When the daughters of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier declared war on each other, boxing fans expected it to be, at best, a sideshow—and, at worst, a debacle. The last thing anybody expected was a genuinely thrilling fight. This story ran in Sports Illustrated Women, September 2001.
The subject of boxing is two people—who they are, and the complex chemical reaction that occurs when they collide on a given night.
It is supposed to be a kind of Spartan Zen, fierce but silent except for the periodic bell and the smack of leather on flesh. The purists prefer that a boxer’s identity be revealed and defined only by what happens inside the ring. But the curse of all the arts is that the most magnificent performance won’t pay the rent if nobody’s watching.
This anachronistic, individual sport has no teams or leagues or municipal franchises, just loners and dreamers surrounded by piranha. So boxing sells what it has—personalities, often depicted as comic-book mutants. There are monsters and noble warriors, saints and hoodlums, and good kids who fight to pay for their sisters’ eye operations. The promoters urge glittery costumes and showboat entrances and prefight insults, or a mariachi band or a python over the shoulders or a battle with a giant octopus—whatever it takes to create the stars who lure in the audiences. The solemn ritual of the sport survives on the neon spread of star shine. You tune in to catch Mike Tyson or Oscar De La Hoya, and you discover the interesting kids on the under-card.
Of course the star of stars, the master who showed the way, was Muhammad Ali. It’s hard to remember now, when he is so revered, but a lot of us detested Ali in the 1960’s for the very reason we later admired him: He was a showman outside the ring. In an era when boxing heroes were supposed to be dignified “good sports,” Ali was a silly, loudmouthed smart aleck. He bragged and he taunted his opponents. His noise would have been brief if he hadn’t delivered in the ring. But he did, and eventually we recognized that his noise was as effective as his boxing. Without it he would have been just as fine a boxer, but he wouldn’t have been a global icon. He made use of the natural tension between the art itself and the need to market it, the sport vs. the spectacle. Athletes and their promoters are still trying to imitate him.
You would think—having been tricked, slicked and spun around by Ali—I’d have learned to keep an open mind. But no. When his daughter Laila started boxing and was followed into the ring by Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, the daughter of his greatest rival, Joe Frazier, I joined the snort-and-sneer brigade. We assumed that greedy promoters were just exploiting the daughters for their fathers’ names. We figured the daughters were coming to this complex and difficult sport too late to learn it properly, that they would disgrace themselves in the ring and tarnish the hard work of serious women boxers.
Despite our dire predictions, the daughters haven’t done that. They willingly admit that they are not the best women boxers, but they are the best-known women boxers. They understand precisely how much novelty voltage smart, attractive females wearing their fathers’ names can generate. They are injecting star power where it is sorely needed.
You can be excused if, after reading the press coverage of the Ali-Frazier-Lyde bout in June, you thought it was the first time women had faced each other in the ring. Actually women have been boxing since the ancient Minoans or before, but they have been generally ignored. Legal warfare in the 1970’s finally secured the right of American women to fight professionally. The stars were few and dim, though. A media conflagration surrounded a 16-year-old Seattle girl named Dallas Malloy back in 1993, when she sued and won the right for women to box as amateurs in the U.S. Interest flared again in ‘99 when a woman named Margaret McGregor defeated a male boxer named Loi Chow. But both Malloy and McGregor retired from the ring soon after their public splashes.
The lone female boxer to parley her moment of fame into stardom has been Christy Martin, who fought a woman named Deirdre Gogarty in a ferocious slugfest during a widely-seen 1996 Mike Tyson pay-per-view show. Martin’s blood-smeared victory glare hit the cover of Sports Illustrated that week, and she continues to box professionally. Although many other women are now respected in boxing circles, Martin has been the only one to make an impression on the general public.
Martin also impressed Laila Ali. Laila’s parents divorced when she was eight years old, and her mother, Veronica, raised her. Growing up in an affluent Los Angeles suburb, she was a quiet kid who leaned toward trouble and was busted for shoplifting as a teen. “Everybody else was trying to get out of the ghetto,” she says. “I was trying to get in.” After studying business in college, she opened a nail salon. She was attracted to boxing when she saw Martin fight, and she took up the sport to lose weight.
