America at Large: Finale failed to dim the memory of Frazier’s greatness

Joe Frazier sat in his hotel room, surrounded by brown paper bags of freshly-delivered pizza and cartons of orange juice. A once star-studded entourage had shrunk to just him and his immediate family. His face freshly nicked and puffed up where he'd shipped too many punches, one eye still leaking blood, enough physical evidence to betray a tough night at the office.

When reporters arrived, he claimed to be celebrating the first draw of his career and talked defiantly of plans to wrest control of the heavyweight division from Larry Holmes. Nobody does delusion quite like a boxer pretending not to have heard the final bell.

“I feel sorry for people who think they’re growing old,” said Frazier. “I’ve got a mother who’s 72 and she’s stronger than me and you. I don’t know nothin’ about growing old. You’ve got to have positive thinking. You can’t get old and die at 38.”

On December 3rd, 1981, six years after Eddie Futch famously stopped the Thrilla in Manila by whispering in his ear, "No one will ever forget what you did here today", Frazier went 10 mediocre rounds with Floyd "Jumbo" Cummings. More than five years since George Foreman battered Frazier into retirement at Nassau Coliseum, he'd returned to the ring again, so far off-Broadway as to be almost forgotten.

Washboard stomach

In a half-empty amphitheatre hard by the stockyards on the southside of Chicago, with a tell-tale paunch where his washboard stomach used to be, Frazier endured the all too familiar ending to every boxing tale, the usual poignant finale, long on guts, short on glamour and glory.

"We don't want a requiem for a heavyweight played on NBC," said Ferdie Pacheco, Muhammad Ali's former doctor turned television commentator, explaining why his network, like all others, refused to show the fight.

This wasn’t a contest anybody needed or wanted, except one stubborn old bruiser from Philadelphia who, 16 years on from his professional debut, reckoned his infamous left hook was immune to the ravages of ageing.

His purse was $80,000, a substantial sum even if it was less than his training expenses used to be for the marquee fights of his heyday, those epics that made him forever part of fistic folklore. At that point in his life, Frazier’s pension was reportedly paying him $70,000 a year but he had extensive interests in businesses that weren’t exactly flourishing.

“I always need money,” said Frazier. “I love to spend money. I love to party. I have the ability, the energy, the know-how. Why take all that energy and know-how and party with it? Why waste it?”

Cummings had turned pro at 29 after serving 12 years for murder in Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, a menacing biographical detail that always helped the box office. With the muscle-bound upper body of a man who’d pumped a lot of iron in the prison yard, he lacked the skills of a genuine contender and, at least in this contest, tired way too easily. Twice in the eighth, however, he pinned Frazier to the ropes and pounded him with flurries of unanswered punches.

Had it been anybody else other than Frazier’s 21-year-old son Marvis working his corner, a towel might have been thrown in and the suffering ended. But Futch had refused to get involved in this particular charade because he knew too well how the story would end.

“They see these young fighters and they see their deficiencies and they think they can whip them,” said Futch. “But what they don’t see is that their own reflexes ain’t what they used to be. It’s like a pair of socks. When the elastic goes, it’s gone. Throw the socks away. You can’t fix the elastic. The reflexes are the elastic in your body. If it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Frazier stayed upright for two more rounds, the last vestiges of his stubborn self. Cummings had done more than enough to win but two myopic judges declared it a draw. What the press recognised as a sympathy vote, an attempt to spare an icon further embarrassment, Frazier interpreted as a sort of supernatural vindication.

“I’m one of God’s men,” he said afterwards. “Separate me from the rest of them. Things that happen to me don’t happen to every man.”

For all that talk, Frazier never fought again, and eight nights later, for a million dollars more, Ali was reminded of his own mortality by Trevor Berbick in a makeshift ring in a Bahamian baseball field. The ignominious endings to their illustrious careers would be largely forgotten, their greatness only amplified by staying retired, something hammered home again on this, the 40th anniversary of the Thrilla.

Still, the fact Philadelphia finally unveiled a statue of Frazier just last month, decades after erecting a monument to Rocky Balboa, suggests he never quite received the adulation he deserved before his death in 2011.

In a curious postscript, Cummings later sued ESPN Classic for $50 million for showing the fight as part of a Frazier retrospective. He alleged the channel was “maliciously intending to injure and aggrieve me and to bring me into public notoriety . . .” A judge dismissed the action.

At that time, Cummings was an inmate of the Menard Correctional Center in Illinois where he was six years into a life sentence for armed robbery.