Joe Frazier’s three-story boxing gym, sandwiched between a gas station and a nondescript industrial building, remained trapped in the shadows of the North Philadelphia elevated train station. The grimy burgundy façade blended in with the bleak urban neighborhood and made the place seem even more forbidding to a casual visitor. The dark, shade-covered windows certainly didn’t help.
The only bright spot was the name “Joe Frazier” in large white letters, adorned with a crown insignia, just above the door. “Cloverlay Gymnasium” appeared in smaller letters as a tribute to the syndicate that had originally owned part of Frazier’s boxing contract and had guided him to a title. Joe had bought the syndicate out several years before to finish off his career as his own man. He had also become the sole owner of the gym—known as “the boss” to all who trained or worked there.
It was March 10, 1980, two months after an initial interview session for a short article with the 36-year-old Frazier and his son Marvis, age 19. I was there now to begin work on a much longer piece that would involve several months of shadowing Joe and, along the way, his son. The aim was to capture the pair at a crossroads of their fighting careers and personal lives. Joe had promised me the kind of blanket access that neither man was used to providing nor normally condoned. Yet, after much discussion, the invasive coverage was finally set to begin that day.
I had heard unsubstantiated rumors that the older Frazier was seriously considering getting back in the ring in the not-too-distant future, while looking to pursue a successful music career. Those long-range plans were likely a response to the comeback announcement just made by his old nemesis, Muhammad Ali. “The Greatest” was in the early stages of putting together a title shot against the current World Boxing Council (WBC) heavyweight champ Larry Holmes for sometime in the following year. And, historically, Joe Frazier’s career moves were closely tied to Ali’s boxing decisions.
At the same time, the younger Frazier was putting the finishing touches on a stellar stint as an amateur boxer. His more immediate agenda included a run at both the National AAU Heavyweight Boxing Championship and an Olympic gold medal to match the one his dad had won in the 1964 Tokyo Games. Joe then envisioned preparing his son for a pro debut just over the horizon and perhaps even a heavyweight championship bout further down the line. Both fighters’ grand plans fed into Joe’s burning desire to solidify his ring legacy and continue his lofty place in the boxing world.
Joe Frazier had retired in 1976 after a historic 11-year professional career with a 32–4 record (27 of those wins by knockouts). But it had all ended on a terribly sour note for the legendary champion. His final couple of bouts had been brutal defeats by the only two men who had ever beaten him—Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. It was an ending Joe still yearned to rewrite.
First, Ali had barely outlasted Frazier in their epic third meeting dubbed the Thrilla in Manila on October 1, 1975. It had been their rubber match after splitting the first two bouts at Madison Square Garden. Both fighters were totally exhausted and badly hurt after 14 rounds of body-crunching blows, a relentless pace, and suffocating Philippine heat.
One of Joe’s eyes had been swollen closed and the other headed that way. Joe’s trainer, Eddie Futch, afraid for his fighter’s health, had stopped the match before the 15th and final round began. It had been questionable in retrospect whether Ali himself could have fought on if the bout had continued. According to a 2011 ESPN story announcing Frazier’s death, Ali admitted after the fight that it was “the closest thing to dying I know of.”
Neither Frazier nor Ali ever seemed to be the same after that battle. The next year an apparently diminished Frazier lost for a second time to George Foreman. He fought a more subdued, tentative fight—a dramatic departure from the trademark free-throwing style of Smokin’ Joe. After a pair of knock-downs, the fight was abruptly stopped in the fifth round. Shortly after the defeat, Joe Frazier announced his retirement.
I opened the door of the gym to an explosion of noise and a relatively small, dimly lit area covered in dark blue carpeting. A swinging wooden gate led to the main workout space and sported a sign that read “Admission $1/No Smoking.” The gym was dominated by a patriotically designed, full-size boxing ring replete with red and white ropes and a blue canvas. The patriotic theme was augmented by small American flags that hung all around the walls.
Two young fighters exchanged cautious blows in the center of the ring while a trainer yelled out a stream of instructions. Nearby a boxer pummeled a heavy bag while others skipped rope or churned out a steady rat-a-tat on speed bags. The wall opposite the ring was covered end to end with a five-foot-high mirror that reflected the work of three shadowboxers down in a crouch and throwing punches from a variety of angles.
