Joe Frazier’s career was defined by his rivalry with Ali, who ridiculed him as a black man in the guise of a Great White Hope
JOE FRAZIER, the former heavyweight champion whose furious and intensely personal fights with a taunting Muhammad Ali endure as an epic rivalry in boxing history, died on Monday night from liver cancer.
Known as Smokin’ Joe, Frazier stalked his opponents around the ring with a crouching, relentless attack – his head low and bobbing, his broad, powerful shoulders hunched – as he bore down on them with an onslaught of withering jabs and crushing body blows, setting them up for his devastating left hook.
It was an overpowering modus operandi that led to versions of the heavyweight crown from 1968 to 1973. He won 32 fights in all, 27 by knockouts, losing four times – twice to Ali in furious bouts and twice to George Foreman. He also recorded one draw.
A slugger who weathered repeated blows to the head while he delivered punishment, Frazier proved a formidable figure. But his career was defined by his rivalry with Ali, who ridiculed him as a black man in the guise of a Great White Hope.
Frazier detested him.
Ali v Frazier was a study in contrasts. Ali: tall and handsome, a wit given to spouting poetry, a magnetic figure who drew adulation and denigration alike, the one for his prowess and outsize personality, the other for his anti-war views and Black Power embrace of Islam. Frazier: a bull-like man of few words with a blue-collar image and a glowering visage who in so many ways could be on an equal footing with his rival only in the ring.
Frazier won the undisputed heavyweight title with a 15-round decision over Ali at Madison Square Garden in March 1971. Ali scored a 12-round decision over Frazier at the Garden in a non-title bout in January 1974. Then came the Thrilla in Manila championship bout, in October 1975, regarded as one of the greatest fights in boxing history.
It ended when a battered Frazier, one eye swollen shut, did not come out for the 15th round.
The Ali-Frazier battles played out at a time when the heavyweight boxing champion was far more celebrated than he is today, a figure who could stand alone in the spotlight a decade before an alphabet soup of boxing sanctioning bodies arose.
The rivalry was also given a political and social cast. Many viewed the Ali-Frazier matches as a snapshot of the struggles of the 1960s. Ali, an adherent of the Nation of Islam, came to represent rising black anger in America and opposition to the Vietnam War. Frazier voiced no political views, but he was nonetheless depicted, to his consternation, as the favourite of the establishment. Ali called him “ignorant”, likened him to a gorilla and said his black supporters were Uncle Toms.
“Frazier had become the white man’s fighter, Mr Charley was rooting for Frazier, and that meant blacks were boycotting him in their heart,” Norman Mailer wrote in Life magazine following the first Ali-Frazier bout. Frazier, wrote Mailer, was “twice as black as Clay and half as handsome”, with “the rugged decent life-worked face of a man who had laboured in the pits all his life.”
Frazier could never match Ali’s charisma or his gift for the provocative quote. He was devoted to a brutal craft, spending countless hours in his spartan training camp and not sparing of his body inside the ring.
“The way I fight, it’s not me beatin’ the man: I make the man whip himself,” Frazier told Playboy in 1973. “Because I stay close to him. He can’t get out the way. Before he knows it – whew! – he’s tired. And he can’t pick up his second wind because I’m right back on him again.”
In his autobiography, Smokin’ Joe, written with Phil Berger, Frazier said his first trainer, Yank Durham, had given him his nickname. It was, he said, “a name that had come from what Yank used to say in the dressingroom before sending me out to fight: ‘Go out there, goddammit, and make smoke come from those gloves’.”
Foreman knocked Frazier out twice but said he had never lost his respect for him.
"Joe Frazier would come out smoking," Foreman told ESPN. "If you hit him, he liked it. If you knocked him down, you only made him mad."
Durham said he saw a fire always smouldering in Frazier. "I've had plenty of other boxers with more raw talent," he told The New York Times Magazinein 1970, "but none with more dedication and strength."
Billy Joe Frazier was born January 12th, 1944, in Laurel Bay, SC, the youngest of 12 children. His father, Rubin, and his mother, Dolly, worked in the fields, and the youngster known as Billy Boy dropped out of school at 13. He dreamed of becoming a boxing champion, throwing his first punches at burlap sacks he stuffed with moss and leaves, pretending to be Joe Louis or Ezzard Charles or Archie Moore.
