* * *
Yank Durham always expected trouble to walk in the door. To appreciate his steep level of paranoia, he once spotted the bewhiskered artist LeRoy Neiman in the gym with a sketch pad. He called Joe Hand Sr. over and asked irritably, “What is that guy doing in here?” When Hand explained who he was, and that Cloverlay planned to commission him to do artwork to display on the walls of the gym, Durham replied sharply, “Then why he is over there taking notes?” In the way royalty once feared poisoning by a conniving member of the court, Durham never allowed Joe to take a drink of water or a bite of food in a restaurant unless it was first sampled by someone on his security staff. To be on the safe side, Durham would cook for Joe himself unless he knew the chef personally. With an eye always peeled for some disruption of the norm, he found himself faced with exactly that in the weeks leading up to the showdown with Ali: there was a spy in camp.
Someone had been calling Ali each night at ten thirty to give him a rundown on how Joe was faring in his workouts. Ali himself told reporters he had “a friend” feeding him information. “His sparring partners are beating up on him,” Ali said. “The other day, one of them bloodied his nose and hit him with over a hundred right hands.” As inside information goes, none of it held any compelling value, yet Ali seemed to think it gave him some small psychological edge, saying: “If I can get the edge on Frazier, why not do it? Football and basketball coaches send scouts to watch their opponents.” For his part, Frazier appeared bored by the whole subject. But Durham pursued it as if he were a bloodhound prowling through the underbrush on the heels of an escaped con. For two weeks, he had his eye on Don Warner as his leading suspect. Warner had been beaten by Cassius Clay in February 1962 on a fourth-round technical knockout and was known to be connected to the Nation of Islam. Although he denied being a member, Warner admitted to occasionally attending meetings. (He later adopted the name Hasan Muhammad.) Durham summoned him to his room at the Franklin Motor Inn.
“You rotten cocksucker,” he roared. “I talked to Clay last night and he said you are the spy.” He told Warner to go to the Cloverlay office and pick up his final check. He was through. But when Warner went to the bank and tried to cash the check, someone had stopped payment on it. He guessed it was Durham. Warner denied any wrongdoing, saying, “Joe did more for me than Clay ever could dream of doing. . . . I have a lot of respect for Joe.”
Guilty or not of the espionage that Durham alleged, Warner found himself engulfed in the choosing up of sides that surrounded the fight, which played itself out in combative letters to the editorial pages of the papers and even in actual shootouts between partisans in bars. As word spread in the city that Durham had found his man, Warner became a target of hostility. Crank calls began flooding the telephone line at his house, where he lived with his pregnant wife and their children; sometimes the voice on the other end would cuss him out, sometimes he would hear just a click and a dial tone. One evening when he was sitting in his living room, there was a sudden splintering of glass. Someone had thrown a rock through his window. Attached to it was a note that said: “SPY.” As he moved through the city on his daily errands, he could feel the accusatory eyes of strangers upon him. Warner later filed a ten-million-dollar lawsuit against Frazier, Durham, and Cloverlay, claiming that his “good name, fame and reputation has been brought into disgrace and disrepute” by his dismissal. Frazier ended up settling it for a relatively small sum.
Someone told Ali that his spy had been caught and asked, “What are you going to do about reports now?”
Ali said that he still had two other “friends” feeding him information. And winked.
To sprinkle the event with some showbiz glitter, Perenchio called upon an old Hollywood connection, actor Burt Lancaster, to work as host of the closed-circuit broadcast with Don Dunphy, the veteran blow-by-blow announcer, and Archie Moore, the former light heavyweight champion. For a publicity stunt, it was announced that Ali and Frazier were each to spar a round or so with Lancaster, whose only pugilistic experience had been that he played a boxer in the 1946 film The Killers. Supposedly, Frank Sinatra was also to be on hand and work the corner for Lancaster. But the announced event never came off. The crowd that packed the Cloverlay Gym on February 16 was disappointed to learn that Ali and Lancaster were in Miami Beach; no one knew where Sinatra was. When Lancaster did show up in Philadelphia later that week, it was not to don the gloves but to chat with writers; he said he abandoned the plan to spar, not because of any fear for his safety but because he considered it “a cheap gag.” Wearing a wide-brimmed black cowboy hat—a prop from his forthcoming film Lawman that he later gave to Frazier, which prompted Durham to call Joe “Dark Gable”—Lancaster accompanied Joe and Yank to the card that J Russell Peltz held at the Blue Horizon on February 22. Only blocks from his gym on North Broad Street, Frazier walked into the arena and found himself swallowed up in boos as the crowd began chanting: “ALI, ALI, ALI!!”
