The Fight Read Online Free PDF Page B

an agreeable lobby, although the autumn brown and pastel orange in the carpets, wicker chairs, walls, lamps and sofas were not different from autumn brown at the Indianapolis Hilton or the Sheraton Albuquerque. It worked in Africa. A little creature comfort went a long way in Kinshasa. The fast elevators gave zap! The fried food was eggs! Taxis came quickly. Still, the happy action was a function of the flow in the lobby rather than the status of people gathered. Social arbiters of Heavyweight Championships would have gone blind looking for a face important enough to ignore. If on the night before the fight a few well-known names would finally arrive, Jim Brown, Joe Frazier and David Frost for three, the old celebrity of the fight crowd was absent. The fight cadre plus George Plimpton, Hunter Thompson, Budd Schulberg and himself made up the notables. Any notions of anonymity had to be discarded.
    For these days Norman was being welcomed by Blacks. If Ali had introduced him as “a man of wisdom” — Ali who had seen him in a dozen circumstances over the years and never quite allowed that he was sure of the name — Foreman, in turn, said, “Yeah I’ve heard of you. You’re the champ among writers.” Don King presented him as “a great mind among us, a genius.” Bundini, lying in his teeth, assured everyone, “No’min is even smarter than I am.”Archie Moore, whom No’min had long revered, was cordial at last. A sparring partner asked for an autograph.
    What celebration. Being greeted this warmly on return to Africa, he felt delivered at last from the bowels of the bummer. The final traces of the miserable fever that kept him in bed for a week on his return to New York were now gone. He was happy to be back in Africa. What a surprise. Since he was not being read in this milieu nearly so much as praised, and since the Black American community with its curious unities of opinion, so much like psychic waves, was spreading a good word on him for no overt reason — no recent published work or extraliterary relation to Blacks half so close as books and articles he had done ten or fifteen years earlier — he came at last to realize the fair shape of the irony. Months ago, a story had gotten into the newspapers about a novel he was writing. His publishers were going to pay him a million dollars sight unseen for the book. If his candles had been burning low in the literary cathedral these last few years, the news story went its way to hastening their extinction. He knew that his much publicized novel (still nine-tenths to be written) would now have to be twice as good as before to overcome such financial news. Good literary men were not supposed to pick up
sums
. Small apples for him to protest in every banlieu and literary purlieu that his Boston publisher had not been laid low with a degenerative disease of the cortex but that the million was to be paid out as he wrote five to seven hundred thousand words, the equivalent of five novels. Since he was being rewarded only as he delivered the work, and had debts and a sizable advance already spent and fivewives and seven children, plus a financial nut at present larger than his head, so the sum was not as large as it seemed, he explained — the million, you see, was nominal.
    Well, the literary world was built on bad cess. For good cause. If no one would be in a hurry to forgive him unless his novel proved immense, then maybe that would force his work closer to such scope. He might have time, at least to parse it out.
    Here in Africa, however, it was another tale. Since the word of his million hit the wire services, his name throughout the Black community had been
underlined
. No’min Million was a man who could make it by using his head. No rough stuff! He did not have to get hit in the head, nor hit on the side of
your
head. This man had to be the literary champ. To make a million without taking chances — show respect! To sign for a sum that Heavyweight champs had not