by Phil Pepe
“No,” Dolly Frazier repeated, “I didn’t give him no special treatment more than any of my children because he was the baby, not like his father did, ‘cause I knew he was going to be leaving here sometime, goin’ around, gettin’ tough, and I didn’t pet him. I kept them clean and I stayed at home with them . . . and I don’t care how large he is, when he come home he must know that this is his mother. Yes.”
Rubin Frazier died in 1965, some years after Billy Joe had grown to be a fine, strong boy, but before he had become Rubin’s “famous son.” When he died, Rubin Frazier took his dream with him to his grave. He never saw Joe become the heavyweight champion of the world. He never saw Billy Joe become “the second Joe Louis.”
Smokin’ North
There was a restlessness growing in young Joe Frazier. His mother had noticed it first. “I knew he was going to be leavin’ here sometime,” she said.
The fire within Joe Frazier began to burn more intensely, the something within him straining to bust loose. It was something he couldn’t control and he didn’t try.
“Look,” he explains, “when you’re on a farm, you sweat and you say to yourself, ‘I’m getting out of here and maybe make a buck.’ You gotta do that on your own. And you work for it. These guys that wish for things and then don’t do nothing to get them make me sick.”
He was too restless to stay in school. He tried playing baseball and football, but they bored him. He was a fullback in football, and although he likes contact, he didn’t like football. “What I didn’t like,” he says, “is when you’re down, ten people can jump on you.”
Joe Frazier preferred the individuality of boxing, one man against another, the better man wins. He was expelled from Robert Small High School in the ninth grade for fighting with a boy who called his mother names, and at the age of fourteen, he got a taste of a new emotion. For the first time, Joe Frazier came face-to-face with bigotry. “Until then,” he says, “I guess I thought everybody was black because I didn’t know any better. One night, this white cat called me a nigger. It was the first time I’d heard the word and I hated it right off.
“He said, ‘Hey, nigger, whatcha doin’?’
“He gets in his car and damn near runs me off the road. Then he gets out and grabs me. He’s bigger than me and he gets me down real quick, but I start hittin’ him back and every time I hit him, I draw blood. I have him down in the dirt and the blood’s all over his face and one of my boys yells, ‘Finish him off, Joe, finish him off.’
“And the cracker, he’s saying, ‘Hey, man, we can talk this thing over, can’t we?’ I let him go. I never had any more trouble from him after that.”
After he left school, Joe got a job in construction for $1.75 an hour. It was good money and it would come in handy. So would the hard physical labor that would build his body. The money was going to pay for his trip north and for other things. There was a girl now, a tiny young lady named Florence Smith. She stood barely five feet tall and she had a neat, trim figure and a pretty face. To this day, Florence, a mother of five, does not look her age.
They were both from Beaufort, but Florence and Joe didn’t meet until the funeral of Florence’s uncle.
“Joe came in with his family to pay their respects and the first time I looked at him, I said, ‘Wow! That’s the man for me.’ ”
They were two country kids, teen-agers in love, and they went for long Sunday drives in an old Ford sedan and planned their future together. There were many promises made.
“I said to her at the time, I said: ‘You know what I want to do? I want to make you happy if it’s the last thing I do.’ ”
Joe kept his promises. Florence has a family and a spacious, expensive home, two mink coats, her own car, expensive clothes, all the money she needs and every modern appliance. Her only complaint is a common one among women who have busy husbands.
“I wish he would spend more time at home with me and the children,” Florence says, sighing. “With training and fighting and singing, it seems he’s away from home all the time.”
They were married on September 25, 1959, before Joe turned sixteen and a year later along came a son, who they named Marvis. Now Joe Frazier was more restless than ever, more determined to leave the South. He had a reason to plan for the future. He was certain of one thing: That future would not be in Beaufort. “I left the South,” he said, “as soon as I found out about the North. I have always been on the move, anyway. You know, man, you’ve got to keep moving, you don’t get nowhere standing still. You do that, they gonna pass you by.” That wasn’t going to happen to Joe Frazier, that was for sure. “When I decide to leave, I just packed up and left. What I mean, there wasn’t no huggin’ and kissin’. I caught the first thing smokin’ North and I left.”
