In the years after Joe Frazier left the ring, his life and fortunes had their share of dramatic ups and downs. The uneven ride took in his financial situation, health issues, and even personal relationships. Yet his fighting legacy remained unassailable, and he received numerous honors for his boxing success. Along the way his rivalry with Muhammad Ali also took on mythic proportions.
Frazier was enshrined in the prestigious International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. This was not to be confused with the World Boxing Hall of Fame that had inducted him years before. The Ring magazine tapped Joe as the eighth greatest heavyweight boxer of all time in 1999, and their May 2017 poll still had him in the same position. Boxing News also had Joe among their 10 best heavyweights to ever put on the gloves.
Most rundowns of the best heavyweights have had Ali consistently ensconced at the top. The 2017 Ring list was no exception. But maybe more telling, for the legacy of both men, has been the effort over the years to fix their place among the greatest sports rivalries.
Without doubt, Ali vs. Frazier has topped just about every list of the best rivalries in boxing history, regardless of weight class. For instance, Boxing News ranked Ali-Frazier at number one on their list of “Top-10 Boxing Rivalries of All-Time.” They explained their choice this way: “Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier produced one of the greatest fights of all-time. This heated rivalry between two all-time greats will forever be the benchmark.”
The Thrilla in Manila has been widely recognized as the greatest boxing match ever—and the Fight of the Century has been consistently near the top of that list as well. But lately, Frazier-Ali has also been in the running for the title as the greatest individual rivalry in all of sports. And the competition for that has put them among the greatest athletes of all time.
Only a handful of iconic matchups, with combatants who transcend their era, have appeared on just about every list of best individual rivalries. These have included basketball’s Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, golf’s Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg of tennis, and, of course, boxing’s Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. These lists of the all-time greatest individual rivalries have come from traditional outlets like Sports Illustrated and the Los Angeles Times—as well as edgier websites like Sportster, Total Sportek, Ranker, and Coral.
Ranker, using fan voting to decide its rankings, placed Frazier vs. Ali at the top of its “Greatest Individual Rivalries in Sports History” list. The pair also headed up the Total Sportek list that ranked only the “top 10” rivalries. The criteria for ranking these rivalries usually began with the rare level of competition and the ferocity of their duels. Yet, unlike the other legendary rivalries, only Frazier and Ali kept the antagonistic nature of their relationship intact well into retirement.
In his postfighting years, Frazier more and more began to refer to Muhammad Ali by his pre-Muslim name, Cassius Clay. It became symbolic of his lingering animosity toward his old rival. It also captured the way Joe felt about a black man who had attacked him in the harshest of racist terms.
The “slave name,” as Ali referred to it, became an easy way to get under the Greatest’s cool veneer. Frazier also saw it as a means to remind everyone that he just couldn’t forgive the public abuse he had taken from his onetime friend.
Of course, there had been numerous attempts in those years by Ali, and others, to put the feud to rest. In 1988, Frazier met up with Ali at Johnny Tocco’s Gym in Las Vegas. They were there—along with George Foreman, Larry Holmes, and Ken Norton—for the filming of a movie titled Champions Forever. Ali, already showing the effects of Parkinson’s disease, seemed somewhat slow and stilted in his movements. According to a 2015 Sports Illustrated piece, Frazier seized on the moment to make a point.
“Look what’s happened to him,” Joe said, reported SI. “All your talkin’, man. I’m faster than you are now. You’re damaged goods.”
Ali replied, his speech slightly slurred. “I’m faster than you are, Joe.” Ali pointed to a heavy bag and suggested a little contest. “Let’s see who hits the bag fastest.”
Frazier removed his jacket and rapidly fired off a barrage of hook shots. With each punch, he grunted, “Huh! Huh! Huh!” It was an impressive show of speed and power.
Ali kept his jacket on as he squared up in front of the heavy bag and assumed a boxing stance. He copied one of Joe’s grunts and bellowed, “Huh!” He had not moved—and had not thrown a punch.
Ali then turned haltingly toward Frazier. “Wanna see it again, Joe?” he asked, a smile spreading across his face.
