Under Marcos’s rule—which was propped up publicly by U.S. military aid and secretly by CIA assistance—the Philippines had been transformed into a police state. In 1972, in the name of fighting communism and terrorism, Marcos had declared martial law, granting himself supreme power. Three years into his regime, it had become commonplace for Filipinos to have family members who’d been disappeared, or to encounter the mutilated bodies of the president’s political opponents, left on the streets as warnings.
One way that the Marcoses managed their reputation at home and abroad was through glitzy events that projected the Philippines as a booming, modernized state. The fight—for which they paid millions in purse money, promotion, and setup—was among the boldest examples. Nobody who knew the country was ever really fooled, and even Kissinger—the white one—warned President Richard Nixon that he thought Ferdinand Marcos was a self-serving tyrant. But boy, could he put on a show.
It was always unclear whether Ali’s wide-eyed embrace of authoritarian regimes was a product of naivete or something more calculated. As with all things Ali, the boundaries between theater and reality were purposefully vague. But he readily availed himself of the Marcoses’ hospitality, taking members of his entourage to parties and events. When Ali’s mistress appeared at a state reception in Manila, Ali’s wife, Khalilah, flew to the Philippines in a fury. Asked by the press about the fight, she responded tersely, “I’m going to root for the best man to win tonight—whomever that turns out to be.”
In many ways, the extracurriculars—the women, the parties, the junkets—were all standard Ali fare by this point. A week before the match, Izenberg wrote that when it came to time, “he never has as much as he would like because there are so many things he wants to say and do before the bell rings. Some of them even concern the fight.”
But Ali’s antics in Manila had a more vicious edge. He leaned into his portrayal of the darker-skinned Frazier as more animal than human, even going so far as to wear a shirt imprinted with the image of a gorilla to the weigh-in. He had brought a toy gorilla to a press conference announcing the fight and pretended his sparring partners were gorillas. During one of Frazier’s training sessions in Manila, Ali taunted him from the rafters. One night, Frazier heard shouting from outside his hotel window. He looked down from his balcony and saw Ali pointing a pistol at him. Ali and his team would later say that the pistol was a toy, but the truth has never been determined.