The Problem of Genius
Yesterday Frank sent me a five minute clip of an out of shape, thirty plus year old Muhammad Ali being knocked from stem to stern by a focused, technically precocious nineteen year old Michael Dokes.
Dokes looks like a worldbeater. He’s had five pro fights, but stylistically looks like a veteran. He puts punches together beautifully and, although not a full-grown adult yet, already bangs with a pro's authority.
Ali looks lousy, and knows it. He spends his time mugging, talking, clowning, and backing into the ropes. Dokes seemingly doesn’t understand that this session is “play” and attacks Muhammad vigorously. Ali takes every shot, apparently impervious to all.
After about two and a half minutes, something remarkable happens. Dokes has Ali trapped in a corner and fires a volley of uninterrupted hard punches, all delivered with perfect form. Ali dodges every single one of them. He moves his head, slips and slides, ducks and pulls back. He doesn’t even bother, for the most part, to put his gloves up to block the shots.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. The only instance that comes to mind is watching an unconscious Wilfred Benitez—likewise trapped on the ropes—instinctively avoid every punch thrown at him by Matthew Hilton.
All of this has made me wonder whether true genius in boxing, when not augmented by supporting craft, isn’t a very dangerous thing. It clearly did Ali a lot of harm. Likewise, it seems to have been Roy Jones’s undoing. Does natural aptitude tend to serve as a disincentive to traditional technique?
posted by Anonymous @ 9:10 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I take your point about genius, Charles. Sometimes, it's all that allows a fighter to be somewhere he shouldn't be, like in with somebody younger, stronger, and well equipped to hurt him. Who was going to tell Ali, "Look, it's stupid to fight Holmes; you're just going to get hit a couple of hundred times, and you're past the point at which you can do anything with him"? Everybody, including those around him, had to be thinking that maybe, just maybe, he had some brilliant scheme going in, or some inspired improvisation within him, that would allow him to squeeze out an improbable win or at least make it close. Hey, it had worked with Foreman--an eternity before, of course, and an entirely different sort of match-up, but I'm talking about the way people must have thought.
In most sports, it doesn't matter if the genius gets blown out when he makes a mistake. Yes, it was pathetic to watch the aging Michael Jordan drag his sorry ass and knees and ego up and down the court with the Washington Wizards, even though he would occasionally go off for a quarter or a half and show flashes of his offensive genius of yore. (Michael Leahy's book on this phase of Jordan's tedious life, When Nothing Else Matters, is very good, by the way.) But, really, so what? The worst that can happen to Jordan is that he gets a booboo on his soul, and money heals those.
But a fighter can get seriously fucked up in one of those match-ups in which he has only genius on his side and the other guy has everything else. And the nature of genius, over time, I think, is to grow more dangerous to its possessor. That's because when the genius is young and impossibly good he develops habits around that full-fledged potency--like Ali's unorthodox defense--that may not work the same way when he's on the reverse slope of his career.
But then there's James Toney vs Samuel Peter. Toney's not a genius on the level of Ali, but he's as close to truly inspired as a biggish man has been for many years. He has no business being in there with a real heavyweight, at this point, and yet he can keep the fight close with anybody around these days, just by moving his shoulders (which he does more beautifully than anybody at all these days) and doing what he does. He's _only_ out there because of his genius, which is so powerful that it can turn a retired middleweight into a high-end heavyweight trialhorse. Not a kind fate, it turns out, and one only made possible by his genius.
I would have said, Charles, until I got to know your writing better, that the final sentence of your latest comment was there to prevent the rest of it from getting too sympathetic, even sentimental, but I've learned to see things differently. Actually, the final sentence is there to allow you to be sympathetic in the first place. It's a reversal of background and foreground I've come to see in, for instance, Mel Gibson movies: the rape and murder of his family is not there to justify the righteous rampage he goes on for the rest of the movie; the rest of the movie is there to allow him to dwell on the rape and murder of his family in the first place. Or it's like a Playboy magazine of the 50s or 60s, in which the naked ladies are there to allow men to think intensely about clothes, personal grooming, and interior design without damage to their self-image as manly men. You've got to have that last sentence, the bottom-line one about making money on Ali getting slaughtered by Holmes, there to ratify and allow feeling bad for Ali in the first place. By making money (at 5-6; I can't believe that many people were that deluded) on his suffering, you buy the right to allow yourself to bleed for him a little, and for Holmes, too, who was caught up in a horrible mess of conflicting impulses and responsibilities. It's a symmetrically elegant little transaction--and hardboiled, too, but not excessively so. I like that in you.
Charles, I think you stated it perfect. Ali was so brilliantly skilled and athletic in the ring, he believed fundamentals and basics were beneath him. At the end of his career when he could no longer float like a butterfly, he wasn't so hard to find. However, blessed with a cast-iron chin and a will to win that has to be thought of as unsurpassed, is what saved him.
Roy Jones wasn't blessed with those to gifts. Had Roy come up a generation or two earlier, I wonder how long it would've been before we found that out? I often thought about what Qawi would've done to Roy, and that was during the time he was being hyped as the next Robinson or better.
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