When last we checked, Joe Frazier had finished 1966 with that big come-from-behind win over Oscar Bonavena and a clean 12–0 record. He headed into 1967 a more disciplined, dangerous boxer than ever before. Yank Durham still constantly barked instructions in the corner, but his fighter had finally learned to listen.
In the new year, Frazier came out busier and more focused in the earlier rounds. He stayed consistently more active in the middles rounds too and began to efficiently dispatch opponents at a furious rate. The young bear of a boxer also learned to bob, weave, and feint his way through the defenses of taller fighters under the tutelage of assistant trainer Eddie Futch. This made the Smokin’ Joe crouch a much more effective stance.
From November 1966 to December 1967, Frazier chalked up seven straight victories against top contenders or wily veterans. Maybe more impressive was the fact that all but one of these triumphs came via knockouts. These respected fighters were falling like tenpins, and Joe threw one strike after another.
The first to go down was Eddie Machen, at 50–8–3, who lasted 22 seconds into round 10 before calling it quits. Two months later, Doug Jones survived only through 2:28 of the sixth before hitting the canvas. He had narrowly lost an earlier decision to Muhammad Ali and seemed confident at first. He likely didn’t fully appreciate Joe’s power until it was too late.
In April 1967, Frazier took a working vacation in Miami Beach to fight the lean, 6ʹ4ʺ, 205-pound journeyman Jefferson Davis. At 29–11–1, Davis figured to have the experience and size—if not the heft—to give the kid from Philly some trouble. However, Joe no longer had the luxury of sneaking up on opponents with his power. He was now ranked third by the WBA and fourth in The Ring magazine standings.
According to an AP report on the fight, Frazier stayed on top of Davis from the start and often had him up against the ropes. He repeatedly scored with left hooks to both the body and the head. In the fifth round, Frazier unleashed a torrent of left hooks right from the bell. He had Davis down twice before the referee put a halt to the assault at 48 seconds into the round. The beating must have made an impression because Davis, only 26 years old, never fought again.
Three weeks later, Frazier ran into a surprisingly resilient George “Scrap Iron” Johnson. From Johnson’s performance, it would seem the metal resided more in his chin than his hands. Scrap Iron stayed upright for all 10 rounds before losing a one-sided unanimous decision. The Ring magazine found out that Johnson had a special motivation for avoiding the knockout. He had brazenly bet his whole paycheck that he would make it to the final bell.
Frazier’s next victim was the popular Canadian champion George Chuvalo. He came out swinging and beat the heck out of Chuvalo for three solid rounds. Somehow the Canuck managed to stay on his feet throughout the onslaught. But the referee mercifully ended the contest just 16 seconds into round four. Chuvalo didn’t seem to appreciate the kindness.
It turned out Frazier was the first fighter to stop Chuvalo, despite all the great heavyweights who had tried. In fact, Chuvalo had become the first man to go 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali in a title bout the previous year. Although Ali had denigrated the Canadian before the match, he lauded him as his toughest opponent to date afterward. Chuvalo’s pride was not soothed by Ali’s belated compliments.
“When it was over, Ali was the guy who went to the hospital pissing blood,” said Chuvalo in a later Irish Times piece. “Me? I went dancing with my wife. No question I got the best of the deal.”
By the way, no one in George Chuvalo’s long career ever knocked him down—not Ali, Foreman, Patterson, Ellis, or Smokin’ Joe.
Frazier’s two-round demolition of Tony Doyle in October 1967—the Irishman who had supposedly defeated him as an amateur—has already been chronicled here. That left the muscular Marion Connor as his final opponent of the year. Although he weighed just 180 pounds, Connor had a 30–4 record and the reputation as a hard hitter for a light heavyweight.
Fighting near home in the Boston Garden, Connor took to the offensive from the opening bell. Frazier, momentarily reverting to earlier form, started slowly and likely lost round one. Joe finally turned up the pressure in the second round and weakened Connor with body shots. Sensing it was time for the kill, he went for the knockout in the third.
Marion Connor relived the moment Joe turned out the lights 24 years later for a hometown publication.
“He threw a punch and he missed and went around with the same hand and—Bam!” said Connor, forming a circle with his left hand. “They told me to watch out for his left hand, but they never told me he’d do that.”
The powerful roundhouse dropped Connor on the spot, and the referee stopped the fight after 1:40 of the third.
Frazier emerged from his yearlong rampage with a spotless 19–0 record. He was now feared for his knockout power and those punishing body shots. He was also the number-one contender in the heavyweight ranks.
Joe Frazier appeared to be entering his professional boxing prime. Yank Durham and the Cloverlay team decided it was time to seek out the absolute best competition and look for a title shot.
