by Phil Pepe
When the round ended, it was Frazier’s fans who took up the chant. “Joe . . . Joe . . . Joe . . .”
Between rounds, Angelo Dundee scolded, threatened, pleaded.
“Stop playing,” Dundee shouted. “Do you want to blow this fight? Do you want to blow everything?”
Ali was not playing in the ninth round. Perhaps refreshed from three rounds of inaction, perhaps alerted to his imminent danger by Dundee’s words, he went to work. He bounced a right off Frazier’s head, then drove a left to the body. He peppered Frazier’s face with jabs, then fired a straight, stiff right. He drilled a right-hand lead off Frazier’s head, then followed up with left-right-left in rapid succession. The combinations were driving home now and Ali was putting on his best sustained attack of the fight. He was turning the fight in a different direction, taking the play away from Frazier and mounting points.
Toward the round’s end, Ali landed three successive left-right combinations to the head and Frazier’s knees sagged and the crowd was alive again, exhorting Ali on. The bell sounded and Frazier wobbled on jellied legs to his corner and a man standing behind the press row leaned over and yelled through the din of the crowd into the ear of a reporter.
“Stay alert,” he shouted hoarsely. “I’m Ali’s bodyguard and I’m going right over you into the ring just as soon as the fight’s over and I think it’s going to be over soon. I think we’re going to knock this sucker out in the next round.”
Had it come full circle? Was Joe Frazier finished? Had Muhammad been playing? Was it now his fight?
Again Frazier bolted out of his corner and raced across the ring, but he ran right into a left to the head and stopped there. Frazier didn’t back off, though, he kept coming and Ali kept raining punches on his face. He came straight ahead and Ali kept bombarding that face with lefts and rights and he could not miss if he tried. The eyes were beginning to close and the cheekbones were beginning to puff up and Frazier was slow and flat-footed and his arms seemed too heavy to be lifted, as if they were weighted at his side.
Joe Frazier was punched out and Muhammad Ali was having target practice with Frazier’s face, using it for the light bag he peppers rhythmically in training. Ali drove a left and right to Frazier’s head and Joe just stood there and took it and Ali turned to ringside and announced, “He’s out,” and the crowd roared.
When the tenth round ended, it was still anybody’s fight. Ali led on one official card, six rounds to four. Frazier led on two others, one by 6-4, the other by 7-3. But there were still five rounds to go and they looked like Mt. Everest to Frazier. It appeared Ali, refreshed now, could continue to use Frazier for a punching bag for the final five rounds, could continue to pile up points and win the decision unanimously . . . and easily.
If a knockout is what Frazier needed, he didn’t appear to have enough reserve left to do it. His face was puffy, both eyes practically closed. His energy seemed to be rapidly slipping away. And so was the fight.
Somehow, from somewhere, Frazier found the stamina to make a strong bid to regain control in the eleventh. He moved in as Ali stabbed with his left, pawing to keep his opponent away. Joe missed a left and as Ali came off the ropes, he slipped and fell. From the balcony, it looked like Frazier’s left had landed and sent Muhammad to the canvas. Referee Mercante ruled no knockdown, wiped Ali’s gloves and waved the fighters to continue.
Frazier continued the pursuer. He forced Muhammad into a corner and bounced two lefts off his head. Two more left hooks to the head by Joe, but Ali fired a left and right to the face and Frazier backed off. Instead of retreating from the ropes, Ali stayed there and waved at Frazier to come back. Frazier did. He came back behind a brutal left hook that hit with mighty force on the side of Ali’s face and the impact drove him onto the ropes. He bounced off and reeled around the ring like a drunk, his legs jiggling unsteadily under him. He stumbled around the ring, Frazier in pursuit, firing lefts and rights, hoping to connect one more time. Was Ali faking? Playing possum? Trying to lure Frazier into range, lull him into a false sense of security, sucker him into a wild swing that would leave his face unprotected? You could never tell with Ali. Certainly, he was capable of play-acting in the ring, but he was stumbling all over the ring, trying to remain upright, trying to support his body on rubber legs.
