Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  Beginning in the fifth round, it did. While Mathis appeared to have been in control prior to that, Frazier began to take command as his big target covered up in the peekaboo style that had been impressed upon him by D’Amato. Dunphy spotted the shift: “Frazier seems to be cutting him down little by little.” Though Mathis had a good round in the sixth, during which he counterpunched effectively and scored heavily, he continued to wear down as Frazier dug in, grunted, and pummeled him with left hooks. To slow Joe down—and catch a breather—Mathis grabbed and held on, which inspired Grady to observe in the Bulletin: “They say Buster is built like an NFL lineman. Sure, and last night he would have drawn 1,000 yards in holding penalties.” By the tenth round, the crisp white trunks that Mathis had worn in the ring were crimson from that bloody nose, which had only worsened as the bout had progressed. The big man no longer had any spring in his legs. Of the uninterrupted beating Mathis was now absorbing, Dunphy observed: “Frazier is just winding up and sending them in.” To get him to reengage, Frazier urged Mathis: “Come on!” With five rounds remaining in the scheduled fifteen-round bout, Mathis found his corner at the end of the tenth and lowered his battered body upon his stool.

  “How far am I behind?” he asked Fariello, his trainer. “Can I pull it out if I win the last five?”

  “Easy,” Fariello told him. “But stop laying on him, Buster. Keep him off!”

  Frazier sat in the opposite corner with the easy manner of a man on a coffee break.

  “What round was that, the tenth?”

  Durham hovered over him and teased, “Naw, the fifth.”

  “Darn,” Frazier said.

  “Keep going at that body,” Durham told him. “If you see his hands drop, take your shot.”

  Think of a drill press puncturing a piece of sheet metal—that was how suddenly the left hook by Frazier in the eleventh round dropped Mathis. Stunned, he swayed as if blown over by a hard wind and fell to the canvas, his body splayed across the bottom strand of the velvet ring ropes. By the count of nine, he had grabbed the top strand and pulled himself up. But referee Arthur Mercante stopped the fight, officially at 2:33 of the eleventh round. Frazier jumped in the air and was embraced by Durham. With his handlers on either side, Mathis began the slow walk back to his dressing room, where he sat for an hour before inviting in the press. Again and again, he said he could not believe “it was me fighting so poorly.” His eyes glistened with tears. Iselin agreed that it had been a “poor showing” and conceded, “Maybe you writers were right. Maybe we should have fought better opponents. . . . But he was so sure he would beat Frazier.” Iselin added that Buster would take a week or so off and “think about whether he wants to stay in boxing.” Over in his dressing room, Frazier found himself running out of words to express his joy. While he had found Mathis to be troublesome in a three-round amateur bout, he had been certain that he could wear him down over a longer distance, particularly given the manner in which Mathis had engaged him—“stoopin’ down under me, all covered up like a turtle. All I had to do was go bam, bam, with hooks and uppercuts.”

  Cloverlay held a victory party at the Iron Horse Restaurant, beneath the Garden in Penn Station. With the homeward-bound train not scheduled to leave until 2 A.M., the cocktails flowed amid a haze of cigarette smoke and speculation of even greater days ahead. Who would Joe fight next? Quarry? Ellis? Or would it be Manuel Ramos? He had been talked up in the papers. Whoever it would be, no one doubted in that heady moment that Joe could lick anyone—including Cassius Clay, or Muhammad Ali, or whatever he called himself. Wearing a red beret with a green towel draped over the shoulder of his overcoat, Frazier was greeted by raucous applause when he stopped by to engage his backers. But he did not stay there long. With Florence on her way back to Philadelphia—she had come to New York but had not attended the bout—Frazier returned to the City Squire Motor Inn, at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Second Street, where there was a big party that only began to wind down at dawn. Frazier opened the door to his suite and found snoring bodies plopped on the sofa, chairs, and floor. In the bedroom he found two young women stretched out on the bed, one with her head at the bottom and the other at the top.