Behind the ring, there was a red brick wall encrusted with framed photographs taken from Joe’s boxing career and the fights of those he admired. A close-up of a smiling, fresh-faced Joe topped the wall, and just below a fit Frazier got weighed in for his first championship bout with Muhammad Ali. Joe Louis was caught struggling with Max Schmeling, Floyd Patterson exchanged blows with the Swede Ingemar Johansson, and then a dazed Patterson appeared to be overmatched by a towering, younger Ali. Farther down the wall, Joe wore his championship belt in a color photo from Jet after beating the enormous Buster Mathis for his first pro title in 1968. Amid all the boxing glory, there was a haunting black-and-white photo of a solitary Joe Frazier running down a seemingly endless country road with a small white dog trailing behind.
Before heading up the stairs to the second floor, I was particularly taken with a painted portrait of a middle-aged guy, looking older than his years, seated in a simple chair. It depicted a weary, serious-looking Yancey “Yank” Durham. He had been flagging a bit before later dying of a stroke at age 52 in August 1973. Joe stood proudly next to Yank with a comforting hand resting on his shoulder. This light-skinned black man had been Joe’s original trainer/manager and latter-day father figure—and Joe’s affection for his mentor radiated from the painting.
At the top of the stairs, there was a fairly large outer office with an oversized window looking out over the hubbub of the gym below. Some of Joe’s many trophies lined the window as a sort of glorious picket fence to be viewed by those gazing up from the workout area. Boxing gloves hung along one wall. Each carried the name of an opponent and the date of a professional fight. Surprisingly, they featured the four painful losses as well as the many victories. There was also a plaque representing Joe’s induction into the then newly formed World Boxing Hall of Fame.
On an adjacent wall was a black-and-white framed photograph of Joe’s wife Florence and his four children. Joe was holding the youngest of his three daughters, then an infant, and a 10-year-old Marvis stood nearby. This was the only picture of his family anywhere in the gym. Beneath the family photo, I found a number of faded news clippings that went back to Joe’s early career and the years before.
One old headline read “Joe Too Was Marked.” It told the story of how Joe Frazier had grown up the second youngest of 13 children in a four-room shack on a farm in Beaufort County, South Carolina. On the day Joe was born, his father Rubin supposedly prophesied that the infant would one day become his “famous son.” When Joe was old enough to tend the hogs and plant okra, he decided to stuff a feed bag with rags, corncobs, moss, and a brick for stability. He hung it on an oak tree and began to occupy every spare moment punching away at the makeshift heavy bag.
“Ya all gonna laugh,” young Joe had allegedly told his brothers and sisters. “But I’m gonna be the next Joe Louis.”
Another article mounted on the wall was from March 8, 1971. It was a Time magazine report on Joe Frazier’s first fight with Muhammad Ali. It contained a pithy description of Frazier in Smokin’ Joe mode.
“No amount of bluster will deter Smokin’ Joe—a ragin’, bobbin’, weavin’, rollin’ swarmer who moves in one basic direction, right into his opponent’s gut,” read the Time piece. “A kind of motorized [Rocky] Marciano, he works his short arms like pistons, pumping away with such mechanical precision that he consistently throws between 54 and 58 punches each round.”
After a while, I was ushered into a smaller, cluttered inner office by Joe’s trusted secretary Rochelle Bacon. The attractive, mocha-skinned woman chatted easily with me in between answering the phone and tending to paperwork. This was as far as I had gotten on my first visit in January. It was where I had previously interviewed both Joe and Marvis. At that time, I had not yet earned the right to enter Joe’s private sanctuary.
“The lair,” as all referred to it, was Joe’s exclusive, tricked-out man cave. Only Marvis seemed to come and go on a regular basis. All others from his inner circle had to be specifically invited in. The lair occupied a long, somewhat narrow space beyond a sliding door at the far end of the inner office. As a mark of my new privileged status, I was scheduled to hold my initial interviews today up in Joe’s lair.
The door to the lair slid open, and I instinctively took a step back. There, on a too-close opposite wall, loomed the image of a larger-than-life Joe Frazier, with left glove cocked, hulking over a flat-on-his-back Muhammad Ali. The nine-year-old black-and-white photo, blown up to a startling full-wall mural, caught the bloodlust in Joe’s eyes as he stared down at a prone Ali, just daring him to get up. For his part, Ali’s swollen face and bewildered gaze indicated the end was near whether or not he made it back to his feet. Nobody in the vast Madison Square Garden audience, by that point in the fight, had been surprised by the unanimous decision for Frazier that followed.
