The Fight (6 page)

There was here, however, no question of wondering whether Foreman might be insane. The state of mind of a Heavyweight Champion is considerably more special than that. Not many psychotics could endure the disciplines of professional boxing. Still, a Heavyweight Champion must live in a world where proportions are gone. He is conceivably the most frightening unarmed killer alive. With his hands he could slay fifty men before he would become too tired to kill any more. Or is the number closer to a hundred? Indeed one reason Ali inspired love (and relatively little respect for his force) was that his personality invariably suggested he would not hurt an average man, merely dispose of each attack by a minimal move and go on to the next. Whereas Foreman offered full menace. In any nightmare of carnage, he would go on and on.

Prizefighters do not, of course, train to kill people at large. To the contrary, prizefighting offers a profession to men who might otherwise commit murder in the street. Nonetheless, the violence capable of being generated in a champion
like Foreman is staggering to contemplate when brought to focus against another fighter. This violence, converted to a special skill, had won him the Championship by his thirty-eighth fight. Foreman had never been defeated. On the night he won the Championship, he had accumulated no less than thirty-five knockouts, the fights stopped on an average before the third round. What an unbelievable record that is! Ten knockouts in the first, eleven in the second, eleven in the third and fourth. No need to think of him as psychotic, rather, as a physical genius who employed the methods of catatonia (silence, concentration and immobility). Since Ali was a genius in wholly separate ways, one could anticipate the rarest war of all — a collision between different embodiments of divine inspiration.

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

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

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

But seeing him in the ring at Nsele, it was obvious George had picked up sophistication. Everything in his training pointed toward this fight. His manager, Dick Sadler, had been in boxing just about all of his life. Archie Moore and Sandy Saddler, together with Sugar Ray Robinson, were precisely the three fighters who provided the most brilliant examples of technique for Ali’s developing gifts. Foreman was one champion, therefore, whose training was being designed by other champions; it gave an opportunity to watch how a few of the best minds in boxing might work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having finished three rounds with Lee, Foreman came out of the ring to work on the speed bag. Then he jumped rope. He did this with nice movement of his feet, skipping in enjoyment to the voice of Aretha Franklin, who was singing “You Got a Friend in Jesus.” This workout, from inception to rope-jumping, had been going on for forty-five minutes, the length with one-minute rests of a ten-round fight, and Foreman did not look the least bit tired. He was thriving on the jump rope, the soles of his feet tapping the floor with the éclat of a drummer using his sticks. Foreman was more than graceful now — he was lively with the sweetness of his footwork.

Dick Sadler, his manager, flat cap back on his big round black head, called a halt. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced to the crowd, “that ends our episode for today. We’ll be back tomorrow doing the same thing in the same way.” He looked confirmed in a good mood.

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

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

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

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