Quote of the Day (Norman Mailer, on the Ali-Foreman Fight in Zaire)

“Ali, gloves to his heads, elbows to his ribs, stood and swayed and was rattled and banged and shaken like a grasshopper at the top of a reed when the wind whips, and the ropes shook and swung like sheets in a storm, and Foreman would lunge with his right at Ali’s chin and Ali go flying back out of reach by a half-inch, and half out of the ring, and back in to push at Foreman’s elbow and hug his own ribs and sway, and sway just further, and lean back and come forward from the ropes and slide off a punch and fall back into the ropes with all the calm of a man swinging in the rigging. All the while, he used his eyes. They looked like stars, and he feinted Foreman out with his eyes, flashing white eyeballs of panic he did not feel which pulled Foreman through into the trick of lurching after him on a wrong move.”—Norman Mailer, The Fight (1975)

The eyes, we hear, are the windows of the soul—but as Norman Mailer saw the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman heavyweight bout in Zaire on this date in 1974, the eyes of the challenger functioned as weapons, just as surely as his fists and legs, processing intelligence and enhancing deception in a fight that nearly every observer gave Ali no chance of winning.

Interviewed by Howard Cosell after the fight, Muhammad Ali christened his technique for nullifying George Foreman’s advantage in firepower “rope-a-dope.” The phrase, though contemptuous, of course, of his opponent, also underplayed the very real risk that the former heavyweight champion of the world took to reclaim his crown by lying against the ropes.

Beginning with round two, Ali was bargaining that he could absorb enough punishment from Foreman—who not only was undefeated but had made short work of his prior rivals—that the then-champ would exhaust himself. In the eighth round, "The Greatest" sprang his trap, lashing out at the now-tired champ and knocking him to the canvass. (Foreman got to his feet, a little too wobbly, after the standard ten-count, KOd.)

I have to admit here that I was unimpressed by Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Executioner’s Song. All those pages of flat prose, supposedly meant to evoke the deadly calm of the “nonfiction novel’s” Western setting, only left me bored stiff.

In contrast, take a look at the passage here—by no means atypical of Mailer’s larger account of the fight in book form. The verbs leap out and come out at you fast, in short bursts—much like Foreman’s punches.

But take a look at the similes, too: “like a grasshopper at the top of a reed when the wind whips,” “like sheets in a storm,” “like stars.” Superficially, they might look like mixed metaphors, if you will, but underlying each is the sense of danger bred by the verbs. (Even “stars” indicate the kind of navigational point sought on the high seas in a storm.)

After the “Rumble in the Jungle,” a weary but satisfied Ali told Mailer, “Maybe they’ll admit that now I am the professor of boxing.” Similarly, Mailer was hoping for his own vindication and return to form.

Last week, I wrote of Mailer’s extreme disappointment over losing the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. In the early 1970s, he went into something like a funk. (A low point: his meditation on Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn, which critic John Simon derided as a “labor of lust…a grisly roller-coaster ride along a biceps gone berserk.”)

“What is genius but balance on the edge of the impossible?” Mailer had written on Ali. It might just as well have been written about himself. The Fight represented Mailer in fighting trim, before he lost his balance in the last few decades of his life with works of elephantine ambition that nobody could wish longer (e.g., Ancient Evenings, Harlot’s Ghost, The Castle in the Forest).