Whatever the Bonavena bout lacked in style points, it was revelatory insofar as Frazier was concerned. Going into it, he was an unknown quantity in the eyes of the press, which could draw no firm conclusions from the parade of cops and barbers he had beaten. But his narrow victory over Bonavena provided a glimpse into the sturdiness of his hide. Frazier proved he could take a punch, get up off the floor, and go ten rounds against a ranked opponent—and win. That said, it was abundantly clear that he still had work to do before he was up to the challenge of Ali, who loomed on the horizon even then as a big payday for Frazier. Within the inner circle of Cloverlay, there were some who would have liked to see it happen sooner than later. Even Frazier seemed eager to get it on with “Clay,” yet he only addressed the subject when asked and always with the caveat that he deferred to Durham when it came to picking opponents. When Ali invited Frazier for a showdown on April 25, 1967, in Tokyo, for a rumored purse of $250,000—three days before he would be summoned to appear at the Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station in Houston—Durham summarily rejected it, later explaining: “If I had sent that boy in there against Clay, I would have been the laughingstock of boxing.” Durham calculated that Frazier would still need one and a half years of “college” before he took on “Professor Clay.”
History engulfed Ali with the escalation of the Vietnam War. Though he had flunked the U.S. Armed Forces qualifying test in 1964 due to poor writing and spelling skills, his draft status was reclassified as 1-A in February 1966 as the demand for soldiers increased. Famously, Ali told the Chicago Daily News, “I don’t have any personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.” Called to step forward on April 28, 1967, Ali refused induction on the grounds that Muslim orthodoxy forbade him to “take part in no wars unless declared by Allah or the Messenger.” Immediately, the World Boxing Association stripped him of his championship and the New York State Athletic Commission suspended his boxing license. A jury of six men and six women convicted him of draft evasion on June 20, whereupon he was sentenced to five years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. He remained free on bond as his attorneys hurried to file an appeal. In the Philadelphia Daily News that week there appeared an article under a headline that asked, CLAY: FRAZIER BOUT BEFORE PRISON?
* * *
Never one to seek attention for himself, Eddie Futch dwelled in the shadows of his profession for years, his brilliance as a trainer known only to his more discerning peers and true aficionados of the sport. He was the son of a Mississippi sharecropper who had come to Detroit in search of factory work and settled in the Black Bottom neighborhood. Only five foot seven but quick with his hands and on his feet, young Eddie played basketball for Northeastern High School and later suited up for the semipro Moreland YMCA. He began boxing at the Brewster Recreation Center in the same stable with then-amateur light heavyweight Joe Louis. From 1932 until 1936, while Futch worked as a waiter at the Hotel Wolverine, he campaigned as an amateur lightweight for the Detroit Athletic Association. He won the Detroit Golden Gloves in 1933. Although Louis had a forty-pound weight advantage, the Brown Bomber used him as a sparring partner. He told Futch, who had a 37-3 amateur record: “When I’m sharp enough to hit you, I’m sharp enough to hit anyone.” When a heart murmur prevented Futch from turning pro in 1936, he began working with a group of young boxers at Brewster that included Berry Gordy, who would go on to found Motown and who once told Sports Illustrated that there is “a little bit of Eddie Futch” in Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson.
To support his wife and four children, Futch had a job during World War II as a spot welder at Ford Motor Company. In his early portfolio of pro talent, he had two contenders—middleweight Jimmy Edgar, who lost twice to Jake LaMotta and fought him again to a draw; and welterweight Lester Felton, who defeated Kid Gavilán and Carmen Basilio. By car, he ferried them and others to engagements across the Midwest, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and into the Deep South, ever vigilant not to allow his fuel tank to drop below half for fear that he would find himself on a country road at a late hour and encounter a gas-station attendant who would deny him service. “I was never one to look for trouble, but I would not take abuse,” Futch told me of his journeys through the segregated South. “I had an automatic pistol up under the dash just in case. Thank God I never had to use it.” Neither Edgar nor Felton ever fought for a championship. Edgar had problems with his eyes—cataracts—and Felton had problems with a woman. Futch told me, “I would tell him one thing, and she would tell him the opposite.” He visited California in 1951 and stayed, at the insistence of a fighter he had once trained. Six years later he had his first champion, welterweight Don Jordan, who found himself under pressure by the mob to go in the tank. To ensure Jordan remained out of their clutches, Futch switched hotel rooms with him prior to a bout in New York in order to cross up any “visitor” who happened to drop by in an effort to strong-arm him.