No, Muhammad Ali wasn’t faking. His eyes gave him away. They were glassy and he seemed not to know where he was and when the bell rang, he wandered aimlessly in the direction of his corner, and Angelo Dundee and Chickie Ferrara were in the ring instantaneously, working feverishly to revive him.
Dr. A. Harry Kleiman of the New York State Athletic Commission was in the ring, too, looking into Ali’s eyes. Dundee was shouting in Muhammad’s ears, slapping his legs, trying desperately to restore them to life.
The bell rang for round twelve and Frazier swarmed all over his man, firing wild lefts and rights, hoping to put an end to it, right there, right then.
Joe forced Muhammad into the ropes and pounded three hooks to the head and the crowd went wild, sensing the kill. His legs wobbly again, Muhammad pitched forward and lay on Frazier to smother his punches, to prevent him from getting an arm free to continue the pounding. Joe pushed Ali off and spun him around with a left and Muhammad was hanging on, trying with all the strength he could muster not to go down. Instinctively, he fought back with both hands and kept Frazier busy enough to prevent further punishment. The brief respite was enough to allow Muhammad to clear his head and just before the bell rang, Ali drove a hard right to Frazier’s head.
When the bell sounded for round thirteen, the fight had already gone further than most experts, including the two participants, had predicted it would.
The one minute allotted between rounds enabled Ali to find new stamina and when he answered the bell for round thirteen, he was dancing again. He was on the balls of his feet, dancing and jabbing, staying away from Frazier’s crushing left, dancing and moving and popping his left.
He was very tired now. They were both very tired. But Ali used every device at his command to stay away from Frazier through the thirteenth. He circled and jabbed and danced when his legs would permit him to, and when they wouldn’t, he fell on Frazier, clutched at his hands, held him, tied him up, pushing his head down and wrestling him into a corner. He did enough, not only to survive the round, but to win it.
It was the same in the fourteenth. Ali fought desperately to keep Frazier off him, and Frazier advanced relentlessly, trying to drive home the one punch that would end the fight. Ali was fighting most of the fight with his back to the ropes not, as he planned, as he hoped, in the middle of the ring where he could dance and move. Forced to fight back, Ali patted Frazier with jabs, then fell into clinches as Joe tried to push him off and resume his attack. Frazier got in some shots, but they were off-balance punches, lacking the force that comes when he plants his feet, digs into the canvas and bombs away.
When the bell rang for the start of round fifteen, they met in center ring and touched gloves and their faces told an inaccurate story of the first fourteen rounds.
Ali was unmarked. Frazier’s face was chopped up. His eyes, just slits now, looked out from between huge ugly welts. His face was puffy and grotesquely misshapen. Yet, on the cards of all three officials, he was far in front in the fight—so far that only a knockout could steal the victory from him—and Ali appeared incapable of mustering the power to deliver a knockout punch. But, then, he had appeared incapable of mustering the same power in the fifteenth round against Oscar Bonavena just three months earlier.
Muhammad came out trying for the knockout, trying for the miracle that would save the fight. He opened up with a left and a right, another left-right combination and then from out of nowhere, Joe Frazier let go a long, looping left that caught Muhammad on the right cheek and he toppled backward and crashed onto the canvas on his back like a felled tree. He had been down only twice in
his professional career. Sonny Banks did it in his eleventh fight nine years before and Henry Cooper did it, but they could not keep him down. This time, it looked like Ali would stay down.
The crowd was on its feet. The entire arena was standing—everybody except Muhammad Ali. He was on his back, too weary, too hurt, too spent, it seemed, to get up. And the fans, all of them seemingly Joe Frazier fans now, were yelling madly.
As Muhammad lay there for just a few seconds, you could see a bulge billowing on his right cheek, where the blow had landed, swelling before your eyes to grapefruit size.
