Virgil

I am not a big boxing fan, but I do remember the great Frazier, Ali, Foreman fights of the early and mid seventies. Well, to be clear, I remember of them. I don’t think any were televised for free. But it was impossible at the time in the US if you remotely followed sports to not be caught up in them. First of all, they were great fighters, and I don’t know if boxing has ever had three great heavyweights in their prime at the same time other than then. Second, in retrospect the Ali salesmanship of the bouts really galvanized the public. Third, the cultural divide that had occurred in the sixties mixed into the rivalries; Ali had evaded the Vietnam War draft and became a cultural emblem. Fourth, and probably most importantly, their personalities were so distinct that one either gravitated to the one you admired or were repelled by the others you didn’t.

Contrary to what you may have seen of George Foreman in the last thirty years, that being the gregarious and charming extravert, in the seventies is was just the opposite. He was introverted, mean and angry by his own admission, big and sculpted like a body builder, and had possibly one of the hardest punches ever. He fought stiff and robotic, but fighters couldn’t survive his punches. He had what might be seen today as a “thug” personality. He had some religious experience which changed his whole personality in I think the early eighties, which is how we remember him today.

Ali, you probably know. He was possibly the most elegant heavyweight ever, quick with the hands and feet, and an incredibly shrewd tactician. He didn’t have the punch of the other two, but he just out maneuvered you, out thought you, and out lasted you. But it was his personality that was so distinct. He was the extrovert of extroverts, flamboyant like a peacock, loud as a lunatic, flashy as an Italian sports car, and verbally assaulting to his opponents with a cutting wit and near malicious vigor. If he were a musical direction, it would be fortissimo.

I loved Joe Frazier. He was as different from Ali as possible. He was tough, quiet though I wouldn’t say introverted, proud, courageous, but most important, at least to me, he was dignified. He was like a Roman warrior, a centurion promoted from the ranks. He was not a big man for a heavyweight fighter. When you look at the video clips below, notice how much smaller he was than his opponents. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the smallest fighter in the ring in all his bouts. He had a brutal left hook. He pushed himself into his opponents chest, which means he had to sometimes take a punch to get there, pushed with a rhythm that got him the moniker “Smoking Joe,” but once there he would pummel the body, first knocking the wind out of you and then wearing you down, and finally as you lowered your arms to protect the mid section, he would sneak that great left hook to the head. Joe Frazier just fought and it wasn’t flashy and he did it with honor.

Well, a few days ago Joe Frazier passed away. He died from liver cancer at the age of 67. Too young. Heck, that’s only seventeen years older than me. I enjoyed reading several obituaries, so here are portions from a few.

First the bare facts from the NY Times Obit: (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/sp...ies-at-67.html)

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 Monday night at his home in Philadelphia. He was 67.

His business representative, Leslie Wolff, said the cause was liver cancer. An announcement over the weekend that Frazier had received the diagnosis in late September and had been moved to hospice care early this month prompted an outpouring of tributes and messages of support.

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. Frazier 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.

From The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/nov/08/joe-frazier)

A crowd-pleasing heavyweight, Frazier's relentless attacking approach included one of the most savage left hooks in boxing. Despite invariably conceding height to his opponents, the 5ft 11.5in Frazier, who had a crouching and weaving style similar to the one which made Mike Tyson such a daunting proposition several years later, used his stocky physique to unload frightening hooks to head and body. "I like to hit guys and see their knees tremble," he said. "I like to feel my strength and go for broke." It was this uncompromising attitude that earned him the nickname "Smokin' Joe".

Frazier's feared left hook floored Ali in the final round of their first encounter and helped him clinch victory in what became known as the "Fight of the Century" at Madison Square Garden, New York, on 8 March 1971. "I was as mad as a junkyard dog at Ali," Frazier remembered. "A lot of people went to the fight that night to see [Ali's] head knocked off – and I did my best to oblige them."

The fast-talking Ali invariably delighted in using the more taciturn Frazier as his stooge. His relentless verbal putdowns of the man who became his greatest rival contained a cruel edge, and the effect of Ali's teasing lingered in Frazier's memory long after both men had hung up their gloves. Frazier never forgave his rival for branding him "an Uncle Tom". Ali also appeared to delight in calling him "ignorant" – a label Frazier hated more than any other.

This festering resentment came to a head on 23 January 1974, when the two men ended up wrestling on the floor of an ABC studio in New York, five days before their second fight at Madison Square Garden. Although Frazier had reluctantly accepted an invitation from the broadcaster Howard Cosell to watch a tape of the first Ali-Frazier fight, the interview proceeded without incident until Frazier mentioned that Ali had to attend hospital after their fight. Seemingly annoyed, Ali replied: "Everybody knows I went to hospital for 10 minutes. You were in the hospital for three weeks. You're ignorant, Joe."

From Time Magazine through Yahoo News (http://news.yahoo.com/joe-frazier-fo...1000965.html):

In typically understated fashion, Ali labeled the fight "the biggest sporting event in the history of the whole planet earth." It was the first time two undefeated heavyweight champs had met for the title. Ed Sullivan, Alan Shepard, Bill Cosby, Michael Caine, Hubert Humphrey and Burt Bacharach were among the luminaries at ringside. Frank Sinatra took pictures for LIFE magazine. The fight lived up to the billing. Frazier, the body puncher, came out swinging for Ali's head. Ali, the ring dancer, tried matching Frazier hook-for-hook. Ali turned up the showmanship: he invited Frazier to swing at his gut, and when Frazier connected, he'd shake his head, as if a little kid were punching him. "Nooo contest," Ali crowed at one point.

