Читать книгу Sporting Blood. Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing онлайн

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What Ali did in the ring was not revolutionary for the simple fact that not a single distinguished heavyweight in his wake could reproduce his style. In a way, Ali was like Dizzy Gillespie, whose virtuosity—one step beyond—could not be duplicated or surpassed for nearly thirty years, or until Jon Faddis began hitting notes not even Gillespie could reach in his prime. Of course, there were variations on the Ali style among the heavyweights—think of flashy Greg Page and flamboyant Michael Dokes—but, for the most part, smaller fighters adopted its main ingredients. The closest a heavyweight came to successfully incorporating the Ali method may have been jab-and-dance master Larry Holmes, who sparred with Ali in the early-1970s and went on to butcher “The Greatest” in one of the saddest spectacles ever seen in a boxing ring.

But the flashpoint reflexes, the improvisatory moves, the stamina needed to dance gracefully for fifteen rounds, the explosive hand speed, the decking, dodging, and darting (all done seemingly in double-time)—these had never been seen before among the bigger divisions. After all, his aspiration as a fighter was madness: to resurrect Sugar Ray Robinson as a heavyweight. More influential, of course, was his personality, part vaudeville, part rassling routine, part mad preacher, part the Dozens. Egotism, insult, exhibitionism, incivility—Ali changed boxing in more ways than one. Even during the most primitive era of prizefighting in America, when fights to the finish were common, a certain amount of gentility was expected. When John Morrissey defeated John C. Heenan to retain his heavyweight title in a gruesome slugfest in 1858, the occasion, blood-soaked or not, called for a strange ritual etiquette: “All the courtesies of war followed with the utmost grace at the end of the close of the fight. Morrissey was carried over to his fallen foe and, in the French style, kissed his hand in token of his valor.”