For a year, Joe lived in New York with a brother, Tom, who had been hit with the urge to move on sometime before. A year later Joe moved to Philadelphia to live with an aunt and took a job in a slaughterhouse, stripping sides of beef for $105 a week.
“The slaughterhouse,” Joe says, “was nothing to write home to Mamma about, but it was a job. It was something I could do. It didn’t make no difference.”
It was something he could offer Florence, though. Joe told his young wife to pack up and bring Marvis North. He was making enough money to afford a small apartment for his small family. For two years, Joe worked in the slaughterhouse, Cross Bros. Meat Packers Co. It was hard work and it was good work. Good because it helped him provide for his family and because it helped him further develop his short, squat, powerful body. Good for no other reason.
“Sure I remember him,” says Bernard Cross, one of the brothers of the Cross Bros. Meat Packers Co. “He worked on the slaughterhouse floor, a nice guy, well liked. He made friends easy and he worked hard. Most people who work here don’t need any more exercise. Not Joe.”
The restlessness inside Joe Frazier remained, a gnawing determination. Inevitably, as it does with many who are trying to escape the ghetto and find a better life, Joe Frazier’s restlessness brought him to a gymnasium, the Twenty-third Police Athletic League gym on Twenty-second and Columbia in Philadelphia.
He went to the gym, Frazier says, to lose weight. “My legs were so fat,” he says, “that I couldn’t get my pants on.”
A man named Duke Dugent remembers the day Joe Frazier first walked into the gym, somewhat bewildered and possessed of no apparent skills. You don’t forget the first day you set eyes on the heavyweight champion of the world. At least, you don’t admit you’ve forgotten. Duke Dugent was the boxing instructor at the Twenty-third PAL then, as he is now.
Joe Frazier didn’t look like a fighter. He was eighteen, married and a father, and he was too fat and too short and too slow. His legs and hips were heavy and his arms were short and stumpy. The qualities that would make him a world champion were not yet obvious. In any case, they never were physical qualities — they were spiritual ones, intangibles like dedication and grit, a hunger and a willingness to work hard and to sacrifice to be something, to be somebody, to be good.
“It was late afternoon in 1962,” Duke Dugent remembers. “He was wearing a suit and coat and trousers that didn’t match. A shirt but no tie. He said he wanted to learn boxing to see if he could make a living at it. I had him fill out a membership form. He said he didn’t have any gym clothes, but I told him not to worry, we’d find some.
“It wasn’t easy. He was big, weighed about two hundred and forty and we had trouble finding something that would fit.”
Dugent put young Joe on a rigid diet, green vegetables and steak, no sweets, but it was Frazier’s resolve that was responsible for the transformation from fat, ugly duckling to a powerful bird. Joe would wake up each morning at five, run three or four miles, report for work at the slaughterhouse and after eight hours of hard, exhausting work that would wear out most men, he’d go to the gym to train unti
l 9 p.m.
After a week or so, Dugent asked Yancey “Yank” Durham, a local professional trainer of limited success, to take a look at the kid.
“I watched him awhile,” Durham says, “and one thing impressed me right off. The boy could punch. At first I thought he was just another fat kid who would quit after a few days, but he didn’t. He kept coming back. I wasn’t involved with him then, I had my own fighters to worry about, but I noticed him. You couldn’t help it. He would show up in that gym with his hands all cut up and tired from working in the slaughterhouse all day. Other guys would stop coming around. Not Joe. He kept coming back and that made you know he was something special.”
You have to be tough to survive in Philadelphia gyms, where the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, prevailed. There was one thing about Joe Frazier. He was tough.
