Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  Obsessed in his youth by dreams of playing professional baseball, Gray had given Frazier work as a janitor at the church. “The Reverend Gray was the backbone of the community in North Philadelphia,” said Mazie. “He saw to it that women and children had clinics to go to and that the men had jobs if they needed one.” It is unknown if Frazier was in attendance on the Sunday that King spoke, but he and Durham were both members of the church. Frazier had an admiration for King that would only later be shared by Ali, who Dr. King had said had become a “champion of racial segregation” when he joined the Nation of Islam. Even if Frazier would concede that there were periods when he lapsed as a churchgoer, he remained true to his Christian upbringing and considered himself a man of God. For inspiration across the years, he would play a cassette tape in his car of sermons by C. L. Franklin, the pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit and the father of the renowned soul singer Aretha. In keeping with the principles espoused by King, Frazier did not think of the white man as the same “incorrigible white devil” as Ali did in those early days. While he was not blind to color, he tended to take people as they came in a down-to-earth way, and not look upon them uniformly in one way or another; if you were good to him, he was good to you. When he came into some money as his career began to flourish, he would write Reverend Gray occasional big checks to help keep the church doors open.

  Beyond just giving Frazier a leg up by throwing him some work, Gray played a critical role in helping him secure backing. By virtue of his positions on the Civil Service Commission and the Philadelphia Housing Authority, he used his influence with the top business leaders in Philadelphia to help organize Cloverlay. Intended to aid Frazier in the same fashion that the Louisville Sponsoring Group had supported Clay—which is to say, provide him with seed money and enable him to avoid problems with the taxman—the investment group was headed by Dr. F. Bruce Baldwin, the president of Abbotts Dairies and author of a doctoral thesis at Penn State titled “The Chemistry of Frozen Milk and Cream.” Baldwin referred to himself as “just a milkman,” but he was more than that, helping out with the Board of Public Education, the Heart Association, and other civic endeavors. Boxing was not an area in which he had any expertise, but his cousin Bowers Baldwin had once been a Golden Gloves champion and he considered himself a buff. Forty investors ponied up $250 for each of the initial eighty shares and included, in addition to Baldwin and Gray, Bruce Wright, an estate lawyer who oversaw contract negotiations; Thacher Longstreth, executive vice president of the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce; Arthur Kaufmann, the former chief executive of the Gimbels department stores in Philadelphia; Robert G. Wilder, an advertising executive; Harold Wessel, head of an accounting firm, and—if only for the amusing story angle it gave him—sportswriter Larry Merchant. In a droll column in the Philadelphia Daily News, Merchant observed that “there is a ring of amateur, wholesome-as-milk goodness to the syndicate” and looked forward to finding a “suitable opponent” for Frazier in his Cloverlay debut.

  Gleefully, Merchant added: “I consider anyone suitable who weighs under 160 pounds, has 40-80 vision, size 18 feet, short arms and hasn’t been in a gym in two years. We’ll moider the bum.”

  Ham and cheese sandwiches were served at the luncheon that was held at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel. (“I admire our frugality,” Merchant observed of his fellow investors. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stuff the fat cats of the press with onion soup and steak.”) Under the terms of his initial three-year agreement, Frazier was guaranteed a weekly salary of a hundred dollars ($773.82 in 2017 dollars), all training expenses, and 50 percent of his purses. Cloverlay paid Durham 15 percent of its 50 percent share and accorded him final say over whom Joe fought, when, and for how much. Training expenses ate up another 15 percent, which left the investment group with 20 percent of the proceeds to split among themselves. Cloverlay held two options to extend, with Frazier receiving 55 percent of his purses when the first option was exercised and 60 percent after the third. Frazier called the arrangement “just swell.”

