The Distance

by Ivan Vladislavic

Genres: Coming of Age; Sports

Synopsis

A boxing bildungsroman—a collage of memories, love, resistance, and the spectacle of Muhammad Ali in Apartheid South Africa.



In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy, Joe, becomes obsessed with Muhammad Ali. He begins collecting daily newspaper clippings about him, a passion that grows into an archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks become the foundation for a memoir of his childhood. When he calls upon his brother, Branko, for help uncovering their shared past, meaning comes into view in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old, speaking out and keeping silent.

Release date: September 15, 2020

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 210

Sample

In the spring of 1970, I fell in love with Muhammad Ali. This love, the
intense, unconditional kind of love we call hero worship, was tested in
the new year when Ali fought Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. I
was at high school in Verwoerdburg, which felt as far from the ringside
as you could get, but I read every scrap of news about the big event and
never for a moment doubted that Ali would win. As it happened, he was
beaten for the first time in his professional career.
It must have been the unprecedented fuss around the Ali vs Frazier
fight that turned me, like so many others who’d taken no interest in
boxing before then, into a fan. ‘The Fight of the Century’ was one of
the first global sporting spectacles, a Hollywood-style bout that captured
the public imagination like no sports event before it. In the words of
reporter Solly Jasven, it was as significant to the Wall Street Journal as
it was to Ring magazine, and it generated what he called the big money
excitement.
I don’t know what I thought of Ali before the Fight of the Century,
but I came from a newspaper-reading family and had started reading a
daily when I was still at primary school, so I must have come across him
in the press, and not just on the sports pages. In March 1967, after he’d
refused to serve in the US army, the World Boxing Association and the
New York State Athletic Commission had stripped him of his world
heavyweight title. This was big news in South Africa, but I cannot say
what impression it made on my nine-year-old self.
Although Ali was absent from the ring for more than three years,
he was not idle: he was on the lecture and talk-show circuit, he appeared
in commercials, he even had a stint in a short-lived Broadway musical
called Buck White. In short, he was doing the things celebrities of all
kinds now do as a matter of course to keep their names and faces in
the spotlight and build their ‘brands’. He went from the boxing ring
to the three-ring circus of endorsements and appearances. He was also
speaking in mosques and supporting the black Muslim cause. But very
little of this activity, whether meant in jest or in earnest, was visible from
South Africa.
In 1970, when I was twelve, a Federal court restored Ali’s boxing
licence. His first comeback fight was against Jerry Quarry in Atlanta
and he won on a TKO in the third round. Six weeks later he beat Oscar
Bonavena and that set up the title fight against Frazier in March the
following year. It was a match Frazier had promised him if his boxing
licence was ever returned.
We had no television in South Africa then and our news came from
the radio and the newspapers. The Fight of the Century produced an
avalanche of coverage in the press. My Dad read the daily Pretoria News
and two weeklies, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Express, and so these
were my main sources of information. In the buildup to the fight I started
to collect cuttings and for the next five years I kept everything about Ali
that I could lay my hands on, trimming hundreds of articles out of the
broadsheets and pasting them into scrapbooks. Forty years later, these
books are spread out on a trestle table beside my desk as I’m writing this.
Let me also confess: I’m writing this because the scrapbooks exist.
The heart of my archive is three Eclipse drawing books with tracing-
paper sheets between the leaves. These books have buff cardboard
covers printed with the Eclipse trademarks and the obligatory bilingual
‘drawing book’ and ‘tekenboek’. In the middle of each cover is a handdrawn
title: ALI I, ALI II and ALi III. The newsprint is tobacco-leaf
brown and crackly. When I rub it between my fingers, I fancy that the
boy who first read these reports and I are one and the same person.