Night of nights

Fifty years gone now, and still we see the red tassels dancing on the white shoes of the Greatest, see the set jaw of his remorseless pursuer, see the Beautiful People glittering in the dimness at ringside. 

Fifty years gone, and there is Frank Sinatra shooting photos and Norman Mailer writing the gamer for Life magazine. There is Muhammad Ali dancing, dancing, dancing. And there, of course, is Joe Frazier: Bobbing and stalking, bobbing and stalking, a human threshing machine chiseling away at Ali's legendary prettiness.

Close your eyes. You can still see it all, can't you?

It was the night of March 8, 1971, and if I close my eyes I can see a friend's lake cabin, and me trying to get the fight to come in on a radio wholly inadequate to its purpose. And pumping my fist when Ali went on his back in the 15th round, because I was not an Ali fan then. 

I was a week shy of 16 years old, see, and I wanted Frazier to shut him up. Which of course he did.

Later, I would see the replays on TV, and notice the incongruity so many other observers noticed: Those red tassels bobbing gaily as Ali crashed to the canvas, his aura of invincibility slipping away forever. 

Later still, I would come to understand how much of Ali's ceaseless patter was stagecraft, and that beneath it was a flawed but unique human being whose magnetism made him the most famous man on Earth. And that inside him beat a lion's heart that ultimately led to his  ruin.

I also came to understand just how special was that night 50 years ago last night.

We don't always appreciate the bigness of an event when it's happening, but March 8, 1971, in Madison Square Garden, was not one of those events. They were calling it the fight of the century before Ali and Frazier ever stepped inside the ropes, and it remains so to this day. It might also have been the fight of any century, boxing having gone into what seems a permanent eclipse.

Big Fight Night is now the province of MMA, and that is a sad thing in the Blob's estimation. There was an elegance to Ali-Frazier, a measure of skill, that made its attendant brutality palatable. There is none the Blob can see in MMA. It's two guys fist-fighting and then rolling around on the mat trying to force a submission.

It is physical and brutal, too, in other words. But there is no style to it.

And it will never have a March 8, 1971. Hell, what will?