Jaws

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE FIGHT

by NORMAN MAILER 239 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.

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 simile for Ali's tactical shift in style.

To 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.

Psychic Energy. There are also the author's ritual mentions of the liver as if it were a window on the soul, psychosomatic illness, and plenty of vigorous metaphors on the uses of terror, dread and psychic energy. He even parodies Rojack of An American Dream by playing around on the terrace ledge of his hotel room, high above the streets of Kinshasa. As always, Mailer is keenly aware of his own celebrity when mixing with other celebrities. As always, no one can cut the competition as well as he does. Zaire's President Mobutu reminds Mailer of "a snake around a stick." Fight Promoter Don King's intellectual pretensions are pricked by simply quoting his pronunciation of the German philosopher "Knees Itch." George Plimpton's genteel competitiveness makes him "a smokeless Vesuvius."

Despite all the entertaining distractions and intellectual feints, The Fight only adds up to Norman Mailer honorably going about the business of making his living. Covering a sport that seems to hold less and less interest for Americans calls for all his savvy. But even Mailer cannot make a silk purse out of a cauliflower ear.

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