Florence Frazier had once told me what it was like to be married to Joe after his 1967 run. She had described her life as the wife of an elite heavyweight boxer. In truth, it didn’t sound all that glamorous. From her perspective, Joe’s success wasn’t always such a good thing.
Florence had said she liked it better in the early days of her husband’s career. She had liked it when Joe would “knock guys out” in the first few rounds.
“When the bigger money came, Joe took more punishment and the fights became harder for me to watch,” Flo had said, fingers pressed below her lower lip. “If he fought in New York, I would go. But I would stay in the hotel until the fight was over rather than watch. I would wait and listen to the report on television.”
That made me wonder exactly when the fights had gotten too rough, too physically abusive for Florence to attend. What fight had represented the tipping point?
“I used to watch the fights live until he fought Bonavena [for the second time] in Philadelphia,” Flo had replied, while attending one of her son’s AAU matches in 1980. “I also went later on to the first and third Ali fights. During the Ali fights I got in the habit of covering my eyes.”
Smokin’ Joe’s professional prime pretty much coincided with an era in heavyweight boxing I call “the Ali wars.” This period began in 1967 when Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight championships and banished from boxing for refusing the draft. The furor over who got to fight for Ali’s crowns, and eventually fill his shoes, sparked the first war. That initial conflict raged on for more than three years—both in and out of the ring.
The second Ali war started once the Greatest was allowed to return to boxing to pursue his lost titles. It began in earnest with the Fight of the Century and thundered through the devastation of the the Thrilla in Manila in 1975. These wars brought on the golden age of heavyweight boxing that featured the likes of Ali, Frazier, and Foreman at first and endured through the 1980s with champions like Holmes and Tyson. These warriors became the measuring stick for all heavyweights to follow and forever changed the landscape of the sport.
Muhammad Ali’s last fight before his banishment came on March 27, 1967. At just 25 years old, he was already a global phenomenon. He had been ordered to report for induction into the army a week before the match and refused.
Ali fought Zora Folley, 11 years his senior, at Madison Square Garden. Folley, at 74–7–4, came in as The Ring magazine’s number-one contender. This was his first championship fight and a reward for taking on the best heavyweights since the 1950s. After the fight, Folley claimed there was no one better than Ali.
“I should know,” he had said. “I’ve fought them all.”
Ali scored a seventh-round knockout on the strength of two short rights. It was a stunning turn after what seemed like a lackluster fight in several of the earlier rounds. The first right was so quick, and hard to see, some likened it to the phantom punch that had put away Sonny Liston in 1964. The victory allowed Ali to briefly retain his WBA, WBC, The Ring, and lineal titles.
Once Ali’s titles were taken away, the WBA decided to hold a heavyweight elimination tournament to determine its next champion. The eight top-ranked fighters, including number-one Joe Frazier, received an invitation to battle it out for the crown. The anemic monetary rewards called for escalating purses that maxed out at only $175,000 for the finalists. A decidedly bigger problem was that the tournament promoter got to keep the ancillary rights to the winner’s fights for two years.
Yank Durham and the Cloverlay group opted to blow off the WBA tournament. Frazier’s management team naturally cited low prize money and the demand for ancillary rights as the reason for balking. In truth, they preferred to see the lower-ranked contenders knock each other off en route to crowning a best-of-the-rest winner. They figured this would set the scene for the only big-money fight available now that Ali was gone—Joe Frazier versus the survivor champion.
The WBA was enraged by Frazier’s refusal to take part in the tournament. It retaliated by dropping him to ninth in the rankings. This made his rejection of the elimination event a moot point in the WBA’s eyes. The snub didn’t work and soon backfired on the organization.
The New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) stepped in to make Frazier their top contender. The plan was to have him fight a heavyweight championship match of their own. When Joe heard the name of his opponent, he was hooked. What more could he want than a shot at his first heavyweight belt and a long-awaited chance for revenge?
On March 4, 1968, an undefeated Joe Frazier took on the 23–0 Buster Mathis for the NYSAC title. The combatants were lured into the match by a chance to win a piece of the world heavyweight crown. It also gave them the opportunity to be the first to fight in the just opened, third incarnation of Madison Square Garden. For Frazier, the specter of battering the man who had beaten him twice as an amateur—including at the Olympic Trials—was simply sweet icing on the cake.
The winner of the match would be recognized as the heavyweight champ by New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Illinois, Maine, and Massachusetts. The prize, and matchup, was momentous enough to draw a then indoor-record crowd for boxing of more than 18,000 fans. The $658,503 in gate receipts was also an indoor record at the time. And the bout was aired via closed-circuit television in 70 cities.