The mural had frozen, in massive proportions, Joe Frazier’s iconic career moment and most valued triumph. It was shot early in the 15th and final round of his 1971 bout with Muhammad Ali at “the world’s most famous arena.” Billed as “the Fight of the Century,” it pitted two undefeated heavyweight champions against each other for the first time with the undisputed title on the line.
The Greatest came in as the challenger with a 31–0 record (25 by knockout). Smokin’ Joe brought his WBC and WBA (World Boxing Association) titles to the contest, along with a 26–0 mark (23 by KO). For Frazier, it was also his chance to silence both the man who had taunted him unmercifully and the masses who openly called for his demise.
Anticipation for the fight could arguably be traced all the way back to 1967. That was when a dominant Ali, then a lithe, brash 25-year-old, had been sentenced to a five-year prison term and stripped of his championship belts. He had been barred from boxing for refusing induction into the armed forces as a result of the Vietnam War–era draft. The plight of the wildly popular, charismatic fighter immediately caught the attention of far more than just the dedicated boxing fans.
During his three-year exile from boxing and string of judicial appeals, Ali became a compelling presence within the antiwar, antiestablishment movement. He was also seen as an audacious Muslim spokesman for disenchanted people of color. By contrast, as Frazier rose to prominence, he was cast by Ali, then many others, as the conservative, pro-war brute—“the White Man’s Champion”—who had regrettably usurped Ali’s place as the star of the boxing world. Ali’s legions of supporters yearned for the day he would return to set things straight.
Fight fever spiked in earnest when the Supreme Court supported Muhammad Ali’s final appeal to overturn his conviction in 1971. With his boxing license restored, Ali shook off the rust against a couple of ranked but somewhat less talented opponents. Frazier had secured his championship belts earlier with knockouts of hard-hitting Buster Mathis and slick, light heavyweight champ Jimmy Ellis. Now most of America simply awaited Muhammad Ali’s opportunity to finally razzle-dazzle the powerful but plodding Joe Frazier in the ring and take back the titles that were rightfully his.
The fight itself became an epic production. Both fighters were guaranteed a then-record purse of $2.5 million apiece. Madison Square Garden sold out far in advance, and millions of people around the world paid to watch the bout on closed-circuit broadcasts. Even A-list celebrities scrambled to secure the limited ringside tickets.
Frank Sinatra wangled himself a first-row seat to serve as a photographer for Life magazine. In fact, one of Sinatra’s shots—Joe connecting with a left hook to the head as Ali hunched against the ropes—became the cover photo. Norman Mailer signed on to do the Life story on Ali, Frazier, and the fight. The article was aptly titled “Ego.” And Hollywood star Burt Lancaster got close to the action by taking on the role of color commentator.
Early on, the fight went according to the fervent wishes of the majority of the crowd. Muhammad Ali controlled most of the first three rounds with a precision jab that raised angry bumps on Joe Frazier’s face. However, Frazier finished the third round with a savage hook to Ali’s jaw, shaking him to the core, and remained the aggressor after that. Frazier’s hooks continued to pound Ali’s body during the fourth round and eventually sapped his opponent’s energy by the sixth.
Joe Frazier later connected with another vicious left hook just seconds into round 11. Ali dropped both of his gloves and a knee to the canvas. Yet the referee seemed to be responding to the pleas of the crowd when he wiped the former champ’s gloves and refused to call the knockdown. Ali held on to Frazier as much as possible to survive the round.
After the early knockdown in round 15, Smokin’ Joe closed the fight with a barrage of vicious blows to the body and head that would have put most fighters out for the count. Ali, to his credit, managed to stay on his feet to the bell. He got to take the announcement of his first professional loss standing up. Many in the crowd booed both Frazier and the decision. Still, given all that he had endured leading up to the Fight of the Century, the victory for Joe Frazier remained incredibly sweet for a long, long time.
Once I stepped fully into the lair, I saw a now bloated Joe Frazier sitting on an exercise bike halfway down the left wall of the room. He wore a gray plastic sweatshirt and red rubberized shorts designed to produce prodigious amounts of sweat as he pedaled through his 10-mile workout. Glancing at Joe on the bike, and then across the room to the taut wrecking machine in the mural, I realized he had to be a good 30 or 40 pounds above his old fighting weight of 210.
