by Phil Pepe
He chose Oscar Bonavena of Argentina, a rated fighter, a tough, experienced brawler, far more experienced than Frazier. Oscar had a reputation of being easy to hit, but hard to knock down. He also had the reputation of being no puncher himself.
Joe Frazier had everything to gain and little to lose against Bonavena. It was unlikely Oscar would knock Joe out, but if Frazier should kayo Bonavena, it would be a tremendous boost for his career. It was, Yank Durham decided, the perfect match—a chance for Frazier to learn more about boxing and a chance for Durham to learn more about Frazier. He told Madison Square Garden matchmaker, Teddy Brenner, that Bonavena was an acceptable opponent and the contracts were signed.
The members of Cloverlay, Inc., had stressed they weren’t in it for money. They were in for the fun, the kicks, the chance to say, over cocktails at the club, “I have a piece of Joe Frazier, the heavyweight champion of the world.” They were in it to be on a first-name basis with Joe Frazier, champion of the world, to introduce him to friends, or, at least, to clasp his hand or throw an arm around his shoulder and have somebody snap a picture to hang proudly on an office wall. They were in it to be part of the excitement when Joe fought in Madison Square Garden, to take a few friends and business associates down to New York in the Metroliner’s club car and to sit ringside and watch the fights and say, “That’s my fighter.”
But now the members of Cloverlay, Inc., were not having fun. Not on this September 21, 1966. Not with the only asset of Cloverlay, Inc., lying flat on his back on the Madison Square Garden canvas and a menacing and determined Oscar Bonavena standing over him, waiting for him to get up, ready to finish the assault. Now there was only anxiety—they might never have their picture taken with the heavyweight champion of the world.
Slowly, groggily, Frazier got to his feet at the count of five and tried to clear his head as the referee tolled the mandatory count of eight. On rubber legs, he wobbled to the center of the ring again, to be met by a devastating left hook to the head that sent him sprawling to the canvas a second time. It was a shattering blow, one that would have taken the heart out of most fighters. There was doubt that Frazier would recover in time to get to his feet before the minimum ten seconds. And if he managed it, one more knockdown, any kind of a slip or push, and the fight would be over by New York State rules, which dictate that if a man is knocked down three times in a single round, the fight is automatically stopped. One more knockdown and Cloverlay stock would dive and Rubin Frazier’s dream that his youngest son would be “the second Joe Louis” would be shattered, at least temporarily.
But Frazier had plenty of heart, more than most fighters, more than many people thought he had. He struggled to his feet again, trying to get his bearings. It was as if he didn’t know where he was and it seemed that anything, even a hard miss, would put him down a third and final time.
There was still more than a minute left in the round, plenty of time to put over the climactic knockdown. Bonavena tried; he tried desperately. He did everything. He pushed, pulled, shoved, jostled and winged away with both hands. But in his desperation, he lost his cool. Frazier stood firm and as Bonavena swung wildly, Joe’s head cleared. He knew where he was, he knew what he had to do. He held on to his opponent when he could, smothering Oscar’s arms and denying him punching room. The sound of the bell was a rhapsody to the ears of the members of Cloverlay. Somehow, Frazier had survived.
He tottered to his corner and plopped down wearily on the stool and Yank Durham went feverishly to work on his physically spent fighter. Durham had a full minute to revive him, to clear his head. Yank labored frantically, using the many tricks of his trade designed to snap a fighter out of his stupor. It is here, in the corner between rounds, that a good trainer earns his keep. He must do his work in one minute, but sixty seconds for a skillful trainer can be enough.
If the fighter has a cut, the trainer will wipe away the blood, squeeze the flesh together to stop the bleeding temporarily, then apply a salve that will, hopefully, coagulate the blood. The salve is usually a mixture of vaseline with liquid adrenalin to constrict the cut, plus a coagulant called thromboplastin powder. The ingredients must conform to commission rules, designed to protect the fighter from permanent injury by the use of certain quick-healing medicines with unfortunate side effects.
