Rip-off of the Century

"HE LOST." Ali or Clay is for the moment superfluous. He lost, but who won?

The government, for one. The Internal Revenue Service is guaranteed 3.5 million of the 5 million guaranteed the fighters, and is bound to get a sizeable chunk of the record-breaking $20 million take. And, of course, the takers won-Madison Square Garden and Fight of Champions, Inc., who promoted the fight internationally, the vast web of local promoters, ticket scalpers, bookies and sportswriters-are all enjoying fat times in Fat City.

And yes, it would be difficult to exclude Joe Frazier, with the $750,000 he'll have after taxes and with his championship belt, from the winner's circle. Yet, despite the substantiality of these credentials, Joe Frazier did not win the championship of the world. He out-pointed a boxer, even dropped him for a four-count in the fifteenth, and walked out of the ring with a sense of personal satisfaction from his highly personal victory. But as for the championship of the world, Frazier never had a chance. Bundini Brown, Ali's assistant trainer and confidant, has said, "The world is a black shirt with a few white buttons." For outside of some of the board rooms, the veterans'lodges and the other button-down watering holes on the button of white America, Muhammad Ali a/k/a Cassius Clay a/k/a HIM is still the Greatest.

II

"HE LOST," but who beat him? Joe Frazier? Not to the world outside of the buttons, not even to many people on them. As they see it, Muhammad Ali was no more beaten by Frazier than Jack Johnson was beaten by Jeff Willard. What beat Johnson was the Mann Act (which was made retroactive to obtain his conviction) and the continuous psychological and economic war of attrition waged against him by the white world. The only difference in Ali's case is a refinement of technique.

But it's an old story, going all the way back to Tom Molineaux, the prima inter pares of the American slave gladiators, who became the country's first heavyweight champion. Born on a Virginia plantation, Molineaux fought against the prime "black bucks" from other plantations while the masters wagered high stakes on the outcome. After he had beaten all comers and therefore was no longer of use to his master, Molineaux was given his freedom. He moved to New York and became the premier boxer on the Waterfront. Exhausting American competition, Molineaux then went to England to take on the English champion, Tom Cribb. Molineaux battered the white man for 23 rounds. Cribb's handlers saw that he was unable to continue, but instead of throwing in the towel, went to the referee charging that Molineaux had lead weights concealed in his fists. The referee, who by the rules should have given the fight to Molineaux, played along with the stalling tactic of Cribb's handlers, waiting for Cribb to revive. In the interim, Molineaux, unaccustomed to the climate, developed a chill. Cribb won in the 40th round.

The British press denounced the tactic used against Molineaux, but the tactic itself was only an unsophisticated beginning. For black fighters were not only cheated in the ring; they were kept out of it. The Southern planters, who had found it as profitable and more entertaining than cock-fighting to pit their darkies against each other, found themselves in the shadow of black fighters such as Vesey, L'Ouverture, and Turner and did not wish to promote combativeness of any form among their slaves. How could they make their other slaves stand in fear if there were a black man amongst them who could equal John L. Sullivan's famous boast, "My name is John L. Sullivan and I can whip any sonofabitch alive"?

During the 96 years between the Molineaux-Cobb bout and Jack Johnson's first title fight, black heavy-weights found themselves locked out of the championship ring. But, if boxing became even more of a white man's game, it remained the poor man's game, it remained the poor man's game. The fighting Irish applied the same mixture of skill, showmanship, and exclusion to boxing that they did to the polities of the same period. (Sullivan, despie his boast, refused to meet Peter Jackson, the greatest of the heavyweight "Colored Boxing Champions of America.") Their boxers, like their priests and politicians, became ethnic standard-bearers and played the role to the hilt. When John L. walked the streets of Southie wearing his diamondstudded belt and raved that there were "enough Sullivans to make an army big enough to capture Canada from the British and make it Irish like it oughta be," even the most aloof of the Gold Coast Irish had to whisper "right on."

Although the heavyweights were Jim Crowed, black little men were able to get into the white ring. Joe Gans, whose reputation earned him the nickname "The Old Master," was the most outstanding of that group. However, even as lightweight champion, he could get bouts only by accepting the short end of the purse or by agreeing to take a dive or both. His last major bout was in 1906 in Goldfield, Nevada, against a young white hope named "Battlin'" Nelson. The bout was the first promotion of the notorious Tex Rickard, at that time a local saloon owner. Rickard, who was to become the most successful promoter of the era, put up a purse of $34,000 in gold coins and displayed it in his saloon. Gans, well past his prime, pounded Nelson senseless. Nelson, however, got most of the purse.

Gans died in poverty a few years later, but it would be inaccurate to list him or Peter Jackson as losers. They won the contests the white world let them fight, and died not defenseless before the world but unnecessary to it. Their affliction was not African lethargy but malignant neglect.

