Joe Frazier, one-half of the last sporting event in history to galvanize and divide America, hasn't been in his grave for 72 hours yet, but the keepers of the 1960s flame are already busy trashing his memory.
The poor bastard. He was a great fighter, but he just wasn't politically correct. Darn.
Joe Frazier died on Monday at age 67, of cancer.
Slate magazine commemorated Frazier's passing with a veritable sneer-fest. Slate's obituary starts off with the statement that Frazier wasn't fit to tie Muhammad Ali's shoe.
From there it turns unpleasant.
Maybe Frazier wasn't fit to tie Ali's shoe, but once upon a time he was fit to mess up Ali's face, nearly bust his jaw and and knock him flat on his can. How many men could do that? Probably not Michael Kinsley.
But Ali, after all, was a hero to the anti-Vietnam War crowd back in the late 1960s and early '70s, that crowd which is all sclerotic now, but in its dotage is still nostalgic for Woodstock, tie-dyed T shirts, bong pipes and Fillmore East posters, and still eager to sneer away anyone who didn't follow the orthodoxy of Woodstock Nation, a group which never existed in the first place and is dying off now.
Ah, stuff it, Slate. And by the way, you can also kiss my ass, all of you aging hippies, all of you who still have November 22 marked in red on your Rolling Stone calendars. Stuff your nostalgia for rebel days that never were. Stick your Moby Grape albums in your ears.
Grow up, for chrissakes, my fellow aging Baby Boomers! Peter, Paul and Mary broke up a long time ago. In fact Mary's dead, as are a lot of you. And soon, me.
Yes, I'm a trailing-edge member of that narcissistic "Woodstock" generation. By which I mean I'm too young to have been at Woodstock, but do remember it. (It's been said that if everyone who claims to actually have been at the original Woodstock festival were actually there, Max Yasgur's upstate New York farm, where the big party took place in August, 1969, would have to have been the size of Connecticut.)
And I do remember that epic night when Frazier squared off for the first time against Ali. The day that preceded it as well. Everyone my age does.
Nothing would be seen to resemble this spectacle until the O.J. Simpson trial nearly 25 years later. America chose up sides on Ali-Frazier. And America followed this fight by any means it could.
As mentioned above, the catalyst that made this prizefight such an epic event was the war in Vietnam. In 1967, Muhammad Ali, whose name had once been Cassius Clay and who had won the olympic gold medal in boxing at the Rome Olympics of 1960, refused to be drafted into the armed forces. He refused to fight in Vietnam. His famous quip "I got nothin' against them Congs," echoed from one end of the nation to the other.
Immediately Ali became an icon to opponents of the war, and a villain to that still-large portion of America, which, in 1967, (a mere two years after President Lyndon Baines Johnson had escalated the U.S. war effort in southeast Asia) believed that the war was justified, a necessary and unavoidable part of America's global crusade against Communism.
When Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to be inducted into the Army, many Americans thought the action was right and justified.
In fact, the generation that had fought World War II, still only in its forties and early fifties at that time, was aghast at Ali's recusancy. By refusing to serve his country, many felt that Ali had showed himself to be unpatriotic, anti-American and undeserving.
Many who felt this way would change their minds later, after the war had dragged on in stalemate mode for a few more years and it began to appear that the United States either couldn't win or didn't especially want to. By 1973, even my father, as loud a jingoist as you could ask for, was beginning to question why the U.S. continued to pour so many lives and so much money into what looked more and more like a black hole.
But that came later. In '71 the country was still pretty much split in two over Vietnam. And as the media would have it, on the evening of Monday, March 8, 1971, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali became single-combat warriors.
Ali was fighting for the left, Frazier for the right, whether they knew it or not.
And everyone cared. At Chula Vista High School, where I was a 15 year-old sophomore that day, the fight was talked about all day long. I asked my teachers what they thought. "Frazier doesn't have a chance," I told Mr. Gary Chapman, my home room teacher and an avid sports fan. "I don't know," Mr. Chapman replied, "Ol, 'Smokin' Joe...'"
That same afternoon my English teacher, Mrs. Rochelle Terry, asked the class after her regular lecture if there were any questions. "Yeah," I said. "Who do you pick in the fight tonight?"
