Joe Frazier Overshadowed Yet Again – Boxing News
By Chris “Man of Few Words” Benedict
The criminally overdue dedication of a 12-foot tall bronze statue in the likeness of Smokin’ Joe Frazier occurred this past Saturday at the X-Finity Live Sports Complex in Philadelphia, former site of the storied Spectrum. By and large, the boxing world was too preoccupied discussing Floyd Mayweather’s IV controversy and every excruciatingly minute detail leading up to his ho-hum, maybe/maybe not last fight against Andre Berto that night to take much notice or really care.
This posthumous indignity is, unfortunately, part and parcel of Frazier’s legacy, standard operating procedure for the heavyweight champion who always seemed to be hiding right in plain sight. Obscured by the not inconsiderable shadows cast off from Muhammad Ali and Rocky Balboa. Always something of an enigma. Commanding respect. Rarely receiving it.
“How does it feel to be heavyweight champion?” one reporter asked Frazier as he held an ice pack to his face at the post-Fight of the Century press conference. As inane as this question already sounds, it is exponentially absurd when you take into consideration the fact that Frazier had been the undisputed champion for more than a year, beating Buster Mathis for the vacant (and newly invented) NYSAC title in 1968 before unifying it with Jimmy Ellis’ WBA and vacant WBC belts with a 5th round TKO over Ellis in February 1970. But it was because he had just handed Muhammad Ali his first professional defeat that he could now be considered the allowable if not acceptable heavyweight champion of the world. Joe Frazier may have shut Ali up (temporarily anyway) and sent him to the hospital (Frazier would soon after require a three-week stay himself, during which rumors circulated that he had died) in March 1971, but his fight for respect was one he would wage until the bitter end, which would come from liver cancer in November 2011.
Ali, born into a relatively well-to-do and close-knit family in Louisville, Kentucky and who never turned in an honest day’s blue-collar work in his youth, had told reporters before their first match at the Garden that he was going to dish out to Frazier a “ghetto whuppin”.
“What he know about ghettos?” responded Frazier, the 12th child of sharecroppers and bootleggers in Beaufort, South Carolina who helped his father work their 10-acre cotton farm at the age of eight. Their personal past histories mattered not at all to Ali, who instead drew the distinction between the two utilizing the illustrative contrast pitting his own high profile membership in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam against Cloverlay Incorporated, the conglomeration of predominately white Philadelphia businessmen who were Smokin’ Joe’s financial backers, essentially the money men funding the Frazier war machine.
Frazier was far less bothered by cryptic threats through the mail to his home and over the phone at the hotel he attempted to find sleep in the night before the fight, both of which simply consisted of the words “lose or else”, than by Ali’s racial put-downs. “He’s got three kids, I got five. They don’t need no more problems”, said Smokin’ Joe. ”I ain’t no white hope”, Frazier continued, pathetic as these words sound issuing from the mouth of a black man made to define and defend his own racial identity. “I’m only a hope for them.”
Worse still was that the slings and arrows Ali hurled Frazier’s way penetrated twice as deep, compounded by the betrayal of being stabbed in the back by the hand he had once put money into, when Muhammad had been stripped of both his heavyweight title and boxing license after refusing service in Vietnam, filing as a conscientious objector before the draft board on religious grounds. A motor mouth with a messiah complex, Ali would proselytize before any congregation large or small who would sit still long enough to listen, and there were millions who unquestionably did exactly that, about how Frazier was even worse than the “white devils”. Boxing Illustrated magazine legitimized Muhammad’s cause by running a cover story written by future Today Show host Bryant Gumbel as a lead-in to The Fight entitled “Is Joe Frazier a White Champion in Black Skin?”
Frazier was an intensely proud man and loyal besides, generous to a fault, but if there was one thing he hated above and beyond all else, it was phonies.
And who else but a phony would accept your money when they were on the skids only to repay it with contemptuous slander? When Frazier took his appeals to have Ali’s boxing license re-instated all the way to the president of the United States, his encounter with power-hungry, war-happy, not-a-crook Richard Nixon was used against him by the beneficiary of his charitable actions, Ali painting Frazier in broad and sloppy brushstrokes as a functionary of white conservative America, thus representative of its nefarious social and political policies.