  The young women were Denise Menz and her roommate, whose parents had a connection to Cloverlay. When her roommate had invited her to join the three of them for a night out at the fights, Denise enthusiastically tagged along, first stopping off for prefight cocktails at a Cloverlay gathering at the City Squire. It was there that she learned that there was an unexpected shortage of two tickets, so Denise and her roommate stayed behind in the Cloverlay suite and later joined in the victory party. “We were up all night dancing, pretending we were movie stars,” said Denise, then nineteen. Not a sports fan, she had no idea who Joe was when he stopped in the bedroom and engaged them in small talk. When he got up and said, “Well, I gotta go. I have things to do,” she presumed she would never see him again. But ten seconds later he tapped on the door and sat down with them to talk some more. And Joe told them, “Next time, I’ll make sure you get tickets.”

  Chapter Five

  Sky Larking

  Joe, peeking inside an envelope at the proceeds from his victory over Manuel Ramos, with Gypsy Joe Harris (L) and Emile Griffith (R), 1968. Philadelphia Bulletin

  Whatever measure of personal accomplishment Joe Frazier gleaned from beating Buster Mathis in March 1968, it was hard not to look upon his small share of the heavyweight championship as scarcely more than an attractive piece of costume jewelry—appealing to the casual eye, perhaps, yet of dubious genuine value given the unjust exile of Muhammad Ali. Seven weeks later, there would be a second petitioner for the vacated crown with the emergence of Jimmy Ellis, the winner of a fifteen-round decision over Jerry Quarry in the finals of the WBA tournament in Oakland. As the United States was drawn ever deeper into the Vietnam War and widespread violence erupted in the wake of the assassinations that spring of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, Ali remained free on bail pending the appeal of his case to the Supreme Court, yet he was prevented by the governing bodies of boxing from pursuing his chosen livelihood. To keep body and soul together, he took speaking engagements on college campuses for a few thousand dollars a throw. At an appearance at Princeton University, where he spoke before a standing-room-only crowd of one thousand on a variety of subjects that included his obedience to Allah and his allegiance to the Nation of Islam concept of racial separatism, Ali called himself “the fastest and the best boxer alive today” and poked fun at Frazier with a fragment of verse warmed over from the Liston days.

  Ali hit him with a hard right.

  “Oh man, what a beautiful swing!

  “Then a left and right, and the champion

  “Punches Frazier right out of the ring!”

  Walled in by the inescapable shadow of Ali, Joe first defended his portion of the heavyweight championship against Manuel Ramos, of Mexico City, on June 24, 1968, at Madison Square Garden. Only 6-6-2 in his first fourteen bouts as a pro, due in part to an undisclosed fracture to his right hand, Ramos had since strung together fifteen consecutive victories, including twelve by knockout. Notably, he defeated Eddie Machen and Ernie Terrell during that stretch. He was a good puncher with a solid chin. Unlike the “runners” to whom Frazier had become accustomed, Ramos figured to stand in and slug it out. Proudly, he reigned as the heavyweight champion of Mexico, which Sandy Grady of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin compared to “being the ski jump champ of Dry Gulch, TX.” Stan Hochman of the rival Daily News chimed in: “He looks like Ricardo Montalban applying for the job of chauffeur in an old Esther Williams movie.” Giving away four inches in height, four and a half pounds in weight, and two and a half inches in reach to the six-foot-three Ramos, Frazier emerged from five weeks of tearing apart his sparring partners at the Concord Hotel at a trimmed-down 2031/2 pounds. Las Vegas installed him as a 4–1 favorite. While Ramos was no pushover, only a noisy contingent of countrymen decked out in floppy sombreros gave him any shot at an
upset.

  Charging from his corner at the opening bell, Ramos stood toe-to-toe with Frazier as they exchanged ordnance. Early in the first round, Ramos caught Joe with a solid right hand to the jaw that buckled his knees and rocked him back on his heels. The action was so intense that veteran broadcaster Don Dunphy exclaimed from ringside: “With the exception of probably [Jack] Dempsey and [Luis] Firpo, this is the greatest first round of a heavyweight championship fight that I can remember” (an opinion later backed up by Nat Fleischer, the ancient editor of The Ring). With the round nearing its end, Frazier pinned Ramos in the corner with a barrage of head and body shots and staggered him with a left hook. Only the ring ropes prevented him from falling. Urged between rounds by Yank Durham to “get closer, cocksucker—and stay down lower,” Frazier sprang out of his corner for the second round and floored Ramos for the first time in his career with a combination right uppercut and left hook. Ramos climbed to his feet at the count of nine. From that juncture, Frazier extracted any resolve that remained in his dazed opponent with a fierce and sustained body attack. With just seconds remaining in the round, Frazier slammed Ramos with a left hook that snapped his head back and sent him spilling to the canvas. Although Ramos was up at the count of two, his glazed eyes betrayed the unambiguous plea of surrender. Referee Arthur Mercante waved the bout over.