Unfortunately, the excitement of the event inside the Garden was drowned out somewhat by the hundreds of protesters shouting slogans outside. Black power groups had organized demonstrations in support of a wildly popular political martyr known as the Greatest. They were joined by a large contingent of young white protesters who also idolized the exiled champ. All the boxing fans and members of the media had to wade through the throng to get in.
“There is no champion but Muhammad Ali,” chanted the demonstrators, the message coming through loud and clear.
With the shadow of Ali looming over the arena, Joe became the aggressor right from the opening bell. He chased the 243-pound Mathis, the heaviest opponent of his pro career, through the first six rounds but had little to show for it. A game Mathis held his own in the exchanges, and the fight remained fairly even.
In the seventh round, Frazier began to step up the ferocity of his body shots. The blows came quicker, harder, and dug more deeply into the flesh around the big man’s midsection. Despite a slip that momentarily swept Frazier off his feet, the pace of his attack never waned. The Philly fighter just kept chopping away.
By round 11, the agile giant had slowed dramatically under the pressure of the nonstop punches. He was also bleeding profusely from the nose onto his white shorts. Finally, in the closing minute, Frazier connected with a short, crushing left hook that sent Mathis sprawling across the bottom strand of the ropes. Somehow, he managed to swim through a fog to his feet by the count of nine. But the referee just stopped the beating there.
After the fight, Mathis was asked where the opening came for the thunderous final punch. He struggled with the answer, visibly shaken by the loss. Tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke.
“I pulled back,” said Mathis, as reported in the Pittsburgh Press. “If you pull back, you get hit. I pulled back.”
It was Joe Frazier’s first professional championship. It was also the first time Mathis had been knocked down in his career. Frazier and his team were elated in the dressing room. They itched to celebrate the title, the culmination of Joe’s boyhood dream. However, that joy was soon tempered by the questions from the media.
The members of the press pretty much took on the attitude of the demonstrators outside the Garden. They questioned whether there could be a true heavyweight champion other than Ali. They wanted to know if Joe felt like the champ with the presence of the undefeated Ali hovering over the arena—and all of the heavyweight division.
Joe didn’t respond right away. He seemed at a loss for an answer.
“What do you think?” he finally asked, according to that same Pittsburgh Press piece. “What did it look like to you?”
Joe had no more to add. He looked over to Yank Durham for help.
“I’m running out of words, man,” he said, deflated by the exchange.
Frazier realized now that banishing Ali from the fight game did not mean he was gone. The Greatest would be the third competitor in the ring for all of Smokin’ Joe’s title bouts.
Joe Frazier’s first title defense was set for June, just three months after defeating Mathis. His management team had scheduled the 6ʹ4ʺ Mexican champion Manuel Ramos at MSG. Frazier took his piece of the world heavyweight title seriously and hit training camp in New York’s Catskill Mountains with a vengeance. He wanted to be seen as a dominant champion in the Ali mode.
Morty Holtzer, in reminiscing about how fierce Joe had been back then, talked about an interesting problem that arose in that camp. He said the trainers had a terrible time finding willing sparring partners for Joe. Holtzer offered a little anecdote to prove his point.
“One big heavyweight, Roosevelt something, weighed 230 or so, came up to the Concord [Hotel camp] before the Ramos fight,” said Morty, warming to his tale. “He walked into the gym and saw Joe hammering the hell out of one of the other sparring partners. I told him to go and change. He said, ‘I’m not even going to get undressed.’ I asked if he was going to at least stay and have his meal, get carfare home. He said, ‘I don’t even want to wait for that. I’m going home. I’m not gonna get killed here.’”
Frazier brought that same ferocity to the fight with Ramos. He knew the Mexican was on a 13-match winning streak against mostly top competition and wanted to set the tone early. Joe came out throwing hard from the start. However, in his haste to dominate, he got careless. Ramos staggered him in the first round with a vicious right uppercut.
The 24-year-old Frazier survived the punch and first round on instinct and superior conditioning. He showed his resilience in the second by shaking off the damage done and going on the offensive. He knocked Ramos down twice in the round. After the second trip to the canvas, the challenger struggled to his feet before signaling to the referee that he couldn’t go on.
The Frazier camp finished 1968 with an absolutely brutal second match against Oscar Bonavena at the Philadelphia Spectrum. Fight film, articles, and an old conversation with Holtzer made it clear why Florence shied away from watching Joe’s matches live after this one. The results were gruesome for both the winner and loser. Joe legitimately beat the heck out of Bonavena, but the Argentine found less than legal ways to do terrible damage as well.
