On Friday, March 14, two days before our flight to Augusta, Marvis woke me up at 9:30 a.m. with an urgent phone call. I had been working late the night before at my Manhattan apartment and tried to clear my head as my wife handed me the phone.
“I got to drop out of this trip,” said Marvis in a soft, weary voice. “There’s no way I can go. Pop says he doesn’t want me flying.”
When I asked why, Marvis gave me shocking news.
“The United States boxing team went down in a plane crash in Warsaw, Poland,” he said. “And I was supposed to be on that plane. But Pop told me not to go.” Joe, luckily, deemed the exhibition tournament as unnecessary for his son’s progress.
Joe Frazier, mortally afraid of flying, went out of his way to drive to music gigs and other events whenever possible. He also tried to keep his family from taking airplanes when it was feasible. Now he had a tangible example to justify his fears.
Marvis said that after his dad had broken the news of the crash over the phone, Joe immediately pressed him on the dangers of flying. “Getting scared now yourself, aren’t ya?” he had asked.
“I’m not scared,” his son had replied.
Marvis, just starting to mourn his lost friends, said his father then reiterated one of his standard warnings. “Those planes will kill you.”
According to Marvis, Joe often told a story about flying to a boxing match with George Foreman. Joe claimed their plane had been struck by lightning and they barely made it to their destination. Marvis said LeGrant Pressley told it differently. Lee described the incident as just loud thunder that shook the plane a little.
Later, I read a New York Post article about the 13 boxers and eight team staffers killed in the crash three miles from the runway at the Warsaw International Airport. The Polish jetliner carried 77 passengers and 10 crew members in all, and everyone was lost. Among the dead was a Philadelphia fighter, Lonnie Young, whom Marvis knew well. Besides Marvis’s tale of why he skipped the trip, the article included a side story about Jimmy Clark, another top amateur heavyweight, who missed the flight. The headline for that piece read “Late for My Own Funeral.”
Ken Johnson picked me up in Joe’s Cadillac, Big Red, at the Augusta airport on Sunday evening, March 16. Instead of heading for our nearby hotel, he said we had a good 45-mile drive to get to an impromptu gig for the band. The show was at a remote, backwoods American Legion post on the outskirts of a small town called Thomson, Georgia. Johnson noted that all the regular clubs were closed on Sundays. So Joe had decided to perform “for his people”—a poor, black, agricultural crowd less than 150 miles from the farming community where he had grown up.
I surmised this would be Joe’s ideal audience. But Johnson said Joe faced no color barriers when he performed.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “The whites are in awe of him. They flock to him for autographs. Joe is considered an international, interracial figure. His best audience is predominantly blue-collar whites. Then blue-collar blacks are second. But he fills up white clubs.”
Johnson and I chatted steadily as we drove along. We seemed to hit it off right away. He told me about meeting Joe two years before while doing entertainment bookings for hotels. Joe called to ask about booking his show into a Philadelphia hotel and, out of curiosity, Ken decided to put him in for the weekend.
“I flew out to see the show and definitely felt the man had charisma on-stage,” said Ken, who told Joe everything worked for him but the band. “I told him straightforward what I thought and he respected that. We became friends and pooled our ideas—picked out a new band together. I was surprised by his knowledge of the music business, what should be done onstage.”
This led to a discussion about Joe’s business acumen. Ken described the boss’s current ventures and implied there could be more due diligence and a central plan. He listed a limousine service in Philadelphia, plans for a meat-packing company to put out Smokin’ Joe breakfast sausages, and a shelved chicken-and-ribs fast-food chain, Smokin’ Joe’s Corner. And, of course, there was the gym, Joe’s aspiration to build a stable of top boxers and his various television commercials.
Johnson felt Joe Frazier’s best hope for building a business empire rested with Marvis. He said the kid had a much better head for financial dealings than his father.
“I know Joe will give it all to Marvis,” said Ken. “He will definitely make the whole operation grow. He’s a very intelligent kid.”
Ken told me he spent 40 weeks a year on the road with Joe, and most of the time they traveled with the caravan. The vehicles included Joe’s big, comfortable 1975 Caddy with dark tinted windows, CB radio, telephone, and radar detector. A 28-foot mobile home, which carried the band, had a kitchen, dining table, and bathroom and slept 10. The equipment truck handled all else needed to put on the show. Ken said the mobile home often came from trade-offs Joe arranged when he did ads for local car dealerships.