It hurt to see how far Joe had fallen from his peak condition during that first Ali bout. He was still obviously strong, but too much weight made it hard to move quickly and change directions. Of course, at his age, dropping weight also took more work. He had a whole lot more conditioning to do before he could think about getting back in the ring for real.
In truth, I also felt guilty remembering how much I had once wanted Muhammad Ali to destroy Joe Frazier in that first fight at Madison Square Garden. Several years younger than Joe and somewhat older than Marvis, I had been one of those draft-age kids in 1971 who adored Ali for his grace in the ring and, even more so, for his fiery anti–Vietnam War rhetoric outside the ropes. Now, I was just starting to warm to Frazier’s proud, plainspoken if somewhat brusque manner. I was surprised to find an often darkly funny or sentimental character behind the gruff public bravado.
Joe, cycling away, waved me over. He gave a shake of his head and then encouraged me to begin my questions. Still caught up in my thoughts about the mural, I immediately went off script. I hadn’t intended to address Muhammad Ali’s plans for a return to the ring until later on. I knew it would be a fraught conversation with Joe—one that hit close to home.
Ali had retired less than two years before in 1979. It was just a few months after eking out a win against a young, hard-hitting Leon Spinks for a piece of the heavyweight crown. He was now talking about fighting a supremely talented, in-his-prime Larry Holmes for the world heavyweight title. Like so many who followed boxing, I saw the potential for a debacle.
“Joe, do you think Ali will get hurt in this comeback?” I asked, initially expecting Joe’s old animosity toward Muhammad Ali, and his knowledge of boxing’s harsh realities, to rise to the surface.
“If he feels he wants to come back, he should do it,” replied Joe, surprisingly coming to Ali’s defense. “Nobody knows his true ability but him. People can sit around and guess all day long, say he’s fat. But only he knows what he can do.” Joe paused and casually glanced at his own belly.
I wondered if we were still just talking about Ali.
“Well, he is fat,” I said, looking to push the issue.
“That’s got nothing to do with it!” Joe snapped. “What guys haven’t gained weight?” He again checked his stomach, and now we were definitely not focusing solely on Ali.
“Yeah, but he’s getting old too,” I said, taking a jab at Ali and, I guess, Joe. “That can’t be good.”
“He’s 38 or 39,” Joe fired back, as if that weren’t old for a fighter. “I know some people say he hasn’t fought a real fight since Manila, but it’s not the fights [or age] that counts. It’s the training. And if he’s been in the gym working out, it should make a difference. He was together enough to go 15 rounds with Leon [Spinks]. He didn’t just stand around and play with him. Ali had to really fight that fight.”
I reminded Joe that was almost two years ago and a lot had changed. Just like a lot had changed with Joe.
At that moment, Marvis came in and quietly took a seat on the couch under the mural. I raised a hand in greeting and turned back to his dad.
It was time to cut to the chase. I asked Joe if Ali’s plans were giving him thoughts of lacing his gloves up again too.
“If Ali made a comeback, it wouldn’t make me think twice,” insisted Joe, his voice getting a bit louder. “Not even one time. No. Enough is enough! I don’t have any financial worries. Fighting and retirement have been good to me. I’m watching Marvis and the other young fighters grow, helping to run the business.”
In one more attempt to push a comeback announcement, I asked Joe about all the time he spent working out in the gym.
Joe paused for a moment and then flashed a sly smile. “I’m just trying to be a good family man as usual.”
This last remark completely broke the mood. Joe cracked up laughing, and Marvis began to laugh as well. I didn’t know enough then to be in on the joke.
“Can Ali beat Holmes if he comes back?” I asked, not letting the reality check go. That abruptly killed the laughter.
“I don’t think he can beat Holmes,” confessed Joe, his bravado suddenly coming way down. “If Holmes is in shape, he wins easily.”
Then Joe just as quickly tried to back off his surprising admission. He talked about how tricky Ali could be in the ring. He even suggested some big fights that an older, overweight Muhammad Ali should be able to win. He became more animated as he moved from one viable comeback victory for Ali to the next.
“There are plenty of guys around for Ali to fight now, and plenty of those guys that he can beat,” said Joe, with a defiant shrug. “[John] Tate would be an easy fight for him. [It would be] the easiest he ever had. Scott LeDoux could hurt him, but Ali would still win.”