Sure enough, at 3 A.M. there was a knock on the door of the room that Jordan had vacated.
Futch answered it.
Standing there was Sonny Liston.
“What do you want?” asked Futch.
Liston glowered, pondered the question, and replied, “Towels.”
Eddie once told me, “The joy I derive from boxing is a simple joy. And that is to see talent blossom and flourish.” With a receding hairline atop his furrowed brow, Futch had broad interests that extended beyond boxing to nineteenth-century British poetry, which he discovered as a young teenager and used to assuage the grief caused by the abandonment of his father. Orderly in his habits, he exuded a courteous air and spoke precisely, striving not to end any spoken sentence with a preposition. In a calm and reassuring voice, he worked the corner with a cool professionalism and attention to detail that would bring him eighteen champions. Beyond his wealth of knowledge and experience, he understood that he held human lives in his hands. He had witnessed the death of seven fighters in the ring. One was obscure Detroit lightweight Talmadge Bussey, who, Futch remembered, was handled by two brothers the evening he faced Luther Rawlings in October 1949. When a battered Bussey came back to his corner at the end of the eighth round, the two brothers squabbled over whether to allow him to continue. “One of them wanted to keep him on his stool, while the other tried to send him out for the ninth round,” Futch would remember. “The bell rang and they pushed him out. Bussey was hit and he never woke up.”
Futch hooked up with Frazier at the invitation of Durham. He had come highly recommended to Durham as someone who could help him maneuver Joe to the championship, given his uncanny aptitude for sizing up styles and choosing opponents. “Yank asked around for people who could help him,” said Futch, who was unsure if he could free himself up. He was working as a clerk for the U.S. Postal Service, which he knew frowned on moonlighting, so he scarcely had time to look after his own fighters. But he agreed to take a look at Joe if Joe would come to California. Futch picked up Joe, Durham, and the sparring partner who had traveled with them at the airport and worked Joe out at the Main Street Gym in Los Angeles. Futch liked what he saw, and he became fond of Joe. The two clicked. Over the apprehensions of Durham, Futch lined up the Chuck Leslie and Memphis Al Jones bouts in May and promised an easy outcome in both.
While Futch did not attend the Bonavena bout in New York that September, it was clear to him even on television back in L.A. that the two second-round knockdowns exposed a weakness in Frazier that called for urgent attention. “Against a taller opponent, Joe would walk straight in and get hit,” said Futch. “He had to learn to punch out of a bob-and-weave.” When Frazier returned to Los Angeles to prepare for his bout against the experienced Eddie Machen in November, Futch drilled Joe in the fundamentals of the bob-and-weave by stretching a rope between diagonal ring posts and challenging him to duck under it as he advanced on an imaginary opponent. To get some sparring in, Futch hooked up Frazier with Quarry, who also trained at the Main Street Gym. The action was so intense that it had to be stopped when Quarry suf
fered a cut lip that required nine stitches.
Promoter Aileen Eaton was appalled. “What a foolish thing for the managers to allow,” she told Jack Fried, of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. “It could have been Frazier who was hurt, and our show would have been broken up.”
Ringside at the Olympic Auditorium was aglitter with Hollywood stars, including Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, and Milton Berle. While Machen had been a former top contender who had been ducked by Floyd Patterson during his championship reign, he was on the downside of his career at thirty-four, his legs no longer able to steer him out of trouble. Still, he had handed Quarry his first pro loss the previous July and, according to Futch, was “someone who could box and punch a little” and give Joe some necessary schooling. Some in the press were unsure if Frazier was seasoned enough to handle the veteran Machen. But he came out in the first round and sent Machen sailing through the ropes onto the ring apron with a concussive left hook to the jaw. Dazed, Machen crawled back through the ropes with the help of the referee, who inexplicably held up the bottom strand instead of continuing the count. Frazier would say later, “Why’d the ref help him? Why’d he help Ed back in?” Frazier poured it on in the ensuing rounds, building a lead in the scoring as he drove Machen into the ropes. But Machen was nothing if not game. In the eighth round, he was backed into a corner when he clipped Frazier with a left hand that would have floored him had he not clutched Machen by the leg. Frazier came back in the ninth round and pounded Machen with such blind fury that Berle stood up at his seat and shouted, “Stop it! Stop it!” The referee obliged him twenty-two seconds into the tenth round. Machen called Frazier “a tough kid [who] should go a long way.” Actor Lee Majors, the star of The Big Valley and later The Six Million Dollar Man, looked into buying Frazier from Cloverlay.
