Boxing
Last fight
Benny Green
The air of finality with which the press invested Muhammad Ali's defeat in Las Vegas last week certainly has less than nothing to do with Ali's avowed professional intentions, but it does indicate ennui on the part of sports writers in desperate need of a new scenario. Having spent the last fifteen years heaping upon Ali's head every ringside cliché known to man, and having added to them every psychoanalytical, social, racial and political platitude ever invented, the boxing writers evidently sorely require fresh inspiration. The ring was hardly cleared last week before reporters and commentators were serving notice on Ali, waving goodbye to him with a haste that must have seemed indecent were it not so comical.
In fact, All has not lost his last fight yet, and it would not at all surprise me if he won a return match with his conqueror Spinks and became the first man ever to win the World Heavyweight Championship three times (which would still leave him floundering in the wake of Sugar Ray Robinson, who won the Middleweight title six times). If there should be a second Ali-Spinks production, the ex-champion is not likely to repeat his mistake of making his opponent a gift of the first five rounds in the name of some abstruse tactical theory, as he did last week. Nor will he feel inclined to look the gift-horse of a labour-saving knockout in the mouth, as he appeared to do in the tenth at Vegas. Like all the great champions, Ali has always done better the second time around, as he demonstrated in the return matches with Cooper, Liston, Norton and Frazier, which suggests that when the time comes to sign contracts, Spinks, if he knows what is good for his managers, will be well advised to find himself committed to some subsequent engagement. The truth is that although Ali has gone back a great deal in the last five years, he has not declined so far that a journeyman apprentice like Spinks can outbox him. Most of Ali's weariness last week was the result of throwing punches rather than receiving them, which is of course a far more acute problem for sated thirty-six than it is for hungry twenty-four.
Even so, Spinks only scraped home by the narrowest of margins, and must surely count himself lucky that he will never drift into a fight with an Ali ten years younger. In any case his ascension, even if it turns out to be temporary, looks very much like a sign that the Heavyweight Championship, whose slide into bathos was so unexpectedly arrested by Ali in the 1960s, is about to slip back to where the likes of Floyd Paterson and Sonny Liston left it, wavering uncertainly between an out-of-town vaudeville act and the stumblings of the purblind.
In the meantime, there remains the fascination of watching how the inroads of advancing age begin to cloud the issues of Ali's once crystal-clear style, for instance the fighting in spurts towards the end of the rounds, the passivity on the ropes in the hope of sapping the enemy's stamina, the inability of the calf muscles to rise to the demands of an emergency. One of the most significant manifestations of Ali's ageing process last week was the way his left leads exposed him to the indignities of the counter-punch. In his golden youth, one of the glories of Ali's technique was the ability to score with fast left leads from outside his opponent's range, partly through fleetness of foot and partly from possession of that hallmark of the great defensive boxer, the ability to hold the head far back without losing either vision or equilibrium. Time and again against Spinks, especially in the later rounds, we saw the effect of Ali's infinitesimal loss of pace, which was that too often the counter was more effective than the lead which invited it.
There is a sense in which we never did see the best of Ali. When he was twenty-five he was stripped of his titles for expressing unfashionable views about Vietnam; by the time the United States Supreme Court rendered his conviction ridiculous by quashing it by eight votes to none, the steam was already beginning to go out of his dancing, although at first, against opponents like Quarry and Bonavena, it hardly showed because he still remembered the choreography, as indeed he still does. As late as the fourteenth against Spinks, Ali pounced out of his corner and performed that encircling fandango which was once the despair of his opponents, a fandango in which he sprayed venomous left leads from a constantly shifting base; the only difference this time was that because the quickstep had slowed to a foxtrot, Spinks was able to read the signals and make his arrangements accordingly. It was the end of a process of deceleration begun by the American government, which is of course what makes Ali by far the most interesting champion of the century, and why the world will continue to be interested in him long after he has finally accepted that retirement which the press was so ungraciously thrusting on him last week.
Ali's predecessors in heavyweight history have not, apart from their fighting, been a very prepossessing lot, and there was almost none of them who did not find the challenge of retirement more demanding than anything that other fighters threw at them. John L. Sullivan eventually sobered up to the point where he was able to clamber on to a Temperance platform; Jack Johnson ran a few night clubs; Dempsey became a restaurateur; Jack Sharkey went fishing, Schmeling became a paratrooper, and Max Baer, having been an amateur comedian in the ring, became a professional one outside it. In looking for possible avenues of escape from nonentity for Ali, perhaps the two most hopeful figures are
Jim Corbett, who went on to become a Broadway matinee idol, and Bob Fitzsimmons, who never even won the title Ali has just lost until he was thirty-five, and later went on to win another world championshiP at a different weight when he was over forty. None of them had the slightest significance apart from their professional activities, and certainly none of them re-created himself in his own image, as Ali did when he changed his name and his religion. The only chamPion with anything remotely approaching Ali's originality is Gene Tunney, who defeated Dempsey twice and then celebrated his retirement by giving a course of lectures on Shakespeare at Harvard. Later, when asked if he had any intention of making a comeback, Tunney responded in the following sternly intellectual terms: The echo of a rumour that I am contemplating returning to the boxing game reached me in Italy. This is in no sense true, for I have permanently ended my I public career. My great work now is to live quietly and simply, for this manner of living brings me most happiness.
Ali will one day have to find a solution to that same riddle of retirement; in the meantime the professional obituaries in the world press have been scandalously premature. What will eventually settle the issue is not the condition of journalists' brains but of Ali's legs, and here there is no man wise enough to forecast events, least of all All himself, for it is one of the truisms of the fight game that no professional ever has any suspicion when it will happen to him. One time I had a long conversation with one of the greatest of all welterweight champions Barney Ross, who had one fight too many when he tried to defend his title in the spring of 1939 against Henry Aralstrong. Ross had taken a famous beating in that fight, and I asked him why. He told Me that for the first five rounds everything was perfect; he was moving away from Armstrong, scoring points and containing the whirlwind. But when he went to rise from his stool to start the sixth round, he found his legs had suddenly stopped working. In that one minute rest between rounds', Ross said, 'I changed from a fighter to an old man.' It remains to be seen whether All does a Gene Tunney or a Barney Ross, but let the fight reporters duly note that the time for a decision is not quite yet.
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