Frazier’s 15-round NYSAC title defense on December 10 went the distance with the Philly fighter winning a deservedly lopsided decision. He pummeled his opponent nonstop throughout the contest. Bonavena, renowned for his granite chin, never hit the canvas, but his face and body served as a graphic testament to Frazier’s punching power. Joe opened nasty cuts atop both of Oscar’s eyes and across the bridge of his nose. And there were raised bruises on his face and body.
Bonavena fought more of a defensive fight—constantly holding back in a peekaboo stance looking for that one knockout shot. As Frazier pressured him along the ropes, Bonavena repeatedly tried to back him off with low blows. The Argentine was warned about hitting below the belt in the third, eighth, 10th, and 12th rounds. Things got so bad that the referee had to penalize the cheap-shot artist by taking away the eighth round.
Marvis Frazier had told me about attending this fight in our initial interview. He had said he was eight years old and realized for the first time that his dad was a “big-time” fighter.
“There was mass confusion,” Marvis had recalled. “I really didn’t know what was going on. I just realized that everybody was yelling for my father—so, I was yelling for him too. After the fight, I went back with him to the dressing room and there were reporters and fans all around him.”
Morty Holtzer, who had worked Joe’s corner that night, had given me a much more graphic, emotional depiction of the dressing room scene after the fight. It was a situation any eight-year-old might want to forget.
“Bonavena had hit Joe with 16 or 17 blows beneath the belt,” Morty had told me. “We came back to the dressing room after the fight and Joe’s balls had blown up terribly. Marvis stood there petting his father’s head, kissing him, asking him, ‘What can I do?’ I started to cry.”
Frazier’s next NYSAC title defense was against an unknown, unranked, and undefeated Dave Zyglewicz. It took place in the challenger’s Houston, Texas, hometown on April 22, 1969. The former Navy Atlantic Fleet champion barely qualified as a heavyweight at 190 pounds. Yet he still boasted 28 wins albeit against mediocre competition.
Zyglewicz had initially been scheduled to fight for the WBA heavyweight crown instead. But reigning champ Jimmy Ellis decided to back out. According to an AP piece, one of Ellis’s sparring partners warned him that officials in Texas wouldn’t let him win.
The sparring partner had reminded Ellis that everyone associated with the fight down there would be white—except the champ. “You think you’re going to knock that boxer out?” Ellis’s friend had said. “If you knock him out, they will disqualify you.”
Frazier took that challenge and proved Ellis’s sparring partner wrong. He came out throwing and soon caught the Texan with a sharp left hook that put him down for an eight-count. Moments later, Zyglewicz was doubled over with a right and a left hook that put him back on the canvas. The match ended in 1:36 of the first round.
“I never felt nobody hit as hard,” said Zyglewicz, in the AP postfight report. “He’s real fast. I never saw the knockout punch coming.”
The bout was not only Zyglewicz’s first loss, but also the first time he had been knocked down.
After Joe Frazier danced his Texas two-step on Zyglewicz, he dramatically stepped up the level of the competition two months later. His fourth NYSAC title defense was against the highly ranked, big-fight tested, “Irish” Jerry Quarry. The durable Quarry brought a rock-solid 31–2–4 record to his Madison Square Garden match with Frazier.
Quarry was fresh off a gut-busting, unanimous 12-round decision over Buster Mathis. In that fight, he had Mathis down in the second round and had hurt him continuously with jarring body shots. Quarry had also dropped Floyd Patterson twice on the way to a mixed-decision win in their WBA elimination tournament bout. And he had barely lost another mixed decision to Jimmy Ellis in the tournament finals for the vacant WBA World Heavyweight Championship.
The ruggedly handsome Quarry was not only formidable in the ring, but also wildly popular with fans. In fact, he had later been named by The Ring magazine as the most popular fighter in boxing from 1968 to 1971. The honor had likely been tied to a combination of Ali’s banishment, Quarry’s string of TV and movie acting credits, and the big-time bouts he had fought in those years. Quarry’s popularity served to undercut much of the crowd support that Joe usually enjoyed in New York City.
The bout began with the kind of heated, toe-to-toe action usually reserved for the last moments of a tight battle when the outcome is on the line. Both fighters kept punching away in the first round, neither giving ground, but Quarry connected more and did greater damage. Quarry relied on superior hand speed, combinations, and his ability to counterpunch. Joe kept on the attack all through the round and connected with a few heftier blows.
The Ring, in a recent 50th anniversary article commemorating the fight, analyzed why Frazier “took a shellacking” in that first round. The piece noted that Frazier’s bob-and-weave motion usually took time “to synchronize with incoming assaults.” It surmised the Philly fighter didn’t mind falling behind early on scorecards because once he had his timing down “hell would be unleashed.” The Ring was impressed enough with both Quarry’s and Frazier’s initial efforts in the fight to dub round one as the “Round of the Decade.”