Even though Frazier said, “What do I care if people holler for him?” whatever forbearance he had projected toward Ali on the day the contracts were signed had eroded, as Ali portrayed Frazier as a favorite of the white establishment that had persecuted him. With a voice that carried over the oceans, he labeled Frazier an Uncle Tom in the way others had done to Louis Armstrong and Sammy Davis Jr. In an article that appeared in Life, Frazier excoriated “Clay” as a “clown” and “phony.” According to correspondent Thomas Thompson, Frazier spoke “with a cold bitterness, a rancor that was surprising for him.” Joe claimed that “Clay” had been “brainwashed . . . and now he has all the black people brainwashed, too.” Frazier snarled, “Clay called me an Uncle Tom. You going to tell me Clay don’t have white friends? What color is his trainer, for example?” In other interviews with the press, he said that “Clay” had separated him from his people, and that the two of them “could never be friends.” When a reporter told him that Ali planned to seal his prediction in an envelope and asked him, “Would you want to take a peek?” Joe frowned and snapped, “What do I want with his mail? I get three hundred letters a day myself. Besides, I doubt if he can write that well anyway.”
Beyond a brief period during which he seemed to lack zip, in part later explained by the fact that he was skipping breakfast, Frazier sailed through his training with grim efficiency. Usually, he would be in bed by 8 P.M. and awake by 2 A.M., some three hours before he typically did his roadwork. Either he would wake up his crew and run anyway or he would lie in bed and think of March 8 and “Clay.” Given the three-and-a-half-year layoff Ali had recently come off, Frazier was certain that he no longer had the same bounce in his legs that had once allowed him to glide out of trouble. With the help of assistant trainer Eddie Futch, who had a granular eye for the imperfections in Ali and would later beat him with Ken Norton, Frazier blocked out a strategy that would enable him to use his superior conditioning to wear down Ali over several rounds. As he had with his previous opponents, he would come at him with far greater pressure than Ali had ever faced. To have any chance of winning, he would have to cut off the ring on Ali, encourage him to take chances by showing him an exaggerated bob-and-weave, slip inside that long jab that Ali discharged in 4/100 of a second, and then batter him with hooks along his beltline. The objective would be to force Ali to “punch up, not down,” which is to say, close the space with which he had to work and get him into position to use only his uppercut and hook instead of that extraordinary jab.
Tensions climbed with the emergence of death threats. Frazier received a letter that warned him to “lose or else,” which was followed by a phone call a few days later to the same effect. Who was behind them? Had they had some connection to the Nation of Islam and its shadowy underground? Or had it been just some fan with a grievance known only to himself? Although it appeared that Frazier was unfazed by any of the threats that came in—in fact, he laughed them off—Les Pelemon and Durham were concerned. “We thought of it as kind of serious,” said Pelemon. Frank Rizzo assigned a sec
urity detail of four Philadelphia detectives to join Joe for the drive to New York. When they emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel, they were joined by a squad of four NYPD detectives that included Joseph Coffey, who in later years would gain fame by his work on the Son of Sam case and his arrest of Mafia don John Gotti. Instead of escorting the caravan to the City Squire Motor Inn on Seventh Avenue between Fifty-First and Fifty-Second Streets—which had received a bomb threat that would prove unfounded—Coffey and his men accompanied them to the Pierre on Sixty-First Street. On the eve of the bout, according to his autobiography, Frazier was watching a crime show, The Naked City, when his telephone rang.
“Joe Frazier, you ready?” Ali asked from the Hotel New Yorker.
“I’m ready, brother,” Frazier replied.
“I’m ready, too, Joe Frazier. And you can’t beat me. ’Cause I am the greatest.”
“You know what? You preach that you’re one of God’s men. Well, we’ll see whose corner the Lord will be in.”
“You sure you’re not scared, Joe Frazier?”
“Scared of what I’m going to do to you.”
“Ain’t nothing you can do. ’Cause I’ll be pecking and poking and pouring water on your smokin’. Bye, Joe Frazier. See you tomorrow night.”