The current tour was originally scheduled for six weeks and would cover thousands of miles, said Ken. It started in Chattanooga and Memphis, Macon and Augusta, Georgia. Then they were supposed to fly to Nebraska, but Joe had just canceled that. So it was on to Jacksonville, Florida; South Carolina; North Carolina; some jobs in Delaware; and Washington, D.C. It would wrap up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at Resorts International, on May 15 for an engagement through July 15.
According to Ken, they flew only when it was mathematically impossible to drive to an essential business function. Then Joe could be really difficult. He often bailed on these appointments—even when they were important. But Ken said it was rare for Joe to play the star on the road. He recalled an incident on their first tour from Boston to California.
“A tire blew out on the mobile home and before I knew it Joe was out changing it,” he said. “The musicians were sitting in the mobile home, and the sound man and roadie were just watching. I said, ‘What the hell is going on here? This is backwards.’ But Joe’s that way. He’s a regular guy.”
I asked if Joe ever got really angry at one of the guys.
“He’s never exploded,” said Ken. “But he is really intense about covering your tracks—making sure your back [and his] is protected. He gets upset over a lack of organization.”
Ken revealed that Joe sometimes chilled out on the road by playing a sermon by some preacher or other. “Joe is more the look-up-to-the-sky-and-gods kind of religious man. [He’s] not much of the go-to-church type.” Ken laughed. “Joe carries the church with him on tape.”
Johnson suddenly slowed Big Red long enough to spot the closed grocery store that marked the place to turn. We made a right down a long, no-name gravel road enveloped by thick-woods darkness. After barreling along for a couple of miles, Ken decided we had gone too far. He backtracked twice before finally getting lucky.
We were saved by a naked bulb and a half-hidden sign reading “American Legion Post #576.” It seemed like an ominous introduction to Joe’s music career.
Ken and I entered a stark meeting room halfheartedly disguised as a nightclub. Red and blue crepe paper balls hung from the ceiling over a bare floor. Clusters of iron-legged tables, ringed by metal bridge chairs, filled the space. Part of the room boasted redwood walls with dim lighting. Yet other areas had institutional off-white walls with bright lights.
Directly opposite the entrance, about 60 feet away, stood a stage just large enough for the eight-piece, all-white Steppin’ Out Band. The group blasted its funky, high-energy horn sound. The open area in front of the stage doubled as a dance floor and Joe’s performance space, once the headliner came on. And, off to the side, was a makeshift bar that seemed to be a world of its own.
The crowd of about 75 black locals, pretty much all farmers, dotted a room that held 300. Most sat quietly at the tables and listened to the band, which overpowered attempts to chat. Just three couples took turns on the dance floor. About 20 men stood at the bar drinking mostly liquor, several straight from the bottle.
Ken took me back to see Joe in his “dressing room” before the main show. I found him in a bare, repurposed storage room with a few chairs thrown in. He sat in one chair while Youngblood tried to steam clean the boss’s outfit for the performance on another. The room was embarrassingly cramped, and I felt like an intruder at first.
Joe and Youngblood were talking boxing, and I jumped in. I turned the focus to the current heavyweight champions and whether there should be a unification match. Joe recognized only Larry Holmes as the champ. He hated the idea of multiple heavyweight titles.
“I went through this two-champion thing in 1970, and I straightened that out between Ellis and myself,” he said, holding up a big fist. “Too many guys are rushing in the last second and being given a title, and then being thrown in with other guys who really haven’t earned a shot at a title. I don’t consider these guys true champions.”
Joe drew a comparison to the heavyweight division during his prime boxing years.
“Floyd Patterson, Ali, and myself, we went through the mill to get to the championship,” he said. “And then we fought other guys like ourselves to keep it. Right now, nobody whatsoever has a shot at taking Holmes, except maybe [Mike] Weaver if he lands a lucky one.”
Joe went back to preparing for his upcoming show. He talked about how hard it could be to get a performance just right. He tried to make a case for why entertaining was often more difficult than boxing. Both Youngblood and I had our doubts.