“Lee asked me if I would approach Yank,” said matchmaker Don Chargin. “He and Burt Reynolds owned a couple of fighters. Later, they would have the welterweight Andy ‘The Hawk’ Price, who beat Carlos Palomino, and José ‘Pipino’ Cuevas. No figures were mentioned; he just wanted to see if Joe was available. So I asked Yank, who laughed and said, ‘You want me to sell a gold mine!’”
Under pressure by Cloverlay to agree to a Frazier-Quarry bout, Durham flew Futch to Philadelphia to persuade the board to back away from the proposal, given that it would be a “hard fight” and that neither Joe nor Jerry was well enough known at that point to be worthwhile financially. “This fight is coming, there is no avoiding it—but not yet,” Futch told the board. They concurred. Instead of Quarry, Frazier was matched next with Doug Jones, who had come within an eyelash of upsetting Clay at Madison Square Garden in 1963 in an unpopular decision. But that had been four long years before and Jones was now frayed at the edges, still a “name” but in no way more than a stepping-stone for Frazier when they squared off at the Arena in Philadelphia on February 21, 1967. Quoted in the papers as calling Joe “overrated,” Jones found himself under a barrage of leather from the opening bell. Heavier by seventeen pounds, Frazier had Jones in trouble with punishing body shots in the third and fourth rounds before Durham instructed him in the corner prior to the sixth to take Jones out with “one shot.” Again, the decisive blow was a left hook. While Frazier would claim with the eye of a perfectionist that he had thrown better ones, he launched it out of his bob-and-weave and spun Jones into the ropes. Sandy Grady observed in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin that Jones “froze in midair, one elbow leaning on the ropes like a meditative Martini drinker at a bar.” Jones slid to the canvas, where he remained sprawled on his back for five minutes. The outcome appeared to spell the end for Jones, whose manager, Alex Koskowitz, said: “From now on, he fights with his wife.” Frazier had taken yet another step closer to “Clay,” even if Durham was not hearing any of it.
Ali was then in preparation for his March 22, 1967 title defense against number-one contender Zora Folley at the Garden—his last fight before he would be stripped of his championship. The Champ held a public workout in the basement of the arena. There, according to Dave Anderson in the New York Times, he stepped into the ring before a crowd of spectators that included businessmen, dockworkers, college students, and even a priest. With Ali was Sugar Ray Robinson, whom the announcer exalted as “the greatest fighter who ever lived.” Ali grinned and corrected: “Next to me.” As Ali was having his gloves laced on for his sparring session with Jimmy Ellis, he spotted Frazier standing in the doorway in a plaid jacket.
“Joe Fraaaaaaaaaazier!” he boomed. “Come up here and have a talk with me.”
Frazier climbed up into the ring. He looked Ali up and down, smiled, and said, “I thought you were much larger. You look pretty small to me.”
Ali replied, “If you even dreamed about fighting me, you’d be in big trouble.”
Ali peeled back Frazier’s unbuttoned plaid jacket to reveal a pair of suspenders and said, “Those won’t keep you standing.” Joe laughed. Ali then told Joe, “Two more years.”
“I’ll be ready,” Frazier promised.
