The Fight Read Online Free PDF

say good-bye to Ali. So he sat down next to him, waited a minute, and said a few words of farewell. Maybe it was the thought of anybody’s departure that produced the unexpected reply. Clearly, Ali muttered, “I gotta get out of this place.”
    Could the interviewer believe what he had heard? He leaned forward. This was as close as they had ever been. “Why don’t you go on safari for a couple of days?”
    With this remark, he lost the rest of his exclusive. Why hadn’t he just said, “Yes, it’s rough.” Too late would he recognize that you approached Muhammad’s psyche as carefully as you would walk up on a squirrel.
    “No,” said Ali, thrusting himself away from any temptation to scratch at the new itch, “I’ll stay here and work for my people.” Boxing is the exclusion of outside influence. A classic discipline.
    Norman went back to the States with no happy intimations of the fight to come.

3. THE MILLIONAIRE
    N OW , OUR MAN of wisdom had a vice. He wrote about himself. Not only would he describe the events he saw, but his own small effect on events. This irritated critics. They spoke of ego trips and the unattractive dimensions of his narcissism. Such criticism did not hurt too much. He had already had a love affair with himself, and it used up a good deal of love. He was no longer so pleased with his presence. His daily reactions bored him. They were becoming like everyone else’s. His mind, he noticed, was beginning to spin its wheels, sometimes seeming to repeat itself for the sheer slavishness of supporting mediocre habits. If he was now wondering what name he ought to use for his piece about the fight, it was out of no excess of literary ego. More, indeed, from concern for the reader’s attention. It would hardly be congenial to follow a long piece of prose if the narrator appeared only as an abstraction: The Writer, The Traveler, The Interviewer. That is unhappy in much the way one would not wish to live with a woman for years and think of her as The Wife.
    Nonetheless, Norman was certainly feeling modest on his return to New York and thought he might as well use his first name — everybody in the fight game did. Indeed, his head was so determinedly empty that the alternative was to do a piece without a name. Never had his wisdom appeared more invisible to him and that is a fair condition for acquiring an anonymous voice.
    Back in Kinshasa, however, one month later, much was changed. Now, he had a good room at the Inter-Continental and so did every figure in Foreman’s camp, the Champion, the manager, the sparring partners, the relatives, the friends, the skilled trainers — we are talking of no less than Archie Moore and Sandy Saddler — everyone in the retinue was there. Some of Ali’s camp were registered as well, most notably Bundini, who later would have verbal wars in the lobby with Foreman’s people. What wars! They must yet be described. The promoters of the fight stayed at the Inter-Continental, John Daly, Don King, Hank Schwartz. Big Black, the big conga drummer from Ali’s camp, was here. Interviewed by a British reporter who asked him the name of his drum, he answered that it was a conga. The reporter wrote Congo. The Zairois censor changed it to Zaïre. Now Big Black could say in interviews that he played the Zaïres.
    Yes, a different mood. The food was better at the Inter-Continental, so were the drinks. The lobby was moving with easy action between Black and white. Musicians left over from the festival four weeks before, operators at the fringe of the promotion, fight experts, hustlers, and even a few tourists mingled with passing African bureaucrats andEuropean businessmen. Employees, male and female, from the gambling casinos came by for a look and mingled with Peace Corps kids and corporation men from cartels. Dashikis, bush jackets, and pinstripe suits passed through the lobby. Public Relations was quick to speak of “Kinshasa’s living room.” It was most peculiarly