If the fighter is not cut but groggy and out on his feet, as Frazier was, the technique is different. Each trainer has his own method: He might sponge the dazed fighter’s head with cold water; or massage the muscles in his neck; or slap him on the inside of his thighs; or shout in his ear. In extreme cases, the trainer might break open a small ammonia capsule and hold it under the fighter’s nose. This practice is frowned upon by most boxing commissions, but it is not against the rules and it is suggested as a last resort. Yank Durham is a shouter and a slapper, normally, but between the second and third rounds of the Bonavena fight, Durham used every technique on Frazier that time would permit.
In the next round, Frazier stayed away from his opponent, boxing him, tying him up, trapping him against the ropes, never permitting him the opportunity of landing another solid, dizzying punch. At the same time, Frazier was chasing the cobwebs from his head.
By the fourth, he was himself again, pursuing his man relentlessly, opening up with body blows and combinations.
From the fifth round on, it was all Joe Frazier. He whipped Bonavena, pounding him with hammerlike hooks to the body, slowing him up, then switching to the head with a volley of ripping hooks. He could not put Bonavena down, but he sliced him open around the eyes, bloodied his nose and left him looking like he’d been pistol-whipped. The decision was Frazier’s and it was clear-cut, a majority vote of the referee and two judges with no dissents from the crowd, heavily laced with South Americans and Central Americans who had made Oscar Bonavena the object of their affection this night.
It had been a close call, but a crucial lesson had been learned. For the first time, Joe Frazier had gone ten rounds. For the first time, he had proved how sound his heart was.
“Now,” Yank Durham asked his fighter when it was all over, “are you ready to listen?”
Joe Frazier was.
And Yank Durham talked to him in that silken purr of a voice that seems to come from his toes. He repeated things he’d said many times before, but this time he found his fighter in a completely receptive mood. It had taken a near-knockout, but Joe Frazier listened and he listened well.
Yank sang the same old song. “Your legs are too big for you to move around a lot,” he said. “Your arms are too short for you to be a jabbing boxer. You don’t have the height to give you leverage. You’re out there trying to jab, move and be a boxer. You don’t have the build for it.You’ll wear yourself out. You got to bring your arms in close and put your legs together and go in there punching. You can’t pick off punches, you got to move your head, bob and weave, slip punches and keep coming.”
The fighting style that Frazier adopted was as subtle as a punch in the mouth, moving in, inexorable, firing punches in nonstop volleys. And he landed enough punches in the mouth to make the style effective.
The Bonavena fight had been a near-disaster, but instead of waiting, instead of letting Joe dwell on Bonavena, Durham decided to throw him right back in, sink or swim. Frazier’s next fight, Yank announced, would be in exactly two months, on November 21 in Los Angeles, and the opponent that had been chosen was the veteran Eddie Machen.
When the match was made, the Philadelphia newspapers let out a collective howl.
“Frazier is being rushed,” wrote one boxing writer. “He’s just a kid and they’re moving him too fast. They’re going to get him knocked off and ruin a promising career. Joe’s not ready for a veteran like Eddie Machen.”
Joe ignored the criticism. He believed he could beat any heavyweight in the world. Besides, if Yank thought Machen was the right opponent, that was it. Even the few dissenters
among the members of Cloverlay bowed to Durham’s greater knowledge. After all, Yank hadn’t made any mistakes yet.
Machen was indeed a veteran campaigner, a classic boxer who had been in with the best in the world, had risen to the top bracket of the heavyweight division, and had been knocked out only once in sixty-one pro fights by former champion Ingemar Johansson.
Durham knew what he was doing. He had in his files, a letter from Eddie Futch, a respected veteran fight trainer who lived and worked in the Los Angeles area and knew all there was to know about West Coast fighters. Futch had seen Machen in a recent fight. Ironically, he had never seen Frazier fight, yet he sent this report to Durham: “From what you’ve told me about Frazier, the kind of fighter he is, the style he has, he can take Machen,” Futch wrote. “Machen is still good. He’s tough and he’s cagey, but he’s older and has slowed a little. His style is tailor-made for Joe. He’s easy to hit. I’m certain Joe will get to him with hooks, slow him up and win the fight.”
