Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  Jerry Quarry could have been a character out of the Leonard Gardner novel Fat City. Jack Quarry, his father, had come out of the East Texas dust bowl, the son of an escaped convict who lived his life on the lam. Jack was a young teenager when he began hopping boxcars across the American West in search of a better life. Along the way, he had the words HARD LUCK tattooed on his fingers, and it was indeed the only luck he would ever know. At the height of the Great Depression, he slept in labor camps and fought for his grub with his fists. While none of his fights ever showed up in the record book, he once claimed to have had 131 of them, “all around the country and in Canada. You just went around from place to place. One day your name was Joe, the next day it was John.” He got by on the “two or three bucks” they paid him for the blood he spilled. Marriage to a young woman from Arkansas yielded eight children—four sons and four daughters—yet he and his wife, Arwanda, always remained just a step ahead of insolvency as they roamed from address to address in California. Jack Quarry told journalist Robert Mladinich: “It seems like we were always living at the end of a cotton patch with signs that said, ‘Okies and Dogs Keep off the Grass.’” When Jerry was three years old, Jack laced boxing gloves on him. By age sixteen, Jerry had more than a hundred amateur bouts—and that did not include backyard brawls with his brothers. At the barroom, Jack beamed with pride as he spoke of the world championship one of his sons would win one day. Three of the four would turn pro—Jerry, who would become one of the top heavyweights of his era; Mike, who campaigned with some success as a light heavyweight; and Bobby, who fought without distinction as a heavyweight. Matchmaker Don Chargin told me he once saw Jerry tear apart Mike in a sparring session and told Jack, “You have to stop this. Mike is going to get killed.” Jack squinted at him and replied: “There’s no quit in the Quarrys.’”

  White heavyweights had been a prized commodity since the days of Jack Johnson, the audacious black champion who was so reviled by Jack London, the San Francisco Bay Area novelist and journalist, that he organized a bigoted campaign to lure over-the-hill former champion James J. Jeffries out of retirement to challenge him. London told Jeffries, “The White Man must be rescued!” Thus, Jeffries became the first “Great White Hope,” of which there would be countless others through the years as black fighters increasingly claimed the championship, beginning with the ascendancy of Joe Louis in the 1930s. While Quarry professed that he was not an advocate of any form of white supremacy, saying he fought only for himself and not any “race or religion,” he could just as easily contradict himself, as he had in his comment to the New York Times that boxing needed “a white champion to replace Cassius Clay.” In an interview with the Associated Press in 1974, he claimed that while it was fine for Ali to “jump around and [call himself] a black militant,” it was high time “for the white man to stand up for himself and be proud.” Such talk only whetted the appetite of fans who looked to the ring as a place to lay bare racial grievances, yet it was not just the promoters who eagerly exploited it for financial gain. When Quarry outpointed Buster Mathis at Madison Square Garden in May 1969, Frazier congratulated him and said with a sly grin: “Baby, you and me are gonna make a lot of money.”

  For someone who had earned top grades in school and was said to have found the New York Times crossword puzzle to be a snap, Quarry somehow always seemed to be his own worst enemy. Columnist Jim Murray once observed in the Los Angeles Times that if Quarry ever penned his autobiography, it would be called Oops! At fourteen, his brother Jimmy fractured his arm with a two-by-four. At sixteen, he broke his back when he dived into a swimming pool from a balcony and hit the side; gangrene set in, and he nearly died. At an American Legion baseball game, he shattered a hand when he punched an umpire in the face over a contested call. On another occasion, he collected fourteen stitches when he was clubbed over the head with two pool cues. In the ring, he had shown superior ability as a counterpuncher, yet he seemed to slide into inexplicable periods of lethargy that caused his fans in California to sour on him and question his heart. Although he had thirty-one victories—of which he claimed nine had come on one-punch knockouts—he had been embarrassed by aging Eddie Machen and came up short against Jimmy Ellis in the WBA Tournament finals. Only later did X-rays uncover the fact that he had fought Ellis with three cracked discs, which had occurred during some brotherly horseplay. “The boys are always in a contest of some kind,” Jack Quarry told Tom Cushman, of the Philadelphia Daily News. “That night Jerry and Jimmy were Indian wrestling, and Jimmy slammed him into a jukebox, back first.” Jerry spent eight weeks in a body cast.

