Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  Frazier had come far in the ten months that had passed since that close call with Bonavena. With Futch on board, he had incorporated the bob-and-weave into his style. He came at his opponents at angles, no longer walking in unprotected, yet critics contended he remained easy to tag, far too willing to sacrifice his body in order to get his shots in. On the other hand, it was widely agreed upon in the wake of his destruction of Chuvalo that he was the hardest hitter in the heavyweight division. Moreover—and the fans picked up on this—he mowed down his opponents with cold finality, as if he were back on the slaughterhouse floor in a bloody apron. Invariably, there would be a smile on his face as he eyed his foe, as if—according to Futch—“he was hungry and in search of something to eat.” Chuvalo attested to the ferocity with which Frazier had come at him in an interview with my father for Sports Illustrated. In his hotel room on Eighth Avenue the evening after the bout, Chuvalo said Frazier was so fast that it was as if he were hitting him with four hands. “Everything moves, his head, his shoulders, his body and his legs,” said Chuvalo, his face swollen and bruised. “Meanwhile he keeps punching and putting on pressure. He fights six minutes every round. . . . Whoever gets him from here will catch hell.”

  Over at the old Garden, Markson told Brenner, “Teddy, you better start thinking about a big show for the new Garden.”

  “I got some ideas,” Brenner said.

  “So have I,” Markson replied.

  * * *

  For a young man who had climbed out of the cradle of poverty, it was a big moment for Joe when he could afford to buy his own house. He and Florence and their three children had lived with Aunt Evelyn for what had seemed like ages, and in 1966, as his career began to take off with the formation of Cloverlay, he found a row house on Ogontz Avenue, in the West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia. There were four bedrooms—one occupied by daughters Jacquelyn and Weatta, and another by son Marvis—and in the finished basement there was room for them to play. For an urban neighborhood, it was relatively safe, yet not without occasional incidents. The races largely coexisted with equanimity in this small patch of Philadelphia, even if that was not the case in more troubled sections of the city. Weatta would remember that an elderly white woman across the street offered piano lessons. Florence always had soul food simmering on the stove—fried chicken, collard greens, pigtails, and such. When Joe Hand once dropped by, he found what appeared to be an ornament sitting on the lawn. Florence had redone the bathroom and repurposed the old sink as a bird bath. That was how they did things back home; nothing went to waste.

  Joe vowed to himself to be the same reliable provider his father Rubin had been. He saw to it that Florence had money to run the house and that the children not only had their needs but their desires met. “Dad was involved in our lives,” said Weatta. “Growing up in the South, he was given everything he needed but not what he wanted. So if we wanted something and he was able, we got it.” He and Florence accompanied them to services on Sunday at the Bright Hope Baptist Church, and, though Joe himself had not been attentive to schoolwork, he demanded that his children hit the books. Around the house, he always seemed to be tinkering with the air conditioner or movie projector or some other household item that was on the fritz. “Why pay somebody to come in and fix it when I can do it myself?” handyman Joe would say. He always had a roll of electrical tape on him. To relax with his children, he would play table games with them in the evening—blackjack, checkers, or Monopoly. Marvis remembered that he would “play monster” with him and his sisters: “Pop would pretend he was asleep and we would crawl on top of him. He would hold us for a couple of seconds and then let us go.” By contrast, he would be far less involved with his children by Rosetta in New York—Renae and Hector. Given the hard feelings that Joe was unable to overcome, there would be years of separation.

  Florence would have a third daughter, Jo-Netta, and become pregnant with a fourth, Natasha, while they lived on Ogontz Avenue. With four children and a fifth on the way, and with the arrival of cousin Vernell Williams and her small child, the house had become suddenly too small, so it was not long before Joe and Florence were looking for a larger place. Also, Marvis was harassed by school bullies who knew how his father earned a living and spoiled for a fight. While Marvis held his own in these encounters, Joe presented himself at William Rowen Elementary to discuss the issue with the principal. Joe remembered how it had been down in Beaufort, how he had faced down the same sort of “scamboogahs” in his youth, and he did not want his oldest son to have any part of it. As Ogontz Avenue fell into decline with the encroachment of gang activity, it became clear that a move was in order. By the end of the 1960s, the Fraziers could afford to move to a better school district in a safer area.