  Cheered for his gallantry as he departed the ring, Ramos told the press, with the help of an interpreter, “I am ashamed.” According to Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Sandy Padwe, Ramos “broke down and sobbed” later, in the privacy of his dressing room. Over in his own dressing room, Joe said he was glad it ended when it did, saying: “Why should he get hurt?” He liked Ramos. While Frazier conceded that he had been stunned by Ramos in the first round, he had quickly pulled himself together and launched a counterattack instead of backing up, which would have been contrary to his burn-down-the-village style. Frazier explained, “If I run and hide, Ramos will turn killer. I had to retaliate.” Financially, the Garden took a loss on the event, yet Markson and Brenner shrugged it off as goodwill in the expectation of doing bigger deals with Cloverlay. Slipping out of his boxing gear and into a blue suit accented by blue alligator shoes, Frazier said that unless the unforeseen happened and “Clay” was sprung loose from his legal woes, he planned to take the balance of the year off to give his singing career more attention.

  Far more than just a lark to keep him busy between bouts, Frazier approached show business with the vigor of any accomplished professional. While his voice would never be as remunerative as his fists or bring him even close to the same level of critical acclaim—quite the opposite, actually, in that it was expensive and the reviews tended to the sour side—he gravitated to the stage when time allowed. In the same way he had applied himself to boxing back at the Twenty-Third PAL, day by day shedding that excess weight in a quest for some larger version of himself, he was certain that through a commitment to hard work he could accomplish similar gains as a vocalist. Although there would be problems at home because of the time it ate up, the late nights, and the way of life that merged with his increasing wanderlust, he found in song an avenue to express himself in a way he could never do in words, and surely not with gloved hands. Even if his bookings had less to do with his virtuosity as a performer than with his drawing power as a champion prizefighter, no one could say that he did not give his all. The occasional split trousers he would suddenly find himself with onstage attested to that.

  Joe had embraced music since childhood. Along with singing hymns in the church each Sunday in Beaufort, he would join in with the quartets that formed in the front yard on summer evenings. Not unlike the way teenagers would harmonize on street corners in South Philadelphia, the a cappella groups Joe joined in with in Laurel Bay performed spirituals, or they would extemporize in what sister Mazie called “a kind of rap.” When instruments were called for, they clapped their hands and drummed on the bottom of a tub. “It was what we did for entertainment,” Mazie said. “When we came in from the fields at the end of a long day, it was the way we had of relaxing. In those early days, we had no TV.” By wide agreement, Joe had none of the vocal skills possessed by his older brother, Rubin Jr.—also called Jake—a church deacon who sang in the choir and years later with a group he helped found, the Gullah Kinfolk. But Joe sang then and later for the sheer joy of it, especially in the car on those long drives he preferred to take instead of flying. As the eight-track player in his Cadillac blared the stylings of the soul stars of the era—James Brown, Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack, and scores of others—Joe would sing along, often the same song again and again. Denise Menz used to sit in the passenger seat and bury her head in a pillow. Lester Pelemon remembered Joe had a fondness for “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Knock on Wood” by Eddie Floyd, and “Mustang Sally” by Mack Rice and later Wilson Pickett.

  “Joe used to call me ‘Puff,’” said Pelemon, who sang with a group called Soul Brothers Six before later joining Joe’s group, the Knockouts. “He was ‘Smoke’ and I was ‘Puff.’ ‘Smoke’ would be behind the wheel, start singing ‘Proud Mary,’ and go, ‘Come on, Puff, jump on in.’ And I would think, ‘Not again!’ But he loved that song, and I sang along with him as we drove down the highway.”