Everyone burst out laughing. It was typical Ali—just good-natured fun to them. But Joe didn’t laugh. He saw it as yet another humiliation at the hands of Ali.
Later, at a lunch for the famous fighters, Holmes and the 290-pound Foreman had to take turns preventing a slightly drunk Frazier from getting at Ali. The frustration for Joe loomed eternal.
In 1989, Joe and Ali were thrown together again. They were invited to be guests of honor at a boxing match in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Ali supposedly wanted to put the past behind them. Joe killed the peace effort before Ali got to say a word. He refused to even be in the same room with his nemesis.
Frazier’s resentment toward Ali came to a very public head in 1996. He was upset by the selection of Muhammad Ali as the torchbearer to light the Olympic flame at the opening ceremony in Atlanta. Once again, Ali was destined to be the center of attention for a worldwide audience. And Joe was inexplicably on the sidelines.
Ali was shaking from Parkinson’s as he reached to ignite the cauldron, according to a 2011 piece by NPR following Frazier’s death. Joe quipped to a nearby reporter that Ali should have fallen into the cauldron. Joe was immediately vilified for his remarks.
Later Frazier tried to put his remarks in context. He wanted them to be seen as the result of years of abuse—and unequal treatment by the media.
“We was fighting,” Joe said, in NPR’s story. “We was at war. I mean why should he speak all these terrible things about me and then I didn’t say anything about him? So, whatever came to my mind and lips, I spit out.”
Joe had always seemed most vexed by the dual standards used to judge Ali’s words versus his own. He saw Ali as made from Teflon in the public’s eye—none of the nasty things he had said or done had stuck to his reputation. Even worse, the media and fans had lauded his impish remarks and cooed about how clever he seemed. They all overlooked the damage done to Joe and his public persona.
The bitter rivalry between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali made both men millionaires many times over during their boxing careers. After all, they had literally pioneered the worldwide, closed-circuit superfight phenomenon with the seven-figure purses. Yet, as they moved through retirement, Ali’s financial fortunes stayed on the rise while Frazier’s fell dramatically.
Frazier’s own marketing manager from 1995 on, Darren Prince, believed his client’s continued animosity toward Ali contributed to his later money woes. According to a 2006 New York Times piece on Frazier’s finances, Prince particularly saw the Olympic remarks and Joe’s insistence that he had won all three Ali fights as sore spots with potential sponsors. The marketing man understood Joe’s need to fire back after all the hurtful things Ali had said. But he felt Joe sometimes “went too far.”
Frazier made the point in his 1996 autobiography that he was quite wealthy at the end of his boxing career. He said the second fight against George Foreman, just prior to retirement in 1976, was never about the money. Yeah, he acknowledged the million-dollar purse he received but claimed he really didn’t need the payday.
Joe went on to catalog his real estate holdings at the time. He claimed they included the Philadelphia house, the South Carolina plantation, and major land investments in Bucks County. He also mentioned a large pension earning high interest rates and a trust fund for nearly $400,000.
From there, Frazier gave a long list of vehicles parked inside his mammoth home garage. They included five late-model luxury cars, a vintage auto, a couple of big motorcycles, and three snowmobiles. In the end, he added the powder-blue Cadillac Seville on order for Marvis.
That 2006 New York Times article painted a much different picture of Frazier’s holdings. It suggested that the legend had squandered the bulk of his money through, well, just being Joe. To me, that was the kindhearted, seat-of-his-pants, fun-loving guy I knew from our time together.
“Joe Frazier has lost a financial fortune through a combination of his own generosity and naïveté, a partying lifestyle and failed business opportunities,” the New York Times article said.
The reporter, conducting his interview in a more run-down North Philly gym than I remembered, asked Frazier about his financial situation. Joe first replied by jovially saying he had “plenty of money” and noting there was even a roll of “$100 bills in the back of the room.” He soon turned serious and second-guessed how he had promoted himself in the past.
“I don’t think I handled it right, because I certainly could have gone out more and done better for myself over the years,” said Joe. “I could have left the gym a little more to be on the road.”