Muhammad was hurt, he was beaten, but something within him made him refuse to take defeat lying on his back. It was pride that motivated him, pride that enabled him to spring to his feet at the count of four. And while referee Mercante picked up the count and tolled off the mandatory eight, Ali shook his head to clear the mustiness inside.
There were still two minutes remaining when Joe Frazier went back on the attack, trying desperately to put over the one final punch that would certainly end it. But he was arm-weary and peering dimly out of slits. His left eye was completely closed, his right eye was half closed and his lips were puffed and swollen. His face looked like a death mask.
Frazier threw everything he had left and he had little. He crashed two lefts to Ali’s jaw, a right to the chin, a left to the body and Muhammad clutched and held. Frazier pushed him off and bombed two more lefts that drove Ali into the ropes, his legs flopping around under him. He was still throwing punches, the crowd on its feet cheering wildly, so wildly that even at ringside, ten feet away from the fighters, you couldn’t hear the bell that was clanging, clanging, clanging to signal the end of the fight, to announce that after fifteen brutal, blistering, punishing rounds, it was over.
Arthur Mercante threw his body between them to stop the punching and Joe Frazier tapped Ali playfully on the head and they threw their arms around each other because now they were enemies no longer. Now they were just two badly beaten, emotionally and physically spent fighters. Now they were two weary warriors who had been through the fifteen-round war together and who had only respect and admiration for each other.
The crowd hushed in anticipation of the decision as Johnny Addie collected the cards of the three officials.
“Draw, draw,” sombody shouted and others took up the chant. “Draw, draw, draw.”
But the decision, when Addie announced it, was really no surprise.
“Referee Arthur Mercante scores eight rounds for Frazier, six rounds for Ali, one round even.”
There was a light smattering of boos, but mostly cheers.
“Judge Artie Aidala scores nine rounds for Frazier, six rounds for Ali.”
The final card didn’t matter. Frazier was the winner. The crowd knew it and Joe Frazier knew it and Muhammad Ali knew it. For the record, Addie announced that Judge Bill Recht had scored eleven rounds for Frazier and four for Ali. But the announcement was drowned in the bedlam around ringside, fans attempting to get into the ring to clutch their hero, Joe Frazier, and Madison Square Garden police blocking the apron of the ring.
It’s doubtful anybody heard Johnny Addie’s announcement, “The winnuh, and still heavyweight champion of the worrlllddd . . . Joe Frazier.”
It’s certain nobody had to hear it. Not the crowd, not Muhammad Ali and not Joe Frazier.
Ali took the news silently, stoically. He stood there, the grapefruit stuck in his right cheek, listening to the announcement that made him a loser for the first time in his professional career. He listened and then the next moment he was gone, hustled off to his dressing room with a cordon of police around him.
Joe Frazier listened quietly, too, and when the second card was read, he leaped into the air, then searched frantically for Yank Durham, picked his massive body out in the crowd in his corner, and leaped into Yank’s arms. Their cheeks touched and Durham’s voice was husky with emotion. “You done it, Joe,” he said. “You done it.”
This is what Joe Frazier had fought for, what he had lived for, what Rubin Frazier had predicted many years ago in Beaufort, South Carolina. And now it was his. Alone. He was Joe Frazier, the heavyweight champion of the world, and nobody could dispute that. Nobody.
“I Done Whipped Him”
It is customary, after a big fight in Madison Square Garden, to deliver both the winner and the loser to a huge, open room in the bowels of the building where chairs are set up and a platform is provided on which there are two chairs, one for each fighter.
This is where the press—there were more than eight hundred representatives of the news media for Ali-Frazier—conducts its postfight interviews; this is where the winner tells how he won and the loser tells why he lost and both tell of the terrible war now ended.
As the press corps gathered, taking seats in anticipation of Muhammad Ali’s first postfight press conference as a loser, outside in the main arena thousands of people still milled around a half hour after the final bell had sounded. They wandered aimlessly in disbelief, Muhammad Ali fans with nowhere to go, no victory party, no celebration to attend. Shock was on their faces and tears of disappointment streamed down their cheeks, their black cheeks and their white cheeks.