  Owning a piece of a heavyweight then held a certain appeal to men of means, if only because it provided them with a chance to step out of the gray world of commerce and into the company of sportsmen. Cloverlay afforded them that opportunity. “It was a cocktail stock,” said Joe Hand, who came aboard after the initial offering. “They could go to the fights, have a drink or two, and enjoy themselves. It was a night out.” Not sold on any open exchanges, shares were available only to Pennsylvania residents, which came as something of a disappointment to George W. Romney, then governor of Michigan and father of future Republican presidential candidate Mitt. “He loved Joe,” said Hand. “Over the years, he would call me and say, ‘How is he doing? Are you sure you can’t sell me some stock?’” Of the forty investors who did get in on the action, a dozen or more hailed Frazier with cheers as he stepped into the ring on January 14, 1966, for his Cloverlay debut. The “suitable opponent” found for him was yet another eleventh-hour substitute, Mel Turnbow, who stepped in when two previously scheduled opponents bailed. Heavier than Frazier by thirty-two pounds, Turnbow had won seven of his nine fights and floored Floyd Patterson in a sparring session. Whatever apprehensions Durham and the syndicate had were dispelled when Frazier clubbed the six-foot-two, 231-pound Turnbow with a left hook in the first round that Frazier said was “so solid my arm ached right up to the shoulder.” Turnbow was unconscious before his head bounced on the canvas.

  Cloverlay provided Joe with comprehensive care. It saw to his needs inside the ring by providing him with patient management that allowed him to develop his skills, and catered to them outside of it in a variety of ways that were aimed to protect him and enhance his profile. Financially, in addition to providing him with an increasing weekly draw, they placed his money in what were understood to be sound investments and kept his taxes current. To shelter him from the wear and tear of the punishing Philadelphia gyms, they purchased an old building on North Broad Street for ninety thousand dollars and converted it into the Cloverlay Gym, which immediately became the finest facility in the city. Cloverlay engaged the clever New York publicist Joey Goldstein to spread the word on Joe, whose communication skills were then a work in progress. Though Frazier was looked upon by the writers who followed him with a genuine fondness, New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte told me he was a “hard interview,” explaining: “It was hard to understand him. I think he tried. He was pleasant.” To help Joe with that and perhaps enable him to reel in more endorsement work, Hand enrolled him in an elocution class at Temple University.

  Frazier narrowed his eyes and asked, “Elocution class, what’s that?”

  “Well,” Hand said, “they teach you how to speak.”

  “Fuck you,” Frazier said. “I know how to speak.”

  Hand laughed years later and said, “Jesus Christ, he was so furious, I thought he was going to throw me out the window.”

  Hand had only attended an occasional bout before he became an investor in Cloverlay. When he joined the group, he remembered that his mother asked, “Joseph, I understand you bought into a fighter.” Hand said yes. She then asked, “And he is black?” Growing up in Lawndale, in Northeast Philadelphia, a community that was surrounded by cornfields during the 1930s and ’40s, Hand said, “I doubt I even saw a black when I was a kid.” Once he was in the fold at Cloverlay, it was not long before Hand was asked to take on an expanded role, which included lining up off-duty policemen to keep an eye on the gate receipts and discourage unauthorized fingers from dipping into the till. As time passed, he took on additional jobs within the organization that included ushering Frazier to and from appointments, during which they spent many hours together and became friends. Hand remembered that he once had Frazier to his house for dinner, where his young daughter stood up and began walking around the table. Hand told her, “Margaret, sit down, would you?” Frazier said, “She is looking for my tail.” While he said it with an air of conviviality, it was clear
to Hand how acutely aware Frazier was of the chasm that existed between the races. And yet it became equally clear how unacceptable the status quo was to him when the Union League extended an invitation to him to speak.

  Frazier said he would be happy to do it.

  “Are you sure?” Hand asked.

  “Yes,” Frazier replied. He said it emphatically.

  “Well, you know, they would never allow to you to become a member there,” Hand said. “Does that make a difference to you?

  Frazier replied, “My hope is when they meet me, they will let black people join.”

  Hand would say years later, “That was his attitude. He knew there was prejudice, but he was trying to overcome it.”

  Hand’s daughter Margaret added, “He thought he could open their eyes and let them see that he was just a man, just like anyone else was. He spoke there. And you know what? They did not change their rule for a long time. But that was always his thinking. Dad took him places where he was not allowed to walk in the front door.”

