Only 5,914 fans showed up to see Frazier face Bob Foster on November 18 at Cobo Arena in Detroit, which had originally reserved the date and venue for an Ali-Frazier bout. Frazier gave away four inches in height and five and a half inches in reach to the light heavyweight champion, yet outweighed him on paper by twenty-one pounds, despite the fact that his trainer Bill Gore said Foster had consumed twelve cans of beer each day for a month in order add extra pounds. According to publicist Bob Goodman, Foster actually weighed less than his announced weight of 188 pounds. “Going into the weigh-in, I placed a ten-pound weight under the belt of his trunks,” said Goodman. “His actual weight was 178.” Notwithstanding the considerable weight disparity, Foster had called it “just another fight” and pricked Joe by calling him “a dumb fighter” in the daily press, noting “he fights the same way every fight.” Futch later said the comment irked Frazier, who to the disbelief of Foster came out in the first round intent upon proving the scope of his boxing skills. The long-limbed Foster caught his stocky opponent with a jab to the chin and followed it up with a right hand that Frazier later said dazed him. “Man, he was rattling my brains,” Joe told Sports Illustrated. When Frazier came back to his corner at the end of the round, Durham roared, “What did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you, you couldn’t give this tall, skinny guy punching room, he’ll knock your fucking brains out?” Goodman would say that Durham told Joe, “You gotta jump in his pants. You gotta bite his chest.”
From that point on, all Foster would remember was that Frazier bore down on him like a big train. Early in the second round, Frazier floored him with a sudden left hook to the head. Foster would not remember beating the count, nor the double left hook to the head and body with which Joe finished the job. Goodman would remember, “Joe hit him so hard that Bob sprained his ankle as the punch spun him around.” As referee Tom Briscoe counted over him, Foster struggled to rise, getting up to one knee before toppling back to the canvas. Durham cradled his head in his lap and cursed Briscoe for not stopping it sooner.
Foster remained in a soupy fog back in his dressing room, where he began slipping back on the boxing shoes that one of his trainers had just removed.
“What are you doing?” the trainer asked.
“I’m getting ready to fight,” Foster replied.
“Bobby, the fight’s over with.”
“What do you mean?”
“He knocked you out.”
Foster blinked back tears and asked, “On national TV? Oh God, everybody saw me get knocked out.”
Ali continued to gleefully disparage Frazier as “a tramp, not the champ.” In the aftermath of the Foster bout, Ali had described Frazier as “just a machine. He has no skills. He has no sense.” Yap, yap, yap; did Ali ever stop to take a breath? Frazier would say that Ali talked whenever he was “afraid” before a fight, but “this time he is gonna be real scared.” When Ali held his final tune-up on December 7, 1970, at Madison Square Garden against Oscar Bonavena (New York had relented and given him a license on the heels of his comeback in Atlanta), Frazier watched on closed circuit from Monticello Raceway, thinking, as Ali found himself battered across fifteen rounds by the ungainly Oscar: Don’t blow it, man. Ali won the fight by technical knockout when he floored Bonavena three times in the fifteenth round. While it was precisely the type of challenging effort that Ali and Dundee were looking for, Frazier was far from impressed with what he had seen. “The way I saw it, Bonavena won every round,” Frazier told reporters. “All those mistakes Clay made tonight, he’ll make again. And when he does, look out.”
Christmas was a joyous event that year. Joe, Florence, and their five children moved out of their small house on Ogontz Avenue and into a deluxe seven-bedroom house on two and a half acres in Montgomery County, which would enable him to avoid paying the onerous city wage tax on his purse from the upcoming Ali fight; Ali would do the same by moving from Philadelphia into a house across the river in Cherry Hill. To celebrate the occasion of Frazier’s move, some sixty-five relatives came up from Beaufort and elsewhere for a reunion. Gone were the days when the bare walls during the holidays were decorated with pictures torn from catalogs, of luxurious possessions others had but the Fraziers could only dream of. Now, the accoutrements of wealth were arrayed before the family’s very eyes in a house that had seven bedrooms, four bathrooms, three recreation rooms, and a six-car garage; Joe would later have an outdoor pool installed in the shape of a boxing glove. As Dolly Frazier sat darning socks by a color television set, the house was alive with the laughter of her assorted grandchildren, all of whom had come to look upon Joe as someone they could count on for guidance and encouragement. One of them was his nephew Mark, who would remember driving in a car with him once. Ali had come to his school assembly in New York and had yanked him out of the audience for some playful sparring when he learned that he and Frazier were related.