  No son ever gazed upon a father with more worshipful eyes than Marvis did. He was six when he first saw his father fight—against Chuvalo in that bloodletting at the Garden—and thought of him as invincible. To Marvis, no man loomed larger in his young world. With a laugh years later, Marvis would remember: “When Pop said, ‘Jump,’ I asked, ‘How high?’” On those few occasions when Marvis would step out of line, Joe would shoot him a hard look and say, “Come over here.” Joe would then ball up a fist, hold it up for Marvis to inspect, and say, “Smell this.” When it came to keeping order in the house, of seeing to it that plates of food were finished and lights were turned off, Joe could get more done with a stern look than his mother, Dolly, could with a quiver of switches. But Joe also heaped affection on his children the same way Rubin had on him, and it was always a sad day when he would leave for training camp, whereupon Marvis would become the man of the house and Joe would become a nightly voice on the telephone.

  In the arboreal solitude of his training camp at the Concord Hotel, in the Catskills, Joe pushed himself hard and his sparring partners harder. He was unsparing with them in the ring, just as he had been back at the Twenty-Third PAL. The beatings to which he subjected them were so severe that it was not uncommon for Durham to have to bring in replacements. “He was an animal,” said Lester Pelemon, an assistant trainer. “The more he hit you, the more he wanted to hit you. And if you hit him? That really pissed him off.” Often in the evening, he and his sparring partners shot craps; Moleman Williams once took five thousand dollars off Joe. Whenever Joe dropped a roll—and that was commonplace—Pelemon remembered that he would instruct him to arrange the order of sparring partners the following day so that the big winner would get in the ring with him last. “By then Joe would be warmed up and really get his licks in—you know, in revenge,” said Pelemon. Appointed camp “snitch” by Durham, Pelemon remembered that once while Yank was away, Joe wheeled out his Harley-Davidson and informed Pelemon he was taking a spin. When Pelemon reminded him that Yank had ordered him expressly not to allow Joe on “that damn bike,” Frazier replied that he was the boss.

  “So Joe got on the bike and he was out there showing off and the bike went out from under him,” Pelemon told me. “The bike spun in circles and ended up in a ditch. When Joe got up, he was all skinned up and bleeding. He said to me, ‘You better not tell Yank!’ And I said, ‘Tell him? All he has to do is look at you.’ Sure enough, when Yank came back and got a look at Joe, he shouted, ‘Les, what the hell went on around here?’”

  To pass the hours in the evening at camp, Joe ran up colossal phone bills, and not just because he was calling home with regularity. When Cloverlay asked Joe Hand to have a word with him on the subject, Frazier told him: “No problem. These are girls. I’ll just drive to the city and see them.” Hand replied, “No, you’re better off using the phone.” Except when he was in camp and observing a pledge of celibacy, Frazier let the good times roll when it came to liaisons with women. One could say without fear of contradiction that he was prolific in his sexual adventures, perhaps not to the standard of NBA goliath Wilt Chamberlain—who claimed in his autobiography that he had had twenty thousand liaisons—but stride for stride with Ali. For his part, Joe looked upon his dalliances a
s a prerogative due him once the bills were paid and the children were tucked in. The same fevered blood that had run through Rubin ran through Joe, who observed: “Change me, you’d have to go back and change my daddy.” From the vantage point of adulthood, Weatta would just shrug and say of her father, “What can I say? He was a rollin’ stone.”

  Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Jack Lloyd found Frazier in his dressing room at the Latin Casino in 1970 with the emcee, one “Mr. Scratch”; a sparring partner known only as Pete; and a man who called himself “Unc”—the very “Uncle Cadillac” who sister Mazie had been so worried would be a corrupting influence on her brother. From across the room, Lloyd overheard part of a conversation in which Frazier said, “Are you kidding? My wife would raise hell.” Frazier explained that Florence did not “think too much of this show business thing,” yet added that she knew he was a “good husband.” By a “good husband,” it seems likely that he was referring to himself as good provider.

  “No wife likes it, man,” Unc said. “They know the temptation is there.”

  “Yeah,” Frazier said, “but she knows I am a good husband.”

  Lloyd observed: “Unc shook his head gravely.”

