One of the few consistent traits shared by “experts” in any field is that they will almost never bet money or anything else that might turn up in public on whatever they call their convictions. That is why they are “experts.” They have waltzed through that minefield of high-risk commitments that separates politicians from gamblers, and once you’ve reached that plateau where you can pass for an expert, the best way to stay there is to hedge all your bets, private and public, so artistically that nothing short of a thing so bizarre that it can pass for an “act of God” can damage your high-priced reputation . . .
I remember vividly, for instance, my frustration at Norman Mailer’s refusal to bet money on his almost certain conviction that George Foreman was too powerful for Muhammad Ali to cope with in Zaire ... And I also recall being slapped on the chest by an Associated Press boxing writer in Las Vegas while we were talking about the fight one afternoon at the casino bar in the Hilton. “Leon Spinks is a dumb midget,” he snarled in the teeth of all the other experts who’d gathered on that afternoon to get each other’s fix on the fight. “He has about as much chance of winning the heavyweight championship as this guy.”
“This guy” was me, and the AP writer emphasized his total conviction by giving me a swift backhand to the sternum ... and I thought: Well, you dumb loudmouth cocksucker, you’re going to remember that stupid mistake as long as you live.
And he will. I have talked to him since on this subject, and when I said I planned to quote him absolutely verbatim with regard to his prefight wisdom in Vegas, he seemed like a different man and said that if I was going to quote him on his outburst of public stupidity that I should at least be fair enough to explain that he had “been with Muhammad Ali for so long and through so many wild scenes that he simply couldn’t go against him on this one.”
Well ...how’s that for equal time? It’s a hell of a lot more than you pompous big-time bullies ever even thought about giving me, and if you want to add anything else, there’s always the Letters to the Editor page in RS.... But the next time you whack some idle bystander in the chest with one of your deeply felt expert opinions, keep in mind that you might hit somebody who will want to insist on betting real money.
Some people write their novels and others roll high enough to live them, and some fools try to do both—but Ali can barely read, much less write, so he came to that fork in the road a long time ago, and he had the rare instinct to find that one seam in the defense that let him opt for a third choice: he would get rid of words altogether and live his own movie.
A brown Jay Gatsby—not black and with a head that would never be white: he moved from the very beginning with the same instinct that drove Gatsby—an endless fascination with that green light at the end of the pier. He had shirts for Daisy, magic leverage for Wolfsheim, a delicate and dangerously vulnerable Ali-Gatsby shuttle for Tom Buchanan, and no answers at all for Nick Carraway, the word junkie.
There are two kinds of counterpunchers in this world—one learns early to live by his reactions and quick reflexes—and the other, the one with a taste for high rolling, has the instinct to make an aggressor’s art of what is essentially the defensive, survivor’s style of the counterpuncher.
Muhammad Ali decided one day a long time ago, not long after his twenty-first birthday, that he was not only going to be King of the World on his own turf, but Crown Prince on everybody else’s ...
Which is very, very High Thinking—even if you can’t pull it off. Most people can’t handle the action on whatever they chose or have to call their own turf; and the few who can, usually have better sense than to push their luck any further.
That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t entirely conquer—he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.
Res ipsa loquitur.
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The Palm Beach Story
In 1982, after a few years of mostly false starts, failed stories, and missed deadlines, Hunter took an assignment from the magazine to cover what was shaping up to be the most scandalous and lurid divorce trial in recent history: Herbert “Peter” Pulitzer Jr. versus his estranged wife, Roxanne, in Palm Beach, Florida. “Big names in the mud, multiple sodomies, raw treachery, bad craziness—the Pulitzer gig had everything,” he wrote. Hunter embedded himself with the local culture of the idle rich, became mesmerized by both the details of the trial and what it seemed to represent (“What is a judge to make of two coke fiends who spent $441,000 last year on ‘miscellaneous and unknown’?”), and delivered a piece that announced his return to form. The fact that he became lifelong friends with Roxanne Pulitzer in the process—after describing her in the piece as like “a jaded Pan Am stewardess”—is a testament to Hunter’s legendary charm.