“He said he’s gonna whup you,” Mark said in the car. “All the kids think so, too.”
Joe glanced over at the boy seated in the passenger seat and replied, “Son, he don’t want any part of Uncle Billy.”
Chapter Seven
The Fight of the Century
The Fight of the Century. March 8, 1971. AP Images
Cloaked in the privacy afforded by a tranquil Sunday morning, Harry Markson and Teddy Brenner stepped off their train at the elevated station in North Philadelphia and strolled across Broad Street to the Cloverlay Gym for an appointment with Joe and Yank Durham. From his first fight in the old Madison Square Garden, against Dick Wipperman in March 1966, Frazier had enjoyed a relationship with Markson and Brenner that had enriched all. The Garden had become his professional home and had done well by him, effectively creating a state championship that enabled him to bypass the WBA elimination tournament and unify the title that had been stripped from Ali by beating its winner, Jimmy Ellis. With Ali now back and licensed to fight in New York, Markson and Brenner had come to Philadelphia with an offer to secure the promotional and site rights for what would go down in history as the Fight of the Century.
A pad of paper sat on the table in front of each as they convened in an upstairs office at the gym that December day in 1970. On them would appear a number that would have once seemed beyond belief to Joe, one with such a long trail of zeros that he was uncertain how to write it down; he would always say math was never his “thing.” According to Brenner in his book Only the Ring Was Square, he and Markson tendered a guarantee of $1.25 million against 35 percent of the gross; they were prepared to offer Ali the same deal. Given their projections of the revenue streams, Brenner explained that both Frazier and Ali could end up earning far more than the guarantee, perhaps as much as “$6 million and $7 million.” But Durham had been approached with a competing offer, one that was less speculative and had a guarantee attached to it that was even more eye-popping: $2.5 million.
“Who made the offer?” Markson asked.
Durham replied, “Jerry Perenchio.”
Suitors for the event had been stepping forward with gusto, only to find themselves either outbid or outmaneuvered. Early on, it appeared that it would end up at the Astrodome in Houston, where Top Rank, Inc. founder Fred Hoffeinz offered the same arrangement as the Garden but with a capacity of thirty thousand more seats. Former New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin also appeared to have the inside position at one point, in partnership with NBC and Johnny Carson. But the forty-year-old Beverly Hills talent agent Perenchio prevailed. In London on December 15, he had heard that the event could be had for five million dollars, so he ran up a sixteen-thousand-dollar phone bill at his hotel in calling seventy possible backers. One of his lawyers recommended that he pool his efforts with Jack Kent Cooke, the Los Angeles sportsman who himself had been exploring the possibility of bringing the event to his arena in Inglewood, California, the “Fabulous Forum”; he also owned the NBA Lakers and NHL Kings, and had held a 25 percent stake in the NFL Washington Redskins. The two talked and were, as Cooke would later say, “com
patible spirits.” Although the event would be held not at the Forum but at Madison Square Garden, which had the support of both Durham and Chauncey Eskridge, the attorney for Ali, Cooke agreed to authorize a letter of credit for $4.5 million, with the additional five hundred thousand dollars paid as a site fee by the Garden. Cooke and Perenchio agreed on a 60-40 split in favor of Cooke, while the Garden received 30 percent of the live gate and closed circuit in New York and Illinois. The $2.5 million flat-fee guarantee for each fighter was a staggering sum for the day—$15,217,531 in 2018 dollars—larger than any athlete at that point had ever been paid for a single performance.