Their rubber match for the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world would be a ‘Thrilla in Manila’. Ali’s arrival was a festival of gratuitous adulation while the landing of Frazier’s middle of the night flight was witnessed by a mere handful of lucky souls who just happened to be hanging around. The verbal jabs began flying (and landing with the hoped-for precision) in no time at all, Ali mocking Frazier by flattening his nose with his fingers at press conferences to simulate Smokin’ Joe’s distinctly broad facial feature and speaking in gibberish in a supposed approximation of the “Uncle Tom” who Ali continually called ugly, uneducated, and flat-footed, couldn’t dance or rhyme, wasn’t pretty like the champ.
Normally articulating his inner thoughts very selectively and almost always privately, Frazier joked that Ali was fond of going around saying that he floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee but, from his experience, thought that it was closer to the truth that Ali punched like a butterfly. Frazier’s face would later illustrate a very different version of the story.
Events took a drastic turn for the worse when Ali incorporated gag props into his comedy routine. Brandishing a six-inch plastic ape, Ali would childishly slap it about the way he planned to do to Frazier, augmenting his pre-fight patter about the contest devolving into a “chilla and a killa and a thrilla when I get the gorilla in Manila.” During a public workout and sparring session, someone from Ali’s camp tossed a huge stuffed gorilla into the ring while Muhammad’s back was turned. Upon taking notice of the interloper, Ali feigned shock and amusement at how Joe Frazier had managed to sneak into his training facility and proceeded to hammer away at the doll propped up on the corner turnbuckles with lightning-quick combinations of lefts and rights. Comparisons, both physical and intellectual, to the simian forebears we all share regardless of skin complexion or intelligence quotient, are about as low as you can go when belittling a person of color.
A devout Baptist, Joe believed, in a turnabout of Biblical fair play, that Ali’s Parkinsonian affliction was retribution visited upon him for the sins of his past, an admittedly harsh penance. When asked what he thought about Ali lighting the torch during the opening ceremonies at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympic games, Frazier responded by saying he wished he was there to push him in, adding at the end of his 1996 memoir “Smokin’ Joe” that, “I’ll open up the graveyard and bury his ass when the Good Lord chooses to take him.” Frazier never got the opportunity to shovel dirt on his adversary’s coffin. In an ironic postscript, Ali served as a (symbolic) pall-bearer at Joe’s funeral.
It could only have thrown salt into already open wounds for Frazier to have to watch from his residence in the small apartment above his gym on Broad Street in South Philly which was in danger of foreclosure as his own hometown erected a monument to a non-existent white heavyweight champion, a fictional creation. Particularly when his training methods (including hammering away at sides of beef in the freezer of the meat-packing plant in which he subsidized his meager winnings as an Olympic, amateur, and early professional boxer, as well as finishing off his roadwork with a sprint up the steps in Fairmount Park) were written without the benefit of even vocal attribution into “Rocky”, making Balboa an amalgamation of Frazier, Rocky Marciano, and Chuck Wepner.
Willie “The Worm” Monroe was being trained and groomed for a middleweight title shot by Joe Frazier. Those plans were spoiled by Marvin Hagler who Monroe beat in their first fight in 1976 only to suffer a pair of knockouts in the two return bouts the following year. Hagler was taken aside and warned by Frazier in all earnestness that Marvin had three things going against him in the fight game.
“You’re left-handed. You’re good. And you’re black.”
Smokin’ Joe’s cautionary words rose from the ash-heap of hurtful experience.
Nonetheless, several hundred faithful Joe Frazier fans did turn out for the unveiling Saturday afternoon, one of which was Michael Spinks. Sylvester Stallone, whose own statue sits beneath the steps of the Art Museum which Rocky famously runs to the top of while training for Apollo Creed, did not see fit to put in an appearance. Joe’s son Marvis, who Ali had apologized to as a young boy in his Manila dressing room for the slurs made against his father which he swore were made in the spirit of hype and self-promotion, offered some brief remarks during which he proudly said, “It took a little while, but it’s here and the Fraziers say thank you.”
So, while later that same night Floyd Mayweather may have-like it or not-tied the 49 fight undefeated streak of Rocky Marciano, at least Joe Frazier finally-albeit from beyond the grave-got to put Rocky Balboa in his rightful place. The land of make-believe.
[si-contact-form form=’2′]