The Road to Tokyo
Regular visits to the gym were having a Pygmalion effect on Frazier. Diet and hard work got his weight down under two hundred pounds, turning fat into muscle, and regular training began to smooth out the rough spots. For hours, he tattooed the light bag with a rhythmic cadence and pounded the heavy bag with resounding thuds. The light bag was for timing and coordination, the heavy one for power.
“Almost from the beginning, you could tell he was going to be good,” Duke Dugent says. “He was awkward because of his size, but his natural inclination for fighting was there. What really made us notice him was his hard work and his almost total dedication to his job.”
Calisthenics became an integral part of Frazier’s daily life and were largely responsible for the metamorphosis that was taking place. He skipped rope to develop grace, coordination, and balance; he did neck bridges, lying flat on his back, knees raised, and lifted his head to strengthen the muscles in his neck, which would make him less vulnerable to punches to his head; he did push-ups and sit-ups to harden his once flabby body. “He could do them all day long,” Dugent said, marveling. “I also made him stand on his toes for long periods for balance. He couldn’t throw a punch without losing his balance at first . . . he was very awkward and stiff.”
Duke Dugent was a witness to the change in Frazier’s body, from a heavy ungainliness to a hard, muscular form with a certain grace and coordination. The first inkling Dugent had that Frazier could be something came when he asked Joe to hit the heavy bag.
“He whomped it . . . I mean really whacked it with short power, you know, the power coming down from the strapping shoulders through the thick chest.”
Dugent gave him intricate punching drills to work on and Joe persevered. He learned to shorten his punches and to double up on his hooks. Instead of long, looping, roundhouse lefts that were easy to see—and easy to block—Dugent got Joe to throw his punches a distance no longer than six inches. They were short, snappy, and tough. And Dugent got Frazier to double and triple up on the hook. Not one punch at a time, but two, three, four in succession. If the first one missed or was blocked, the second would certainly get home. Or the third, or the fourth. All great fighters punch in combinations. It’s what makes them great, not just good.
“At first he was bad,” Dugent recalls. “The next day he was great. Just like that. He learned quickly. He mastered the punching combinations in no time. He had more fortitude than any man I’ve ever known. Not that I thought for one minute in those days that he would become the world champion. How could you? But as hard as he was working, as quickly as he was learning, I knew he would be something.”
His altered appearance, the feeling of power and strength, the improvement that was readily discernible and the hunger to be somebody kept bringing Joe back to the gym. “I thought it was thrilling,” he says. “I felt like I had more energy than the average guy.”
Florence Frazier, mother of two now, gave steady encouragement to her husband. She would have liked Joe to spend more time at home with her and the children, but she would not stand in his way—not because of the promises he’d made of riches and luxury, but because it was what made him happy and Florence Frazier was happy if her man was happy.
Now it was time to send Joe Frazier into the ring. Dugent took him around the country to fight in amateur boxing shows and Joe’s reward was a string of successes. He won the Middle Atlantic Golden Gloves heavyweight championship in 1963 and again in 1964. His only defeat in three years was a decision to a three-hundred-pounder from Michigan named Buster Mathis. He was ready for his big chance, the Olympic Trials being held in the Singer Bowl at the site of the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow, New York. He was ready to show that all his hard work was well invested.
By a coincidence, it was in the Olympic Trials that Yank Durham, who would become his guiding force, first got to handle Joe. Duke Dugent came down with a virus and was unable to go, so a man named Pat Duffy, head of Amateur Athletic Union boxing in Philadelphia, asked Durham to accompany Frazier to New York and work with him. Six fights, six knockouts later and Frazier was only one of two heavyweights left in the tournament. Joe Frazier and Buster Mathis. The winner was to represent the United States in the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
It was a close fight. Mathis, a curiosity because of his size, got all the prefight publicity. A hulk of a man at three hundred pounds, he was amazingly quick and nimble. He had captured the fancy of press and public and he also convinced the judges. They gave Buster the decision and for the first time in his life, Frazier came close to being a quitter.
Joe was very depressed, so depressed he talked about giving up boxing before his career had even started, before he had earned a penny in the ring.