  By this point Hand had escaped the subway. Rizzo happened to run into him one day down there, one and a half years into his exile, spotted his badge, and said, “Hand! I thought I told you to come see me after a year.” Hand told him he was happy underground. But Rizzo promoted him to detective. Hand became his eyes and ears. “Rizzo liked to know what was going on in the city,” said Hand. “Dope was not yet as big as it would become, but you had numbers, horses, and prostitution.” Hand roamed the nightscape of Philadelphia, dining in fine restaurants and dropping by seedy bars. No one on the force had better contacts or was a sharper dresser. Hand said, “Rizzo used to come to me and say, ‘I have a meeting next week with so-and-so. See what you can find out about him.’ And I would come back a week later and know more about who he was meeting with than the person knew about himself.” And then one day in 1970 Rizzo called Hand, told him he understood that he was involved with Frazier, and asked, “Do you think Joe would like to sit down with me and have lunch?”

  Chapter Four

  Asswhuppings

  Joe and Muhammad Ali, 1967. AP Images

  The old Madison Square Garden stood on Eighth Avenue between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Streets, in an area that was once known as Jacobs Beach. Along with steering the career of Joe Louis, promoter Mike Jacobs held boxing at the Garden in an iron vise under the aegis of the Twentieth Century Sporting Club, which had its offices a crosstown block away at the Brill Building. Under a big marquee that announced the attraction of the evening in block letters, which in any given week would have included an NBA or NHL game, the circus, or even a political rally, the entrance to the Garden was flanked by a hot dog counter on one side and a hat store on the other. Inside, assorted bookmakers camped out in the shadowy corners of the lobby, where there stood a bronze statue of turn-of-the-century lightweight Joe Gans, “The Old Master.” Clouds of cigar smoke befouled the interior of the arena itself, which had a balcony that became a launchpad for projectiles in the event of a controversial decision. Then with the New York Journal-American, Dave Anderson remembered that a whiskey bottle flew by his ear when Gabriel “Flash” Elorde, of the Philippines, won an unpopular ten-round split decision over Frankie Narvaez, of New York by way of Puerto Rico. Fire axes, beer cartons, and splintered pieces of wooden chairs descended upon press row, which prompted Anderson and Journal-American columnist Jimmy Cannon to crawl under the ring for safety.

  Even as Eighth Avenue became overrun with porn shops and dodgy bars during the 1960s, the Garden occupied the center of the boxing universe. Commissioned by promoter Tex Rickard in 1925 to replace the 1890 incarnation of the building—which had been actually located at Madison Square—it was a beehive of matchmakers, managers, publicists, reporters, and assorted sponges. Bob Goodman, the son of Garden publicity man Murray Goodman and later a well-traveled publicist himself, had vivid memories of the pitch-and-yaw of the Garden boxing department on the second floor, which was adjacent to Ring magazine headquarters. “Spittoons were everywhere you looked,” Goodman said. “No one was without a cigar.” Amid the overlapping conversations, United Press International reporter Jack Cuddy sat in a corner chair and pretended to doze, his ear peeled for an angle he could peg a story on. Goodman said, “Suddenly, he would open an eye, look around, and shuffle out the door. The next thing you knew, UPI had a scoop.” New York City still had seven dailies until the early 1960s, and each of them had two or three men who pounded the boxing beat. Big play was given to boxing and horse racing in the sports pages in what remained of that golden Guys and Dolls era, when men hurried by in snap-brim hats and overcoats with wide lapels, and the women who accompanied them were dolled up in high heels and furs.

  New York would embrace Joe Frazier in a way that Philadelphia had not yet done. Notwithstanding the Yuletide generosity that had been showered upon him by the fans there two years before, he would become increasingly irritated by what he perceived to be a lack of appreciation by his adopted hometown. Of his relationship with Philadelphia, Frazier brooded: “They don’t know when they’ve got something.” But Madison Square Garden did. With the construction of yet another incarnation of the Garden under way, scheduled to open in early 1968, the search had commenced to identify new stars who could be crowd pleasers in an era in which television had more or less abandoned the sport. Thus, the Garden introduced Frazier on March 4, 1966, on a card of young heavyweights headlined by Jerry Quarry, a hard-nosed counterpuncher from Bellflower, California, who had two essential components that promised certain box office: he was as white as a hospital bedsheet and possessed an inclination to brawl that would have elated his Irish forebears. On that evening at the Garden, Frazier stopped Buffalo cop Dick Wipperman on a fifth-round technical knockout and arguably stole the show from Quarry, who battled the more experienced Tony Alongi to a ten-round draw. For Harry Markson, the president of Garden boxing operations, and Teddy Brenner, his matchmaker, the potential pairing of Frazier and Quarry figured to bring a windfall.

