Ali by Jonathan Eig

Author:Jonathan Eig [Eig, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

36

Trickeration

It’s never about the money. It’s always about the money.”

It was one of Bob Arum’s favorite lines, and the truth of it never failed the promoter. Boxers would say they loved to box. They would say they did it for the thrill of the competition, to settle scores, to prove their skills, to earn a place in the pantheon of greats. These boxers would say that when the time came to hang up their gloves, they would do so without hesitation — only to hesitate, time and time again, unable to resist the money. When his jaw was swollen after his clash with Frazier, Ali had announced he was ready to quit. Two or three more fights, culminating with the rematch with Frazier, and that would be it. He would be set for life, done.

Then he went on to fight ten times in twenty-four months, with Arum arranging most of the events. Ali still spoke eagerly of getting another shot at Frazier, but he no longer seemed to be in a hurry, not when he could make millions beating up men like Juergen Blin and Joe Bugner.

“Don’t let nuthin’ happen to Joe Frazier,” Ali said, as he knocked off one tomato can after another.

He admitted the money mattered. “It ain’t too late to start saving,” he said. “I get $100,000 for a fight, I buy something costing $8,000, something else cost $24,000, and the one-hundred goes like hell. It costs me $10,000 a month to live. I can’t keep that up.”

His assets included two Rolls-Royces, a small collection of Cadillacs, a home in New Jersey, and a home for his parents in Louisville. Gene Kilroy, who served as Ali’s all-purpose facilitator and handled many of his day-to-day business transactions, introduced Ali to accountants at Peat Marwick International, and the accountants told Ali that he could save a fortune in taxes by writing off more of his business expenses. With that in mind, Ali bought a six-acre property in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, about twenty-five miles north of Reading. Ali had the land cleared and began building log cabins. This would be his new training center, where he could get away from the hustle and hustlers of New York and Miami, and where he could prepare in isolation for his upcoming fights. He planned to build enough cabins to house about twenty, he said, so that his sparring partners, his cooks, his wife, his children, his friends, and his entourage members would always have a place to sleep. With Ali, isolation was a relative term.

The training camp would help save money too, Ali said, because he would no longer have to pay for gym time and hotel rooms. Ali had other ideas for cutting back on spending. “I’m going to make my wife make her own clothes,” he said in an interview with the New York Times. “She don’t have to, but I’m going to make her do it.” His goal, he said, was to put 75 percent of his income into savings until he had a million dollars socked away.

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