“He thought he won the fight and deserved to be the one to represent his country in Tokyo,” Dugent remembered. “A lot of other people thought Joe won, too. Buster wore his trunks almost up to his chin and Joe had hardly any target at all. If he tried to punch to the body, he was warned to keep his punches above the belt. But Buster’s belt was somewhere around his chest. Still, Joe felt he deserved the decision. When he didn’t get it, he was discouraged enough to want to quit. We were able to talk him out of it. We explained that things like that happen in sports, that you can’t let them stop you, you have to overcome your setbacks.”
Dugent suggested to Joe that perhaps he could arrange to have him make the trip to Tokyo as a sparring partner.
“I can’t do that,” Joe said sadly. “I’ll lose my job with the packing company. I need the money.”
Dugent called Philadelphia police commissioner Frank Rizzo, who contacted the Cross Bros. Meat Packing Co., and they agreed to hold Joe’s job for him. The next move was to get in touch with the United States Olympic Committee and have Frazier certified to travel with the boxing team as a sparring partner—and an alternate in case something happened to Mathis. At first, Joe was reluctant. It meant taking a leave of absence from his job and there were three Frazier children now. It was tough to make ends meet, even with the job Florence Frazier had as a packer for Sears department store. She knew what her husband wanted and somehow she would manage. If Joe was to realize his boyhood dream, if he was going to become “the second Joe Louis,” as his father had predicted, he couldn’t quit now.
Joe joined the Olympic team and received the first break he ever got in his life. The team was in San Francisco, prior to departing for Japan. Partly to keep the Olympians fit and partly to entertain troops, the team fought an exhibition show at the Hamilton Air Force Base. Mathis was paired with Frazier and Buster threw a right hand that landed with a crack on Joe’s head. Mathis was badly hurt. He had broken a finger on Frazier’s head and it would have to be in a cast until October 10. The Olympics were scheduled to start on October 11 . . . but they would start without Buster Mathis. Joe Frazier would have to substitute.
“They had no choice,” Joe says. “There was only one heavyweight left and it was me. Either I fought or they forfeited any chance of picking up a medal in my division. I felt that everybody�
�s eyes were on me. At the time in Philadelphia, the Phillies weren’t doing so well and I got letters from my wife and sisters, you know, saying, ‘Hey, don’t let us down like the Phillies.’ This kind of gave me the confidence to keep going.”
And Joe Frazier kept going. In his first fight, he flattened George Oywello of Uganda in 1:35 of the first round. In his second fight, he kayoed Athol McQueen of Australia in 0:40 of the third round. That put him in the semifinals, where he came up against the huge Russian Vadim Yemelyanov.
It was the final fight of the semifinal program and it was fraught with overtones. The crowd of 4,000 in the arena took sides on political grounds and Frazier was the last American hope. Three other U.S. semifinalists had been defeated earlier and seven Russians had advanced to the finals. Only Joe Frazier stood between the United States and its first shutout of a gold medal in Olympic boxing history.
In the second round, Frazier went to work on his opponent, pounding him with left hooks in the most explosive display of punching power in the tournament. The crowd was on its feet as the Russian went down twice, took the mandatory eight count, and got back on his feet. During the melee, Frazier threw a left hook that smashed home, but as soon as Joe connected, he knew he had damaged his left hand. The pain flared from his hand, fierce, excruciating pain shooting up through his arm. He was certain his thumb was broken, certain he couldn’t throw another punch . . . but he didn’t have to, not that night. A white towel came floating out of the Russian corner signaling an end to the fight. Frazier was the winner in 1:59 of the second round. He was in the finals.
Now there was just one more man to beat, a gigantic German named Hans Huber, and Joe Frazier could become the first American to win the Olympic heavyweight championship. Floyd Patterson and Cassius Clay had gone on to become world heavyweight champions and had won the Olympic gold medal, but neither had won as a heavyweight. Patterson had taken the middleweight title in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. Clay had captured the light-heavyweight crown in the 1960 Olympics in Rome.