  * * *

  Scanning the far reaches of the new Madison Square Garden as he stood in press row, Jimmy Cannon turned to Dave Anderson and observed, “You’d have to have an arm like Roberto Clemente to hit us with a bottle from up there.” Far more than just a building to stage boxing events—which had been the original intent of the now-decrepit old Garden—the $150 million Madison Square Garden Center housed not just the arena itself but six other facilities, including the Felt Forum (a 5,227-seat concert hall); a forty-eight-lane bowling center; the National Art Museum of Sport; a Hall of Fame of Garden heroes; a rotunda for trade and sport shows; and a 486-seat movie theater. To clear space between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and from Thirty-First to Thirty-Third Streets, the Pennsylvania Railroad Station had been demolished, amid fruitless protests by dissenters that included the New York Times editorial page, which called it a “monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance.” Although passengers would still arrive and depart from the lower floors of the new Garden, it was without the grandeur that travel to and from there once inspired. Yale University architecture historian Vincent Scully lamented the passing of that era: “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.”

  Bob Hope and Bing Crosby teamed up to open the arena on February 11, 1968, with a gala event billed as “The New Garden Salute to the U.S.O.” The comedian and the crooner had not performed together “live and in person” since 1942, yet here they were, the top bananas on a star-studded revue that included Pearl Bailey; Joey Heatherton; Jack Jones and his wife, Jill St. John; Phyllis Diller; and Les Brown and his Band of Renown. In a boxing spoof in which he squared off with unbeaten former heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, Hope called himself “Chicken Delight” and told the 19,870 patrons in attendance that in the 1920s in Cleveland he appeared in three amateur bouts as “Packy East.” He won the first two but said, “The last time, I got knocked right into dancing school.” The laughs would cease and the action would become genuine three weeks later when the new Garden jumped in with its first boxing event: Joe Frazier against his old rival Buster Mathis. The winner would be recognized as heavyweight champion in New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Central and South America, and Asia, and was then slated to meet the winner of the WBA tournament to unify the title that had been torn from Ali.

  As Frazier and Mathis engaged in preparations for their March 4 bout, the eight-man tournament had been whittled down to Jimmy Ellis and Jerry Quarry. At the Houston Astrodome in the quarterfinal round that August, Ellis had stopped Leotis Martin on a technical knockout in the ninth round of a bloody bout in which Martin nearly had his bottom lip sheared off. That October in Los Angeles, Quarry prevailed in his quarterfinal bout by edging Floyd Patterson in a twelve-round majority decision that provoked boos from the crowd at Olympic Auditorium. “You lost, Quarry, you lost and you know it. You got a pass, you bum,” yelled a fan as Quarry walked up the aisle to his dressing room. At Freedom Hall in Louisville in December, Ellis scored a unanimous twelve-round decision over Oscar Bonavena, who had advanced to the semifinals by beating Karl Mildenberger in Frankfurt in September. Ellis floored Ringo in the third and again in the tenth round. Quarry then faced Thad Spencer, who had gained his semifinal berth by upsetting 8–5 favorite Ernie Terrell the previous August. With a six-day stubble of beard, Quarry stopped Spencer on a technical knockout with three seconds remaining in the twelfth and final round in Oakland. Quarry had told the New York Times prior to the victory: “Boxing needs a white champion to replace Cassius Clay.” Ellis and Quarry would meet in April.

  To get some work in prior to the Mathis bout, Frazier had been fed two soft touches in the fall of 1967. In the first sports event at the new Spectrum in Philadelphia, Frazier stopped an overmatched Tony Doyle before a crowd of only 8,404 fans. To hype the event, Doyle, of Salt Lake City, Utah, and his manager, Angelo Curley, had circulated the amusing fiction that Doyle had beaten Frazier four years before at the National Amateur Athletic Association tournament in Utica, New York. Stan Hochman exclaimed in the Philadelphia Daily News: “Yo, didn’t they think someone would look it up? Didn’t they think The Utica Observer has files?” Frazier told the press in his dressing room that he was looking forward to taking some time off. He explained to Philadelphia Daily News columnist Tom Cushman: “I’ve been away from my family too much this year.” But that vacation would not begin until he traveled to Boston and faced former New England heavyweight champion Marion Conner in December. With a thirty-one-pound weight advantage, Frazier stopped Conner on a technical knockout in the third round and for his effort picked up five thousand dollars. Next up: Buster Mathis, “The Big Bus.”