In October 1999, after a year of gym work but no amateur competition experience, the 5’10", twenty-one year-old Ali made her pro debut at the Turning Stone Casino in upstate New York. Wisely, she insisted that her bout not be televised live. Nonetheless, her father’s name rang media bells, and TV news stations played the story as happy fluff with brief video clips of Laila’s first-round knockout win and shots of her father in the audience. The boxing press, always disdainful of the celebrity aspect of the sport, sniffed that her opponent was a porky waitress with no skills. In interviews Ali herself stressed that she was a beginner and had a lot to learn.
It’s a mark of Muhammad Ali’s spectacular power that, some twenty-five years after his great trio of fights with Joe Frazier, their names are still linked automatically. At home in Philadelphia after Laila Ali made her debut, Frazier-Lyde got a phone call from a local boxing reporter. Frazier-Lyde was 38 years old and, at 5’9” weighed a chunky 210 pounds. She was the mother of three, a busy lawyer and a former boxing columnist for the Philadelphia Sunday Sun. Although she went to college on a basketball scholarship, she thought her athletic life was over. “When I made dinner for my kids, if they didn’t eat their food, I was eating their leftovers,” she laughs. The reporter asked if she’d seen Laila fight. “I said, well, looking at her, I could kick her butt.’ And it was all over the paper.”
Frazier-Lyde saw the response to her flip remark as an unexpected opportunity. She started hitting the gym and publicly demanded a showdown with Ali, promising to “establish Laila financially and then establish her horizontally.”
Ali did her best to ignore Frazier-Lyde, but four months later Jacqui, minus 35 pounds, made news with her own pro debut, stopping her opponent in the first round. She continued to campaign for a match with Ali. Frazier-Lyde had been an alert adolescent when her father lost two out of three in the great fight trilogy and she liked to talk up the legacy of the fathers. Ali resisted the notion. “I wasn’t even born when all that was going on. This is not about our fathers,” she said repeatedly. “This is about you and me.”
Early in 2001 Ali finally agreed to a fight, though it was questionable whether the match would ever take place, much less have an audience. In keeping with boxing’s long tradition of family enterprise, both women are promoted by their husbands, rather than by the established promoters who have connections to make fights happen with ease. No big casinos or television networks would even consider the event. Nobody thought it would make a dime. And why would they? There had never been a big, heavily promoted bout between women.
So the fighters set out to create their own spectacle. Both fought other opponents in a non-televised March 2001 event at the Turning Stone Casino. The casino was wavering about whether to host the big match, but a prank by Frazier-Lyde clinched the deal. At a press conference after the March fights, she presented Ali with a white cake decorated with a big red heart. She gave a short speech, saying the heart was for Ali’s “heart trouble about fighting me.” Then she punched her fist through the cake. The assembled press went wild. The casino recognized a marketable commodity and a dynamic saleswoman. It signed on to host the fight.
From there the hype kicked in hard. With three months until their June 8 bout, the women began an aggressive publicity campaign. Frazier-Lyde was the loud one. She took the excited, talkative, joking role associated with Muhammad Ali. Laila was as steady and calm as Joe Frazier. She was comfortable with silence, but when she spoke she was clear and pointed.
They gave hundreds of interviews. They posed back-to-back on the covers of TV GUIDE and Jet. They hit the nightly news on every major network.
Still, on the Monday before the Friday-night fight, it seemed as if all their efforts might not have been enough. Almost half of the tickets to the 8,000-seat show tent were still unsold. The crucial pay-per-view sales were unknown, and their bout was the same night as the second game of the NBA finals.
During the week before a fight, male boxers with any clout usually refuse to do any promotional activities except one press conference at the weigh-in. For Frazier-Lyde and Ali, there was no such luxury. That Monday they spent long hours in a Syracuse shopping mall, signing autographs, cooing at babies, shaking hands. Tuesday they gave speeches at schools with TV cameras in tow. Frazier-Lyde arm-wrestled a high school principal (and won). Wednesday brought a big press conference at the casino and Thursday the weigh-in. In between, there were endless interviews. Ali says she’d wake in the mornings as her husband handed her the phone to do yet another radio Q&A. “I told him, ‘You are wearing me out,’ but I don’t think he believed me.” And always there were the workouts.
The general news media gobbled it all up; Katie Couric even refereed an early morning trash-talking session on “The Today Show.” But disgusted sportswriters responded with venom, pointing out that the two women had only 16 bouts’ experience between them and that Frazier-Lyde was sixteen years older than Ali. Respected sports newspaper columnist Jerry Izenberg called the match “a marriage between the god of memory and the farce of merchandising.” Boxing writer Bert Sugar dubbed it “a stroll down mammary lane.” Other women boxers scoffed. Christy Martin—who had fought the month before on the under-card of a men’s championship—was not amused by the prospect that Ali and Frazier-Lyde would be the first female head-liners on a pay-per-view show with male boxers on the under-card. She fumed in USA Today; “You should have to pay your dues before you are in the spotlight like that … This is the worst thing that can happen for boxing.”