"Muhammad Ali," she smiled. Mrs. Terry was a confirmed sixties gal, leftie to the bone. I even remember the laced-up boots she was wearing that day, kind of a counterculture fashion statement of that era.
Media coverage of what Norman Mailer would call "The Fight" in a book he wrote about this event entitled The Fight (Mailer was rich enough to have a ringside seat -- oh, yes, the celebrities and "beautiful people" were out in force at Madison Square Garden that night, including Mailer, Frank Sinatra, and a phalanx of flamboyantly-dressed black men who called themselves "Ali's Army") was kept very tight. This was YEARS before pay-per-view, and the forces of greed were not giving away anything for free. There was no television coverage, except perhaps closed-circuit, the ancestor of pay-per-view.
Since I brought up closed-circuit and called it "the ancestor of pay-per-view," I'll fill in those of you who were born after the advent of HBO and are too young to remember closed-circuit, how it worked.
In fact I'll tell you, as we dreary old people tend to, from personal experience.
And that experience, coincidentally, involves Muhammad Ali.
On October 26, 1970, a few months prior to "The Fight," Ali staged his first "comeback" bout after having been stripped of the heavyweight title three years earlier.
He fought Jerry Quarry that night, and dispatched him quickly. I saw this fight, even though television was not allowed. How? Via "closed-circuit:" The Ali-Quarry fight was shown on a big closed-circuit screen at the San Diego International Sports Arena. You had to buy a ticket to come and watch this bout on the big TV. Someone gave my father two tickets, and he took me along to see Quarry vs. Ali, which if you blinked you might have missed it. The bout was stopped after three rounds when a cut over Quarry's eye could not be closed. (You could still smoke in public in those days, and I will never forget the sight of my father, along with his Immigration Service buddies, standing there with a cigar in his mouth, shouting encouragement to the video image of doomed Jerry Quarry.)
The fight lasted all of nine minutes. And I still had to go home and do my homework. Damn.
Still, seeing Ali-Quarry in October of '70 was a treat, despite the shortness of the fight.
The Ali-Quarry match raised some eyebrows, by the way, over how suddenly it was stopped. I overheard my dad remarking to his INS pals, "The question is, who's in the tank?"
I was writing juvenile poetry by then, and duly wrote a poem entitled The Question Is, Who's In The Tank?: Reflections On The Ali-Quarry Fight. Mercifully, it is long lost.
My dad and I did not get to see "Ali-Frazier I," as the fight later came to be called (see "World War I" for marketing references) on closed-circuit TV. Evidently nobody gave my father tickets to this one, although I'm sure The Fight was shown on closed-circuit TV in some venues, for those who could pay. And I'm sure that those who could pay had to pay a lot. My family was poor in those days. We had to make do.
We did. The best we could do, Dad and me, was to follow the 50-word summaries of each round which were allowed to be broadcast on the radio after each round ended. We sat in the kitchen together that night, as I'm sure millions of others all over America did, our ears glued to the radio.
I doubt that a boxing match had attracted this much attention since Billy Conn fought Joe Louis in 1941.
My father and I rooted passionately for "Smokin' Joe." It was 1971, Muhammad Ali was an America-hating traitor, (and probably hated white people as well; after all, he was a Black Muslim, a follower of Elijah Muhammad, the successor of the assassinated Malcolm X, and we had all heard the anti-white rhetoric of Malcolm X), and we wanted Frazier to pound him into dust.
Personally, as I had told Mr. Chapman that morning, I did not think it was going to happen. In fact I didn't think Frazier had a prayer. During the 1960's, on ABC's Wide World of Sports and elsewhere, I had watched Ali destroy one opponent after another.
Ali seemed invincible.
Of course I was just a kid then, and didn't know that Ali, for TV's benefit, had been fighting a series of opponents during the mid-1960s who really didn't deserve to be in the same ring with him.
To cement his reputation as "The Greatest," having won the Olympic gold medal and then beaten such real champs as Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson earlier in the decade, Ali "defended" his title against a list of nobodies which included George Chuvalo, Brian London, Karl Mildenburger, and a fellow named Cleveland "Big Cat" Williams, who, a few months before climbing into the ring with Ali, had been shot by a Texas policeman. Williams was missing one kidney plus ten feet of his small intestine, and had nerve damage in one leg to boot. Ali beat Williams in three rounds. No big surprise there.