How could it be? How could Muhammad Ali lose a fight? And then, as if realizing it was true, they wandered out of the arena in a stupor, they wandered out into the gloom of night taking their disappointment and their shock with them.
In the press interview area, just about every one of the four hundred seats was occupied. The press waited, but no Muhammad Ali. Word came that he had been taken to Flower & Fifth Avenue Hospitals to have his swollen right cheek X-rayed.
Rumors spread through the room that Ali had suffered a broken jaw, rumors that would be dispelled as soon as the X rays were read. The swelling, it was determined, was the result of hemorrhaging in his cheek.
There were tears in Bundini Brown’s eyes as he made the announcement: “Muhammad Ali will not be here,” he said. “But don’t worry about it, we’ll be back. We ain’t through yet. It was one of the greatest fights ever held. The people got their money’s worth. Muhammad was out for three years. He’s not complaining. We’re not complaining.”
Before he left for the hospital, Bundini said, Ali had one question. “Did I put up a good fight?”
“You put up a great fight,” they told him.
Joe Frazier was there at the press conference. His face was swollen and misshapen and he held an ice bag to the large, ugly welts that had popped up all over it, painfully responding to questions through puffed lips. But he answered them, he answered all the questions they threw at him.
Would he fight Ali again?
“I don’t think he wants any more. He can have more if he wants it, but he’s not going to want more, not after what I did to him. Nobody wants more after that.”
Will you retire now?
“Man, the fight’s just over. I’ve got to live a little, man. I been working ten long years.”
How did it feel to be heavyweight champion of the world?
Frazier bristled.
“I always felt like I was the champ. I fought everyone they put in front of me, God knows.”
Why did he think Ali had stayed in the corners when his plan was to use the entire ring?
“He must have been crazy, but he had no choice. Man, he couldn’t move. All those body shots hardened up on you.”
What was all the talking in the ring?
“It was just talk, but it gave me inspiration. And all the time he was jiving me it gave me time to get leverage for my left hook. I told him, ‘I’m gonna do the same to you.’ ”
Finally, Frazier couldn’t resist one solid left hook at those members of the press who had demeaned him as unworthy to wear the title.
“What can you say about me now?” he asked. “What can you
say now? He underestimated me. He thought I was slow and flat-footed. He can punch me, but he can’t hurt me.”
Still, there was room in his heart for some kind words about his opponent.
“You’ve got to give him credit,” Frazier said. “He takes one good punch. That shot I hit him with in the fifteenth round, I went ‘way back to the country to throw. He’s got a good punch and he’s a good man. God, he can take it.”
Now, Joe Frazier asked to be excused. He had fought fifteen brutal rounds and he was tired. He had absorbed hundreds of punches. He had traded his face for the heavyweight championship of the world.
“Now,” he pleaded, “let me go and straighten out my face. I ain’t quite this ugly.”
As he rose to leave, the members of the press applauded him and in applauding Joe Frazier, they were applauding courage.
John F. X. Condon announced the figures. The crowd had drawn 20,455 and paid $1,352,951, both records for Madison Square Garden.
A small crowd of reporters had wandered into the dressing room of referee Arthur Mercante. “It was a great fight,” Mercante was saying. “The way they were hitting, I was surprised it went fifteen rounds. They threw some of the best punches I’ve ever seen.”
The corridor that led from the press interview area to Frazier’s dressing room was clogged with people, fans, relatives, reporters. Special police pushed their way through the mass of humanity, enabling Frazier to walk through. They reached the dressing room and the door swung open and Frazier entered a room that was not big enough for the thirty or forty people crowded around inside.
When they saw him, they rushed to him, clutching him, throwing their arms around him, pounding his back, shaking his hand, planting wet kisses on his bruised cheeks.
Joe sank wearily on a bench, too exhausted to move, too weary to talk. He just sat there and somebody began untying the laces on his boxing shoes.
“Keep this room clear,” growled Yank Durham through the cigar in his mouth. “I don’t want a lotta people in this room.”