“You have a lot more people to deal with to succeed—the audience, eight musicians, a sound man, and when the sound’s off it kills you,” said Joe. “In the ring, it’s just the three of us—me, myself, and I. In music, you’re either good or bad. There’s no in between.”
I asked if he felt more appreciated by a down-home black audience, like the one tonight. Did he treat it differently than playing for, say, a wealthy white audience?
“I don’t get any more up for them than any other club I work,” said Joe, who fell back on his old work ethic. “Whether it’s a low-income neighborhood, a classy club, 5,000 people in the audience, or just one lost soul in the place, I’m going to do my job. But it’s nice to come back to the kind of people you began with. Let them know you haven’t forgotten them. I want to show them money doesn’t have to change or spoil people.”
Joe noted, however, that these rural farmers were often uncomfortable about meeting him.
“A lot of these people get nervous when they see me and don’t know what to say,” said Joe, offering an example. “I was sitting in the car making a phone call this afternoon. A couple of these guys start with ‘Hey, what’s happenin’ m’ man? What it look like?’ I played along to make them feel comfortable. I got all loud with them and gave them a chance to relate to me—as one of their people.”
So, this applied to how he related to poorer black people?
“I don’t mean only black people. I mean any people who don’t know what it’s like to reach the top. I’ve been to the mountaintop and want them to know a little bit of what it’s like. And that I can reach back down to earth and relate to them.”
Joe suddenly jumped up and started heading out the door. He wore a suit vest without a shirt underneath.
“In fact, I’m going out right now and do just that,” he said. Youngblood and I followed him out to the bar.
Most of the men at the bar immediately looked up from their shots or lowered their liquor bottles. Several huddled around Joe and greeted him, while pawing at his shoulders or arms. They all wanted to make physical contact with the ex-champ at first, establish that he was real, and be able to say they had touched him. Joe patiently answered questions about his lifestyle and his fights with Muhammad Ali or George Foreman. He even offered a vague “We’ll see” as to whether he planned to get back in the ring soon.
Some men claimed they lived close to where Joe grew up, and asked if he knew or remembered different people from back then. Joe never gave anyone an abrupt “No.” He always made it sound like he just might know the person. He jived easily with all of them, signed autographs, and made it seem like old friends at a reunion. Yet a couple of the men had an edge to their voices when they spoke to the man who made it out, became famous. One older guy even asked for a “loan” from “the rich boxing champion.”
Youngblood eventually gave Joe a time’s-up nod, and we headed back to the dressing room. Joe sat down, took a deep breath, and began to get ready for the show. Suddenly, the door swung open and a slender, 5ʹ6ʺ drunk of about 40 ambled into the room. The guy, dressed in denim with a cap pulled over his eyes, stood a few feet from Joe and swayed unsteadily.
“Ahyeahhh, how ya doin’, Joe Frazier?” he crooned.
“How you all,” replied Joe, turning in his seat.
“I want a contract with youuu,” sang the drunk, reeling a step closer. “I want a piece of your ass. I think I can take ya. Give me a contract. Scared?”
Before the drunk finished his challenge, Youngblood sprang up and crossed the room. He coaxed the man back toward the door. “Now that’s enough,” said Blood, in a low, firm voice. “You got to be leaving now.”
For the next 15 minutes or so, the drunk continued to shout through the closed door. When I left for a moment to check on the band’s set, he offered to fight me too. Then he went back to challenging Joe.
“People know my personality,” said Joe, nodding toward the voice outside. “They see that I talk to everybody. So, they come in all the time to push for more. If I was a cranky son of a bitch, they wouldn’t bother me as much. Sometimes they have a tendency to over-relate.”
I laughed and asked if anyone ever tried to whup the ex-champ during a performance.
“Nah, they’d have to be out of their Goddamn minds,” said Joe, a tinge of weariness in his tone. “Some of these dudes are [crazy]. But I would never do nothin’. I’d keep performing and walk to the other side of the floor. Young-blood or Kenny would take them off the floor.”
So, it wasn’t his job to deal with every crazy fan?
“My job is to keep performing,” he said. “I’m not a comedian or a preacher. If I deal with something like that, it will either be very funny or a funeral. If you enjoy my singing, sit down and listen. If you don’t, the hell with you! Some people call me some bad names out there, but I don’t care.”
