BYPLAY by ROGER KAHN: Doing It Just One More Time

The fighter sat in semidarkness, talking in an urgent whisper. When you sit with Muhammad Ali, he talks in whispers. He knows that when the heavyweight champion speaks softly, you strain to hear.

"Why are you fighting this fight?" I asked. "Why are you going on?"

Rays of late afternoon sunlight angled against an off-white wall. Ali, who wore black, had positioned himself in darkness.

"To do good works," he said. "I helped a Jewish nursing home. You know I go in the ghettos. Two, three days after this fight, I may be on the South Side of Chicago talking with people. What heavyweight champion before ever done that?" Ali stroked his brows, which are unmarked for all the punches crashed against them. "I gives a lot away. I got a mission. God, if there is a God, he's gonna judge me. That's when I die. And I'm gonna die. Sonny Liston. He died."

I nodded.

"And you," Ali said. "You gonna die. Jimmy Cannon, he was once sitting right where you are, and he died. You ever think about that?"

I had driven cheerfully into the Catskill Mountains, the gefilte fish capital of the cosmos, to observe two black men readying themselves for a fight at Yankee Stadium. The Ali I remembered was brave, young and handsome, and as remote from death as spring. But now this man had turned contemplative and grave. He was telling me something with great subtlety. Muhammad Ali was dying as a fighter.

Ken Norton, 31, the opponent, is child of the black middle class, a star in two dreadful movies and the possessor of a body that Irving Rudd, a boxing publicist, called "mythologically hewn."

No rancor separated the fighters. Ali had been guaranteed $6 million. Norton would earn $1 million. Sept. 28 was payday, but as they worked toward summits of conditioning, the world yawned. Ali is proud of his ability to sell tickets, and at the public prefight physical, he staged a vulgar, raucous demonstration.

"You a nigger," he screamed at Norton, in a meeting room at Grossinger's hotel. "You a yellow nigger. And your movies are bad." Ali lifted a poster displaying a photo of Norton that had appeared in the Village Voice. Posed next to a sink, Norton wore only a jock.

"You are a disgrace to athletics," Ali shouted. "You are a disgrace to your race. You are a disgrace to your country, posing for a picture with your balls hanging out."

Norton ignored the champion, and a doctor in a yellow and black sport jacket took pulses and blood pressure; complaining that he could not do his work unless Ali quieted down. Ali signaled to his retinue, and presently his seconds and Norton's seconds were calling each other flunkies.

"Both men are in superb condition," announced Harry Kleiman, the doctor.

"When Ali gets beat, you go on welfare," cried one of Norton's people.

"You are just a nigger," said Ali's man, Drew Brown.

The champion's eyes showed merriment. Privately he had given Joe Louis $10,000 to spend two weeks with him at the Concord Hotel. Publicly he refused to notice Louis wince whenever the word "nigger" rang out.