  Even as Quarry and Frazier professed to be friends at the prefight press briefings, there was an undercurrent of tension between them that dated back three years to their sparring session in Los Angeles at the Main Street Gym, where Frazier had backed Quarry into the ropes and opened a cut below his lower lip. When Frazier had chosen to opt out of the WBA tournament, Jerry called him a “chicken.” Eddie Futch flew in from California to work with Frazier during the final ten days of training camp at the Concord Hotel. “Quarry has never faced anyone who fires the bullets Joe does, and as often as Joe does,” said Futch, who added that Frazier “hurts you with everything he throws.” Upon hearing Quarry boast of the one-punch knockouts he had piled up—and how he planned to dispel any doubts as to the size of his heart when he stepped into the ring with Frazier—Futch observed, “I hope he does think in terms of one punch. If he does, he will get hit with enough leather to cover a sofa.” The Garden held a public workout in Times Square for Joe and Jerry a week before the bout, before an audience that included Mayor John V. Lindsay. While not referring to Quarry as a Great White Hope per se, Condon reminded the crowd on hand that he was just that by announcing, “Remember, this is the first Irishman to fight for the champeenship since Jimmy Braddock!”

  Good sense once again abandoned Quarry on fight night, and Frazier performed precisely the upholstery job that Futch had envisioned. Intent upon proving his bravery, the 12–5 underdog set aside his toolbox and came at Frazier with a hammer. With a Garden crowd of 16,570 squarely behind him, Quarry enveloped Frazier in a vortex of left hooks and chopping right hands in the first round. But Frazier did not back up. The blows caromed off his head, any one of them capable of cutting down a lesser opponent, yet he advanced unimpeded. Near the end of the second round, Frazier caught Quarry with a cruel left hook to his jaw. By the third round, the high energy that Quarry had heaped upon Frazier had dissipated to an occasional spark. Blood began flowing from a cut under his right eye. Through the fourth round, Quarry held his right glove up to protect the wound as Frazier dug punches into his body, each one accompanied by a grunt. “Frazier is a relentless fighter,” broadcaster Howard Cosell told his audience from ringside. “He keeps coming. And coming. And coming.” As Frazier poured on the pressure in the fifth and sixth rounds, Quarry battled back with the dregs of his resolve, the cut under the eye wider now. Working the head and body, Frazier pinned Quarry to the ropes in the seventh round, then buckled his legs with a left hook to the jaw just before the bell. Dr. Harry Kleiman inspected the eye between rounds and ordered referee Arthur Mercante to stop the fight.

  “You wanted blood. Well, you got it,” said Jack Quarry, who claimed his son had set out to please the critics who had called him “a bum.” My father had been unsparing of Quarry in the pages of Sports Illustrated and would again take him to the woodshed in his coverage of the bloodletting at the hands of Frazier, observing that “only a fool has no fear in the ring” and that Quarry had insisted upon being just that in choosing to go to war with Frazier. Comanager Johnny Flores complained that the fight had been stopped prematurely, despite the fact that Jerry could no longer see out of his swollen eye. “It’s a title fight,” Flores groused. “He had another eye, didn’t he?” Quarry himself had argued with the ring doctor to give him one more round, if only to allow him to hold on to his manhood and go out on his back. He then added, “It was a helluva first round,
wasn’t it?”

  Whatever accounted for the truculence that had come over Frazier in the weeks leading up to the fight, it was gone now. He had earned more than he had in any previous bout—$506,000, once the live gate and closed-circuit revenues were totaled. And he had placed himself in position for an even larger payday against either “Clay”—his preference—or Jimmy Ellis. As Frazier stood in the ring with Cosell for a television interview, exclaiming that he would defend his title against “anybody at any time,” Ellis climbed through the ropes in a powder-blue sports jacket.

  Cosell spotted him and shouted, “Wait a minute! Here comes Jimmy Ellis! Come in here, Jimmy!”

  Frazier turned to walk away and scoffed over his shoulder at Ellis: “You ain’t no champ.”