I asked what usually prompted the name calling. Joe thought for a moment and then sounded like he was remembering a specific incident.
“I said something about Clay, and they called me ‘a dumb n----r.’ I just laughed. A lot of people out there are still fighting those Clay fights. I tell them, ‘I ain’t ever coming back to prove any points from those fights.’ Let them keep their doubts in their minds.”
David Cherry, DC, took the floor first as Joe’s warm-up act. The young James Brown clone, dressed all in white, had a fine voice and all the moves of the Godfather of Soul. He kicked off his act with an electric version of “Do You Want to Party,” and many in the crowd bolted to their feet. He left the audience more alive and focused on the show.
That’s when the headliner came out wearing a black-sequined fighter’s robe over a white shirt and two-piece, hot-pink jumpsuit. His opening song, “First Round Knockout,” written just for him, allowed the ex-champ to sing about boxing, beating the odds, and winning in surprising fashion. While Joe sang the punchy tune, he pranced in circles in the open area below the stage, threw signature hooks, and celebrated victory. Huddled together just above him, the band belted out crisp notes and counted to 10 in unison when the final knockout came.
There was an intimacy to the setting that fit Joe’s folksy approach and empowered members of the audience to say or do things they shouldn’t. Heck, anytime somebody arrived or moved around during the show, they had to pass within a few feet of him. Joe also had a habit of speaking directly to people in the middle of songs, which they took as permission to talk back. The results were sometimes touching and poignant, other times not so good.
During the opening number Joe talked for a moment about rallying for wins against fighters he wasn’t supposed to beat. A nearby customer took the opening.
“Are you coming back to fight Ali?” he shouted, loud enough for all to hear.
Joe interrupted the number to provide a testy reply. “I’m through beating on Clay,” he announced.
The man got up to shout at Joe for his use of the name “Clay” and to challenge his dismissive attitude toward Muhammad Ali. Two other patrons yelled out hurtful remarks about Joe’s career-ending loss to George Foreman. This emboldened a drunk to charge within a couple of feet of Joe, and Ken had to step in to ward him off. In response, some in the audience came to Joe’s defense, shouting support. And the band got louder to cover the dustup.
During the next song, Joe again talked with the audience. He took time to make reference to his unique fighting style. He said he never tried to mix in other fighters’ styles. He admitted to taking more blows with that straight-ahead approach, but bragged, “I gave out more than my share.”
Some guy at ringside shouted out that he had lost money on Frazier’s fights.
“You couldn’t have lost too much money,” Joe quipped. “I had 36 fights and lost only four.”
Again, he heard more shouts about Ali and losing to Foreman. Through it all, Joe just smiled and offered his mantra for these kinds of situations. “Ain’t nothing but a party,” he said, before going back to the song. “Yep, yep, yep, yep.”
Joe’s earlier example of “people still fighting those Clay fights” suddenly seemed like more than just a nasty story. I now had a better feel for how those clashes with Ali had stayed with Joe all these years later. I saw firsthand signs of the way the Louisville Lip had managed to distance Joe from many of his own people.
Still the audience warmed up a bit after this, in part due to Joe Frazier’s refusal to get angry. Applause for each song got gradually louder, but random jibes about Ali remained audible. One more intimate song, “Tonight’s the Night,” gave Joe a chance to sing directly to the “ladies” in the room. And he played it for all it was worth.
Earlier Joe had described his mind-set for performing that song. “Hey, we got to do it tonight,” he’d said in a singsong, husky voice filled with desire. “You know I can relate to that. That’s a get-in-touch-with-the-ladies song. I get all kinds of crazy ladies come running up on that number. It gets them going, but I can deal with it.”
Joe had pointed out that no matter what the subject of a song, or the message implied, he tried to keep it energetic. “I’m a high-energy man,” he told me, the smile spreading wide. “If I sing, ‘Let’s get undressed,’ my style will suggest just throwing those clothes off!”
Joe, gauging the vibe in the room, decided to wrap up the show. He transitioned quickly from one up-tempo number to another. Suddenly, without warning, he motioned to cut the music.