The biggest blow to Frazier’s fortune was the money he lost from his 140 acres of land in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The trust that bought the property from him was supposed to settle the debt in annual payouts. But when the trust went out of business, Joe’s checks stopped coming. His daughter Jacquelyn Frazier-Lyde, a lawyer, sued on her father’s behalf, but the case was dismissed in 2003.
The Times reported that years later, the land became a residential community with an estimated worth of $100 million. None of it went to Joe.
Despite revelations of a fortune lost, nothing shook me more than the report on Frazier’s living situation. The 62-year-old ex-champ confessed to residing on his own in an “apartment” just up the stairs from the gym.
“This is my primary residence,” he told the newspaper. “Don’t matter much. I’m on the road most of the time, anyway.”
Joe Frazier and his wife Florence divorced in 1985. In his autobiography, Joe described the split as amicable. Given Joe’s fun-loving nature and Flo’s kind heart, that seemed plausible. But from what I had observed five years earlier, the divorce was also inevitable. Flo had been constantly frustrated by Joe’s prolonged absences. She had become more and more outspoken about it in our conversations—albeit in her soft-spoken manner.
In his book, Joe gave his take on what went wrong with the marriage. To his credit, he stepped up and took the blame.
“Hey, I wasn’t easy,” he admitted. “I know that. I tended to go where I wanted, when I wanted. I was restless in the house. Still, I did the best I could. The proof was in the pudding: The proof was in those kids.”
Joe’s love for, and dedication to, the family—and especially his kids—was never in question. He took great pride in the accomplishments of all of them. There was evidently a lot to be proud of—and a whole lot of kids to keep track of as well.
Frazier acknowledged fathering 11 children by a number of different women. Of course, he had Marvis, Jacqui, Weatta, Jo-Netta, and Natasha with Florence. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer piece after his death, Joe also had a daughter Renae and a son Hector “with another woman during his marriage.” And he openly talked about fathering four other sons: Joseph Rubin, Joseph Jordan, Brandon Marcus, and Derek Dennis.
“I have taken responsibility for all of them,” he said, in his 1996 book. “My thinking was: If I’m strong enough to make ’em, then I’m strong enough to take ’em as my responsibility.”
Besides Marvis, both Hector and Jacqui became high-quality professional boxers. Joe’s nephew Rodney Frazier also did quite well in the ring. Joe had a hand in training them all after his retirement. Marvis played a key role in their preparation too.
Hector, fighting under the name Joe Frazier Jr., was a welterweight with an impressive 23–7–4 record from 1983 through 1992. Nineteen of his wins came by way of knockouts. He began his pro career by knocking out his first 12 opponents.
Rodney Frazier, a heavyweight, went 16–4–0 in his relatively short career. However, 12 of those wins were knockouts. He was undefeated at 12–0 until he stepped up in class and lost on a TKO to Philipp Brown—the last man Marvis fought and beat.
Jacqui Frazier-Lyde, a super middleweight, only fought 14 official professional fights from 2000 to 2004. But she won the vacant Women’s International Boxing Federation World Light Heavy Title in 2001 and the Global Boxing Union Female World Super Middle Title in 2002. She finished her boxing career with a 13–1 record. She also became the first woman inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame.
Jacqui Frazier’s only loss came in an extremely close, mixed decision. I’m sure Joe, like some others at ringside, thought his daughter had been robbed. Maybe the hardest part of the loss was that it came at the hands of Muhammad Ali’s daughter Laila.
As talented as Jacqui was in the ring, her greatest successes came later in the courtroom. She earned her law degree at Villanova University and went on to a noteworthy career as a lawyer. Jacqui eventually was elevated to municipal court judge in the Philadelphia criminal justice system.
Marvis Frazier, after his retirement from fighting, had his own share of recognition and success. He was inducted into both the Pennsylvania and Philadelphia Boxing Halls of Fame. He was also named to serve in 1992 as a United States boxing coach.
Marvis, as forecasted, took an active role in both the family businesses and the church. After first running the Frazier limousine service for a while, he oversaw his dad’s endorsements and card-show bookings. But, eventually, he focused primarily on managing the Joe Frazier Gym and the training program there.