Frazier settled into a better offensive rhythm in the second round and continued to keep the pressure on. He worked in close with both hands and refused to give Quarry much punching room, according to an AP report the next day. Quarry, for his part, stayed active in those early rounds. He was hoping to catch Frazier with one big blow before fatigue set in.
The fight turned more decisively in Frazier’s favor early in the fourth round. That was when he opened a nasty cut around Quarry’s right eye. By the end of the round, there was also a puffy mouse under the eye that bled heavily. Quarry pleaded with the doctor not to stop the fight between rounds. Despite’s Quarry’s reputation as a bleeder, the doctor let him continue.
Frazier swarmed all over Quarry after that—sensing the end was near. Quarry’s eye swelled almost shut in the fifth round and took a number of direct hits in the sixth and seventh. Joe pecked away with flurries of accurate jabs and threw in a mix of hooks and quick uppercuts. Quarry fought back valiantly all through those rounds but couldn’t mount a substantial attack while trying to protect the eye.
Referee Arthur Mercante finally stopped the fight between the seventh and eighth rounds on the doctor’s orders. Joe, comfortably ahead on all three scorecards, was officially awarded a seventh-round TKO. Quarry didn’t argue the doctor’s decision, but he openly wept. Even though the match lasted nowhere near the scheduled 15 rounds, The Ring named it its “1969 Fight of the Year.”
Joe Frazier’s next fight, a unification match against WBA champion Jimmy Ellis, was truly years in the making. Frazier had to first overcome a reluctant opponent, and a public that refused to accept Ali was gone, while defeating one strong challenger after another. It took an amazing confluence of political pressure, dedication, and persuasion to finally bring a true World Heavyweight Championship fight to fruition.
After winning the WBA tournament for Ali’s vacant title in April 1968, Ellis barely beat Floyd Patterson on points that September. Ellis had sustained a broken nose in the first round of that fight, and he took time off to heal afterward. Proposals for title defenses against British champ Henry Cooper and Argentine Gregorio Peralta fell apart over the next several months. And Ellis seemed to consciously avoid taking on Frazier despite his NYSAC crown and string of impressive title defenses.
The public, and boxing governing bodies, began to clamor for a Frazier-Ellis match. Frazier was now 24–0, with 21 knockouts, and seemed a worthwhile successor to the Greatest. When the NYSAC aligned with the WBC, the pressure for a possible undisputed heavyweight title fight soared. The final component for legitimizing the unification bout fell into place when Ali was persuaded to issue a retirement statement. This convinced Nat Fleischer, founder of The Ring magazine, to declare the winner his champion as well.
Frazier and Ellis finally met on February 16, 1970, at Madison Square Garden. It had been eight months since Joe had stopped Quarry. Ellis had been out of the ring for nearly a year and a half. Joe outweighed a purposely bulked-up opponent by several pounds and came in as the odds-on favorite to win. But boxing experts had to acknowledge Ellis’s speed and lethal right hand. After all, Ellis had knocked Oscar Bonavena down twice with the right and Joe had never come close to putting him on the canvas.
Ellis was managed by Angelo Dundee, who suddenly had a lot more time on his hands with Ali out of the picture. Dundee stirred things up before the bout by saying he wouldn’t be surprised if Ellis won by a knockout.
“I’ll come out smokin’,” Frazier had replied, with a knockout threat of his own.
In the first round, Ellis kept on the move but managed to stop and plant in regular intervals. As a result, he found the distance and power base needed to get off solid combinations. Several of these punches made contact as Frazier predictably charged in. Ellis took round one on most scorecards.
By the middle of the second round, Frazier went into full smokin’ mode and pressured Ellis with nonstop left hooks, looping rights, and occasional jabs. He gave Ellis absolutely no punching room or time to catch his breath. Frazier remained at his swarming, body-wrecking best in the third. Ellis wore down in a hurry and never seemed to hurt Frazier, who talked and laughed at times after an exchange.
Frazier turned dead serious in the fourth and put Ellis down twice in the round. The first knockdown came two minutes into the round on a powerful left hook. The second one was just before the bell on another left hook to the jaw. Ellis made it to his feet at the count of nine after the bell. But Dundee decided to throw in the towel before the fifth round began.
After the fight, someone asked Ellis when he had picked up the count.
“At five,” Jimmy replied, according to an AP story the next day.
“Both times?” another reporter asked.
“I only went down once,” said Ellis, quite seriously.
That was when Ellis’s manager broke into the conversation.
“Gentlemen, now you know why I stopped the fight,” he said.
Dundee was later asked what he thought of Frazier now—in light of the way he won. People wanted to know if Ali’s manager thought Joe deserved to be the champ.