“We sho’ enough LOVE YOU!!” yelled Joe, speaking for the group. He then ran from the tight ring of tables, waving Vs for victory.
The whole time his “funky white boys” chanted “Smokin’ Joe, Smokin’ Joe, Smokin’ Joe. . . .”
After the show, Joe held court in his little dressing room. He spoke almost exclusively to the two young women standing in front of him despite all the others present. I signaled to Joe’s 22-year-old nephew, Stanley, to step outside. We headed back to the bar.
Stanley Frazier’s mother, Rebecca, was Joe’s slightly older sister. Stanley became a Frazier through coincidence when his mother happened to marry a man named David Frazier. He lived with 11 other family members on the historic South Carolina “plantation” Joe had bought for his mother Dolly right after the Fight of the Century.
“I help take care of the place for Joe,” said Stanley. “We don’t see Joe down there too often, but when he comes it’s like a family reunion. And, when he’s on the road, we try to see him whenever we can.”
Joe had called his family a couple of nights ago. Stanley immediately headed out with his mother and aunt Julia for the over-100-mile trip. They managed to surprise Joe by making it to Augusta in time for the late performance at another club.
“He definitely plays to us when we’re in the audience,” said Stanley. “He wants to show the family that he can do it, especially me. Because I always tell him, ‘You can’t sing, you know you can’t sing. Leave the singing to Jacqui.’ Oh my God, she can sing. That’s another Aretha Franklin.”
Stanley went on to reminisce about the day “Uncle Billy,” the family’s name for Joseph William Frazier, purchased the plantation. He also explained how the family wound up coming along.
“Joe got the place and he went home and told his mama,” said Stanley, recalling his uncle’s exact words. “He said, ‘Mama, I went and got a plantation for ya.’ We were only about 25 miles away. But she didn’t want to get away from her friends, relatives, everybody we knew in that area. So why not go along with her. The place is 366 acres.”
Dolly had raised her enormous brood of kids in a shack built by her husband and the older children. It was in the poor, black Laurel Bay section of Beaufort. The Brewton Plantation, bought by her youngest surviving son in 1971, was located in Yemassee, another part of Beaufort County. The property dated back to the early 1700s and was owned by a number of prominent, southern white families over the years. According to SouthCarolinaPlantations.com, there were as many as 95 slaves kept on the property in 1834.
Joe reportedly purchased the plantation “sight unseen” and discovered it to be in particularly poor shape. According to the website, Joe invested a lot of money on the repairs and did a good deal of the work himself. He purposely broke tradition by not placing the plantation sign at the entrance. The heavyweight champ hung a pair of boxing gloves instead.
Stanley offered a description of the property and its current residents. He made it clear that Uncle Billy didn’t necessarily save the best accommodations for himself.
“The big house has two bedrooms that can fit this whole club in each,” he said. “And you can’t say Joe has the master bedroom because the girls’ room is just as big. My house has four bedrooms and the guest house has three. On the plantation is my mother and her kids, my aunt Julia and her kids. My grandmother and my oldest uncle live in the big house.”
Despite the size and grandeur of the property, Stanley made it clear that he and the other Fraziers hadn’t lost the family’s age-old work ethic. This was a working plantation, and everyone preferred it that way.
“We raise cattle, hogs, chickens, goats, and I grow corn, grain for the cattle, and pickles for the Vlasic Pickle Company,” said Stanley. “I also build houses on the side. Joe knows that I’ll stick with the hard work all day long.”
Farm life and hard labor were obviously major parts of Joe’s early years in rural South Carolina as well. But he also had to deal with the special dangers of growing up in the final throes of the Jim Crow South. He was young, tough, assertive, and black. Not the safest of combinations back then before the civil rights movement and efforts to overcome hard-core segregation.
Ken Singleton grew up with Joe Frazier. In a Beaufort Gazette article published after Joe’s death, he remembered the kid everyone called “Billy Boy” as a truly “bad dude” in a brawl. He said the young teen would fight with marines and locals in juke joints, usually with racist remarks as the cause. Yet he was generally kind to other kids at school. He prided himself on protecting the weaker kids from the bullies—of course, sometimes for a nominal fee.