By his own admission, Perenchio knew nothing of boxing. But as the head of the talent agency Chartwell Artists, he had cultivated an appreciation for star power, numbering among his clients Marlon Brando, Glen Campbell, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Andy Williams. In hyping a promotion that he claimed would “transcend boxing,” Perenchio said that while both Joe and Ali were “superstars,” the “focus is on [Ali]. Without him in it, it would be like seeing Gone with the Wind without Clark Gable.” Of course, Ali was in full accord with that, telling the Wall Street Journal: “Why do you think the fight is so big? Frazier never wrote any poems. He never did any shuffles.” Perenchio estimated worldwide gross revenues of between $20 million and $30 million, which included $1.2 million from the live gate, $15 million from closed circuit, $4 million from between-round commercials, $1.5 million from foreign radio and television, $1 million from program sales, and $10 million from a documentary film that Perenchio planned to release. To add to the take, he also planned to auction off the gloves, trunks, and shoes of both fighters, noting: “If they can sell Judy Garland’s Wizard of Oz red slippers for fifteen thousand dollars, then we should get at least as much for these.” The avaricious young entrepreneur added that he expected the trunks to go for even more if either had blood splattered on them.
A press conference to announce the fight was held on December 30 at Toots Shor’s, the Manhattan saloon that for years had been a hideaway for Hollywood celebrities and ballplayers. Although it had been scheduled for noon, it was an hour late getting started due to an incident that had occurred back at Madison Square Garden as the contracts were being signed. In an act of playful exuberance, Ali clutched Joe and began tussling with him. As Joe Hand stepped in to break it up, Joe tore the seam in the back of his brown plaid suit, which necessitated a return to the City Squire Motor Inn and a change into a blue suit. Ordinarily, given the care Frazier took with his appearance, it was the type of behavior that would have incensed him. But Ali could have given him a hotfoot on this day and Joe would have done a tap dance. As he told his brother Bozo, “How can I be mad at a guy who’s making me this much money?” Once the press conference finally got under way, Ali sat at the table, separated from Frazier by Edwin Dooley of the New York Athletic Commission, and shouted for all to hear across the five boroughs and beyond: “Believe in me, not the newspaper writers. Joe Frazier is a fraud, an amateur. I’m the real champion! Frazier is a flat-footed machine. I’m an artist.” On and on he harangued, until Frazier got up from his seat, handed the artist a wedge of lemon, and told him, “Suck on this for a while.”
Eight weeks before the March 8 bout, Joe opened up training camp at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, where the conditions were perfectly fine for Alpine skiing but somewhat less so for getting into shape for a prizefight. Far from the sunshine and palm trees Ali enjoyed in Miami Beach, where he toiled each day at the Fifth Street Gym and clowned with the visiting press, Frazier braved subzero temperatures as he set out each morning before sunup to do his roadwork, his body wrapped in layers of clothing as a hard wind whipped down from the hillsides. Even with steel-studded boots, he found himself slipping on patches of ice. By the end of his run, icicles had become tangled in his beard. “I had to scrape them off with a comb,” Denise would remember. Seventeen inches of fresh snow in early February drove him back to Philadelphia, where he set up headquarters at the Franklin Motor Inn and did his running each morning in Fairmount Park in more agreeable wind chills. Occasionally as he ran, he would picture “Clay” at a post on the path ahead of him. “I gotta run and get him,” he said. “So I run hard to that post and then maybe he’ll be at the next post and I gotta run after him again.”