“Joe Frazier tonight would have licked anybody in front of him,” said Dundee, in another AP article. “Tonight, he was great.”
Frazier was asked what was next for him. With Muhammad Ali gone, there really wasn’t much left to accomplish. He had just won the undisputed World Heavyweight Championship. Frazier had retained the NYSAC crown and won the WBA and WBC belts and The Ring title. All the championships that had once belonged to the Greatest had been taken by the 26-year-old from Philadelphia.
“Now I’m gonna retire,” said Frazier, riffing on the Ali announcement. “I am going to sing rock and roll until that fellow [Muhammad Ali] who wanted to give me a belt [from The Ring magazine] wants to fight me.”
If the Fight of the Century was Smokin’ Joe’s greatest victory, the four-round dismantling of Ellis likely ranked a close second.
Joe Frazier’s joke about retiring until he could fight Muhammad Ali almost became a reality. He only defended his World Heavyweight Championship once before meeting Ali in their much-anticipated first match.
On November 18, 1970, nine months after taking out Ellis, Frazier stepped into the ring at the Cobo Arena in Detroit against an overmatched Bob Foster. The light heavyweight champ weighed just 188 pounds to Frazier’s rock-hard 209. Joe was the prohibitive favorite to win the match. This might have explained the tiny crowd at Cobo willing to pay big bucks for watching live.
The closed-circuit business for the fight was much more impressive. In fact, the closed-circuit TV showing at Madison Square Garden, combined with a live George Foreman–Boone Kirkham match, drew more than 18,000 paying customers. Those New York–Philadelphia Frazier fans were not disappointed.
Frazier was on a bit of a mission. Foster had made the mistake of calling Joe a “dumb” fighter several times during the weeks leading up to the bout. Joe heard the remarks and fumed in silence.
In the first round, Joe tried for a more cerebral approach. He didn’t throw too many punches. Instead, he seemed content to just move and box with Foster—to gauge the flow of his attack. Maybe Joe thought it made him look like he was thinking his way through the round.
In the second round, Frazier stopped overthinking his approach and concentrated on getting some revenge. He countered a Foster jab with a powerful hook to the chin. Foster went down for a nine-count before shakily rising to his feet. Joe pounced with a vicious hook to the body and another to the head. Foster went down and out—just 49 seconds into the round.
Joe’s opponent looked dazed enough to worry even Yank Durham. The trainer ran into the ring and cradled Foster’s head in his arms until the doctor came to check him out.
Pat Putnam, from Sports Illustrated, had talked to Frazier’s assistant trainer, Eddie Futch, before the fight. He wondered how Foster’s disparaging comments might impact the fight and Joe’s desire for revenge.
“He never reveals his feelings,” said Futch, about Joe’s prefight demeanor. “But that remark Foster made about being dumb really got to him. He works hard, and he prides himself on being a craftsman. He’s too serious about his work to take a remark like that lightly. . . . And when an opponent’s mouth gets to Joe, they are in trouble. They had better run—run like thieves.”
According to Putnam’s Sports Illustrated piece, Foster admitted to being totally dazed after both second-round knockdowns. He even owned up to not hearing either count.
“I’m dumb, huh?” Frazier said, when hearing Foster’s confession. “Well, he ain’t so smart. He fought me, didn’t he?”
By the time Joe Frazier had disassembled Foster, Muhammad Ali’s comeback was building steam. On August 11, 1970, the City of Atlanta Athletic Commission granted Ali a boxing license while his federal conviction remained under appeal. That cleared the way for Ali’s third-round knockout of Jerry Quarry on October 26 of that year.
A September 1970 win in federal court had also pushed the New York State Boxing Commission to reinstate Ali’s license. This led to a much more demanding battle against Oscar Bonavena in December. Ali emerged with a gritty but somewhat uninspired TKO in the 15th round. Despite the mediocre reviews for Ali, everyone looked to a much more dynamic performance when he met Frazier for the undisputed World Heavyweight Championship in March 1971.
After his triumph in the Fight of the Century, Joe Frazier received a long list of tributes and honors. But none meant as much to him, or hit so close to home, as the one in Columbia, South Carolina, on April 7. Frazier became the first black man invited to speak to the South Carolina legislature since the post–Civil War Reconstruction era. Quite a reversal for that young, poor kid who had to leave his home state years before to remain safe.
Frazier, flanked by an American flag sandwiched between a Confederate flag and the state flag, began with some humorous remarks about working on farms as a boy. But he ultimately delivered what turned out to be a moving, broad appeal for civil rights activism. Dave Anderson caught the flavor of Frazier’s 12-minute speech in his New York Times article the next day.
