The Fight by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page A

characteristic of a great deal about Foreman. “Excuse me for not shaking hands with you,” he said in that voice so carefully muted to retain his powers, “but you see I’m keeping my hands in my pockets.”
    Of course! If they were in pockets, how could he remove them? As soon ask a poet in the middle of writing a line whether coffee is taken with milk or cream. Yet Foreman made his remark in such simplicity that the thought seemed likable rather than rude. He was telling the truth. It was important to keep his hands in his pockets. Equally important to keep the world at remove. He lived in a silence. Flanked by bodyguards to keep, exactly, to keep handshakers away, he could stand among a hundred people in the lobby and be in touch with no one. His head was alone. Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence. It vibrated about him in silence. One had not seen men like that for thirty years, or was it more? Not since Norman worked for a summer in a mental hospital had he been near anyone who could stand so long without moving, hands in pockets, vaults of silence for his private chamber. He had takencare then of catatonics who would not make a gesture from one meal to the next. One of them, hands contracted into fists, stood in the same position for months, only to erupt with a sudden punch that broke the jaw of a passing attendant. Guards were always informing new guards that catatonics were the most dangerous of the patients. They were certainly the strongest. One did not need other attendants, however, to tell you. If a deer’s posture in the forest can say, “I am vulnerable, irreplaceable, and soon destroyed,” so the posture of a catatonic haunts the brain. “Provided I do not move,” this posture says, “all power will come to me.”
    There was here, however, no question of wondering whether Foreman might be insane. The state of mind of a Heavyweight Champion is considerably more special than that. Not many psychotics could endure the disciplines of professional boxing. Still, a Heavyweight Champion must live in a world where proportions are gone. He is conceivably the most frightening unarmed killer alive. With his hands he could slay fifty men before he would become too tired to kill any more. Or is the number closer to a hundred? Indeed one reason Ali inspired love (and relatively little respect for his force) was that his personality invariably suggested he would not hurt an average man, merely dispose of each attack by a minimal move and go on to the next. Whereas Foreman offered full menace. In any nightmare of carnage, he would go on and on.
    Prizefighters do not, of course, train to kill people at large. To the contrary, prizefighting offers a profession to men who might otherwise commit murder in the street. Nonetheless, the violence capable of being generated in a championlike Foreman is staggering to contemplate when brought to focus against another fighter. This violence, converted to a special skill, had won him the Championship by his thirty-eighth fight. Foreman had never been defeated. On the night he won the Championship, he had accumulated no less than thirty-five knockouts, the fights stopped on an average before the third round. What an unbelievable record that is! Ten knockouts in the first, eleven in the second, eleven in the third and fourth. No need to think of him as psychotic, rather, as a physical genius who employed the methods of catatonia (silence, concentration and immobility). Since Ali was a genius in wholly separate ways, one could anticipate the rarest war of all — a collision between different embodiments of divine inspiration.
    The fight would then be a religious war. That was to Ali’s advantage. Who could say Ali was without a chance in any religious war that took place in Africa? Norman had smiled when first hearing of the match, thinking of evil eyes, conjurors, and black psychological fields. “If Ali can’t win