A Near Death Experience
Contacted by the New York Times, Frazier immediately accepted, saying: “This has been going on too long. It's like we've been fighting the Vietnam War.” In a way, of course, they always were, right here at home, as symbols, with Nixon's Silent Majority cheering on “Smokin' Joe,” the iconoclasts chanting “Ah-lee! Ah-lee!”
In their first meeting, in Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971, Frazier floored Ali in the fifteenth round and retained the heavyweight championship belt he won after Ali was stripped of it in 1967, for refusing military induction. Ali, broken-jaw loser, was hospitalized for a week; victorious Frazier, face grotesquely rearranged, spent a month in the hospital.
In their second Garden match, on January 28, 1974, when neither man was champion, Ali skillfully out-pointed Frazier, who may have escaped a knockout thanks to the referee's improper intervention in round two.
Finally, in the Philippines on October 1, 1975, Frazier challenged Ali for the title Ali reclaimed from George Foreman in Zaire. The “Thrilla in Manila” (so christened by Ali, the peerless promoter) ended when Frazier's trainer refused to allow Smokin' Joe, his face beaten beyond recognition, to begin the fifteenth round. Many boxing historians rank Ali-Frazier III as the most punishing, thrilling heavyweight battle ever. Ali said the fight brought him near death; he fought another six years.
Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, by Mark Kram (HarperCollins, 240 pp., $20)
Prime Target for Vultures
Despite their friendship — Joe loaned Ali money, lobbied for Ali's license — Frazier persisted in calling Ali Cassius Clay. In response, Ali belittled Frazier publicly and often, mimicking him wickedly, depicting him as a gorilla, an Uncle Tom too dumb and ugly to be champion. This went on for years, with little disapprobation attaching to Ali. A gritty, proud champion, Frazier remained bitter for decades, stung as much by Ali's cruelty as by the public's acceptance of it and ensuing deification of Ali.
To redress these wrongs, former Sports Illustrated reporter Mark Kram summons the Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. A familiar face from Ali documentaries, Kram aspired to write a “corrective” to the “stenography…hagiography [and] hero worship” surrounding Ali. In this, Kram wages an impressive fight; but methodologically, he loses on points.
In taking aim at Ali, Kram launches a frontal assault on the Black Muslims; this marks an astute recognition that more than we may care to remember, Ali's compelling biography — his name change and antiwar stand, his public and private treatment of wives and lovers, ring opponents, and flunkies — either flowed from, or offered stark contrast with, Ali's stated religious convictions. Thus the Black Muslims are depicted as a racist, sexist, hypocritical, corrupt, and violent “cult” that saw Clay as a “fool fighter” to be dropped instantly if he lost to Sonny Liston, a small and small-minded “sect” of militants who “reduced [women] to chattel” and daydreamed about the mile-long Mothership that would one day exterminate white people with lasers. Ali's functional illiteracy (“Is that right? Cars cause smog?”) made him a prime target for vultures, Kram argues, as well as a pliable but utterly false symbol for countless causes celebre of the Sixties. Kram writes: “Seldom has a public figure of such superficial depth been more wrongly perceived — by the right and left…
[Ali's] multitudes of followers were not boxing fans [but] seekers of the antihero. What mattered was Ali's style, his desecrating mouth, his beautiful irrationality so like their music….[A]nd now, near the death rattle of the Sixties, when they would soon return to the suits of the organization man they hated and become ruthless material dandies, they had their own black superhero — Muhammad Ali, who had not the slightest idea what they were talking about…. He was not about the counterculture, and certainly not women's rights; in his view both were avenues of disintegration, if he ever thought about them at all. Ali was about Ali — for his right to work and the teachings of Elijah [Muhammad, founder of the Black Muslims] that nourished him.
A Museum of His Own
Though it contains many pearls of reportage and passages of arresting writing, Ghosts of Manila ultimately amounts to a compendium of complaints that have mostly been aired before. Ali's occasional abuse of his entourage is amply documented in Muhammad Ali: A View From the Corner (1992), by personal physician Ferdie Pacheco, and in The Fight (1975), by Norman Mailer — a celebrity colleague who, like Howard Cosell and Bryant Gumbel, attracts Kram's harshest derision. Likewise, Ali's calumnies against Frazier earned appropriate disapproval even in authorized biographies like Thomas Hauser's Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (1991). And Ali's illegitimate mistresses and children have told their stories in TV documentaries and elsewhere.
Moreover, Kram's failure to fully document his reportage ensures that someone else will probably write the definitive Ali “pathobiography.” First, Kram tells us he covered Ali for eleven years, but never specifies the dates. Many conversations and anecdotes carry no attribution at all; while in some cases, Kram asserts his presence, in most others, readers are left to wonder about Kram's projections of omniscience. Only boxing Talmudists will spot Kram — despite undertaking “very little…preparatory reading” for this book — using Floyd Patterson quotes taken from a long-ago Esquire article uncredited here. Finally, Kram frequently cites critical accounts from Ali's ex-beneficiaries and others with axes to grind, even though Ali can no longer defend himself; indeed, to support the blockbuster claim that Ali's resistance to the draft was fueled not by religious principle but by fear of living with whites in barracks, Kram relies chiefly on the word of one anonymous childhood friend of Ali's.
Surely Kram's elevation of Joe Frazier is overdue and welcome, and his zealous attempt to puncture the Ali myth a conceptually worthy endeavor. But Kram's truest writing on Ali comes, ironically, in his occasional, grudging praise for “The Greatest.” “Ali was physical art,” Kram says, “belonged in a museum of his own…. Whatever you might have thought of him then, you were forced to look at him with honest, lingering eyes, for there might never be his like again.”
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
