The Fight by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online

chain to God — that unbroken chain of lives going back to the source of creation. But the American Black was sociologically famous for the loss of his father.
    No wonder their voices called attention to themselves! They spoke of a vital (if tense) force. A poor and uneducated man was nothing without that force. To the degree it lived inside him, he was full of capital, ego capital, and that was what he possessed. That was the capitalism of the poor American Black trying to accumulate more of the only wealth he could find, respect on his turf, the respect of local flunkies for the power of his soul. What a raw, searching, hustling, competitive capitalism. What a lack of profit. The establishment offered massive restraint for such massivefevers of the ego. No surprise if tribal life in America began to live among stone walls and drugs. The drug gave magnification of the sentiment that a mighty force was still inside oneself, and the penitentiary restored the old idea that man was a force in a field of forces. If the social contract of the African restraint had been tradition, the American Black with a political ideal was obliged instead to live with revolutionary discipline. As he endured in his stone walls it became a discipline as pulverizing to the soul as the search for condition of a boxer.
    Bantu Philosophy
proved a gift, but it was one a writer might not need. Not to comprehend the fight. There was now enough new intellectual baggage to miss the train. Norman would bring some of it along, and hope he was not greedy. For Heavyweight boxing was almost all black, black as Bantu. So boxing had become another key to revelations of Black, one more key to black emotion, black psychology, black love. Heavyweight boxing might also lead to the room in the underground of the world where Black kings were installed: what was Black emotion, Black psychology, Black love? Of course, to try to learn from boxers was a quintessentially comic quest. Boxers were liars. Champions were great liars. They had to be. Once you knew what they thought, you could hit them. So their personalities became masterpieces of concealment. There would be limits to what he could learn of Ali and Foreman by the aid of any philosophy. Still, he was grateful for the clue. Humans were not beings but forces. He would try to look at them by that light.

4. A GANG OF CHAMPS
    T AKEN DIRECTLY , Foreman was no small representative of vital force. He came out from the elevator dressed in embroidered bib overalls and dungaree jacket and entered the lobby of the Inter-Continental flanked by a Black on either side. He did not look like a man so much as a lion standing just as erectly as a man. He appeared sleepy but in the way of a lion digesting a carcass. His broad handsome face (not unreminiscent of a mask of Clark Gable somewhat flattened) was neither friendly nor unfriendly, rather, it was alert in the way a boxer is in some part of him alert no matter how sleepy he looks, a heightening common, perhaps, to all good athletes, so that they can pick an insect out of the air with their fingers but as easily notice the expression on some friend in the thirtieth row from ringside.
    Since Norman was not often as enterprising as he ought to be, he was occasionally too forward. Having barely arrived in Kinshasa again, he did not know you were not supposed to speak to Foreman in the lobby and advanced on him with a hand out. In this moment, Bill Caplan, whodid Public Relations for Foreman, rushed up to the fighter. “He’s just come in, George,” said Bill Caplan, and made an introduction. Foreman now nodded, gave an unexpected smile, and proceeded to make his kind remark about a champ at writing, his voice surprisingly soft, as Southern as it was Texan. His eyes warmed, as if he liked the idea of writing — the news would soon come out that Foreman was himself working on a book. Then he made a curious remark one could think about for the rest of the week. It was