  Originally, Joe formed the Knockouts with a group of friends, some of whom he had grown up with in South Carolina and who had found their way to Philadelphia. One of them was Bobby Kears, who played the bass guitar and for whom Joe purchased a nine-thousand-dollar dialysis machine a few years later when he developed kidney problems. “We had heard Joe wanted to form a band,” Kears told Hochman in the Daily News. “One night we all got together. . . . Joe liked the way we played.” Rehearsals were held on the second floor of the Twenty-Third PAL, once Joe had finished working out for the day. In April 1968, Cloverlay arranged for him to cut two singles on their label for local release: “Come and Get Me, Love” and “The Bigger They Come, the Harder They Fall.” Jerry Gaghan dropped an item in his showbiz column in the Philadelphia Daily News that speculated Cloverlay would be “taking a big batch of the biscuits.” With the release of two more singles that summer aimed at national release—“You Got the Love” and “Good News”—he and the Knockouts headed down to Atlantic City in early August to play in front of a live crowd.

  The place was called the Jet Set Bar and Lounge. Standing at the door was Ben Anderson, a vice-squad cop who was said to own a piece of the operation under the table. Joe was up onstage in a tuxedo singing when there was a noisy commotion in the lobby, where Ali appeared with a hundred or so followers. They were soaked. Along with a companion, Ali had braved a downpour to hand out Nation of Islam literature in a stroll along the North Side, the crowd behind him growing with each soggy step. Anderson stopped him at the entrance of his club, whereupon Ali spotted Frazier onstage and began heckling him amid the laughter of the audience. For someone who looked upon his singing career as a serious undertaking—and Joe did—this unexpected visit by Ali had to be an irritating intrusion. But Anderson let Ali pass and Frazier played along as the dethroned champion joined him onstage. “I’m going to jail,” Ali announced. “I’d rather be in jail than in Vietnam dead.” At that point, he and Frazier stripped out of their jackets and began sparring, as Ali dazzled the room with his incomparable footwork. “This is my man,” Ali said of Frazier. Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he stole away back into the rain.

  Joe and the Knockouts debuted formally at the fourteenth annual Hero Scholarship Thrill Show at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on September 7, 1968, before a crowd of ninety thousand. Wearing a fire-engine-red jacket and shoes, black trousers, and a white turtleneck, Joe hopped onstage as if he were bounding into the ring and sang “You Got the Love” and “The Bigger They Come, the Harder They Fall.” On hand that day was local disc jockey Jerry Blavat—“The Geator with the Heater”—who enjoyed a bond with the black community because he played the latest from Motown instead of the Beatles and featured acts s
uch as Sly and the Family Stone, Peaches and Herb, and the Temptations on his weekday television show on WFIL, Jerry’s Place. Blavat became fond of Joe and invited him to become a regular on the show, yet when asked to assess the level of skill Joe possessed as a performer, he paused and with a shrug observed: “It was a good thing he was the Champ.”

  Frazier was asked to appear two days later on the seventeen-hour-long WFIL-TV Variety Club telethon on behalf of handicapped children, hosted by comedian Joey Bishop. Among the lineup of stars were Gladys Knight and the Pips, Leslie Uggams, Bobby Rydell, Rodney Dangerfield—and Muhammad Ali. A former South Philadelphian who had come to prominence alongside Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. as a member of the Rat Pack, Joey sparred with Frazier onstage, even at one point accidentally grazing his nose with a knuckle. Ali got in on the act later in what Hochman described in the Daily News as a “wild charade, the kind of thing that used to make people laugh, and now only leaves them squirming.” Instead of “The Ali Shuffle,” he did “The Uncle Tom Shuffle.” Ali slipped off the diamond pinky ring Frazier was wearing and tried it on. Playfully, he began throwing jabs at Frazier, who slapped them away with what Hochman called a look of “churning puzzlement.” On the heels of what had happened in Atlantic City, Frazier had come to his breaking point. According to Hand and Pelemon, Frazier was helping to unload equipment from the trunk of his Cadillac outside the Academy of Music that Sunday morning when Ali turned the corner with a parade of fifty or so fans behind him.