An Associated Press piece, also on Beaufort’s farewell to Joe, noted that Billy Boy was unfairly expelled from school in the ninth grade for brawling with a white student. The white boy had called his mother Dolly hateful names. In the Jim Crow South, black boys were not supposed to respond to white taunts.
In the long run, it was a combination of the racist environment, limited financial opportunities, and the underlying threat of retaliation from the white community that would convince Frazier he had no future in Beaufort. Billy Boy had always worked hard with his father on the family’s 10-acre farm. But the soil was poor and yielded a limited array of crops, a meager income. So Joe, like his mother and father, also had to put in long hours on the farms of prosperous white families to survive. Frazier often pointed to a particular incident on one of these local farms that finally forced him to make a move.
Young Joe had been working for a number of trouble-free years on the Bellamy family farm, according to his 1996 autobiography. Mac and Jim Bellamy treated him okay—“as okay as a black man was treated in those times.” But the wages were poor—as for all other black workers—and Joe admittedly didn’t expect much consideration from either man. One day a young black boy accidentally messed up a tractor, and Jim Bellamy supposedly whipped him with his belt right there in the fields. Joe went back to the packinghouse and told the other black workers about the beating.
Jim Bellamy was furious at Joe for running his mouth and threatened to whip him with his belt if he didn’t get off his place. Joe let him know, in no uncertain terms, that he was not going to use that belt on him. That supposedly made Bellamy even more furious.
When Joe’s mother heard about the incident, she made his options clear. “Son, if you can’t get along with the white folks, then leave home because I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
In 1959, after months of working odd jobs to make traveling money, Billy Boy left Beaufort and headed north to New York. He planned to live with his older brother Tommy and his wife in Harlem. He was just 15, with no source of income, and had a pregnant girlfriend he planned to leave behind. Joe promised Florence to send for her, and the not-yet-born child, when he could.
That didn’t happen until quite a bit later—when Joe had moved on to Philadelphia, the beginnings of a fascination with boxing, and a job at a kosher slaughterhouse.
The members of the Smokin’ Joe Frazier Revue were staying at a rather drab Augusta motel. It certainly was not the kind of fancy hotel suitable for a sports celebrity. The entrance opened directly onto a four-lane highway about 15 feet away. The trucks and cars that whizzed by all day and night sounded as if they were passing right through the rooms. The billboard out front read: “Low Weekend Rates. Welcome Joe Frazier.”
The Indian family who owned the place made sure that their honored guest and his manager had gotten rooms in the “redone” area. The band and roadies stayed in the less desirable “unretouched” rooms. The small pool offered water with a slight brackish color that discouraged jumping in. Neither Joe nor his employees complained about the accommodations. Nobody expected Resorts International–type digs for a mixed-race troupe in Augusta circa 1980.
It was late in the afternoon on Monday, March 17, when Joe finally emerged from his room. He was still with one of the women he had met at the American Legion post the night before. They had survived the day on fast food delivered by Youngblood. Joe stood for a while on a grass field near the motel watching me and some of the guys in the band throw around a football, then a Frisbee. As usual, Joe was friendly and relaxed but didn’t join in on the sports activities.
Once the woman took off, I reminded Joe of our initial plan to do at least one formal interview a day while on the road. He nodded, and we settled in on the terrace of his room for a freewheeling conversation. Joe began by talking about how hard he had to work to fit into his tight outfits onstage.
“If I don’t watch what I eat, do roadwork, and train in the gym, I’m going to get fat,” he said, standing to show me how thin he supposedly looked. “I know, after doing two shows at night, I have to get out there and run my couple of miles. I psyche myself. Training ties the past to what I’m doing now.”
I suggested the roadwork might also help to get him ready for a comeback sometime soon. He let that go and moved on to the difficulties of balancing his commitment to Marvis, the gym, performing with the band, and his other businesses. He saw the need to be more selective in the future about the gigs he took—and to make an effort to work closer at home. He implied how hard it was to make everyone happy.
That led to Youngblood’s favorite topic—the leeches in the boxing world. He despised all those characters who tried to hang on to a champ’s entourage without earning their keep. Joe laughed and said he knew that was common in show business too.
“I don’t know about Frank [Sinatra] or Ali, but people around me have to work for their money,” he said. “Everybody has a real job—no free rides. A lot of people depend on me for jobs. . . . I feel I owe them something. I have a responsibility to keep working and making money so they can keep making money.”