Both of those predictions seemed open to argument. Yes, Ali had defeated LeDoux in a five-round exhibition match in December 1977. It was just months before losing his title in the first bout against Leon Spinks. But LeDoux had connected to Ali’s chin early in the fight and had done some damage later on. What’s more, that had been a bit younger, more in-shape Ali.
The “easy fight” for Ali against John Tate came across as one hell of a bigger stretch. Tate was the 25-year-old, undefeated WBA heavyweight champion at that time. If Tate were going to lose—which he actually did a couple of weeks later to an up-and-coming Mike Weaver—I didn’t think it would be to a rounding-into-shape Ali, who was sneaking up on 40.
Yet, despite time and boxing sense, Joe seemed to be working hard to keep Ali’s dreams alive. Maybe he was arguing to support his own dreams as well. It was all said like a man with visions of an Ali vs. Frazier IV fight dancing in his head. And that would have been the mother of all dream fights.
So, on that day, I decided to just listen to Joe Frazier’s string of debatable winning scenarios for Muhammad Ali’s comeback. I would like to think my silence served as a kind of stand-in for every boxing fan’s prayer that another miracle fight could be in the offing. On a more practical level, it certainly became an important fallback strategy in dealing with Joe later on whenever things heated up. The best move with Joe was often to just keep my mouth shut and pick my spots.
Joe Frazier eventually got up off the exercise bike and turned his attention toward his son. He moved to the middle of a blood-red shag carpet in front of the couch, beckoning Marvis to rise and square off against him. Marvis quickly obeyed and took a spot two feet away with his arms dangling loosely at his sides.
Joe stared into a face that came across as his younger mirror image. Marvis’s skin had the same dark brown hue but was much less marred or swollen. The kid also had an identical sprawling nose that covered a wispier mustache and thinner, chin-lining beard. There was the similarly close-cropped Afro behind a high forehead as well, except the hairline didn’t recede above the temples to form a widow’s peak. The same almond-shaped eyes stared back but with a softer glow.
The older Frazier, legs spread shoulder width apart, stood flat footed in his low, “shell” crouch. He began to bob slightly up and down and slipped visibly into his Smokin’ Joe persona. His upper body looked massive in the gray plastic sweatshirt as he hunkered down for the sparring lesson.
Marvis, two inches taller at 6ʹ1ʺ, chose instead to rise up on his toes just within reach. He had a broad, muscular back that tapered to a much narrower waist than his father could ever recall having. The teen wore a skin-tight white T-shirt under bright orange shorts that thinned to suspender-like straps. The outfit accentuated the graceful physique of a natural athlete. Marvis became completely still waiting for his dad to begin.
“Gotta plant ya feet when ya throwin’ combinations,” barked Joe, nudging his boy with a double left hook to the body and a solid push to the side of the head.
They wore unpadded workout gloves, but Marvis still skittered a few steps from the impact and shuffled his feet to catch his balance. An average man would have toppled to the ground.
“If I was in the corner, I’d have ya slippin’ and slidin’ and slamming those hooks in tight,” said Joe, as he began to move in again.
Joe shifted his shoulders one way and then another. He fired off several multiple-blow variations—all purposely short of their target. Marvis reacted with a start to each flurry and ducked easily under a final high, sweeping right cross. His face stayed calm, but the eyes were now wide and keenly alert.
Joe’s shoulders remained hunched as they feinted menacingly once again from side to side. He then moved directly ahead, in that Smokin’ Joe crouch, to within an inch of his son.
“Stay right in front of your man all the time,” urged Joe.
Bobbing up and down, he ordered Marvis to throw a jab and then cover his left ear.
Marvis stood tall and upright, the way his official trainer, George Benton, had taught him. He dutifully raised the unpadded gloves and poked out a half-speed jab. The second he recoiled to cover his left ear, Joe powerfully cuffed his son’s glove.
After a more brisk jab from Marvis, Joe dropped his shoulder and rose up on a sharp angle to hook the right ear. Marvis displayed flash reflexes and danced back a step, anticipating the blow. The kid was instantly surprised by a hard slap to the arm and a jarring palm straight to the chest. It clearly could have been a damaging fist to the stomach or chin instead.
“You don’t waste energy dancin’ or backin’ off from a dude like [Tony] Tubbs,” said Joe, making his point without his usual camouflage smile. “Boxing these guys is good if the guy will stand there and box—you outpoint him. But [don’t do it] with guys who run away and try to sneak a shot on you. You should have stayed close and nailed him whenever you could.”