The fighters took the criticism in stride. To those who said they were exploiting the legacies of their fathers, both women pointed out that promoters, TV networks and journalists had made many millions from their fathers’ efforts. What was so wrong with their daughters getting some mileage out of the family names? They also argued that their actions weren’t hurting women’s boxing—rather, they were getting it some attention. As Ali put it, “I’m hoping that promoters see that …you can make women the main event and you can put your money behind women and make money off it. Because that’s what promoters are concerned about. A lot of these girls don’t realize that I’m in their corner. They can be mad because I get all the attention, but I’m trying to help.”
Of course, there was another possibility: If the fight turned out to be bad in any of the thousands of ways that a boxing match can be awful, then the failure would extend well beyond Ali and Frazier-Lyde. Their own names would be mud, but they might injure the prospects of other women boxers.
FIGHT NIGHT.
The huge tent behind the casino was filling. Fans flew in from California, drove in from New York City and Philadelphia; the casino ultimately wound up selling nearly 7,000 tickets, and the pay-per-view sales numbered around 100,000. The great names of boxing history had been attending Boxing Hall of Fame ceremonies down the road in Canastota and were cropping up everywhere in the crowd. The white-maned patriarch of boxing managers, Lou Duva, floated through to work with his fighters on the under card. George Foreman’s daughter, Freeda George Foreman, a fighter herself, walked by looking nine feet tall and elegant in a green suit. Reporters at the press tables had the jitters. Some bellyached at having to cover this travesty. Others mourned in advance. “We just hope that it won’t be as bad as we’re afraid it could be,” somebody said. “That would be embarrassing and ugly and sad.”
The preliminary bouts rolled by. The last bout before the main event was a slow rhino waltz of heavyweights. Halfway through, Joe Frazier entered the tent, greeted by enormous applause. Muhammad Ali had an appointment elsewhere that night.
Frazier-Lyde made her entrance led by her trainer and brother, Marvis. She was in black, as always. Ali wore white as always. They faced each other, inches apart, and shared a long stare before retreating to their corners.
The national anthem came and passed, the introductions, the referee’s instructions. Then the first bell rang.
Styles make fights, they say. A boxer’s style takes years to develop and is as distinctive as a singer’s voice. The women may have swapped their fathers’ public personae, but their embryonic boxing styles stayed in the family. Ali is the long-armed boxer who wants to punch from a distance and move freely, keeping her opponent away with a jabbing left hand. Frazier-Lyde tends to fight as if in a phone booth, getting in close to throw short, powerful punches. In the first few seconds she charged in and took the fight to Ali.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t finely skilled by any stretch. It was that scary, gorgeous thing that the ritualized crisis of boxing occasionally spawns—a real fight. Not a game at all. The women were equals, if not in technique, then in strength and will. The pace was furious. They ate punishment and rallied to return the favor. Dominance seesawed between them. Both refused to lose. It was personal. It was a hurricane in a box.
Between the third and fourth rounds a reporter who had been scathing before the event said, “This is a terrific fight.” Duva stumped around the outside of the ring, shouting at the reporters, “They belong on the front page tomorrow!” Nobody disagreed.
Toward the end, the crowd was on its feet, jumping and screaming. When the last bell rang the mood was delirious. Ali won a majority decision with one judge scoring it a draw. Joe Frazier was in the ring hugging his daughter and calling her a winner. Duva was hollering into the stands, “Nobody shoulda lost that fight! They both fought their hearts out! Boxing won!”
Circus was a word commonly tossed around in the run-up to the Ali-Frazier-Lyde fight. It was used to mean hype with no substance, glitz without glory. It meant easy, safe and phony. As if fire-eaters don’t burn, big cats can’t strike, and wirewalkers never fall. As if gravity were a powder-puff opponent and the planet packs no punch at all.
This fight was a circus, as all big boxing matches are. The glitter gets the audience in the door and puts them in the seats. And then the joke is over. The white lights go on above the ring, and two people give whatever they’ve got. Sometimes it’s a clear view of the human heart. That doesn’t happen every time. Maybe it doesn’t happen often enough. But when it does—as it did that night—it’s the greatest show on earth.