  The twenty-two-year-old Frazier stayed busy until the Garden could find a way to book him again. At the Hotel Philadelphia in early April 1966, he ran his record to 7-0 by scoring a second-round knockout over Charley Polite, with a left hook that broke his jaw and sheared two molars at the gum line; Dr. Baldwin was so distressed by the spectacle that he had Cloverlay cut Polite a $250 check for groceries until he could work again. From there, three busloads of fans followed Frazier from Philadelphia to the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh, where he chopped down six-foot-five, 237-pound Don “Toro” Smith in the second round—again with that left hook. Joe shrugged: “I work harder than that in the gym.” Next, he set aside his fear of flying and headed to Los Angeles, where he acquainted two opponents, Chuck Leslie and Memphis Al Jones, with his signature punch and flattened them a week apart at the Olympic Auditorium—Leslie in three, Jones in one. At Convention Hall in Philadelphia in July, he floored Brooklyn barber Billy Daniels with left hooks in the second, third, fourth, and sixth rounds before the fight was stopped in the sixth. With an ice pack held against a bruised eye, Frazier said with a grin as he talked with reporters, “What do you think of that? I have a black eye. I look like a fighter.” Although he now had eleven victories in the bank—“asswhuppings” all—he would remain untested until Brenner signed him to face Oscar Bonavena.

  They called him “Ringo.” From Buenos Aires, he wore Prince Valiant bangs, his hair cascading in curls. With his lantern jaw, outsized neck, eighteen-inch biceps, and two flat feet, Bonavena had the appearance of a caveman, which the Garden used to its promotional advantage by dressing him up for a photo shoot in animal skins. Schooled by seventy-six-year-old Charley Goldman, the legendary trainer who had shaped Rocky Marciano into the undefeated heavyweight champion—and who said of Oscar, “He hits harder than Marciano did”—Bonavena proved to be a disengaged pupil, given his preoccupation with the opposite sex. His handlers had to keep him more or less under house arrest while he was in training. Stan Hochman
observed in the Philadelphia Daily News: “There are only a few things Bonavena enjoys more than talking to girls and they also involve girls.” Roadwork bugged him, as did training in general, yet he endured enough of it to win twenty-one of his twenty-three fights, which had included a ten-round decision over Canadian George Chuvalo as a 9–5 underdog at the Garden in his previous bout. In keeping with his uncouth manner, Bonavena disparaged Frazier by sniffing the air and asking, “What is that smell? Is that you, Joe?”

  Close to six inches of rain fell on Manhattan the day and evening of September 21, 1966, the largest downpour the city had seen in sixty-seven years. Still, a crowd of 9,069 pushed through the turnstiles for what Durham had expected to be an easy win for Joe. The ungainly Bonavena impressed neither of them. While the Argentine hit hard, he was a disorganized puncher whose footwork appeared to be encumbered by leg irons. Sandy Grady portrayed the lumbering Oscar with amusing precision in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin: “Mostly, he fights like a guy trying to push a car out of a snow-bank.” But Bonavena could be a handful, which Frazier discovered to his chagrin in the second round. With a grunt, he caught Frazier with a left-right combination that sent him folding to the canvas. Joe got up at the count of five. Only seconds later, Bonavena floored him again with a left hook. Frazier bounced up at the count of two, grinning, as if to assure Bonavena he had not been hurt. But he was in jeopardy; Bonavena would have been declared the winner under the “three-knockdown rule” if he had dropped Frazier again. From their seats, 146 Cloverlay shareholders squealed in alarm: “Keep your hands up!” “Slip and move!” Frazier survived the second round, collected himself, and battled Bonavena toe-to-toe across the remaining eight rounds in an affair that deteriorated into a back-alley brawl highlighted by blows beneath the belt. Frazier walloped Bonavena in the groin in the seventh round—he later called it an “accident.” “Ringo” answered it with a less-than-accidental blow down under, followed by a wink and a faux apology. At the end of ten exhausting rounds, Frazier was awarded a split decision that drew howls of disapproval from the Garden crowd.