  Ellis waved at him and replied: “You ain’t good enough, boy.”

  * * *

  Of the countless places Ali could have chosen to live, he moved from Chicago to Philadelphia in January 1970. With him were his wife Belinda (who in 1975 would be given the Muslim name Khalilah) and their young child, Maryum. Naturally, reporters asked him if he had done so to bug Frazier, if it had been part of some elaborate ploy to hype the emerging rivalry between the two. Ali said no, that he would have rented an apartment in Philadelphia if that had been his aim instead of going to the expense of buying and furnishing a house. He explained that he had come to Philadelphia because it was near New York, where he had frequent business, and eliminated the need to fly. The three-bedroom house, with twenty-two telephones, was located in the Overbook section and was sold to him by one Major Benjamin Coxson, who had befriended Ali two years before and had once been described in the press as “a flamboyant black capitalist with a long criminal record.” Even if Ali said he had not intended to annoy Frazier, Joe looked upon his presence as an unwelcome intrusion and warned him to mind his manners. He would abide no “sky larking” from Ali.

  Even before the antagonisms between them became entrenched, Joe and Ali were not particularly close. Given the high stakes that were involved and violence that they expected to visit upon one another, it seems fair to say that they could never be, not in the way Ali would profess to be with Coxson. But the two fighters were friendly with each other in a way that rivals sometimes are and understood the immense value they held for each other. George James remembered that Joe and Ali used to drive around the city as they hatched their plans. “They would find a beat-up old wreck and use that so no one would recognize them,” said James. Ali talked up the Nation of Islam with Frazier, just as he had done with Sugar Ray Robinson and others. Frazier had no interest, in part because he was a devout Baptist who eschewed racial separatism and in part because of the way the Nation of Islam parted its membership from its money. When Ali was down at heel during his exile, Frazier occasionally slipped him some “love,” never forgetting how Floyd Patterson brushed him off when a few hundred dollars would have been the difference between eating and not. Away from the savagery of the ring, Frazier looked upon his peers with a certain esprit de corps and would always lend a hand to one who had come upon hard times, as he would for years in the case of Gypsy Joe. A long conversation between Joe and Ali during a car ride to New York in 1970—when the rancor between them had briefly cooled—was recorded and included verbatim in Ali’s autobiography, The Greatest. Ali asked Frazier if he would let him come aboard as a sparring partner for two hundred dollars a week in the event that he wasn’t allowed back in boxing. Frazier was skeptical.

  FRAZIER: First, I like to know, who is gonna be the “sparring partner”?

  ALI: Me! I’ll be your sparring partner. I’m not fighting. I just said . . .

  FRAZIER: Sound like you want to be the main event.

  ALI: No. You heard what I was saying.

  FRAZIER: I heard you!

  ALI: If I get—

  FRAZIER: I heard what you said, but to hear you switch it around like I would be the sparring partner.

  Ali told him he would only do it if they were certain there would be no actual fight between the two. Otherwise, it would “hurt the gate,” just as it would not be to their advantage to appear “too friendly.” Frazier seemed amused yet wary, never quite sure what cards Ali had up his sleeve. Two years before at the Academy of Music, Ali said, “I look at Joe Frazier and I see ten million dollars.” But he had enraged Frazier with his antics that weekend, had gotten him to go for a tire iron, and that played perfectly into the narrative Ali knew he would have to spin in order for him and Frazier to be more than just two men meeting in a boxing ring. Ali understood that white America wanted to see Joe tear his handsome head off. In an evolving tactic, playful in the beginning yet increasingly ugly as their rivalry deepened, Ali would leverage the blind fury he unleashed in Frazier in an effort to ring the cash register. When Ali would call him an Uncle Tom, it was not something he believed—he said so explicitly in his autobiography—yet it was language that incited passions that could be banked and borrowed against. Frazier simply did not have it within himself to play along, not when it turned the black community against him and caused his children to be taunted by their classmates in school. He could not accept being pushed around even in jest, not as a boy in the backwoods of Beaufort and surely not as heavyweight champion.