In view of "matchups" such as these, by the time Ali was stripped of his title in 1967, more than one sportswriter was accusing him and his manager, Angelo Dundee, of running a "Bum-of-The-Month" club.
But as a child I was taken in by all the hype. The media wanted us to think Ali was unbeatable, and I believed them.
Goliath. And worse yet, a Goliath who openly hated America, had a big, loud mouth (and probably hated white people.)
We needed a patriotic David to take him down. But I didn't think such a figure existed.
I had no faith that Frazier, or anyone else, could do the job. I'd seen Ali plow under too many opponents, not realizing that so many of them were handpicked straw men. Jerry Quarry was a fighter of some reputation (good grief, he even made an appearance on I Dream of Jeannie!) but he wasn't in Ali's league.
Surprise: Frazier not only beat Ali that night, but knocked him flat on his ass in the 15th round.
And if Frazier didn't quite break Ali's jaw, (that honor would go to my fellow San Diegan Ken Norton two years later, when Norton defeated Ali for the North American Boxing Federation title), Frazier did give Ali a swollen jaw, which I saw a few nights later on The Dick Cavett Show.
Oh-kay, for you GenX'ers, GenY'ers and GenZero'ers who don't remember The Dick Cavett Show or Dick Cavett, his was a late-night talk show on ABC television in those days.
Cavett often had controversial and/or political figures on his show as guests. The '70s media called him "The Thinking Man's Johnny Carson."
Of course, that last sentence would require that I explain to you under-35's who Johnny Carson was.
Heck with it. Google him.
Anyway, March 8, 1971 was a "moment" which would not be repeated. Ali eventually won the title back from Frazier, and defended it successfully a number of times as the nineteen-seventies went on.
Not to take anything from Ali; maybe we can blame his manager, but again, it was "Bum-of-the-Month Club" time for while.
In 1975, for example, Ali fought Chuck Wepner, a Bayonne, Wisconsin liquor store owner who may have been as tough as nails, (he was) but as a fighter he was a journeyman rather than the master Ali was. Wepner was known as "The Bayonne Bleeder" for the ease with which a rival fighter could cut him. Ali-Wepner was a joke.
I actually watched this fight on TV. The late Howard Cosell, a sportscaster who had a somewhat-prickly relationship with Ali, (and also with the rest of the nation) commented that this bout between Wepner and Ali would at best give Wepner a good story he could tell in his Bayonne liquor store years later.
That's all Cosell would give Wepner. But Wepner did earn it. He had no business fighting Muhammad Ali. But he probably did plenty of liquor store business later, based on the fact that he had fought Muhammad Ali, boxing's equivalent of "I once pitched batting practice to Albert Pujols."
Ali, aging by now, lost his title to Leon Spinks in 1978. He won it back from Spinks, as he had won it back from everyone else who ever took it away from him. But after losing a 10-round decision to Trevor Berbick in 1981, Ali retired from the ring.
(I was a 26 year-old reporter in Vacaville, CA when Ali fought Berbick, and although not a member of the sports staff, I wrote a feature story about Ali's career for my newspaper.)
Jumping back to 10 years earlier, I also remember watching Ali's 1971 interview with Dick Cavett, a few nights after his loss to Frazier.
I was impressed that Ali was man enough to admit that Frazier had bested him. Speaking through that swollen jaw, Ali told Cavett, "All that talk you've heard about his left hook? That ain't just talk. When you see me on my backside, you know that punch had something behind it."
Good sport, Ali, despite his earlier reputation as a screechy, self-promoting loudmouth.
The end of the Vietnam War cooled a lot of passions, and by the time Ali's career entered its twilight half-a-dozen years later, many people who had cheered for Frazier to pound the daylights out of him for refusing to serve in the Army had changed their tunes.
One of them was my own father. By 1972, angry (along with a lot of other people) at Richard Nixon, and getting fed up with the way the Vietnam thing just seemed to keep going on and on and on in the nightly news, with no end in sight, my father remarked, "You know, goddammit, I'm starting to understand how the young people in this country feel! This Vietnam bullshit has gone on long enough!"
