TIPPING POINT:Joe Frazier was well entitled to feel bitter about how his greatest rival was put on a pedestal despite some contemptible behaviour, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR

IT’S A week now since Joe Frazier died too young, too neglected and probably still too bitter. Nowhere has his death been reported or commented upon without having Mohammed Ali’s name in the opening paragraph – here too. Usually Ali has appeared in the first sentence, continuing, even in death, to define his great rival’s life and career.

Just as he did throughout the last half of his life, Frazier would have felt that sting, fumed at the injustice of it. Bitterness is hard to expunge entirely when right is on your side and despite periodically conciliatory noises towards Ali over the years, Smokin’ Joe clearly still detested the man he famously put on the floor at Madison Square Garden 40 years ago. One can only hope that, by the end, he had at least partly reconciled himself to the sporting public’s capacity to overlook the ugly parts of those they choose to place on a pedestal.

Ali remains on the highest pedestal of all – “The Greatest”. The one consistently rated as the greatest sporting figure of the 20th century. Famously pretty, and articulate, and controversial, Ali’s public persona was lapped up by a grateful media delighted to worship at the altar of a man who was far from the pug-nosed caricature of a heavyweight champion. Ali happily played along, always with one eye on the box-office, and the other on his profile.

Famously brave in the ring, he could also be courageous out of it. “No Viet Cong ever called me Nigger,” perfectly summed up the moral vacuum at the centre of the American government’s insistence that the World Heavyweight Champion should go to Vietnam.

But what everyone forgets now is how loathsome Ali’s politics could be, all that separation of the races stuff, the white blue-eyed man being the devil. He once spoke at a Klan meeting, proving how the nation of Islam really was just a different side to the same fanatical coin. And we also forget how poisonously ignorant the man himself could be. Frazier never forgot. And he could never forget how Ali continued to be so readily embraced by a world seemingly also so determined to cast the sharecropper’s son from South Carolina in the role of villain.

Joe couldn’t talk as good as Ali, wasn’t as “pretty,” never espoused broad political principles and never craved public attention. He wasn’t colourful. But what he had was a personal decency that saw him quietly come to Ali’s aid when his licence was stripped.

Frazier boycotted an elimination tournament to find a successor to the banished champion, petitioned Nixon to have the licence returned, gave the notoriously profligate Ali money. And Ali’s response to that was to rain years of contemptuous insults on top of a man who had tried to help him.

Frazier may not have spoken out on the issue of civil rights, but political engagement is hardly a duty. In the cauldron of early 1970s American politics though, Ali calling Frazier an “Uncle Tom” was contemptible. The impact on Frazier’s family was immense. His children were taunted for years afterwards.

“The Thrilla in Manila” was intensely personal for Joe, hardly surprising because people also forget the title is only a small part of a piece of Ali doggerel that revolved around rhymes with gorilla.

Ali later tried to fob it all off as promotion, a piss-weak justification for cheap, bullying behaviour. And yet he’s the great totemic figure, the icon.

Broke and sick, Frazier was entitled to his bitterness about that. But he also knew better than most how “colourful” sells.

To a mass media ravenous for copy to shovel out to an ADD sporting audience, quiet decency doesn’t cut it. That’s why after a decade of tennis excellence revolving around possibly the two greatest players ever to play the game, there are plenty who still pine for the days of McEnroe, Borg and Connors. Never mind that Federer and Nadal have taken tennis to the nth level in terms of technical skill and fitness: for those who tune in for the two weeks of Wimbledon, it’s all boring compared to the good old days when McEnroe would go “tonto” and Connors would invite him to eff off.

Never mind that McEnroe’s outbursts coincided to a remarkable degree with how close the other man was getting to beat him. It was all so exciting watching the brattish New Yorker sound off like a petulant child, and just like any child he would get over his strop in a heartbeat, leaving his opponent tight-lipped with temper and completely thrown. The avuncular figure that sits in the commentary box now is a long way from his pomp when Mac had all the personal charm of a spitting puff-adder. But hey, he was colourful.

Of course it’s not just a sporting phenomenon. That other icon of 20th century culture, JFK, was pretty and fluent too, and has had any amount of posthumous virtues ascribed to him. All of them conveniently ignore how Joe Kennedy, to all intents and purposes, bought “the spare” his 1960 election through links with the mob and labour bosses that only the most goggle-eyed of Kennedy groupies can ignore. But JFK looked good and could deliver a line, many of them written by Ted Sorensen.

No doubt there are any amount of sociological reasons why humanity responds so readily to excitement and looks and the perception of glamour. And no doubt there are psychiatrists worldwide who can anticipate years of repeat business should the topic ever turn to a psychosexual examination of sports’ fan-base.

There were lots of women who wanted to comfort Roy Keane on the back of that infamous Saipan sulk where one man’s need for attention exerted an unprecedented hold on the national psyche. But there must have been plenty of guys too, given that a display of some remarkably adolescent temper found itself being justified in the sort of existential terms that the longer we leave the whole affair behind whiff even more strongly of Grade A bullshit.

Keane was miles offside during that whole sorry and desperately chippy affair, and hung a conspicuously dull but worthy man in Mick McCarthy out to dry while doing it.

But even now, a substantial portion of the Irish population will have nothing said against the Cork man, the pretty one, the fluent one, the colourful one, the one who coldly and calculatedly ended Alf Inge Haaland’s career. After all, a whiff of sulphur is exciting, especially at a safe distance.

Ali had it. Frazier didn’t.

But Smokin’ Joe had substance, something reflected in the generosity of the tributes paid to him, including, it has to be said, Ali’s.

Nothing, not even being able to give good quote, could hide that.