Word: alie
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Champion Muhammad Ali is steadily punching his way through assorted beefcakes to become the highest-paid athletic performer of all time. He received $2 million for his light workout with Joe Bugner and has been promised twice as much for his September bout with Joe Frazier. Heavyweight Norman Mailer's last big deal was a $1 million contract to produce 500,000 to 800,000 words, or roughly five books. After taxes and expenses, he notes, that is not much money for a man who bears the costs of five marriages and seven children...
Perhaps this is what makes The Fight, Mailer's account of last year's Ali-Foreman bout in Zaire, humid with a sense of obligation. Even though Ali beat the odds and regained his championship, it was not a truly good fight. For all his buildup as a killing machine, Foreman moped around the ring like a man bitten by a tsetse fly. Mailer's blow-by-blow description of the fight strains to create more excitement than a ringside radio announcer. "Making love to a brunette when she is wearing a blonde wig" is his punchy...
...compensate for the one-sided action in the ring, Mailer continues his familiar shadowboxing with the ineffable. He uses nearly all the old combinations. In his interviews with Ali and Foreman, Mailer is the old Manichaean attempting to create tensions with ambiguities of good and evil. Ali is seen not only as a dark prince who taps Mailer's deepest anxieties about Negroes, but also as the "black Kissinger" who may one day pose some vague political threat...
...preliminaries are finally over. Ever since he upset George Foreman in Zaïre last October to regain the world heavyweight championship, Muhammad Ali has been beefing up his bank account at the expense of harmless opponents. First he played with Chuck Wepner in Cleveland for $1.5 million, then humiliated Ron Lyle in Las Vegas for $1 million. Last week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, he pocketed $2.5 million with an easy 15-round decision over European Heavyweight Champ Joe Bugner. In fact, his toughest opponents in Kuala Lumpur were the sopping 118° under the ring lights and the near...
Biggest Payday. What the champion had to announce after the fight, though, was far more interesting than the bout: on Oct. 1 in Manila, Ali will fight ex-Titleholder Joe Frazier. The purse, put up by the Philippine government, guarantees $4.5 million for Ali and $2 million for Frazier. Counting closed-circuit TV and other "ancillary" income, Ali should take home close to $8.5 million, Frazier $4.5 million-the biggest payday in the history of sport. As if they needed a down-to-earth incentive, the two fighters shook hands on a whopping $1 million personal bet. "It will...