It should therefore come as no surprise that when Ali fought Earnie Shavers on the night of September 29, 1977, and the pre-fight warm-up included a short clip of Ali, relaxed in his jogging suit, saying softly that he was through with fame and glory and now just wanted to "help people," Dad remarked, "He's a great guy!"
He was a great guy, Ali. And is. I don't know how much of this was PR-driven, but I do recall that when 52 Americans were being held hostage by murderous fanatics at the American Embassy in Tehran in 1980, Ali spoke up. (One of those murderous fanatics, by the way, is now the president of Iran, but that's a discussion for another day.) Ali offered to exchange himself for the 52. "I'm a Muslim," he told the press, "I don't think they'd hurt me."
If true, it's a great story and a tribute to a man with a big heart.
Unfortunately, it seems that Frazier spent his post-ring years shadow-boxing. He maintained over and over that he despised Ali and wanted to fight him one more time. It almost became his trademark.
And then, more disappointment: Frazier's own son did show some promise as a fighter, but not much. As a colleague of mine who was knowledgeable about boxing said, "He's not Dad." Well, who was?
The terribly sad thing was, what could Frazier do in the shadow of a man with such an aura as Ali had?
Not much. I feel sorry not just for Frazier, but for all fighters who had to fight in Muhammad Ali's charismatic "aura."
In fact I don't think I feel sorrier for anyone than poor old Larry Holmes, who had the misfortune to inherit the heavyweight title after Ali had retired. Kind of like being Louis XV: who was going to notice the king of France who followed Le roi soleil, Louis XIV? Holmes was a great fighter, but after the flamboyant Muhammad Ali, who was going to remember him?
Me. And I will also remember Joe Frazier.
 |
| Smokin' Joe in his glory days, the 1970s |
Joe Frazier, one-half of the last sporting event in history to galvanize and divide America, hasn't been in his grave for 72 hours yet, but the keepers of the 1960s flame are already busy trashing his memory.
The poor bastard. He was a great fighter, but he just wasn't politically correct. Darn.
Joe Frazier died on Monday at age 67, of cancer.
Slate magazine commemorated Frazier's passing with a veritable sneer-fest. Slate's obituary starts off with the statement that Frazier wasn't fit to tie Muhammad Ali's shoe.
From there it turns unpleasant.
 |
| Joe Frazier makes life difficult for Muhammad Ali, knocking him on his butt in the 15th round. March 8,1971 |
But Ali, after all, was a hero to the anti-Vietnam War crowd back in the late 1960s and early '70s, that crowd which is all sclerotic now, but in its dotage is still nostalgic for Woodstock, tie-dyed T shirts, bong pipes and Fillmore East posters, and still eager to sneer away anyone who didn't follow the orthodoxy of Woodstock Nation, a group which never existed in the first place and is dying off now.
Ah, stuff it, Slate. And by the way, you can also kiss my ass, all of you aging hippies, all of you who still have November 22 marked in red on your Rolling Stone calendars. Stuff your nostalgia for rebel days that never were. Stick your Moby Grape albums in your ears.
Grow up, for chrissakes, my fellow aging Baby Boomers! Peter, Paul and Mary broke up a long time ago. In fact Mary's dead, as are a lot of you. And soon, me.
Yes, I'm a trailing-edge member of that narcissistic "Woodstock" generation. By which I mean I'm too young to have been at Woodstock, but do remember it. (It's been said that if everyone who claims to actually have been at the original Woodstock festival were actually there, Max Yasgur's upstate New York farm, where the big party took place in August, 1969, would have to have been the size of Connecticut.)
And I do remember that epic night when Frazier squared off for the first time against Ali. The day that preceded it as well. Everyone my age does.
Nothing would be seen to resemble this spectacle until the O.J. Simpson trial nearly 25 years later. America chose up sides on Ali-Frazier. And America followed this fight by any means it could.
 |
| Earlier in the same fight. Ali was showboating, as he often did in those days, but you can see that despite the legerdemain of his footwork, he was scared of Frazier's deadly left hook. |
As mentioned above, the catalyst that made this prizefight such an epic event was the war in Vietnam. In 1967, Muhammad Ali, whose name had once been Cassius Clay and who had won the olympic gold medal in boxing at the Rome Olympics of 1960, refused to be drafted into the armed forces. He refused to fight in Vietnam. His famous quip "I got nothin' against them Congs," echoed from one end of the nation to the other.