Joe was still fuming from Marvis’s second fight with Muhammad Ali’s prize protégé just a month earlier. He had been uncharacteristically muzzled for his son’s fight with Tony Tubbs and blamed Benton for the loss. In the aftermath, a tug-of-war had emerged for control over his boy’s fighting style.
Joe ended the minilesson with Marvis, then turned to me to continue making his point about that second Frazier-Tubbs bout.
“He didn’t lose control of the fight,” said Joe, looking over at his son. “He just did what the corner told him to do. That’s what a good fighter does. They told him to box. If I was in the corner, I would have told him to go out there to slip and slide and punch.”
“Did you like anything about Marvis’s approach to the fight?” I asked.
“I liked the way he was throwing the left hooks—they were about a hair off target. But he can sharpen that up by being closer to the guy and timing him right. But I’d have sent him out straight from jump street because I know Tubbs was afraid. Tubbs knows that Marvis can punch and he wasn’t going to stand in there with him.”
George Benton wanted Marvis to take advantage of his height, grace, and natural quickness. He saw no advantage in having his boxer take punishment while grinding out wins. However, Joe saw a younger version of himself with surprising punching power for an amateur. He saw no reason for the corner to leave anything to chance.
Marvis Frazier had won his first fight against Tony Tubbs. It had taken place three months earlier on national television. The bout had been immediately billed as more than just a showdown between two top amateur heavyweights. It had been sold as both a preview of the next generation of Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali and another round in their age-old battle.
Despite the Frazier vs. Ali theme, it didn’t take the television crew long to pick up on the behind-the-scenes war of wills between George Benton and Joe. The NBC camera had shifted repeatedly between Marvis trying to follow Benton’s instructions to use his reach and Joe at ringside bellowing for him to do the opposite. Marvis had kept throwing long-range jabs, dancing away, and then shooting a straight right hand before retreating again.
Joe, supposedly working as a color commentator, had been draped over the ring apron. He had started snorting out short-armed hooks and looked as if he were ready to climb under the ropes.
“Jam him,” Joe had yelled, after having thrown aside his earphones. He had clearly given up on describing the action.
Joe’s impassioned words had confused Marvis momentarily near the end. They had played on his son’s compulsion to gain Joe’s approval. However, Benton’s message had ultimately gotten through and Marvis mostly kept to his corner’s disciplined attack. Frazier, the 1979 National Golden Gloves and world junior champion, had come away with a unanimous decision that established him as the country’s highest-ranked amateur heavyweight.
In the rematch just two months later, Tony Tubbs and Ali had gotten their revenge. Tubbs had taken a page from Ali’s old fight plans to deal Marvis a crushing defeat. He countered Frazier’s probing jabs with flurries of accurate taps punctuated by hasty retreats.
The quick in-and-out attacks frustrated Marvis and took him away from his corner’s disciplined jab-and-move approach. He eventually jettisoned the official fight plan and let the Frazier instinct to swarm take over. Marvis unleashed awkward, lunging hooks coupled with a number of misguided uppercuts.
Marvis had ultimately inflicted the greater damage. Unfortunately, amateur contests are judged by frequency of contact rather than force of impact. The loss had stamped an indelible stain on Marvis Frazier’s previously pure 44–0 record.
Joe believed that Marvis should have been in close, hammering tight hooks to the head and body from the first bell. He felt Tubbs never should have had the room to jab away and flee.
“George figured somewhere down the line I’d probably get Marvis excited [again] by calling shots he didn’t want him to do,” Joe said to me, the lingering resentment all too obvious. “So, I decided to pin my mouth because I’m not the chief trainer. I kept a damn hard promise to George. But I know with his ability, with his power and the little know-how he has, Marvis can go out there and slaughter cats right away.”
Joe turned away from me and drifted back toward the stationary bike across the room. He seemed to be deciding on another round of cycling before changing for the real workout down in the gym. Marvis sat back down on the couch and waited for his dad to get ready. It was a good time for me to get his take on the loss to Tubbs.
“How do you cope with a stunning loss like that?” I asked. “It must hurt to lose your perfect record to someone you know you can beat?”
“Once more I put the fight in God’s hands,” said Marvis, already a lay deacon at his family’s church. “Maybe the Lord wanted me to know just what my victims felt like. What it is to lose . . .”
