audi launching pad for avant-garde talent, you how great I was, and you chumps ence that he was that earlier Roman where he sports a new tuxedo to en wouldn't listen. There's never been deity incarnate, combining speed and gage in poetry competition with a line anything like me in the history of the grace with eloquence, wit, and a mys up of ezra-pounded bards, grooving to world." terious elegance.