Joe Frazier

Joe Frazier is being buried today. If I had my way it would be a state funeral.

In my youth I drove to another state to watch him fight Ali the first time. It was Everyman assailing the tower. It was as close to Shakespeare as anything I had ever seen in sports. It was brutal, it was painful but everyone who was there, regardless of his sympathy or his bet, walked out of the fight a better person. Frazier was shorter, lighter and much less athletic than Ali. He went into the fight a buffoon. Ali ridiculed him, taunted him, denigrated him to the glee of the media who loved Ali because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, his good looks, his entertaining glibness and his Muslim thinking. They thought this new Black Muslim notion was interesting and they felt Ali was a better guy. Ali, Kennedy aside, was the first man I can recall whose celebrity eclipsed his achievement--and he was one of the best fighters ever. Ever. But he was cruel.

With the help of his Muslim advisers, Ali polarized the fight by making it racial. It seems hard to believe now but Ali actually made it a fight between him, a Black Muslim, and Frazier, whom he successfully classified as white. The logic was a bit loose but Ali said Frazier was of a slave mentality, worked like a white man and believed in the America as seen by white men. (Ali actually once spoke at a KKK meeting against miscegenation.) The fight was a battle of human will, expert and savage on both sides. And Frazier heroically won. Ali's camp thought they had won and not without reason. It was close but Frazier won, a remarkable victory of the human spirit. He was hospitalized after the fight for three weeks.

They fought again twice, once an embarrassing clutch and jab fest that Ali "won" and the third, in Manila. Ali kept up his cruelty, introducing a gorilla puppet he called "Joe" and carrying it, or a facsimile, everywhere as he promoted the fight. Frazier, neither facile nor particularly bright, never could respond well and actually attacked Ali in frustration during a television interview. The fight was filled with the usual Ali drama although there was one strange event late at night when Ali showed up with a gun to threaten Frazier at his hotel. The fight was a war, fifteen rounds of toe-to-toe attack and defense. Into the fifteenth, Ali had come back in the thirteenth and fourteenth and the fight was a draw on most cards. The fifteenth would decide it. In the corner Ali told his manager to cut his gloves off, that he wanted to quit. In Frazier's corner the trainer realized that Frazier was blind in one eye (something he had hidden for years) and his good eye was closed. He rightfully threw in the towel against Frazier's wishes. At Frazier's withdrawal, Ali collapsed in his corner and had to be revived. Most think that had Frazier just answered the bell, Ali would have quit.

Strangely, Frazier provided Ali with his finest moments as a fighter and it defined his career. He was a brave and skilled fighter and only Frazier allowed him to show that. (His performance against Ken Norton where he fought for 10 rounds with a broken jaw and won a split decision was another such moment.)

But despite his skill and heroics, he was never the better man.