In the 11th round, however, Frazier pummeled Ali with two left hooks. Ali staggered and barely survived the round. In the 15th and final stanza, Frazier landed one more roundhouse left, sending Ali to the canvas. He got back up, but by that point it was finished: Frazier won the fight on a unanimous decision.

It was the only time he beat Ali. Frazier lost his championship belt to George Foreman, who knocked Frazier down six times before the ref stopped their 1973 title fight in the second round ("Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!" Howard Cosell memorably cried.) The next year, Ali got his rematch with Frazier, and won it in a decision to set up their rubber match, in Manila, on Oct. 1, 1975. The "Thrilla in Manila," took place in 100°F heat before an estimated 700 million closed-circuit and television viewers in some 65 countries. It became the duo's most famous brawl. Frazier refused to wear down, but by the 14th round, Ali was pounding him at will. Frazier's eyes were almost swollen shut. Frazier's trainer, Eddie Futch, threw in the towel at the end of the round. "I want him, boss," Frazier screamed. Futch refused. "It's all over," Futch replied. "No one will forget what you did here today." He was right. Afterward, Ali said he had never felt closer to death. He described Frazier as "the greatest fighter of all time, next to me."

And possibly the best written obit I came across, from James Rosen in National Review Online (http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...ro-james-rosen). Rosen captures the political undercurrents of those early seventies. As a preteen back then I never really picked up those undercurrents, and even now I can’t help but feel they were exaggerated.

‘Don’t you know I’m God?” taunted Muhammad Ali, in the first of the epic trilogy of heavyweight prizefights with Joe Frazier that defined the early 1970s. Ali even took to accompanying each word — Don’t — you — know — I’m — God? — with a swing of his fists, unleashing another flurry of his lightning-fast punches. Frazier, undaunted, singularly unaffected by Ali’s sophomoric doggerel and sophisticated psy-ops, kept boring in on his opponent, a steady, bobbing, weaving machine, and spat back through his bloodied mouthpiece: “Well, God, you gonna get whupped tonight!”

And very near the end of that first encounter between them, on March 8, 1971 — the Madison Square Garden spectacular between two undefeated heavyweight champions, billed, without hyperbole, as the Fight of the Century — Frazier made good on his promise.

It was 26 seconds into the 15th round. With his signature roundhouse left hook — the 30th he’d landed, the final explosion in a breathtaking night of fireworks — Frazier connected with Ali’s right jaw, snapping his head back and dropping The Greatest to the canvas. Bedlam at the Garden! Ali was up quickly, but with that one punch, “Smokin’ Joe” entered the ranks of the immortal, one of only three professional fighters ever to put Ali down. The pride of Philadelphia had answered definitively, at least for one night, the questions that haunted boxing, and America at large, at the close of the fiery Sixties.

Who would triumph: the beautiful dancer and satirical poet, or the grunting, uneducated working man? Was history on the side of anti-establishment rebels and countercultural heroes, or unalloyed toughness and Richard Nixon’s silent majority? At last, America had an answer: The uglier man, the less captivating figure, the African American who was darker and came from more impoverished southern origins, but whom Ali derided, inexplicably and unforgivably, as the Uncle Tom between them, the traitor to his people; yes, for one night, this man, Joe Frazier, would prevail. “What a man!” marveled screen legend Burt Lancaster, of Frazier, in his ringside color commentary.

And Rosen concludes his piece with a wonderful flourish:

A final cruelty: The Ali–Frazier–Foreman axis served, with unusual clarity, to disprove the applicability of the transitive property to sports. If A is greater than B, we all learned, and B is greater than C, then A must also, by definition, be greater than C. Not in boxing. Frazier floored Ali, and Foreman annihilated Frazier, so in transitive terms, Foreman should have absolutely decimated The Greatest. But in the Rumble in the Jungle, the Foreman–Ali fight held in Kinshasa, Zaire, on Oct. 30, 1974, and memorialized in the documentary When We Were Kings, Ali easily KO’d Foreman in eight rounds. In an instant, Ali became not only the first boxer to regain the heavyweight championship, but the undisputed conqueror of the transitive property.

That wasn’t really the final cruelty, of course; there followed the long anticlimax of Frazier’s post-championship life and career, and the irrevocable sentence he was doomed to serve out, as a character in the inescapable Book of Ali. But wherever Joe is smokin’ today, whatever ring now trembles at his plodding, bobbing, weaving, left-hooking genius, let us honor his humanity with the fervent wish that the place is packed to the rafters with appreciative fans, all there to see Joe Frazier, good and decent man, heroic fighter and heavyweight champion, and no one else.

Of course this wouldn’t be much of a memorial to Frazier without a few clips from his fights.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z-3Teq9jT0

And his greatest moment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt-vjZTVLV0

And finally let me end with quotes (http://sports.yahoo.com/box/news?slu...azier-quotebox) from the two surviving fighters of that triumvirate.

“The world has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration. My sympathy goes out to his family and loved ones.”— Muhammad Ali

“Good night Joe Frazier. I love you dear friend.”—former heavyweight champion George Foreman