Free The Fight by Norman Mailer Page B

was over, Ali yelled to the side of the hall, “Archie Moore, number one spy, you tell George I’m running. I’m going to work him until he’s stupid and then the torture begins. War! War!” Ali shouted, and rushed out swinging like an archetype of determination, only to go slack and wave to Williams to pound him on the ropes.
    “Archie Moore, number one spy,” he called over his shoulder even as Williams was hitting him.
    Ali had fought Moore more than ten years ago. Not yetChampion then, not even any world-soul larger than Cassius Clay, the Louisville Lip, he had still made predictions the fight would end in four. Archie came into the ring overweight and overage, but he nearly knocked The Lip out in the first round. He caught him a powerful sneak punch and as Cassius staggered back, Moore threw one of his best right hands. If it had hit, the fight might have been over, but Clay, half-unconscious, managed to avoid it. After that, the fight went to Cassius. By the end of the third round, Moore’s legs were so used up he did not sit down on his stool. He remained standing in his corner for fear that once seated, he would not have the strength to get up and answer the bell. He did not, of course, last through the fourth, and it was the end of his career. Archie Moore, with a record of something like two hundred fights, once Light-Heavyweight Champion, and in the ring for the Heavyweight title twice, was retired by Cassius Clay: something of the echo of that night was in Ali’s voice as he cried, “Number one spy!” as if, indeed, it still irritated Ali that he, the first disciple of Moore’s art, should find the old master in his opponent’s employ. Of course, there was no reason for Moore to love Ali, who had never acknowledged his artistic debt. For that matter, Archie had hardly been given full credit for how much he influenced other boxers. Once, in answer to the Irish fighter Roger Donoghue, who asked how Moore could throw punches out of a position that kept his arms crossed in front of his face, Archie replied, “You’re talking about technique, Roger, and what I do is philosophy.” Moore may indeed have brought boxing over to philosophy. He was probably the first to articulate (and hewas strikingly articulate) that not all heavy punches were heavy, not all traps worth avoiding nor all openings there to be taken, not all exhaustions should be thought depleting, nor all ring ropes constricting to one’s back, no corner had to be without room to fight, no knockdown was like any other, and no paradox could ever press upon you without offering its compressed power. Moore was to boxing what Nimzovitch had been to chess. (Ali, needless to say, could offer his considerable parallel to Bobby Fischer when it came to heckling an opponent out of his skin.)
    These days Moore looked like an orotund Black professor who played a saxophone on weekends. His gray mustache curved down on each side of his mouth in a benign Fu Manchu, and his sideburns grew like mutton chops — a plump and dashing man in late middle age. What a titillation to recognize that he was close to sixty and yet had been in the ring with Ali.
    Moore’s presence as the first philosopher of boxing must have been encouraging Ali to reveal himself as pugilism’s master of the occult. He proceeded to get himself knocked out by his sparring partner. A ritual knockout.
    As the second round began, Ali beckoned for Williams to belabor his belly. Obediently, Williams came forward and pounded at Ali’s capacity to absorb endless punches to the stomach. “Oooh, it hurts,” Ali yelled suddenly. “It huuuuurts!”
    Quickly the Zairois interpreter said to the Blacks in the back seats:
“Il frappe dur.”
Ali came off the ropes and wrestled again with Williams. As they walked, Ali made a speech to Moore. “Your man has no class,” he cried loudand clear through his rubber mouthpiece, “no footwork. He thinks slow. The turkey is ready for the killing.”