Free Ghosts of Manila by Mark Kram Page A

Mathis, a three-hundred-pound ballroom dancer in the ring. Joe was down, wanted to quit. “You a baby, that it,” Durham said. “Go on, then, butcher them cows the rest of your life.” He was still at Cross, often slicing his fingers with knives; his hands were showing more stitches than a baseball glove. Durham talked him into being a sparring partner for Mathis. Buster was lazy, unmotivated, and the coaches saw it. Stick around, they told Joe. If this guy catches a cold, “you’re in.” Buster came up with an injured knuckle. Joe went on to win the gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.
    Frazier was in bad shape economically when he returned. He was now married to Florence and had two children. Local sportswriter Stan Hochman heard of his problem, and soon gifts and money began showing up, one of them a golf bag filled to the top with five-and one-dollar bills from a collection that had been made on the street. How now to make his big move as a pro? Durham went to black business leaders. They turned him down cold, saying that Joe was too small, his arms too short for a heavyweight. “Fuck ’em,” Yank said, “we’ll do it alone.” Back to Cross and more stitches; one day a bull escaped inside and headed right for Joe; it was shot dead. With all the blood, the smell, the long hours, cut off from the gym in a full-time way, he began to feel like one of those steers, shackled and hoisted, just before the rabbi slit its throat. He told Florence: “Man, I gotta get outta there.”
     
    I t has been said that every generation gets—as with presidents—the heavyweight champion it deserves. It’s an interesting observation, and handy transport for character and failures. But is it accurate, or just a claim by boxing religionists to impute to the ring more than its naked animalism should carry? On inspection, there have been some reflective conformations of champions and their times. As far back as 1805, William Cobbett, Tory reformer and journalist, brooded over Britain’s spiritual decline driven by what he perceived to be an outbreak of foppish manners, and he predicted that “when champions like Jem Belcher no longer have respect be assured that national cowardice is at no great distance.” No such stirring attachments attended the early American ring of outlawry and crudeness, a period of migratory punch-ups on gaslit barges and small islands illuminated by torches supported by the upper and lower classes and largely an expression against the moral intrusion and social airs of the middle class.
    John L. Sullivan was the first to shoulder national identity, and he mirrored the Gilded Age in many ways. Loud and obnoxious, predatory by instinct, by every trait a bullhorn in tune with the national mood of expansiveness and acquisition; Teddy Roosevelt tagged him as a national treasure, convinced that American blood ran highest in his veins—not to mention usually enough whiskey to drop an elephant.After Sullivan, some champions became inseparable from their times. Jack Johnson, with his restless eyes for white women after the turn of the century, his presence and skill in the ring being like a night terror to white supremacists like Jack London, who begged the challenger Jim Jeffries to wipe that smile from that face and “restore our national place.” Joe Louis, with an exterior as silent as cathedral stone, a thirties profile of racial memory in repose so he could survive professionally while blacks dangled from trees in the South, and he was regarded as a human replica of the quaint black jockey on the lawn in the North. Until World War II approached, when he was raised to a bright symbol of patriotism and American might against Max Schmeling, Hitler’s claim to racial superiority. Rocky Marciano, with his immigrant’s desire to please and respect authority, the follower of orders for the sake of the tract home and lawn; but the sharp reminder that whites still could brawl despite his manifestation of