“Mmm, mmm,” grunted Joe from across the room, obviously leery about the direction the conversation was taking. “If Marv was allowed to talk to all these guys in the ring, he’d probably punch ’em silly. Then give ’em an Amen!”
Joe laughed loudly, and his son promptly joined in.
Marvis picked up on Joe’s signal right away. He instantly turned back into “the chip” that his dad often insisted was not “too far from the old block.” Marvis launched into an animated account of the taunting smile he had flashed to Tony Tubbs in the second round of their last fight.
“It was like Tubbs hitting me with his best shot,” boasted Marvis, peering over at Joe from the sofa, “and me answering, ‘Nah buddy, you ain’t got nothing that can hurt me. And wait until you see what I put on you!’”
“Yep, yep, yep,” said an excited Joe. He spread his legs apart like a chunky colossus, peeled off the plastic sweatshirt, and went into a taunting tale of his own.
“In all our fights me and Muhammad were always talking,” said Joe with a broad grin. “He’d be sayin’, ‘I’m gonna kick your ass.’ And I’d answer, ‘Yeah, and I’m gonna wrap yours up as a goin’ away present.’”
Joe’s macho bravado, I assumed essential for any boxer, seemed to revolve around never admitting to being vulnerable, hurt, or weak. It showed up not just in conversations about boxing but in his approach to life. I wondered where that attitude originally came from.
“As one of the youngest in the family, I grew up around my dad,” said Joe, obviously glad to talk about the hardscrabble life of sharecropper Rubin Frazier. “I learned to be a man when I was a boy. Where guys 12 and 13 were talking about going to school, I was talking about chasing the ladies. That happened because I was raised to work side by side with my dad.”
According to Joe, in a later autobiography, Rubin’s left hand had been lost, and part of the forearm amputated, due to shots fired by a drunk friend who saw his father as competition for a woman’s affections. It happened a year before Joe was born. And Joe just assumed the role of his dad’s left arm in the fields as soon as he was able.
“What was that like?” I asked.
“He used to let me go to parties with him and I used to boogie right along with him,” said Joe, a smile lighting up his face. “[It was] to the point where it helped me to grow up and be a more secure man and to stand on my own in any situation. That’s what I try to pass along to my own kids. Do what you want to do, be strong, and then stand up for it.”
Joe climbed back on the bike and pedaled slowly at first. He seemed to be waiting for my next question.
“Is that your definition of what a true man should be?”
“A true man number one provides for his family and, second, does whatever is good for himself,” said Joe. “He must be loyal to himself. If he can’t be loyal to himself, then he can’t be loyal to anyone else. A man stands up for what he believes in and runs the family and the business. The man must make the decisions in the family and be the leader if he wants to be a man.”
“Does that mean a man doesn’t compromise?” I asked, looking to stoke Joe’s macho fire and clarify his southern farm boy philosophy.
“If he wants to be a partial man, then he can give a woman the final say,” said Joe, in a deprecating tone. “You can talk things over with your lady, but the man should have the last word. That means this is what we’re doing and there’s no doubt about that.”
With the women’s movement heading into its third decade, I was curious to see how far out of step with the times this would go. Yeah, Joe was a bit old for the baby boomer cultural revolution, but this seemed to be from another century.
“How do you justify that authority for the man?” I asked, the challenge rising in my voice.
“Well, after all, they took a rib out of my side to make that lady,”—Joe laughed and cycled progressively quicker as the righteous spirit in him grew—“ain’t no doubt about that! I’d have all my ribs if they didn’t take one to make her. I might have been even stronger.”
Years later I would wind up doing one of the last interviews with a founder of the modern women’s movement, Betty Friedan. The author of the ground-breaking book The Feminine Mystique talked about how far society had come on gender equality. I couldn’t help but smile and think back to Joe’s comments up in the lair.
I wondered where Marvis stood on all this.
“Well, first of all I think a man must have faith,” said Marvis, beginning on safe ground. “Secondly, he has to be the head of the family. I don’t feel, however, that only the man has to make the decisions. There has to be a joint thing.”
“Meaning what?” I prodded.
“If a man and woman make the commitment that they’re going to strive together, I feel they should agree on things, work things out together,” said Marvis, looking up to make eye contact with Joe churning away on the bike. “[There should] not be just one of them loudly voicing their opinion.”