It was as if Eddie Futch had written the script. The fight went exactly as he had predicted—Machen starting fast, winning the early rounds, Frazier’s hooks beginning to land in the middle rounds and coming on strong toward the end.
In the early rounds, it looked as if Durham had made his first mistake. Machen was clever. He was making Frazier look like an amateur. Eddie would wait for Joe to rush, pop two lefts, then cross a right and tie his opponent up before he could drive through with one of his powerful hooks. Machen was smart. He had moves Frazier never knew existed and he was giving Joe a thorough boxing lesson.
But Eddie Machen found out that Frazier doesn’t discourage easily. He kept taking Machen’s punches, but he never stopped moving in. By the fifth round, Machen was no longer able to hold off Frazier’s rushes. Joe took two or three punches, but he kept boring in. In the early rounds, Machen was agile enough to sidestep Frazier’s punches, but as the fight wore on, Eddie was a half step slower, a vital half step. Now Frazier’s hooks were finding their target and the fight was beginning to turn.
“We’re doing fine,” Durham said as Frazier sank onto his stool after the sixth round. “Let’s keep it up, we’re doing fine. We got him now.”
“We ain’t out there at all,” Joe replied. “You’re sitting here watching me go out there and fight.”
Toward the end of the fight, Machen had nothing left.
It was, said Frazier, his toughest fight. “My first fight with an old pro,” he said. “I had to keep driving all the way before I finally got to him. Now what do those Philadelphia sportswriters think of me? Do they still think I’m being rushed? Do they still think I’m not ready for fighters like Eddie Machen?”
Joe Frazier answered his own question. “I’m ready for anybody.”
The press agreed. For the first time, sportswriters wrote seriously about Joe Frazier as a potential heavyweight champion. And Eddie Machen, a KO victim for only the second time in his career, quickly climbed aboard the rapidly growing Joe Frazier bandwagon.
“He needs polishing,” said the veteran Californian, “but he’s awful good. The boy has no defense, but the way he stays on top of you, he don’t need one.”
Now Frazier was on his way. He took a three-month vacation from the ring after the Machen fight, then resumed his climb up the heavyweight ladder by stopping Doug Jones in six on February 21, 1967. Jefferson Davis fell in five two months later, and four weeks after that George “Scrap Iron” Johnson became only the second man in sixteen professional fights to finish standing against Frazier. But Johnson was soundly whipped in the ten rounds and Joe easily won the decision.
Next was another Madison Square Garden fight on July 19, 1967. The opponent was George Chuvalo, who had never been stopped and who had gone fifteen rounds against Muhammad Ali just sixteen months earlier. Joe Frazier stopped him. He handed the Canadian a merciless whipping and the referee finally called an end to the fight in the fourth round with Chuvalo beaten to a bloody pulp, both eyes punched practically closed.
Joe then concluded his year’s work by taking out tall Tony Doyle with a right uppercut in 1:04 of the second round in a fight that dedicated the new $12,000,000 Philadelphia Spectrum on October 17.
As he returned to his dressing room, Joe Frazier heard the crowd. They were cheering for him, yelling for him. “You the next champ, Joe,” they kept saying. “You the next champ.” Frazier smiled and waved at them.
“It went like I planned,” he said in his dressing room. “I suckered him in the first round, feeling him out. I knew he couldn’t get away . . . I did more fighting in the gym. I’m the first ever to fight here in the . . . er, the Spectrum. And some night I’ll come back here to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.”
Two months and one day after he demolished Tony Doyle, Frazier put an end to 1967 by knocking out Marion Connors in three rounds. In two and a half years, Joe Frazier had ripped through nineteen opponents, seventeen of them failing to go the distance. He was ready for the best heavyweights in the world. He was ready to go right to the top. There would be no stopping Joe Frazier now.
