SIDELINE CUT:GIVEN A chance to be magically transported to any of the storied boxing nights starring Muhammad Ali, many in his legion of fans around the world would instantly rush to the steaming heat of Kinshasa or place themselves in that bizarre and fascinating week in Manila when he fought past breaking point with Joe Frazier. The mythology surrounding that fight is such that it has, in the decades since, begun to overshadow their first meeting, the so called Fight of the Century in Madison Square Garden in 1971.
“So now the ambiguity of his presence filled the Garden before the fight was fairly begun,” wrote Norman Mailer, who was among the famous faces in the crowd. The glamour of the occasion and the aura of the fighters brought out pearls and politicians in equal measure. For instance, Bernadette Devlin was in the crowd, shouting animatedly for Ali, while among the men carrying the flashbulb cameras was Frank Sinatra – Ol’ Blue Eyes spent the evening moonlighting as a photographer for Life magazine.
The night was more fabulous in drama than most Hollywood plots could ever hope to rival and the fight matched the hype for 15 rounds of bravery and fury. The contest definitively swung Frazier’s way only in the 15th round, when as Mailer described it, he threw “a heaven of a shot which dumped Muhammad Ali into 50,000 newspaper photographs” and afterwards sent him to the bright reality of a hospital waiting room to have his jaw examined for a possible fracture. By then, the world was gossiping about the when and where of a rematch.
The death of Joe Frazier earlier this week saw the spotlight once again directed on those peerless, savage fights in which he engaged Ali and on the lingering bitterness caused by the fact that both were black American champions trying to understand where they fitted into a society where race ever was and will be a scorching issue.
In an appraisal of Frazier’s life work that appeared in the New York Times this week, the eminent Dave Anderson offered the opinion that Frazier was not only a better fighter than Ali, he was a better man. Ali’s cruel and ungracious treatment of Frazier during their rivalry – his taunting and his accusation that Frazier was a white man’s puppet — will always be held up as an example of the darker side of his nature, the flip-side to the handsome, quick-tongued entertainer.
His words travelled with more viciousness and hurt than any of the shots he threw at Frazier when they were locked into their epic exchanges in the ring. And even though he has apologised and admitted he was wrong many times since, it seems that Ali will never be fully forgiven for what was a calculatedly hateful slur on Frazier’s integrity.
It was beyond cruel because if anything, Ali ought to have been thankful to Frazier, who lobbied to have Ali’s boxing licence returned to him after the years he spent as an outcast because of his stance on the Vietnam war. For all of Ali’s public proclamations about the race struggle, it was Frazier, as Anderson points out, who achieved the significant honour of being the first black person to address the State Legislature in his home state of South Carolina since the Civil War.
Frazier understood as well as anyone the nuances and difficulties of making one’s way as a black person in 1970s America and he relied upon the proven American recipe – unflinching hard work and determination – to make it. His unorthodox blue collar training techniques – punching the slabs of meat in the Philadelphia factory in which he worked in his early days and running up the steps of the Museum of Art – later became two of the most instantly recognisable images in Hollywood when Sly Stallone incorporated them into his 1976 blockbuster Rocky.
Frazier recognised the unfairness and inequality all around him and used his boxing skill and limitless courage to rise above it and earn the multi-million dollar purses that ought to have set him up for life. He understood how the world worked and made his way through it with dignity and honesty. Ali, meanwhile, wore his confusions and conflicted attitudes on his sleeve. When he railed against Frazier, he might well have been exorcising the pent-up frustrations he experienced in the years when he was banished from boxing.
In taunting Frazier, he might as well have been taunting himself for the fact that he too played the game and put on the pantomime for the enjoyment of the white television stars who egged him on and the white faces who bought up the all the expensive seats.
The film footage of the fight in Manila holds everything of the majesty and brutality of boxing. Man’s courage and brutality vying for the stage and the ropes separating two worlds: the voyeurs sitting watching on (and those agape enthralled the world not just then but ever since) and the world into which Frazier and Ali threw themselves. The fight provoked several classic written accounts but even the most immediate and vivid descriptions are just vague guesswork into the state of mind that both men shared through the most gruelling and tortuous minutes of that fight.
The snatches of conversation that drifted out of the ring and onto the notebooks of the pressmen – “Old Joe Frazier, I thought you were washed up” – seem too perfectly Mark Twain to be true; and the concluding drama – Frazier, all but blinded by welts around his eyes but desperate to go back in for the 15th round only to be prevented from doing so by his trainer Eddie Futch while Ali, sitting on the other stool completely spent – has entered the lore: that 15th round, never to be fought, holds the most magical of questions: what would have happened?
And although the contest went Ali’s way, Futch was correct when he told Frazier, “No one will ever forget what you did here today.” The world, of course, moves on fast and the drama of that fight has been repackaged and retold in books and in documentaries. Both men shook off the physical cost of the fight in the weeks afterwards – although the illness which would rob Ali of his wit and swiftness was only a few years down the line – but Frazier, understandably, could never quite let go of the emotional hurt caused by his protagonist.
Maybe Ali was telling the truth when he said afterwards that calling Frazier ugly, likening him to a gorilla, calling him an Uncle Tom was all just part of the game – that he was just trying to promote the fight.
It is too late now of course but it is a shame that the two men who starred in one of the classic episodes of sport could not sit down together in recent years to celebrate themselves.
Best return to the last passage of Mark Kram’s timeless account of that night, written for Sports Illustrated in 1975. The morning after the fight, Ali is sitting in his hotel suite reflecting on his latest fight and on his adversary, Smokin’ Joe, in that warmed honeyed drawl of his.
“You get so tired. It takes so much out of you mentally. It makes you go a little insane. I was thinkin’ that at the end. Why am I doin’ this? What am I doin’ here against this beast of a man? It’s so painful, I must be crazy. I always bring out the best in the men I fight, but Joe Frazier, I’ll tell the world right now, brings out the best in me. I’m gonna tell ya, that’s one hell of a man and God bless him.”