Immediately Ali became an icon to opponents of the war, and a villain to that still-large portion of America, which, in 1967, (a mere two years after President Lyndon Baines Johnson had escalated the U.S. war effort in southeast Asia) believed that the war was justified, a necessary and unavoidable part of America's global crusade against Communism.
When Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to be inducted into the Army, many Americans thought the action was right and justified.
In fact, the generation that had fought World War II, still only in its forties and early fifties at that time, was aghast at Ali's recusancy. By refusing to serve his country, many felt that Ali had showed himself to be unpatriotic, anti-American and undeserving.
Many who felt this way would change their minds later, after the war had dragged on in stalemate mode for a few more years and it began to appear that the United States either couldn't win or didn't especially want to. By 1973, even my father, as loud a jingoist as you could ask for, was beginning to question why the U.S. continued to pour so many lives and so much money into what looked more and more like a black hole.
But that came later. In '71 the country was still pretty much split in two over Vietnam. And as the media would have it, on the evening of Monday, March 8, 1971, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali became single-combat warriors.
Ali was fighting for the left, Frazier for the right, whether they knew it or not.
And everyone cared. At Chula Vista High School, where I was a 15 year-old sophomore that day, the fight was talked about all day long. I asked my teachers what they thought. "Frazier doesn't have a chance," I told Mr. Gary Chapman, my home room teacher and an avid sports fan. "I don't know," Mr. Chapman replied, "Ol, 'Smokin' Joe...'"
That same afternoon my English teacher, Mrs. Rochelle Terry, asked the class after her regular lecture if there were any questions. "Yeah," I said. "Who do you pick in the fight tonight?"
"Muhammad Ali," she smiled. Mrs. Terry was a confirmed sixties gal, leftie to the bone. I even remember the laced-up boots she was wearing that day, kind of a counterculture fashion statement of that era.
Media coverage of what Norman Mailer would call "The Fight" in a book he wrote about this event entitled The Fight (Mailer was rich enough to have a ringside seat -- oh, yes, the celebrities and "beautiful people" were out in force at Madison Square Garden that night, including Mailer, Frank Sinatra, and a phalanx of flamboyantly-dressed black men who called themselves "Ali's Army") was kept very tight. This was YEARS before pay-per-view, and the forces of greed were not giving away anything for free. There was no television coverage, except perhaps closed-circuit, the ancestor of pay-per-view.
Since I brought up closed-circuit and called it "the ancestor of pay-per-view," I'll fill in those of you who were born after the advent of HBO and are too young to remember closed-circuit, how it worked.
In fact I'll tell you, as we dreary old people tend to, from personal experience.
And that experience, coincidentally, involves Muhammad Ali.
On October 26, 1970, a few months prior to "The Fight," Ali staged his first "comeback" bout after having been stripped of the heavyweight title three years earlier.
He fought Jerry Quarry that night, and dispatched him quickly. I saw this fight, even though television was not allowed. How? Via "closed-circuit:" The Ali-Quarry fight was shown on a big closed-circuit screen at the San Diego International Sports Arena. You had to buy a ticket to come and watch this bout on the big TV. Someone gave my father two tickets, and he took me along to see Quarry vs. Ali, which if you blinked you might have missed it. The bout was stopped after three rounds when a cut over Quarry's eye could not be closed. (You could still smoke in public in those days, and I will never forget the sight of my father, along with his Immigration Service buddies, standing there with a cigar in his mouth, shouting encouragement to the video image of doomed Jerry Quarry.)
 |
| Muhammad Ali on the "comeback trail," 1970. He dispatched Jerry Quarry in three rounds. |
Still, seeing Ali-Quarry in October of '70 was a treat, despite the shortness of the fight.
The Ali-Quarry match raised some eyebrows, by the way, over how suddenly it was stopped. I overheard my dad remarking to his INS pals, "The question is, who's in the tank?"