“We must save our people,” Joe had said, in the heart of his talk. “I mean white and black. We need to quit thinking who’s living next door, who’s driving a big car, who’s my little daughter going to play with, who is she going to sit next to in school. We don’t have time for that.”
The standing-room-only crowd, according to Anderson, gave Joe a prolonged ovation at the end of his remarks.
In a luncheon in Joe’s honor that followed, different members of the Frazier family got up to speak. The champ’s 10-year-old daughter Jacquelyn offered a timely poem.
“Fly [sic] like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” she said. “Joe Frazier is the only one who can beat Muhammad Ali.”
In January 1972, the champ bulked up to 215 pounds for his third World Championship title defense against the 195-pound Terry Daniels in New Orleans. Las Vegas oddsmakers gave Daniels no chance to win and didn’t even bother to make a betting line for the contest. They proved prophetic when Frazier ended the fight in 1:47 of the fourth round.
Five months later, Joe Frazier defended his world heavyweight crown again in the unlikely venue of Omaha, Nebraska. His equally unlikely opponent was Ron “the Butcher” Stander from nearby Council Bluffs, Iowa. The local boy came in with a 23–1–1 record and a reputation for withstanding abuse until he found an opening for his knockout punch. His claim to fame was a knockout of the highly respected Earnie Shavers.
In a New York Times retrospective on the fight, writer Dan Barry described a first-round blow by the Butcher that “buckled Frazier’s knees.” Frazier took that as a wake-up call and connected on an uppercut to the jaw that put Stander out on his feet. In the second and third rounds, blood flowed from cuts above Stander’s right eye and the bridge of his nose. The referee stopped the fight at the end of the fourth round when he determined the fighter could no longer see.
Barry noted that, going into the fight, not even Stander’s wife gave him a reasonable shot at winning. “You don’t take a Volkswagen into the Indy 500, unless you know a hell of a shortcut,” she had said.
Joe’s next title defense, in January 1973, turned into the train wreck known as Frazier-Foreman I. The embarrassing multiple knockdowns ended Joe’s winning streak after 29 consecutive victories. It also sent him through a desperate redemption campaign that began with the London decision over Joe Bugner and a dubious loss to Muhammad Ali in their second meeting. But he ultimately fought his way back into title contention with second-time wins over Jerry Quarry and Jimmy Ellis.
Quarry brought a 49–6–4 record into his June 1974 fight with Frazier. He had fought two tough fights against Muhammad Ali, scored victories over George Chuvalo and Ron Lyle, and taken out Earnie Shavers in one round since their last meeting. He saw the fight with Frazier as a stepping-stone to a title match of his own with Foreman.
Joe staggered Quarry at the end of the first round, connected with both hands in the second and third, and dropped him with a shot to the stomach just before the bell in the fourth. He opened nasty cuts over both of Quarry’s eyes in the fifth round. Then, when it seemed time to finish him off, Joe visibly backed off. The referee waved the reluctant fighter to continue, and Joe dutifully landed a few more accurate punches before the ref finally stopped the fight.
“Joe was hitting Quarry at will and looking around for somebody to stop the fight,” Morty Holtzer had said, when I asked if Joe had ever showed mercy in the ring. “He was pleading with his [Quarry’s] corner, ‘Someone stop this fight—I don’t want to hurt him anymore.’ Gil Clancy [Quarry’s trainer] finally threw it [the towel] in. Joe always had a little compassion for anybody he fought—even Ali.”
Joe’s concern for Quarry mimicked the way Larry Holmes reacted years later to a helpless Marvis. Despite the killer instinct most great boxers shared, they tended to more readily differentiate a competitive fight from a one-sided slaughter. They hungered for victory but could more easily afford to show mercy to a beaten opponent.
Joe Frazier’s final match before the Thrilla in Manila took place in Melbourne, Australia, against Jimmy Ellis on March 2, 1975. Joe braved the long, frightening flights because a win would reestablish him as the number one contender for the heavyweight crown. Even better, it meant one more championship match against his nemesis Ali, who had defeated Foreman for the title in the Rumble in the Jungle just months before. Joe dominated much of the fight against Ellis and knocked him out in 59 seconds of the ninth round.
“Joe bought his contract back from Cloverlay before the fight in Australia with Jimmy Ellis,” Morty had said, to show me how Joe had been preparing for his last big-money fight with Ali. “But he gave them [Cloverlay] the Ellis fight. We [Joe, Yank, and Morty] now had Joe, but Cloverlay by then was more than just Joe.”
The Thrilla in Manila took place at the Philippine Coliseum, in Quezon City, on October 1, 1975. The fight was held at the strange time of 10:45 a.m. to go along with the live, closed-circuit television airings around the United States. No official attendance figures were offered for the match, but spectators filled every aisle and available standing space. And many literally clung to the rafters.
