Ali vs. Frazier

You should give your husband a break from asking about sugar cookies.

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This is not an auspicious start to the new year. Beached on the couch, Kleenex box balanced on your stomach. The pile of books and magazines you gathered in your initial fever remain untouched by your bedside.

This is what you get for being social during the holidays.

In an attempt to silence your groaning, your husband drops the remote on your delicate stomach.

“Watch something.” He’s grumpy, himself, now that he’s beginning to sneeze.

You’re over-medicated and about to pass out so it doesn’t matter where you land. In a few clicks, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier appear in fuzzy black and white for their first match. You know this one. It took place the month after you were married. You had joined your husband in the rural Ohio town of Ravenna where he was the city reporter for the county paper. He was out that evening, covering something as thrilling as the town’s Water Board Department’s quarterly report. The only reason you turned on the TV was to fill the attic apartment with anything that would assuage your lonely uncertainty about marriage.

It was the first boxing match you ever saw. What Google tells you now that you didn’t know then was that it was called the “fight of the century.” The beauty of this fight is that both men entered the ring as champions and one of them would leave a loser. Frazier was younger and had recently defended his championship title twice. Ali was bigger but hadn’t fought since he was stripped of his title as punishment for refusing to be drafted. It had been almost four years since his last fight. Regular people squeezed into Madison Square Garden beside celebrities and dignitaries. Frank Sinatra persuaded Look magazine to hire him as a photographer so he’d get closer to the ring than his front row seat.

In the first seconds of the first rounds, Ali seems to take charge. He pins Frazier’s head against his shoulder. He looks like a mother soothing her baby.

Your husband pops back in to see how you’re doing.

“They got this graceful box-trot thing going on,” you say, admiring Ali’s grace and tenderness.

“If he keeps pressing Frazier’s head down on his neck, he could kill him,” he says.

“Oh,” you say sheepishly as the referee bravely squeezes between the slugs.

Frazier uncouples himself with BAM, BAM, BAMS! to the chest. Ali’s head bounces around like a bobblehead.

During those early months of marriage you would often come home from the restaurant where you worked and make a dozen sugar cookies. This was a rare feat since baking bored you, it’s exactness rubbing against your natural free-for-all cooking style.

It’s the third round of 15 and you are wondering why you would even think of baking sugar cookies back then. It was October, the sun paling out the kitchen window. The farm fields surrounding the town bristled with the remains of a meager harvest. Perhaps the challenge of baking even such a simple recipe as a plain cookie made you feel useful. A gift that a uneasy bride could offer her perpetually optimistic husband.

“Do you remember the sugar cookies I used to make?” You ask your husband who’s now completely absorbed in the fight.

“What?” he says after you repeat the question.

“The sugar cookies I used to make you when we were in Ravenna.”

You are the keeper of memories, the obsessive chronicler of moments others have long forgotten.

He smiles down at you. “Maybe?” After all these years he’s learned how to settle his wife. He lightly pats your head, actually more of a caress. The time to put you down for a nap can’t come soon enough.

The fight goes on and on. At the beginning of each round, Don Dunphy predicts it will be the last. Ali and Frazier, though, press forward. Round 7, the referee warns Ali about his neck hugs. Round 8, Frazier has Ali on the ropes but Ali uses it as an advantage to protect his head and chest and then go after Frazier’s side. The champ swings Ali into the center of the ring and pounds him. Round 10, a pissed-off, revived Ali relentlessly charges Frazier and brawls with him straight to the bell. Round 11, Frazier briefly knocks Ali down, though he rallies with his two-stepping moves and a startling set of lightening punches. Round 15, Frazier wallops Ali and down he goes, this time to the mat and the Garden explodes. But Ali shakes himself together and he and Frazier see it through to the end.

The fights and rematches you and your husband had those first months are unforgettable: the time you locked him out of the bedroom; that afternoon you got on your bike, not knowing where you were going except away; the many many days you despaired that your life would ever get any better. The time he yelled through the locked door to go if you wanted to; the time he waited on the house steps for you to come back; the many, many hours he spent cradling you against him.

Your husband returns just as Frazier is declared the winner.

“How was it?”

“Brutal. Ali lost. I feel bad for him,” you say.

He laughs. “You won’t when you watch their next fight. That was brutal.”

He picks up the remote and turns to an old comedy series episode. “You want some soup?”

“That’d be nice,” you say.

He goes into the kitchen, comes back ten minutes later with a bowl of chicken and rice for each of you. He follows it with tangerines and Oreos for the next episode.

Soon after the Ali and Fraizer fight you found a better job where the cooks and other waitress filled the hours between orders with stories about their own troubles. They needed to be written down when you came home. There was no longer time or a need to bake sugar cookies.

“Nap time,” he says.

“Nap time,” you agree.

And the two of you trudge off to the bedroom and fall asleep together.

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Sugar Cookies with Oil

This is the recipe I would have used. It comes from the copy of The Joy of Cooking that my mother-in-law gave to my husband after he graduated from college.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Sift together:
2 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons double-acting baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon or 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Combine:
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup vegetable oil

Add to this mixture and beat well after each addition:
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla

Add the flour mixture all at once and beat well. Shape the dough into 1/2 inch balls. Dip the balls in:
Granulated sugar

Bake about 10 to 12 minutes on a lightly greased sheet.