III

FOUR YEARS after the Gans-Nelson bout, Tex Rickard staged and refereed the heavyweight championship contest between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries. Jeffries, who held the title from 1899 until he retired in 1904, had been persuaded to make a comeback. Dressed for his role, Jeffries entered the ring on July 4, 1910, with American flags on his trunks, proclaiming that he would give Johnson "the licking of his life." The record-breaking crowd cheered for all it was worth. Then Johnson stepped into the ring to an anvil chorus of passionate booing and nigger baiting. Two years before, Johnson had won the title after pursuing the white champion around the world to get the fight and around the ring during it. On this hot day in Reno, Johnson toyed with his opponent. Hitting him at will with either hand, Johnson mocked Jeffries, as the ex-champ groped for clinches with lines like "Oh, Mr. Jeff, don't love me so." Jeffries went down twice in the 15th round and got up once.

What gave Johnson's victory a racial symbolism commensurate to Pearl Harbor was not the fact that he was black, but that he was Jack Johnson. A different sort of black man, one as modest as Peter Jackson or as controllable as Joe Louis, could have gained the acceptance or even the affection of white American fight fans. He would have been praised as a model man, as a credit to his race, but still would have been only a lucky black brute whose success the system benevolently tolerated. Nor was it merely because of his affairs with white women that Johnson was prosecuted and persecuted. Other black fighters had been and were similarly entangled, but had genuflected to the system by keeping their affairs clandestine. The system did not condone their activities; it controlled them. The system found Jack Johnson as controllable as flash floods, cyclones, and Standard Oil. In his body was a concentration of wealth comparable to the Beef Trust. In the ring he flaunted his power with a serene arrogance which was far more irritating than the aggressive contempt of a Morgan or a Boss Tweed because it was devoid of acrimony and humorlessness. Johnson never mauled his opponents. For a period of rounds he would lay back, content with controlling the other fighter and enjoying himself. From time to time, he would challenge his opponent to take a shot at his unprotected chin and then smother the billow, accompanying the defensive maneuver with an offensive flurry of his own. A showman, as well as a master of ring psychology, Johnson converted a fight from a contest into a personal exhibition. He would defeat his opponents only after he had made them feel and appear totally unnecessary. In effect, he was reversing the traditional roles in the relationship of the black fighter and his white counterpart.

Outside of the ring, Johnson was equally uncontrollable, and, to the extent of his considerable capabilities, continued his game of identity exchange. White society had claimed and legislated the irrelevancy of a black man, but Jack Johnson proved the converse. To do so, however, meant that he had to take punches as well as give them. After the Jeffries fight, Johnson opened up a nightclub, the Cabaret de Champion, outfitted in classical opulence, with a Rembrandt in its valuable art exhibit. In a passionate display of righteousness that must have overdrawn their moral account for the next half-century, the Chicago authorities closed the club. To substantiate the case against him under the Mann Act, white women, some of whom had never even met Johnson, took bribes and testified against him. Johnson was convicted, then the ruling was overturned. But, in the interim, Johnson had jumped bail and fled to Europe.

Jack Johnson's importance to black people lay not so much in what he did, but how he did it. His style, which the system found so outrageous, was appreciated by many blacks who understood its origin and effect. Whites also learned a lesson from Johnson. At least, Tex Rickard did. The promoter of the Johnson-Jeffries contest. Rickard later went on to manage Jack Dempsey, and in that capacity displayed the knowledge he had gotten from Johnson by never allowing his man to face Henry Wills, a black fighter whom some felt was a good as Johnson. Johnson himself never got another shot at Fat City, but he did not need one.

IV

"HE LOST!" Goliath, Jack Johnson, Ali... the independent villain controlled at last. Ali was aware of this line of progression long before the fight with Frazier. Consciously, by adopting Johnson maneuvers like the "anchor" punch-the punch Ali used to knock out Liston in the Lewiston, Maine fight-and by creating devices of his own-the Ali Shuffle during the fight and the poetry before it-Ali has done much to revive John-it-Ali has done much to revive Johnson (could anyone imagine The Great White Hope as anything more than a cruel joke during Floyd Patterson's reign?) and, in his way, has suppressed him... at least made the old champ safe for women and children. And as with Johnson, it has been Ali's style that has made him champion of the world. And like Johnson, he has been prosecuted under a selective law.

Ali, like Johnson, will survive.

If there is a tragedy in this "Fight of Champions," Joe Frazier is the Othello and the takers, that vast locust combine, play Iago. The prefight publicity has made it impossible for Frazier ever to be champ to black America and the rest of the world. Rather than revealing him as another black man of different convictions from Ali, the PR portrayed him as a vacuous white hope in blackface.

What makes Iago evil? Envy, power-lust, money. For that they ripped off Joe Frazier, but it's an old story.