Joe glowered at Marvis and then me. He didn’t like where I was taking things. I noticed that the man who always seemed notoriously thrown by Muhammad Ali’s jibes could control the atmosphere in most rooms with a mere frown or grudging smile. Did he consciously try to bully people into doing what he wanted?
“I don’t have to look angry for people to know this is what will happen now,” said Joe, looking a bit annoyed. “It is very rare for me to get really angry. I try not to get angry, stay calm and natural. No, people don’t misread me. No, no, no, no. Nah, I don’t think there’s any chance in the world that they could misunderstand that I said no from here.” Joe pointed to his gut.
The ex–heavyweight champ fixed me with a stare.
“I don’t fool people and I don’t like them to fool me,” said Joe, setting the ground rules. “I try to be strong, straightforward, honest—but at the same time a little shrewd hopefully.”
Joe got up from the bike and walked to the wall refrigerator. He grabbed a quart bottle of beer and began chugging. I took the moment to absorb the message offered and forged on.
“Well, I know a good boxer doesn’t show his emotions in the ring,” I said, easing into my next point, “but what about out there with the public? Things must sometimes get a little nasty for someone who has had such high-profile fights. Do you need to keep your feelings inside?”
Joe thought about it for a moment and took another swig.
“Yeah, every man has to at times,” he said, talking about hiding his emotions in public. “There are times I get hurt out there. You cover it up by maybe not saying nothing. [I use] a forced smile. Like to say, ‘I’m hurt man, but I’m going to come back soon and retaliate.’ I get people saying things that hurt me or bother me 24 hours a day walking on the street. I get it on the car phone, office telephone, and I get it by just going to the clubs.”
“What kind of things do they say?” I asked, starting to empathize.
“People say things like ‘Old Joe Frazier, what happened with George Foreman? What about Foreman?’ And I answer, ‘What about the brother?’ I’ll always try to answer people’s questions whether it’s a smart remark or just being nice. My answers usually match the attitude of their questions.”
I started to sense the layer of pain lurking beneath the years of putting on a public face. That led me to ask if a true man ever let the painful emotions just come out.
“I don’t think you’re less of a man for crying,” said Joe, taking me by surprise. “It’s healthy for you. I cry if something goes wrong—I’ll cry right out. But if I cry out of anger, look out! Somebody’s in trouble. Crying shows a man has a heart and helps him let out his pressures. Just don’t cry for nothing.”
“What about all the terrible things Ali said about you before the big fights?” I asked Joe, remembering mocking comparisons to a gorilla, among other slurs. “It seemed a lot of the times you had to just take the public abuse.”
Joe didn’t answer right away. He seemed a bit thrown by the directness of my comments.
“Did you ever feel the urge to publicly complain about the way you were treated by Muhammad Ali, by the press?”
“I never complain about anything!” said Joe, agitated by the question. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll come back here [the lair] and sit down with the door closed. I’ll think about all the wrong ways I could react to the situation. That’s how I handled all the bad things that have happened to me in the nearly 20 years in the public eye. I get all the wrong responses out of my system. Sometimes, of course, all you have is wrong choices. Often there is nothing right to do.”
Joe stopped and put down the bottle of beer. He seemed ready to wrap it up.
“Yeah, but with the public, with the media, aren’t you always forced to do something?” I asked, refusing to finish the session on a wishy-washy note. “Give me an example of a time when there are only wrong choices.”
“Well, suppose I take this mic and knock it out of your hand,” said Joe, shooting me a sardonic grin. He paused briefly. “No, that wouldn’t be right.”
He paused again, still grinning. “Well, what if I take the tape recorder and smash it up?” He stared at me, and I stayed silent. So did Marvis.
“No, that wouldn’t be right either,” Joe said. “Well, what if I hit this writer upside his jaw?” Joe asked, the smile clearly gone from his face.
There was a much longer pause. I was barely able to breathe.
“No, that definitely wouldn’t be right,” said Joe, in a husky voice.
I started to speak, and Joe raised a big palm to stop me.
“Or maybe I would say, ‘I just don’t want to talk about it,’” said Joe, his tone more exasperated. “That would probably be the best way to handle a writer who has said something to hurt my feelings.”
With that, Joe peeled off the rubberized red shorts, turned his bare back to me, and headed for the shower.
I was left mumbling under my breath, “Good example, Joe.”