At 15, Frazier went to New York to live with a brother. A year later he moved to Philadelphia, taking a job in a slaughterhouse. Durham discovered him while Frazier was boxing at a Police Athletic League gym in Philadelphia to lose weight.
Under Durham’s guidance, Frazier captured a Golden Gloves championship and won the heavyweight gold medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
He turned pro in August 1965 with financial backing from businessmen calling themselves the Cloverlay Group (from cloverleaf, for good luck, and overlay, a betting term signifying good odds). He won his first 11 bouts by knockouts. By winter 1968 his record was 21-0.
A year before Frazier’s pro debut, Cassius Clay won the heavyweight championship in a huge upset of Sonny Liston. Soon afterward, affirming his rumoured membership in the Nation of Islam, he became Muhammad Ali. In April 1967, having proclaimed, “I ain’t got nothing against them Viet Cong,” Ali refused to be drafted, claiming conscientious objector status. Boxing commissions stripped him of his title, and he was convicted of evading the draft.
An eight-man elimination tournament was held to determine a World Boxing Association champion to replace Ali. Frazier refused to participate, and Jimmy Ellis took the crown. But in March 1968, Frazier won the version of the heavyweight title recognised by New York and a few other states, defeating Buster Mathis with an 11th-round knockout. He took the WBA title in February 1970, stopping Ellis, who could not come out for the fifth round.
In summer 1970, Ali won a court battle to regain his boxing licence, then knocked out the contenders Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena. The stage was set for an Ali-Frazier showdown, a match-up of unbeaten fighters, on March 8th, 1971, at Madison Square Garden. Each man was guaranteed $2.5 million, the biggest boxing payday ever. Frank Sinatra was at ringside taking photos for Life magazine. An estimated 300 million watched on TV worldwide, and the $1.35 million gate set a record for an indoor bout.
Frazier, at 5ft 11½ ins and 205 pounds, gave up three inches in height and nearly seven inches in reach to Ali, but he wore him down with blows to the body while moving underneath Ali’s jabs. In the 15th round, Frazier unleashed his famed left hook, catching Ali on the jaw and flooring him for a count of four. Ali held on, but Frazier won a unanimous decision.
Frazier declared, “I always knew who the champ was.” But he continued to bristle over Ali’s taunting. “I’ve seen pictures of him in cars with white guys, huggin ’em and havin’ fun,” Frazier told Sport magazine two months after the fight. “Then he go call me an Uncle Tom. Don’t say, ‘I hate the white man’, then go to the white man for help.”
For Frazier, 1971 was truly triumphant. He bought a 368-acre estate called Brewton Plantation near his boyhood home and became the first black man since Reconstruction to address the South Carolina Legislature. Ali gained vindication in June 1971 when the US Supreme Court overturned his conviction for draft evasion.
Frazier defended his title against two journeymen, Terry Daniels and Ron Stander, but Foreman took his championship away on January 22nd, 1973, knocking him down six times in their bout in Kingston, Jamaica, before the referee stopped the fight in the second round.
Frazier met Ali again in a non-title bout at the Garden on January 28th, 1974. Frazier kept boring in and complained that Ali was holding in the clinches, but Ali scored with flurries of punches and won a 12-round unanimous decision.
Ali won back the heavyweight title in October 1974, knocking out Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire – the celebrated Rumble in the Jungle. Frazier went on to knock out Quarry and Ellis, setting up their third match, and second title fight – the Thrilla in Manila, on October 1st, 1975.
The fight was gruelling, held at Quezon City, outside the Philippine capital, before a crowd of 28,000 in 100-degree-plus heat. Ali won the early rounds. Frazier rallied. Then Ali came back. By the end of the 14th round, Frazier could barely see. He had already lost most of the vision in his left eye from a cataract, and his right eye was puffed and nearly shut. Eddie Futch, working Frazier’s corner, asked the referee to end the bout. When it was stopped, Ali was ahead on the scorecards of the referee and two judges.
“It’s the closest I’ve come to death,” Ali said.
Frazier returned to the ring nine months later, in June 1976, to face Foreman at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island. Foreman stopped him on a technical knockout in the fifth round. Frazier then announced his retirement. He was 32. He later managed his eldest son, Marvis, a heavyweight. In December 1981, he returned to the ring to fight a journeyman named Jumbo Cummings to a draw, then retired for good, tending to investments from his home in Philadelphia.
