Muhammad Ali

The word, once upon a tíme, was uppity. His hips bump and grind: lubricous. He gives Ken Norton a sensual come-on, flirting, waving him in toward his body, brazen as some Eighth Avenue tart. He is still gorgeous: his eyes, wrathful or sham-wrathful, flame like the mute, exaggerative eyes of a silent film vamp. Before each early round he will propeller one arm: caricaturing the sport, its dead-seriousness. And between rounds he will cheerlead 30,000 at Yankee Stadium in a chorus of “Norton must fall, Norton must fall.” This isn’t the prize ring: closer to the bull ring. Muhammad Ali has complicity with his audience: matadors have a similar, though more tacit, relationship: human art and bravado—you and I—against unconscious, doomed brute strength. Ali degrades his opposition, his black opposition in particular, to a dumb creaturehood. This isn’t exactly good sportsmanship. And good sportsmanship serves as a hedge against eventual defeat. Ali will pocket $6 million tonight because he is, has always been, willing to risk more than money and the odd hits..He risks humiliation.

But Ken Norton is a lousy bull: not impetuous enough. Arms twitch up and jitter, defensive: Jersey mosquito legs snapped off. His attack is awkward, patient. Ken Norton boxes as though he’s gotten to Yankee Stadium by passing a civil service exam. He doesn’t punch; he punches in. It’s what you might call a drudge fight. In simple fact, Norton has bored Ali half to death. Ali needs rash foils: Liston, Foreman. Fighting Ken Norton is rather like painting a still-life of your laundry. Worse, Norton won’t be awed by Ali’s charismatic gall: he has beaten him once (he broke Ali’s jaw then) and lost once on a questionable split decision. There isn’t even danger to pique Ali’s interest. That broken jaw notwithstanding, neither man can be significantly hurt, neither man has the left hook of a Girl Guide. Ali loiters on the top rope, forearms up/across his face and chest. Norton will push cranky weak jabs through: someone trying to get inside an occupied phone booth. This is Ali’s rope-a-dope stratagem. In his most brash, magnificent performance he let mighty George Foreman slug himself limp before knocking him out. But the ropes here are taut—Ali can’t lean away from Norton’s pedestrian abuse—and Norton is in superb shape. Ali’s mouthpiece-fat grin says, You-can’t hurt-me. True, Norton can’t. And, meanwhile, out of an elitist disdain, Ali has given five or six rounds away.