With Ali out of action and possibly headed behind bars for who knew how long, the World Boxing Association announced that it would hold an elimination tournament to choose a new champion in conjunction with Sports Action, Inc. Spearheaded by Mike Malitz, Sports Action included elements of Main Bout—attorney Bob Arum, former Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown, and Fred Hofheinz, the son of Judge Roy Hofheinz, the mastermind behind the Houston Astrodome—which had been involved with Ali in the theatrical television promotions of his bouts. Sports Action, Inc. was backed by the American Broadcasting Corporation, which enabled Malitz to outspend rival Madison Square Garden and ultimately line up eight of the top contenders in the heavyweight division: Oscar Bonavena, Jimmy Ellis, Leotis Martin, Karl Mildenberger, Floyd Patterson, Jerry Quarry, Thad Spencer, and Ernie Terrell. While it was preposterous to think that the public would embrace any of these aspirants as a legitimate champion in place of Ali—who had by then beaten Mildenberger, Patterson, and Terrell and would later beat Bonavena, Ellis, and Quarry—the upside appeared to be that these would be lively bouts and would perhaps pump some unpredictability back into a sport that been dominated by Ali. ABC slotted the bouts as programming for Wide World of Sports beginning August 4, 1967, in Houston.
Cohorts of Leotis Martin strolled the sidewalk with placards urging Frazier to “take a shot at a real fighter” as Cloverlay convened a board meeting to weigh an offer by Malitz on May 10, 1967. In April, with Doug Jones behind him, Frazier had fractured the jaw of Jefferson Davis in Miami Beach on his way to a fifth-round technical knockout and then scored his sixteenth victory by winning a ten-round decision over George “Scrap Iron” Johnson in Los Angeles in May. By then, Frazier had ascended to number two in the WBA rankings and had cards to play. Futch claimed he discouraged Durham from entering the tournament, which included opponents who could be a problem for Frazier at that stage of his development—particularly Terrell, Ellis, and Quarry. Shrewdly, Futch told Durham, “Let them fight it out. Why fight through a crowded field when you can wait for the winner?” With no interest in tangling with the potentially dangerous Martin, Durham received the approval of the Cloverlay board to decline the offer by Malitz and instead sign to meet George Chuvalo at Madison Square Garden in July.
With a scarred face that had withstood years of punishment, including fifteen rounds each with Ali and Terrell and twelve with Patterson, Chuvalo had not been knocked off his feet in sixty-two professional bouts. The son of a Croatian-born butcher, Chuvalo grew up in a grim section of Toronto called the Junction, where he learned to box at age nine from lessons he found on cards enclosed in cereal boxes. He won eighteen of nineteen amateur bouts, including the Canadian amateur heavyweight championship in May 1955, and a year later turned pro by knocking out all four of his opponents in the Jack Dempsey Heavyweight Novice Championship at Maple Leaf Gardens. When his career stalled in the early 1960s, he scraped up five thousand dollars to buy back his contract from his manager.
Someone had told him that there was a trainer in Detroit who worked well with aggressive fighters—Theodore McWhorter—so Chuvalo packed up his wife and three children and found lodging in the Motor City in a ten-dollar-per-week room, where they subsisted on canned spaghetti and Ritz crackers. “I was living like a dog,” Chuvalo told Sports Illustrated. With the help of McWhorter and later Irving Ungerman—a Toronto poultry processor who became his manager—Chuvalo acquitted himself nobly. The Ring magazine selected his loss to Patterson on February 1, 1965, as the Fight of the Year.
No prior effort in the ring by Frazier highlighted his emerging aura of savagery better than his evisceration of Chuvalo. While he did not “tilt George”—which is to say, become the first to knock him down—Frazier was as unpitying of Chuvalo as he had been of the three sparring partners he had gutted during training camp. He had promised the press that he would “come out smokin’” and he did precisely that. By the end of the first round, Chuvalo was bleeding from two cuts—one on his left forehead from an apparent head butt and the other below his right eye. Blood spurted from the eye cut as Frazier bore in on it in the second and third rounds. By the end of the third round, the big-boned Canadian could not see out of his swollen right eye. He later said, “I looked like a one-eyed cat peeping into a seafood store.” Early in the fourth round, Frazier pounded two left hooks into the eye that landed with such cruelty that Chuvalo, his face now covered with blood, was certain that his eyeball had been jarred loose. The pain was unbearable. He turned away from Frazier as the referee stepped in and stopped the fight. Doctors later told Chuvalo that his eye had “fallen through the optic floor” and he had been in danger of losing it.
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