I was writing juvenile poetry by then, and duly wrote a poem entitled The Question Is, Who's In The Tank?: Reflections On The Ali-Quarry Fight. Mercifully, it is long lost.
My dad and I did not get to see "Ali-Frazier I," as the fight later came to be called (see "World War I" for marketing references) on closed-circuit TV. Evidently nobody gave my father tickets to this one, although I'm sure The Fight was shown on closed-circuit TV in some venues, for those who could pay. And I'm sure that those who could pay had to pay a lot. My family was poor in those days. We had to make do.
We did. The best we could do, Dad and me, was to follow the 50-word summaries of each round which were allowed to be broadcast on the radio after each round ended. We sat in the kitchen together that night, as I'm sure millions of others all over America did, our ears glued to the radio.
I doubt that a boxing match had attracted this much attention since Billy Conn fought Joe Louis in 1941.
My father and I rooted passionately for "Smokin' Joe." It was 1971, Muhammad Ali was an America-hating traitor, (and probably hated white people as well; after all, he was a Black Muslim, a follower of Elijah Muhammad, the successor of the assassinated Malcolm X, and we had all heard the anti-white rhetoric of Malcolm X), and we wanted Frazier to pound him into dust.
Personally, as I had told Mr. Chapman that morning, I did not think it was going to happen. In fact I didn't think Frazier had a prayer. During the 1960's, on ABC's Wide World of Sports and elsewhere, I had watched Ali destroy one opponent after another.
Ali seemed invincible.
Of course I was just a kid then, and didn't know that Ali, for TV's benefit, had been fighting a series of opponents during the mid-1960s who really didn't deserve to be in the same ring with him.
To cement his reputation as "The Greatest," having won the Olympic gold medal and then beaten such real champs as Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson earlier in the decade, Ali "defended" his title against a list of nobodies which included George Chuvalo, Brian London, Karl Mildenburger, and a fellow named Cleveland "Big Cat" Williams, who, a few months before climbing into the ring with Ali, had been shot by a Texas policeman. Williams was missing one kidney plus ten feet of his small intestine, and had nerve damage in one leg to boot. Ali beat Williams in three rounds. No big surprise there.
In view of "matchups" such as these, by the time Ali was stripped of his title in 1967, more than one sportswriter was accusing him and his manager, Angelo Dundee, of running a "Bum-of-The-Month" club.
But as a child I was taken in by all the hype. The media wanted us to think Ali was unbeatable, and I believed them.
Goliath. And worse yet, a Goliath who openly hated America, had a big, loud mouth (and probably hated white people.)
We needed a patriotic David to take him down. But I didn't think such a figure existed.
I had no faith that Frazier, or anyone else, could do the job. I'd seen Ali plow under too many opponents, not realizing that so many of them were handpicked straw men. Jerry Quarry was a fighter of some reputation (good grief, he even made an appearance on I Dream of Jeannie!) but he wasn't in Ali's league.
Surprise: Frazier not only beat Ali that night, but knocked him flat on his ass in the 15th round.
And if Frazier didn't quite break Ali's jaw, (that honor would go to my fellow San Diegan Ken Norton two years later, when Norton defeated Ali for the North American Boxing Federation title), Frazier did give Ali a swollen jaw, which I saw a few nights later on The Dick Cavett Show.
Oh-kay, for you GenX'ers, GenY'ers and GenZero'ers who don't remember The Dick Cavett Show or Dick Cavett, his was a late-night talk show on ABC television in those days.
Cavett often had controversial and/or political figures on his show as guests. The '70s media called him "The Thinking Man's Johnny Carson."
Of course, that last sentence would require that I explain to you under-35's who Johnny Carson was.
Heck with it. Google him.
Anyway, March 8, 1971 was a "moment" which would not be repeated. Ali eventually won the title back from Frazier, and defended it successfully a number of times as the nineteen-seventies went on.
Not to take anything from Ali; maybe we can blame his manager, but again, it was "Bum-of-the-Month Club" time for while.
In 1975, for example, Ali fought Chuck Wepner, a Bayonne, Wisconsin liquor store owner who may have been as tough as nails, (he was) but as a fighter he was a journeyman rather than the master Ali was. Wepner was known as "The Bayonne Bleeder" for the ease with which a rival fighter could cut him. Ali-Wepner was a joke.