  In the three and a half years that had elapsed since he had faced Frazier as an amateur, Mathis had shed seventy-five pounds and now tipped the scales at 240. Early on, he was conditioned by the eccentric trainer Cus D’Amato, who delivered on his promise that he would work Buster until his blisters bled. By virtue of cutting calories and hours upon hours of roadwork, the weight came off. But while Cus was an extraordinarily fine teacher, Buster found him to be so disagreeable that his management team fired him. The group—Peers Management—was a consortium of young blue-bloods headed by Jimmy Iselin, whose father was president of Monmouth Park racetrack and a director of the New York Jets. With an eye toward bagging that rarest of athletic prizes—a heavyweight champion—Iselin and his cohorts had looked far and wide for the perfect candidate. Of the young heavyweights they scouted, including Frazier and Quarry, Iselin claimed that Mathis graded highest in personality, speed, size, and strength. Peers invested sixty thousand dollars to get Mathis up and running, part of which included the construction of a gym in Rhinebeck, New York. “We brought him along slowly, the way you would a racehorse,” Iselin said. To that end, Cus lined up a string of pushovers for Buster, just as he had done with Floyd Patterson years before and would do with Mike Tyson years later. Mathis came into the Frazier fight with an unblemished record in twenty-three pro appearances, yet he remained unranked until The Ring magazine slipped him in at the bottom of the Top Ten only days before the bout. He had not been invited to participate in the WBA tournament.

  Ranked number one by The Ring but only number eight by the WBA—he had been dropped from number two when he declined to appear in their tournament—Frazier commanded $175,000 for the Mathis bout, one hundred thousand dollars more than Buster received and fifty thousand more than he would have been guaranteed by Malitz if he had advanced to the finals. In order to ensure a lucrative gate that would enable them to pay Frazier his price, Markson and Brenner sweetened the card by adding a championship match between middleweights Emile Griffith and Nino Benvenuti. At the Concord Hotel in the weeks leading up to the bout, Frazier forged a
friendship with Griffith. They sparred together in a closed-door session, offered each other tips, and in the evening could be found shooting craps. Nearing the end of camp, Joe called down to Bright Hope Baptist Church on a Sunday and spoke to the congregation over loudspeakers. He told them, “Keep praying for me.” But to hear his banter with reporters, it was Buster—and not he—who needed to call upon divine intervention. “He runs like a thief,” said Frazier, who was still irritated by his two losses to Mathis as an amateur. From across the Hudson River in Rhinebeck, Buster shrugged and called Frazier a “nitwit.” Down in Philadelphia, Cloverlay sold close to eight hundred tickets among its shareholders and chartered a special eight-car train for the group to travel to Manhattan. Holders of ringside seats were asked to wear formal attire.

  Some three hundred so-called black militants armed with placards paraded up and down the sidewalk outside the Garden in protest of the unceremonious dethroning of Ali. By and large a peaceful assembly, it underscored the widely held contention that, as Sandy Grady observed in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the pairing of Frazier and Mathis to determine a champion was “a flashy hollow charade as long as Clay is still the best fist fighter in the world.” But the evening proved to be just the blockbuster that the Garden had hoped it would be, as a crowd of 18,096 fans produced a record indoor gate of $658,503. On the heels of the Griffith-Benvenuti bout, in which the handsome Italian won the title for the second time in a unanimous fifteen-round decision that Red Smith dismissed as a “dull affair,” the showdown between the big boys was nothing if not entertaining. With a thirty-nine-pound weight advantage and that three-and-a-half-inch edge in reach, the six-foot-three Buster appeared to tower over Joe, who not only was three and a half inches shorter but boxed out of a crouch. Through the early rounds, Buster was up on his toes, holding Frazier at bay with what closed-circuit announcer Don Dunphy described as “catlike moves.” But Frazier bobbed and weaved as he poured on the pressure and adhered to the strategy that Durham had articulated to him: keep working that body until his hands drop, then go for the head. Near the end of the second round, Mathis began bleeding from the nose. Early in the third round, the pace was so intense that Dunphy observed: “Something has got to give.”