There was no air-conditioning in the arena, according to an independent.co.uk article posted September 29, 2005. The humidity and temperature soared as the venue filled up. By fight time, the air in the arena was jungle hot and stifling. The bright ring lights made the air between the ropes hotter still.
My impressions of the fight came from many sources but relied most heavily on the firsthand recollections of Joe, Marvis, and others in the Frazier camp. The early interviews with the Fraziers had touched on prefight emotions in the dressing room, Marvis’s reactions from ringside, and poignant moments between father and son. Even though Joe was the one taking on Ali, Marvis recalled the fight as a shared experience.
“Before the last Ali fight, we prayed in the locker room,” Marvis had said, glancing at Joe sitting next to him just outside the lair. “I was 15. . . . I felt a part of him and the rest of the team that was there getting him together. I felt like I was his guide leading him into battle.”
I asked Joe what his mind-set had been before going into the arena, before his rubber match with his greatest rival. His answer had come in the form of a warrior code. It had been a lesson on how to do battle with honor.
“You know this is not just a fight,” Joe had said, leaning toward me. “This is a war. You go out there and pray for victory. There’s two men out there and the better man that day wins. If I lost, I got no hate against anybody. I told Marvis before the fight it’s in God’s hands.”
Marvis had remembered watching the fight from a seat near his father’s corner. The progression of the match came across as a terrible roller-coaster ride for the teenager.
“At first, I saw Pop winning all the way,” Marvis had said, putting himself in the moment. “But, after a while, his eyes started to get puffy and he started to get hit more than he should. I felt his manager, Eddie Futch, was just in stopping the fight. I felt like I was in there taking the blows. I was trying to move with him and throw punches with him.”
I asked Marvis if he had tried to say anything to his dad between rounds.
“I was sitting there saying, ‘Give Pop my strength, Lord,’” he had replied. “I wished I could just lie there and be drained—just give him my energy. But things don’t work that way.”
Marvis then focused on his actions once the fight had ended—with his father sitting beaten and drained on his stool.
“I went into the ring and hugged him, and told him I still loved him. He said, ‘I’m sorry Marv.’ I said, ‘There ain’t nothing to worry about. I love you.’ It hurts like hell to watch your Pop get beaten up. But I realized, even then, that’s part of the game.”
Muhammad Ali threw everything he could muster at Frazier in the early rounds in Manila, hoping for a quick resolution. When Joe fought through the onslaught and began to turn the tide in the middle rounds, Ali seemed physically and emotionally deflated for a while. He realized this was going to be the fight of his life.
Both combatants bashed away relentlessly at each other. They kept throwing hard through the blazing heat, blood, pain, and exhaustion for longer than anyone thought possible. At the end of 14 rounds, it was difficult to tell the winner from the loser.
Frazier and Ali later looked back at the fight—especially Joe’s performance in those middle rounds—and showed great admiration for each other. Their often-quoted comments, about Ali’s ability to take a punch and Joe’s resilience, took on biblical proportions.
“Man, I hit him with punches that would bring down the walls of a city,” Frazier said, as if preaching to the uninformed. “Lordy, he’s great!”
Ali replied with his own reverent tribute. “Joe Frazier is one hell of a man,” he said. “If God ever calls me to a holy war, I want Joe Frazier fighting beside me.”
In the aftermath of the greatest, most grueling boxing match of all time, both fighters took time to heal. Then, eventually, they each followed their nature in selecting the next match. Frazier, predictably, signed to meet George Foreman the following year. He rushed to fight the one man who had dominated him and knocked him out.
That was typical for Joe Frazier. He aimed to beat the best and always looked for the quickest route back to a championship fight. And, as we know, that ended poorly for him and led to retirement.
Muhammad Ali made the smarter choice. He eased back into the fray by defending his World Heavyweight Championship against Jean-Pierre Coop-man in February 1976. The moderate-sized Belgian had a 23–3 record against mostly unranked European boxers. He was considered by most experts as totally undeserving of a title shot. He appeared to have no hope of dethroning the Greatest. Not surprisingly, Coopman was knocked out in five rounds.
In one of our early conversations, I asked Morty Holtzer what had been the most telling tribute Muhammad Ali had ever offered Joe Frazier. He had thought for a while, smiled, and recounted something Ali said at a press conference before the Coopman fight. It had been a response to reporters questioning the validity of his challenger—Coopman’s right to fight Ali for a world heavyweight title.
“Three times I fought Joe it was life and death,” Ali said, according to Morty. “I deserve an easy one for a change.”
It seemed a most fitting way for Ali to honor his fierce, forever rival.