Both Frazier and Ali had daughters who took up boxing, and in June 2001, it was Ali-Frazier IV. Frazier’s daughter Jacqui Frazier-Lyde fought Ali’s daughter Laila Ali at a casino in Vernon, NY. Like their fathers in their first fight, both were unbeaten. Laila Ali won on a decision. Joe Frazier was in the crowd of 6,500, but Muhammad Ali, impaired by Parkinson’s syndrome, was not.
Long after his fighting days were over, Frazier retained his enmity for Ali. But in March 2001, the 30th anniversary of the first Ali-Frazier bout, Ali told The New York Times: "I said a lot of things in the heat of the moment that I shouldn't have said. Called him names I shouldn't have called him. I apologise for that. I'm sorry. It was all meant to promote the fight."
Asked for a response, Frazier said: “We have to embrace each other. It’s time to talk and get together. Life’s too short.”
Fascination with the Ali-Frazier saga has endured, and sometimes an analogy has been drawn beyond the boxing world. Following a 2008 presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, Stuart Stevens, a Republican media consultant, said McCain should concentrate on selling himself to America rather than criticising Obama.
As Stevens put it, “More Ali and less Joe Frazier.”
John Dower, the director of the 2009 British documentary Thrilla in Manila, said of Frazier: “He’s a good-time guy. But he’s angry about Ali.” In March 2011, Frazier told reporters he had not seen Ali in person for more than 10 years. “I forgave him for all the accusations he made over the years,” he said. “I hope he’s doing fine. I’d love to see him.”
But as Frazier told The New York Timesin 2006: "Ali always said I would be nothing without him. But who would he have been without me?"
New York Times
JOE FRAZIER: The facts
Born January 12th, 1944
(in Beaufort, South Carolina)
Won the Olympic heavyweight boxing gold medal for the United States in 1964 in Tokyo.
Won the world heavyweight title in 1970 after knocking out champion Jimmy Ellis.
Hands Muhammad Ali the first defeat of his professional career on March 8th, 1971, winning a 15-round bout at New York's Madison Square Garden billed as "The Fight of the Century".
Lost his title in 1973 to hard-hitting George Foreman.
Frazier loses second fight with Ali, again at Madison Square Garden, in a 12-round decision on January 28th, 1974.
In one of the most epic sporting events, Frazier lost to Ali in a brutal fight in the Philippines, known as "The Thrilla in Manila" on a technical knockout when trainer Eddie Futch would not allow Frazier to fight the 15th round.
Inducted into International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990.
Frazier retired in 1976 – staged an unsuccessful return in 1981.
Career record of 32-4-1, including 27 knockouts.
HEAVYWEIGHT LION: Five of Smokin' Joe Frazier's most memorable fights
February 1970 v Jimmy Ellis
Madison Square Garden, New York
(Won TKO fifth round)
Frazier was crowned world champion for the first time, winning the WBC and WBA titles at Madison Square Garden. The aggressive Frazier was at his relentless best, flooring Ellis for the first time in his career on two occasions in the fourth round. Ellis failed to emerge for the fifth.
March 1971 v Muhammad Ali
Madison Square Garden, New York
(Won on points)
Frazier emerged victorious from a showdown billed "Fight of the Century", his first and last victory over bitter foe Ali. Ali was floored in the 15th round by a left hook after Frazier had dominated the final third of the fight. Both spent time in hospital in the aftermath.
January 1973 v George Foreman
Kingston, Jamaica
(Lost TKO second round)
Hard and fearless, Frazier nevertheless had trouble in his two fights against the bigger Foreman, the only opponent to beat him convincingly. The first contest was the most emphatic, with the outgunned Frazier going down three times in the first and then again in the second round to lose his world titles.
January 1974 v Muhammad Ali
Madison Square Garden, New York
(Lost on points)
The second instalment of a thrilling trilogy was the least entertaining with Ali looking to hold as often as possible on the way to clinching a unanimous 12-round decision that avenged his earlier defeat.
October 1975 v Muhammad Ali
Manila, Philippines
(Lost TKO 14th round)
Arguably the greatest fight of all time brought one of sport's fiercest rivalries to a brutal conclusion. His right eye closed, Frazier was pulled out by trainer Eddie Futch despite pleading to continue. Unknown to Futch was that Ali was about to retire himself. Frazier later said he was ready to die in the ring.