  Even before he purchased the Overbrook house, Ali had been a frequent visitor to the Philadelphia area, where he was never far from the scrutiny of NOI headbanger Jeremiah Shabazz—born Jeremiah Pugh—at Mosque No. 12, at Fifty-Seventh Street and Haverford Avenue. The very same week Frazier claimed a portion of his title by beating Mathis in March 1968, Ali showed up for speaking engagements in Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey. He addressed an overflow crowd at the University of Pennsylvania, where he said Negroes who favored integration were “heading down the path of destruction.” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Joe McGinniss found the talk “so tiresome . . . you find yourself no longer listening, [but] studying instead the organ pipes on the wall.” The following evening at the Convention Hall in Camden, Ali again called for the separation of the races and urged the small audience on hand to “cease and desist in the consumption of all pork products,” which he claimed were contaminated with “maggots and pus.” A confrontation erupted at the door of the Camden event between two Fruit of Islam guards and one Arthur G. Slobodin, twenty-eight, who had been denied admittance. When asked why, Slobodin claimed that one of the guards told him: “Because you are white . . . because you have blue eyes.” Police arrested Slobodin and charged him with disorderly conduct “for his own good.”

  Later that same year Ali became acquainted with Major Coxson, who had had sixteen arrests and twelve convictions in the previous twenty years for crimes including car theft, larceny, weapons offenses, fraud, and interstate transportation of stolen vehicles. But that would not stop him from running for mayor of Camden in 1973. When the Philadelphia Daily News asked him if he was concerned that his career as a racketeer would hurt his campaign, the dapper “Maje” replied, “No. The country is run by racketeers.” From his purportedly legitimate holdings in an automobile leasing agency and real estate, along with shadowy underworld connections that would ultimately prove his undoing, Coxson had become one of the wealthiest men in the Philadelphia black community. Ali would eventually appoint Coxson as his agent and became his regular houseguest until he moved to Philadelphia. Along with prominent local civil rights leader Stanley Branche, Coxson had big plans for the reclamation of his boon companion and for himself. Whenever the fight between Ali and Frazier came to pass, it would occur in Philadelphia and he would promote it. Ali called him his “gangster.”

  Initially, the hope was to stage an exhibition bout between Ali and either Frazier or Ellis for charity. Branche applied to the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission for permission on behalf of Ali, who stated in his formal request that it was his intention “to help the youth of the ghetto remain within the confines of the law . . . talk to various gang leaders,” and donate 50 percent to the organizations that formed
Black Coalition, Inc., such as the West Philadelphia Branch of the NAACP, the Young Militants, and others. But Cloverlay attorney Bruce Wright told Branche that Frazier had not “a single, blessed thing” to gain by beating Ali in an exhibition and that a loss “would finish his career.” Branche accused Wright of being interested in only “the financial end . . . and not the good of the community.” In any event, it became a moot point when the commission rejected the request by a 2–1 vote. Upon hearing the news, Ali proposed that he and Frazier have it out on an Indian reservation, which he presumed would not be subject to “government controls.” Apparently, the Navajo reservation in Window Rock, Arizona, had approved the bout. Nothing would come of it.

  Like some occupying army, Ali camped in close proximity to Frazier during the summer and fall of 1968. When he was not delivering a speech, he was doing a radio or television interview, or popping off in the papers. There he was at the Jet Set Lounge and Bar in Atlantic City. There he was three weeks later in Center City Philadelphia, standing in the back of a yellow convertible rapping with his fans as four attractive young women circulated through the lunch-hour crowd collecting donations for Black Coalition, Inc., laughter escalating as he cried: “Tell Joe Frazier if he’s not soon out of town, I’ll get Rap Brown to burn him down!” And there he was at the Academy of Music less than a week later, Ali calling out to him, needling him, Frazier furious now, his eye on the tire iron in the trunk. At one point along the line, Frazier glared at Ali and asked, “What you doing in Philly?” And Ali replied, cooing: “To be closer to you, honey.” But it was not until the following year that Frazier denounced Ali openly, calling him “yellow . . . a coward . . . and a disgrace to boxing” prior to the Quarry bout. Ali dismissed Frazier as a “bum” and added, “I ought to give him a good whuppin’.”