Marvis ran the gym for years and watched it get dragged down as the neighborhood around it declined. Near the end, he nurtured plans for a vastly expanded renovation of the gym to be known as the Frazier Center. Marvis begged his father to keep the gym open and let the grand plans unfold. But Joe became disillusioned and demanded the gym be closed down in March 2008.
In his autobiography, Marvis said he was “devastated” by the decision. Five years later he was still bemoaning his dad’s call to close the gym.
“When Pop said, ‘Shut it down,’ it just killed me,” he admitted in an interview. “I never asked for anything from my father. All I wanted was his love. That’s all.”
In 2013, two years after Joe’s death, the Joe Frazier Gym building was named to the National Register of Historic Places.
Away from boxing and the gym, Marvis Frazier answered to a higher calling. He became an ordained Pentecostal minister at Faith Temple Church of God where his family worshipped. He also became deeply involved in an organization called Prison Fellowship. It was a ministry that traveled to various penal institutions to work with prisoners and restore families through faith-based reentry programs.
In one of life’s great twists, Frazier traveled with the Prison Fellowship to the Plainfield Correctional Facility in Indiana. Former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, the man who effectively ended Marvis’s fighting career, was incarcerated there. According to Marvis’s book, Tyson refused to meet with the visitors until he heard that the group included Joe’s son. They met and chatted for a while, and then Marvis prayed for the man who had knocked him cold in 30 seconds flat.
Marvis’s marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Daralyn, remained strong and loving all through the nineties and into the new millennium. The couple had obviously embraced many of Marvis’s early notions about the respect and patience needed to make a relationship work. They had two bright, accomplished daughters together, Tamyra and Tiara.
The girls were teenagers in the spring of 2001 when Daralyn was diagnosed with colon cancer. She died that November. Two years later, Marvis’s older daughter, Tamyra, thankfully survived her own battle with cancer.
Legendary brawlers like Joe Frazier didn’t retire from boxing feeling young and healthy. They left the ring looking old for their age. They also tended to suffer from an array of ailments that went along with their brutal lifestyle. Despite his initial claims to the contrary, Frazier was anything but healthy.
Joe was virtually blind in his left eye. He had taken way too many blows to the face over the years in an attempt to fight in close. Not surprising, he had some troubles seeing out of the right eye too.
The ex-champ also required a series of back surgeries for injuries caused by a car accident. In addition, he suffered from chronic high blood pressure and diabetes. But, in the end, it was the quick-spreading liver cancer that proved to be lethal.
Doctors found the cancer in the latter part of September 2011. Within several weeks, Joe was confined to home hospice care and soon succumbed to the disease. He died on November 7, 2011, at the age of 67.
The heartfelt tributes from luminaries in the boxing world poured in immediately. Oscar De La Hoya, welterweight champ Shane Mosley, former heavyweight titleholder Lennox Lewis, and light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins all offered accolades. Floyd Mayweather not only sent kind words and prayers, but also offered to arrange for his financial support team to pay for the funeral.
Muhammad Ali was one of the first of Joe’s old opponents to weigh in. Although his words struck just the right note of reverence, there was no apology included. That had supposedly been done indirectly years before.
“The world has lost a great champion,” Ali said, reported the Guardian. “I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration. My sympathy goes out to his family and loved ones.”
Ali had previously apologized to Joe through an interview with the New York Times, and later other publications, in Frazier’s final years. Initially, Joe had complained that the apology had been to the publication and not him directly. But in the May 2009 issue of Sports Illustrated, Joe relented and said he no longer felt the same animosity toward his old rival. While I don’t doubt Joe voiced his forgiveness, I’m still convinced he had his fingers crossed behind his back.
George Foreman’s remarks after Frazier’s death came via an interview with the BBC. They seemed to hit on what would be a recurring theme for all of Joe’s renowned former opponents.
“Joe Frazier was the most amazing fighter,” he said. “He never stood more than 5ʹ10ʺ but he had every big man in boxing afraid of the little guys. He was such a terror.”
Joe Bugner picked up where Foreman left off. Of all the praise heaped on Joe that day, I always thought the former British champ’s comments would have pleased him most.
