Ghosts of Manila, by Mark Kram.
New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
$25 - 167 pages.

In his rare public appearances these days, Muhammad Ali is a shambling, palsied shadow of his former self - a victim of both Parkinson’s Disease and too many shots to the head over a long career.

For those who remember him from his younger days, however, he was a legend, a young fighter with a mouth, possibly the greatest boxer ever produced in this country, an opponent of the draft, a convert to Islam and a man whose face was known round the world. Many said that Ali alone brought boxing back from the brink of extinction and made the sport exciting again.

After reading Mark Kram’s Ghosts Of Manila, the reader will have much to ponder regarding the legend of Ali. What slowly emerges in Kram’s portrait of Ali, his rivalry with Joe Frazier and their last big fight - “The Thrillah in Manila” - is the sense that Ali had little control over his own life.

Surrounded by a changing coterie of friends and fans, Ali was often driven more by emotions than by reason or even love, particularly in his relations with various women. Persuaded by friends, managers, and his own ego to continue fighting long after he had lost his power to fight, Ali emerges as a victim of his own propaganda, a living ghost whom others still manipulate for their own benefit.

Kram also gives us Joe Frazier, a decent man who some despised because he was a moderate in racial issues. Speaking to the South Carolina Legislature, Frazier said:

“We must save our people. I mean white and black. We need to quit thinking who’s living next door, who’s driving the big car, who’s my little daughter playing with, who is she going to sit next to in school. We don’t have time for that.”

Bryant Gumbel, among others, used such speeches to attack Frazier after he defeated Ali in their first fight. Gumbel, whom Kram describes as leading “... a fat, privileged life in TV, with an ego and ambition that not even a mother could love, let alone colleagues,” attacked Frazier in an essay titled “Is Joe Frazier a White Champion in Black Skin?”

Kram also gives the reader a mini-history of American pugilism, with thumbnail biographies of Rocky Marciano, Archie Moore, Joe Louis and other less famous boxers. He describes the transition that took place in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of fight managers and promoters as Ali helped move the game from cigar-chewing hoods and sharks to slick, easy men with deep pockets.

Where Kram fails in his book - and this is a major failure for someone who covered boxing for Sports Illustrated for 18 years - is in his description of the fights between Ali and Frazier. He waxes poetic to the point of near incoherence. Here, for example, is part of the description of the Manila fight:

Came the sixth, and here it was, that chilling moment that you always looked for when Joe Frazier was in a fight. Most of his fights had it written large: You can go just so far into that desolate, dark place where his heart pounds, you can waste his perimeters, see his head hanging in the public square, then suddenly there he is, a somber cloud mass blotting out the sun.

Within this same paragraph, Frazier becomes a shovel and a wild boar going for a truffle while Ali’s body is “... fast becoming one of Baudelaire’s lost balloons.” The idea of straight reporting - “Fraizer threw a combination of hard punches to the body, then whacked Ali with two vicious left hooks to the head” - seems beyond Kram’s powers.

Yet Kram has done a service here - not just for the literature of boxing, but for modern sports in general. He shows us how the legend created by Ali helped lift black athletes up from the silence of Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson. But Kram also shows that Ali’s antics also helped change the climate of sports for the worse, giving us the loudmouthed, cheap, crass behavior exhibited by so many of our athletes, black and white, today.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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