Controversy greeted Frazier as he arrived back in Philadelphia. The Southern Christian Leadership Council had called a press conference in January and threatened to call for a boycott of the bout unless certain conditions were agreed upon. Chiefly, the SCLC asked that closed-circuit ticket prices be lowered from twenty dollars to ten dollars to accommodate the stressed incomes in the black community; that black businessmen be allowed to control 20 percent of the closed-circuit locations; and that 15 percent of the revenues in each state be used in the ongoing effort to battle drugs and crime. “Tell ’em to drop dead,” Durham told Hochman in the Daily News. In searching out “the best possible deal” he could for Frazier, Durham said he opened up the bidding to all parties; if the SCLC had a desire to be involved, “all they had to do was come up with the money.” Now that it had been sold to Perenchio and Cooke, Durham recommended that the group take it up with them, not Frazier. Some weeks later, an offshoot of the SCLC calling itself the Consumer Education Protective Agency set up a picket line on the sidewalk in front of the gym with placards that proclaimed: GET RICH QUICK FIGHT PROMOTERS EXPLOITING BLACK COMMUNITY! LOWER ALI-FRAZIER TICKET PRICES. Upon crossing the line with one of his security guards, Frazier just shook his head and said, “Sometimes silence is the best answer.” But Durham was far from silent with one of the organizers.
“Where were you people when I was working on the railroad breaking my back as a welder?” Durham boomed. “Where were you people when Joe Frazier was scraping out a hundred dollars a week working in a slaughterhouse?”
Stan Hochman later asked if Durham had any sympathy for the needs of impoverished black people. The Daily News columnist observed that Durham clenched his fists for emphasis and replied, “I’ll tell you something. If I give money to fight poverty, it goes to fight poverty among whites as well as poverty among blacks.”
Standing-room-only crowds packed the Cloverlay Gym to watch Frazier train, as his eleven-year-old son Marvis sat at the door and collected a dollar per head. Loud soul and R&B music rattled the windows as Frazier worked over his four sparring partners, Ray Anderson, Ken Norton, Don Warner, and Moleman Williams. At one point along the way, Frazier sidelined the 175-pound Anderson by opening a cut on his upper lip with a crushing left hook. The wound required three stitches to close. Although none of the sparring partners possessed the same skill set as Ali, Durham claimed that they represented four riddles for Joe to solve each day. J Russell Peltz, then a twenty-four-year-old promoter who was just getting his start, remembered that he dropped by the gym one day, paid his dollar, and asked if he could use Warner on a boxing card he had coming up at the Blue Horizon, once the fraternal lodge of the Loyal Order of Moose but now a boxing arena that aficionados of the sport would fondly characterize as a “bucket of blood.” Durham eyed Peltz and scoffed: “I pay my sparring partners more than you can pay them for a fight.” Peltz laughed years later as he told me, “And he does this in front of hundreds of people.”
Calling Peltz off to the side for a chat, Durham told him he had fifteen complimentary tickets or so for the fight that he wanted him to sell on the street. He explained to Peltz that whatever he could get for them above face value, they would split 50-50. Had he been more sophisticated, Peltz later said, he would have understood the small fortune he could have reaped. But he was still young and inexperienced and he let the tickets go one by one at face value until he got down to a final front-row seat for $150. He considered keeping it for himself but would remember, “I was not exactly setting the world on fire then.” He sold the ringside seat to the owner of the Tippin’ Bar at Broad and South Streets—“a guy we called Booster.”
Peltz circled back
to the gym and handed five hundred dollars or so in cash to Durham, who apparently had been expecting a far healthier roll. “He looked a little disappointed,” Peltz said. But the young promoter still planned to attend the bout. When the Garden announced that it was opening up sales for twenty-dollar seats, Peltz and two friends took a train from Philadelphia to New York the evening before to stand in line. As he would remember it, it was cold and snowy; they took turns going for coffee. Finally, the Garden box office opened up at 8 A.M. “You were only allowed to buy two tickets each, so I took two,” Peltz said. One of them he would use for himself; the other he would leave at the front desk of the Americana Hotel for a woman who did not show up to use it. Years later, he wished that he had retrieved it and held on to it, noting: “Do you know what an unused Ali-Frazier ticket goes for today?”
Smokin' Joe Page 18
