The Inner Life Of A Wealthy Warrior

On the night of Jan. 29, shortly after 10:30 p.m., one millionaire climbed into the ring at Boston's Hynes Auditorium to spar with another millionaire. The first was that slightly bored philanthropist, Muhammad Ali, who was donating his presence. The second millionaire, Peter Davenport Fuller, who was suffering from anything but boredom, had bought almost $20,000 worth of tickets to distribute for the worthy cause of the evening, the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts of Roxbury.

As always, Ali looked like an actor superbly impersonating a fighter. The handsome, unmarked face, the years of consecrated ego building, the mystique of being champ—all combined to create a marvelous theatrical illusion that Louisville poor boy Cassius Clay had, in fact, been born to wealth and a special 20th-century breed of aristocracy.

In the other corner, Fuller, a Harvard man whose father had been governor of Massachusetts and had left an estate of $12 million, looked like everybody's idea of a failed club fighter, a supernumerary straight out of Rocky. As he did the obligatory shuffle and neck-loosening head wobble, it was hard to believe that here was a man who had belonged to the Algonquin Club; served as state chairman for the American Cancer Society; sat on the boards of Boston College and Boston University; and bred horses on his 200-acre farm in North Hampton, N.H. (including the most famous last-place horse in history, Dancer's Image, disqualified winner of the 1968 Kentucky Derby). Or that he owned a Cadillac agency that looked more like an elegant art museum, with sculptured ceilings, chandeliers, polished mosaic floors and reproductions of a Rembrandt, a Monet, a Renoir and a Reynolds on the walls.

At 53 years old—outweighed by 43 pounds, outreached by eight inches, mismatched by almost 20 years—what was this broken-nosed Boston Brahmin doing, not only climbing into the ring with The Greatest but looking as if he actually wanted to fight him? For a moment the crowd that had come to see Ali puzzled over how to respond to this mood of, well, war. Then Ali, the clown who leaves an audience laughing at his straight man, turned the scene into farce with a mock battle speech: "I've never wanted to whup a man so bad as I want to whup this man.... Old man, if you so much as dream of laying a hand on me...."

To the Ali-watchers, it all added up. Here was a rich man's ego trip—a fantasy staged by a Walter Mitty who could afford to pay for his own scenario. On the other hand, here was Ali, not about to be upstaged.

After waltzing for a couple of parody rounds—fiercely swishing the air, landing a tender blow now and then—Ali talked to the people maybe four rounds' worth, which may put his priorities these days into fairly accurate perspective. He advised the young to enter college instead of the ring, and he seemed to mean what he said.

The hungry fighter that night was indeed the man born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Fuller speaks a kind of Ivy League English that keeps drifting into street talk, or possibly the other way around. The only speech delivered afterward, in private, went like this: "Hey baby doll, if I'd known it was going to be like that, I'd have flown down to Florida, gotten a gorgeous tan, lifted a few weights to bulge the muscles and just posed."

Instead, Fuller had trained for almost two months. He was up in the morning during the most grueling of winters, doing roadwork. He ground out sit-ups on a wrestling mat in the basement of his Georgian brick house. He boxed at Vinnie's Gym.

It has become the custom to speak casually, drolly about the athletic escapades of middle-aged men. One hears the poised voice of George Plimpton, masterful at self-deprecation. But a middle-aged jock climbing into a ring to compete, not just against a younger man but against his younger self, can play as tragedy as well as comedy.

The story of Peter Fuller begins with a gentleman named Jackie Martin, who was in Fuller's corner against Ali. In the days when Hollywood was making really execrable fight movies, Jackie would have been played by Mickey Rooney. Now 65, he is a former featherweight, round and bouncy with irrepressible hopes, and a mouth born to say. "You can go all the way, kid."