I actually watched this fight on TV. The late Howard Cosell, a sportscaster who had a somewhat-prickly relationship with Ali, (and also with the rest of the nation) commented that this bout between Wepner and Ali would at best give Wepner a good story he could tell in his Bayonne liquor store years later.
That's all Cosell would give Wepner. But Wepner did earn it. He had no business fighting Muhammad Ali. But he probably did plenty of liquor store business later, based on the fact that he had fought Muhammad Ali, boxing's equivalent of "I once pitched batting practice to Albert Pujols."
Ali, aging by now, lost his title to Leon Spinks in 1978. He won it back from Spinks, as he had won it back from everyone else who ever took it away from him. But after losing a 10-round decision to Trevor Berbick in 1981, Ali retired from the ring.
(I was a 26 year-old reporter in Vacaville, CA when Ali fought Berbick, and although not a member of the sports staff, I wrote a feature story about Ali's career for my newspaper.)
Jumping back to 10 years earlier, I also remember watching Ali's 1971 interview with Dick Cavett, a few nights after his loss to Frazier.
I was impressed that Ali was man enough to admit that Frazier had bested him. Speaking through that swollen jaw, Ali told Cavett, "All that talk you've heard about his left hook? That ain't just talk. When you see me on my backside, you know that punch had something behind it."
Good sport, Ali, despite his earlier reputation as a screechy, self-promoting loudmouth.
 |
March 8, 1971: Round 15. After knocking
Muhammad Ali on his ass, Joe Frazier walks
back to his corner.
|
The end of the Vietnam War cooled a lot of passions, and by the time Ali's career entered its twilight half-a-dozen years later, many people who had cheered for Frazier to pound the daylights out of him for refusing to serve in the Army had changed their tunes.
One of them was my own father. By 1972, angry (along with a lot of other people) at Richard Nixon, and getting fed up with the way the Vietnam thing just seemed to keep going on and on and on in the nightly news, with no end in sight, my father remarked, "You know, goddammit, I'm starting to understand how the young people in this country feel! This Vietnam bullshit has gone on long enough!"
It should therefore come as no surprise that when Ali fought Earnie Shavers on the night of September 29, 1977, and the pre-fight warm-up included a short clip of Ali, relaxed in his jogging suit, saying softly that he was through with fame and glory and now just wanted to "help people," Dad remarked, "He's a great guy!"
He was a great guy, Ali. And is. I don't know how much of this was PR-driven, but I do recall that when 52 Americans were being held hostage by murderous fanatics at the American Embassy in Tehran in 1980, Ali spoke up. (One of those murderous fanatics, by the way, is now the president of Iran, but that's a discussion for another day.) Ali offered to exchange himself for the 52. "I'm a Muslim," he told the press, "I don't think they'd hurt me."
If true, it's a great story and a tribute to a man with a big heart.
Unfortunately, it seems that Frazier spent his post-ring years shadow-boxing. He maintained over and over that he despised Ali and wanted to fight him one more time. It almost became his trademark.
And then, more disappointment: Frazier's own son did show some promise as a fighter, but not much. As a colleague of mine who was knowledgeable about boxing said, "He's not Dad." Well, who was?
The terribly sad thing was, what could Frazier do in the shadow of a man with such an aura as Ali had?
Not much. I feel sorry not just for Frazier, but for all fighters who had to fight in Muhammad Ali's charismatic "aura."
In fact I don't think I feel sorrier for anyone than poor old Larry Holmes, who had the misfortune to inherit the heavyweight title after Ali had retired. Kind of like being Louis XV: who was going to notice the king of France who followed Le roi soleil, Louis XIV? Holmes was a great fighter, but after the flamboyant Muhammad Ali, who was going to remember him?
Me. And I will also remember Joe Frazier.
Re Dominoes. I'm very much interested in the post-war period myself. I've just finished listening to two books about an NKVD officer (my namesake actually) in the '50s in Russia: Tom Rob Smith - Leo Demidov 1 (Child 44)
ReplyDeleteTom Rob Smith - Leo Demidov 2 (The Secret Speech). And now I'm going to listen to Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate - this time in Russian (no audio book available in English). Keep up the good work, Kelley.