Yank
On April 28, 1967, in Houston, Texas, exactly thirty-seven days after he had defended his heavyweight championship for the ninth time in three years with a seven-round knockout of Zora Folley, Muhammad Ali refused to take the step forward that would make him a soldier in the United States Army. Ten days later, a federal grand jury indicted Ali on a charge of draft evasion, a crime that carried with it a fine of $10,000 and, if he was found guilty, imprisonment for five years. But in the minds of millions of self-righteous, quick-to-condemn Americans, some of them in control of boxing in the United States, Muhammad Ali had already been found guilty.
Within hours of the indictment, a chain of events was set off that would alter the history of boxing and have a lasting, irrevocable, and vital effect on the life of Joe Frazier.
On the grounds that boxing could not accept a jailbird as heavyweight champion, the World Boxing Association acted without hesitation to strip Muhammad Ali of his title and suspend him from fighting in its domain, which is to say almost everywhere. To make the exile complete, the New York State Athletic Commission followed the WBA’s lead, depriving Ali of his crown and suspending him in the state which boasts, among other landmarks, the Statue of Liberty.
Once the WBA had acted to remove its cherished crown from the head of Muhammad Ali, it decided that the world could never survive being denied a heavyweight champion, and it moved to start an elimination tournament among the leading heavyweights in the world, the survivor of the lose-and-out tournament to wear the coveted crown with the WBA’s blessings.
For this honor, the WBA selected the eight leading heavyweights based on its monthly rankings. They were Floyd Patterson of Marlboro, New York; Jimmy Ellis of Louisville, Kentucky; Thad Spencer of San Francisco, California; Oscar Bonavena of Argentina; Ernie Terrell of Chicago, Illinois; Karl Mildenberger of Germany; Jerry Quarry of Bellflower, California; and Joe Frazier of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
It was a nice, neat arrangement, except for one small problem. It didn’t quite meet with the approval of Joe Frazier of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Rather, it didn’t meet with the approval of Yank Durham.
“Screw their tournament,” Yank hinted from the strength of Frazier’s No. 1 ranking in the WBA’s list of heavyweights. “I don’t need them, they need me. Let them fight it out and I’ll fight the winner.”
It was a courageous step and a dangerous one. Durham was turning his back on boxing’s powers-that-be and gambling with high stakes. There was money to be made in that tournament, a guaranteed $25,000 for the first fight, $50,000 for the second, and $100,000 for the last one. That’s a total of $175,000 for three fights, more money than Frazier had made in all his first nineteen fights as a pro.
And a vital part of the prize was recognition by the leading author
ity in the world, the WBA, as heavyweight champion and public acquiescence in that title.
The alternatives looked bleak. By staying out of the tournament, what was left to Frazier? Inactivity. Lack of public acceptance. A few fights for peanuts.
Yank Durham gambled. He gambled that the public would admire him for his defiance of boxing’s governing body and, therefore, have greater respect for Frazier. And he took the risk that when the tournament was over, when eight fighters had finished knocking each other around and the WBA had its champion, there would be only one legitimate challenger left and his name would be Joe Frazier. Then he would get a shot at the vacant crown in one fight, not three. And, Yank Durham gambled, for a lot more than $175,000.
True to their word, the members of Cloverlay’s Board of Directors let Durham have his way. There were a few random dissenting opinions among Cloverlay’s rank and file, those who believed that Frazier belonged in the tournament, that his developing career would be best served by entering it. But at a meeting of Cloverlay’s Board of Directors on May 10, 1967, Durham outlined his reasons for holding out and so convinced the board, which voted unanimously to go along with Yank.
The group sent word to the press of its decision, saying, “The money isn’t enough,” and adding it didn’t want Frazier “tied up for two years by the ancillaries.” Part of the deal was that ancillary rights to the champion for two years would go to a corporation called Sports Action, promoters of the tournament, and that the champion’s first defense would be for Sports Action in the Houston Astrodome. “We won’t fight in the tournament,” a spokesman for Cloverlay said, “but we’ll fight anyone, anytime.”