What about all the people expecting a handout from the rich boxing champ?
“People who know my background, know I value money,” said Joe, reminding me of the hard times as a kid in Beaufort. “When people put the pinch on me, I don’t give them nothing but tombstone. You got to be dead to get one of those. No supporting the I-don’t-work guys.”
Joe quickly added that wasn’t always the case. He said, when he was younger, he gave money to everyone who asked—even Muhammad Ali.
“I was trying to support the world,” he said. “Now that I’m a senior citizen, I can handle the people trying to put the bite on me and separate them from the ones who really need some help.”
It had been cloudy and drizzly most of the day. But just as we were finishing up the interview, the sun suddenly broke through. The sunshine, and Joe’s cheery disposition, encouraged me to ask one final, really foolish question.
I wanted to know what it was like to be in the ring with a heavyweight champion. Joe looked around and saw that the rectangular terrace was only a little smaller than a standard boxing ring. He suddenly hunkered down into his Smokin’ Joe crouch, bobbed up and down, and peered at me through his clenched fists. From two feet away his shoulders looked massive.
“Put up your fists,” he ordered. “Throw some punches.”
I was 5ʹ10ʺ and 180 pounds with a goofy, college boxing class for experience. I froze at first and then nervously flicked out an open-handed jab. Joe didn’t move, but I backed up and attempted to dance away just the same. He then took two lightning-quick lateral steps while somehow moving forward to cut off the ring. I wound up in the corner of the terrace with a fist the size of my head winging toward my face.
Joe mercifully pulled back the punch at the last second—an inch from my nose. I know if that fist had landed at full force, it would have caused some serious damage.
That evening the Smokin’ Joe Frazier Revue began a midweek engagement at a nightclub in a notoriously rough, black section of Augusta. It boasted a multicolored façade with glass doors that made it look like the entrance to a psychedelic supermarket. We arrived in the midst of a torrential downpour.
Pasted to one door was a cluster of newspaper clippings on Joe’s entertainment career. One in particular, from the October 23, 1979, edition of theNashville Banner, caught my eye. It was titled “Smokin’ Joe Lands Big Punch in Heavyweight Show Biz Act.” At the top, there was a photo of Joe, in a white-studded boxing robe, singing joyously into a microphone. The article actually compared his sound onstage to Marvin Gaye and the lead singer of the Commodores.
In the piece, Kenny claimed Joe did about 200 dates a year. He said, “If I let him, he’d play somewhere every night.”
Joe called music his “first love” and talked about the role it played in the early days in Beaufort. “I used to sing in the church with my mama and in the cotton fields with my daddy,” he said.
A red sign nearby on the glass door, apparently in crayon, announced: “By Popular Demand Smokin’ Joe—Monday thru Thursday Nites.” The other door displayed posters of previous acts to have graced the club’s stage. These were mostly gospel groups like Napoleon Brown and the Bell Jubilees, the Pilgrimaires, and Reverend Squeaky Morgan and the Harrison Gospel Singers.
Just inside there was a bar, jukebox, and a dance floor enclosed in iron railings. The football-field-long main room stretched out beyond that and offered the same kind of simple tables and metal bridge chairs found at the American Legion—except this room had an ample stage and seating for well over 500. Unfortunately, as the time for the 11:00 p.m. show neared, only about 25 patrons had braved the foul weather.
Joe, visibly upset at first by the turnout, threatened to cancel. After a meeting with the apologetic owner, he finally relented and prepared to go on. In fact, he eventually refused to take money for the performance in an essentially empty room. Joe often showed a touching sense of generosity in such situations.
Kenny, for his part, was furious. Yet he agreed to do one more night before blowing out the rest of the booking. It was his job to protect Joe’s interests and look for something better.
At the last minute, a few more people arrived and Joe began to relax a bit. The late arrivals surprisingly included a very prominent local businessman. He was the only white paying customer in the place. This small-town mogul owned a formidable automobile sales company, and Joe was scheduled to appear at his main dealership that coming Wednesday. Ads for the engagement had been flooding the Augusta airwaves since the moment I landed.
