Watching The Man In The Mirror

They had been there for 13 days, in a cottage by a small dun-colored lake in suburban Atlanta; thick woods in back, with the autumn foliage still and heavy from a rain that had come through the night before. The railroad tracks were half a mile or so back through the woods, the freight trains going by once in a while—heavy and long loads, they must have been, because the whistle would die mournfully off in the distance while the wheels of the last cars clicked slowly and distinctly across the sidings on the far side of the ridge.

The cottage belonged to State Senator Leroy Johnson, one of the key figures in Muhammad Ali's return to the ring. He had donated it to the Ali contingent for its training headquarters, and on this, the day of the Jerry Quarry fight, the interior was a shambles. The bedrooms, three of them, were crowded with unmade cots and half-filled suitcases. In the main room, where the curtains were drawn to provide a permanent gloom for TV and film watching, a mounted kingfish had fallen off the wall and lay with its tail in the fireplace. Beside it floated a half-deflated balloon with an inscription on it that read SOUL BROTHER. Scattered about the floor were newspapers and boxing journals, along with strips of film, soiled socks, upturned ashtrays and various items of athletic equipment, including a shuttlecock (there was a sagging badminton net out in the backyard), sweat pants and boots. Above an unmade cot a bed sheet was tacked to the wall to be used as a motion picture screen. A long sofa was set along one wall, with a television console opposite. In the corner of the dining alcove stood a big trunk marked MUHAMMAD ALI—THE KING. On it lay a yellow pad on which someone had written the words, "Joy to the whole wide wide world a champion was born at 1121 W. Oak Street Louisville Ky it was...." An unfinished document in the handwriting, it turned out, of Cassius Clay Sr.

By contrast, the kitchen was neat—a woman's touch provided by a cousin of the Senator who came in every day to provide meals for the camp. "I don't even dare look in those other rooms," she said.

Outside, Muhammad Ali was just returning from his weigh-in at the Regency Hyatt House in downtown Atlanta. The cottage began to fill with his entourage: his father; his brother, Rahaman; Angelo Dundee, his trainer-adviser; Bundini, his assistant trainer; his official biographer; his official photographer; sparring mates; his accountant and a number of business advisers; a couple of reporters; a man dressed entirely in green, including green shirt, tie and socks, who was a detective supplied by the police and who had a squat-nosed gun at his hip. Another armed man was posted outside. He was supposed to keep people away from the fighter, but his function seemed to be to show people to the cottage door.

At noontime Jim Jacobs, the former handball champion, arrived with a fight film he had recently completed on the career of the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, which he thought would particularly interest Muhammad Ali. The parallels between the two fighters are striking—both exiled from the sport, both in difficulty with legal authorities, both great showmen in and out of the ring. Ali lounged on the sofa, a telephone close at hand, and watched the film begin to flicker on the bed sheet. "Look at these advantages I have," he whispered. "Quarry—he don't have a machine and movies like this. He has nothing to look at but the walls."

To Jacobs' despair, Ali's attention was constantly interrupted by the phone at his side. Instinctively he picked it up when it rang, invariably to find the caller trying to cadge a few tickets for the fight. Ali would announce himself, often to a startled squawk from the other end, and he would go on to say that buses were scheduled to leave the Regency an hour before the fight, and he would arrange to see that those aboard got into the arena. Sometimes Ali knew the caller personally, and he would call out: " Sidney Poitier, you're my man" or "Whitney Young, my goodness."

Jacobs kept his film running throughout the interruptions. Ali paid as much attention as he could, lolling on the sofa, sucking on a blue plastic toothpick. Occasionally he rolled his shoulders to keep the muscles loose. " Jack Johnson," he said, reverently. He mentioned that the old fighter's facial features looked a little like Babe Ruth's. The phone rang, and he bent over the receiver, talking into it softly. He hung up the phone, and the sight of Johnson chasing a chicken caught his fancy; he wondered aloud if running after a particularly lively chicken wouldn't be a valuable training exercise for a fighter. He thought he might hire some for his next fight. At one point in the film the deep, simulated voice of Johnson announced, just prior to the Jim Jeffries fight: "If I felt any better, I'd be scared of myself...," and Ali laughed. One felt that he might have stored the line away for future use. He was interested that Johnson always insisted on being the first fighter to climb into the ring, that this was so important to him that the procedure was a stipulation written into his contracts. But the Johnson antics in the ring were what made Ali lean forward out of the sofa; if he was talking to someone on the phone, his voice would trail off. When Johnson grinned and appeared to taunt Tommy Burns in the early rounds of their fight in Australia that won him the heavyweight championship, Ali commented, "He's something else." He watched Johnson make a derisive gesture with his glove, waving goodby to Burns as he turned for his corner at the end of a round. "Look at that," Ali said. "He's signifying, 'See you later, partner.' I believe I'll do that with Quarry tonight."

Angelo Dundee stared uneasily across the room. "Just like him to pick up some crazy notion from that film," he said. "Why doesn't the phone keep ringing?"

On the bed sheet, scenes of the Johnson-Stanley Ketchel fight were beginning. Ketchel was a middleweight fighting far over his class (the publicity movies of the signing for the fight show him in a long camel's hair coat and extra-high cowboy boots to disguise his relative lack of stature), and at one stage of the bout Johnson bulled him to the canvas and then, almost apologetically, picked him up and set him on his feet as one would a child. Watching the film, one half expected Johnson to dust him off. Ali was delighted. "Tonight," he said, "just set Quarry down and pick him up." He rocked back and forth.

"Oh, my," said Dundee. "At the bell you never know what's going to happen with this fellow." (Before the second Liston fight, the one scheduled for Boston that was postponed when the champion suffered a hernia, Ali was toying with the idea of hiding a muleta in his boxing trunks. He planned to produce it in the first round and play Liston like a bull.)