“He weighed about a stone lighter than myself, but he was so courageous and ferocious,” said Bugner, in the Guardian. “You had to hit him with a sledgehammer to put him away. In 1973, I was 23 years old. I became a man after that fight because I realized you can’t go through a career like boxing without seeing and feeling the power of the greats.”
It was only fitting that an iconic boxer like Joe Frazier had two funerals. One was a celebrity-rich extravaganza at a huge Philadelphia church for Smokin’ Joe. The other was an intimate down-home gathering of old friends and relatives on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. It was for the farmer’s kid known as Billy Boy.
According to various accounts, Joe’s daughter Jacqui was the driving force behind organizing the funeral for the folks from Beaufort County. Approximately 250 people attended the memorial service at Bethesda Christian Fellowship on November 16, 2011. They all had their own memories and stories of the local hero—and those memories filled the space. There was only one thing missing to make the moment complete—the honoree himself.
“I was really hoping to bring my father with me today,” said Jacqui to those assembled, reported the Philadelphia Tribune. “I was really trying to make sure you had an opportunity to see his face.”
The majority of the family had insisted that Joe’s remains be kept in Philly for the bigger funeral and the burial to follow. Yet it didn’t stop family and friends from remembering all that their Billy had done for them.
“When he came home, we knew he never forgot Beaufort,” said Joe’s niece Dannette Frazier. “He’d spend three or four days here because he had to visit everybody.”
Dannette later recalled how “Uncle Billy” had dropped everything and driven 700 miles from Philadelphia to be with the family when her mother—Joe’s sister—died.
“He was legally blind,” said Dannette, amazed her uncle had made it in one piece. “He said, ‘It was easy. I just looked at the tail lights in front of me.’ That’s the loving uncle we knew.”
Several days earlier, Joe Frazier had been lying in state for a public viewing at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. Thousands of admirers had filed by to pay their respects. Few had ever met the boxer, but many talked as if they knew him.
The “private” funeral, on November 14, was for the benefit of nearly 4,000 invited guests, a horde of A-list friends, and the world press. They filled the Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church in Frazier’s adopted city. Joe’s closed white casket was fittingly adorned with his championship belt and a pair of boxing gloves. There was also a blanket over the casket that proclaimed the occupant as “Heavyweight Champion of the World.”
The Reverend Jesse Jackson presided over the service, and sports greats like Muhammad Ali, Magic Johnson, and Larry Holmes took their places in the front pews. Ali, accompanied by family members, seemed both frail and emotional throughout.
Reverend Jackson, at one point, urged the mourners to rise and show their love for Frazier one final time. Ali, by several accounts, stood and applauded long and enthusiastically for his fallen rival.
In his eulogy, Jackson lauded Frazier for his rise from “segregation, degradation and disgrace to amazing grace,” according to an AP story. But he also bemoaned the fact that a fictitious character like Rocky Balboa received honors denied the all-too-real boxer from Beaufort. There was a statue of Rocky erected outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art—and Joe, the archetypical Philly fighter, deserved one as well.
“Tell them Rocky is fictitious; Joe is reality,” said Jackson. “Rocky’s fists are frozen in stone. Joe’s fists are smokin’. Rocky never faced Ali or Holmes or Foreman. Rocky never tasted his own blood. Champions are made in the ring, not in the movies.”
Jackson’s words must have hit home. Four years later, a 12-foot bronze statue of Frazier was erected in front of the NBC Sports Arena in South Philly. Joe, in boxing trunks and gloves, had been caught throwing his eternal left hook.
Joe would have loved that.
It has been several decades since my stint in Joe Frazier’s inner circle. But I never needed a statue or fight films to feel his presence. The thing I held close over the years was his resilience in the face of disappointment. I relished his refusal to admit loss.
Whenever defeat seemed inevitable, I tried to channel Smokin’ Joe’s up-beat spirit and hard-won resolve.
I’d recall his raspy laugh that inevitably led to a shrug.
“Ain’t nothing but a party,” he’d have said, flashing a grin. “Yep, yep, yep, yep.”