The mogul wound up getting pretty drunk during the performance and began to draw more attention at times than the headliner. Joe took the whole thing in stride and even introduced the businessman from the audience.
“Without the next man, you couldn’t make it to work,” said Joe. “You couldn’t even get to buy food.”
The tipsy white mogul responded by standing and giving Joe a clenched-fist, black-power salute. He repeated the surprising gesture several more times. He also bickered later with some people in the audience he saw as rude to the ex-champ. The mogul only escaped retribution because Joe stepped in, took him to the dressing room, and later arranged for someone to drive him home.
Despite the heavy rain, Joe and Youngblood got ready to jog a couple of miles on the way back to the motel. Joe was wearing a sweatshirt, gray knit pants, and green patent leather shoes with high heels. He saw no problem in running in that kind of footwear.
Just as we were ready to leave, the singer James Brown walked in to visit his old friend Joe Frazier. Sure, why not? The day was already totally surreal. Brown agreed to meet Joe at his motel room later on.
Joe and Blood, as promised, still did the run. They methodically sloshed along in front of Big Red most of the way back. As they ran along, the band sped by in the equipment van and splashed both of them. The boys in the van yelled and screamed out the open windows. Joe shook his fist, managed a smile, and just kept running.
About an hour later, after Joe changed, I found myself in Frazier’s modest motel room with a drink in my hand. I was—wait for it—talking music and boxing with the Godfather of Soul and Smokin’ Joe. The two discussed what Joe needed to learn to produce his own records. Brown said he would gladly help Joe move up in the music business and even raised the prospect of doing a record together. He suggested Joe might be part of a tour called James Brown and Friends.
Joe kept pushing his friend for hands-on lessons in studio production, but Brown seemed more intent on talking boxing. He wanted to know, like everyone else, what Ali was going to do with his comeback. Joe shrugged and responded instead to Brown’s request to get up and do a little sparring with him. The two squared off, poked out playfully at each other, and seemed as giddy as a couple of kids.
Frazier eventually got Brown to take an impromptu trip to his music studio out in the woods. In a matter of minutes, a small posse came together and piled into Big Red. The rustic music studio had platinum and gold records mounted all over. The singer started off giving Joe his production tutorial, but the conversation soon shifted to Brown’s stories of his amateur boxing career from younger days. He obviously missed being in the ring. He even suggested that he and Joe should consider changing roles for a while.
“If Joe comes into music, maybe I’ll go back and do some fighting,” said Brown.
From there, the two discussed difficulties on the road, running businesses on the fly, and the roles of their sons in the family business. Then Brown wanted to know if Joe’s white boys could jam like his black band.
Despite not getting to bed until well after 3:00 a.m. on Tuesday, Joe was up five hours later for a 9:00 a.m. interview at a remote radio station on the outskirts of Augusta. WRDW, owned by James Brown, stood in the middle of an open field down a very muddy dirt road. It had suddenly become the only black media organization on Joe’s schedule.
We were greeted by the on-air interviewer Tara Haskins. She was a lithe, highly attractive black woman who seemed intent on asking Joe some serious questions despite his bantering and friendly flirting. She led off with wanting to know how the ex-champ got his Smokin’ Joe handle.
“The name came from Yank Durham telling me to go out and smoke for a round,” said Joe. He remembered getting so lathered up that he didn’t have time to cool down between rounds. He said he’d still been smokin’ when the next round began.
Haskins then asked Joe which boxers he idolized. Joe immediately offered Joe Louis, former welterweight champion Kid Gavilan, and Sugar Ray Robinson.
So far, so good. The question that got the interviewer in trouble had to do with how young men and women could get started in boxing.
“Women are not made to get in the ring,” responded Joe, with a shake of the head. “Women shouldn’t be fightin’ or carrying no weapons. A woman belongs in the kitchen so she can give her man a kiss and make him some supper after a hard day’s work. She should greet him with a sweet smile and say how glad she is that he’s home.”
Haskins made a face and openly cringed. She said, “We won’t deal with that.”
I cringed at first too. But then I caught the twinkle in Joe’s eye. It made me wonder if we had been played. Don’t forget that Joe’s daughter Jacqui, like Ali’s daughter, went on to become a very good professional boxer.