“I’ll be there. Don’t be late.”
* * *
Early on March 8 in his suite at the Pierre, Joe turned to Lester Pelemon and noted, “Well, Puff, it’s the countdown. At this time tomorrow, it’ll be over and we can go on the road singing again.” Up at 8:30 A.M., Frazier passed up breakfast in anticipation of the weigh-in and shadowboxed until he worked up a sweat. Casually, he spoke of heading down to South Carolina, of kicking back with the Knockouts there and buying a new house for his mother. Surrounded by a phalanx of eight detectives, he showed up for the weigh-in just before noon, wearing a vivid green and gold brocade robe. Stitched on the back of it were the names of five of his children. He removed it and stepped on the scale: 2051/2 pounds; Ali would weigh in later at 215 pounds. For the security of the two men, the Garden provided them both private rooms where they were fed and shielded from the commotion that only intensified with the onset of evening, as New York society and others who aspired to it stepped from the rear doors of black limousines parked six and eight deep from the curb. As Pelemon would remember, Frazier no sooner checked into the room that had been set aside for him than he was “ready to go.” He began pacing the floor.
“Keep him calm, Les,” Durham told Pelemon. To pass the hours, Pelemon and Joe began singing some of the songs from their act a cappella—“Proud Mary,” “Knock on Wood,” and “My Way.” Four hours before he was due in the ring, he reported to his dressing room. There, he shadowboxed some and then lay back on a padded table, chatting with Durham, Futch, and Pelemon. Slowly, he stripped out of his street clothes and began donning his gear: first his athletic supporter, then his trunks and shoes. Seated on a chair, he held out his hands for Durham to wrap with layers of gauze and adhesive tape as a representative from the opposing dressing room looked over his shoulder. As Durham did the same while Ali had his hands bandaged, Ali looked up at him and asked if he thought Frazier could whip him. Durham would remember, “I told him I KNEW Frazier was gonna whip him.”
Durham returned to Joe’s dressing room, walked him to a corner, braced his hands on his shoulders, and looked deep into his eyes. “Well, we’re here,” he began. “I want you to know what you’ve done, boy. There will never be another Joe Frazier. They all laughed. You got us here. There’s not another human being who ever lived I’d want to send out there, not even Joe Louis. Win tonight, and the road will be paved in gold. Think of those mammy-suckin’ white people and the hot fields soaking up the sweat and hope of your parents. You were made for this moment. Take it, cocksucker!”
“Five minutes!” someone shouted.
Frazier lowered himself to one knee and prayed aloud:
“God, let me survive this night.
“God, protect my family.
“God, grant me strength.
“And God . . . allow me to kick the shit out of this mothafucker.”
From his twenty-dollar seat among the hoi polloi in the upper tier of the Garden, J Russell Peltz placed his binoculars up to his eyes and scanned ringside: sure enough, there was Booster, the Philadelphia bar owner to whom he’d sold a ticket, standing cheek by jowl with Frank Sinatra, there with his new Leica as a photographer on assignment with Life (which used one of his action shots the following week on the cover). Had he turned his glasses elsewhere, he would have spied a galaxy of stars that included Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Gene Kelly, Ethel Kennedy, Lorne Greene, Joe Namath, Marcello Mastroianni, Hubert Humphrey, Michael Caine, Abbie Hoffman, Bernadette Devlin, Hugh Hefner, and scores of others. In the hours prior to the bout, the ringside aisles had become a runway of eclectic fashion, with tuxedos and formal evening dress tossed together with furs, hot pants, and stiletto heels in a display of what Joe Flaherty of The Village Voice called “the horny sheet sharers of sex and ego.” Of the 760 press credentials the Garden issued (they denied another five hundred), the lineup along press row included Norman Mailer (Life), Budd Schulberg (Playboy), and William Saroyan (True). In setting the scene in the piece he filed that night for Sports Illustrated, my father observed of Ali in his lead: “He has always wanted the world as his audience, wanted the kind of attention that few men in history ever receive. So on Monday night it was his, all of it, the intense hate and love of his own nation, the singular concentration and concern of multitudes in every corner of the earth, all of it suddenly blowing across a squared patch of light like a relentless wind.”
Roaring cheers from the crowd of 20,455 accompanied Ali and then Frazier as they came into the arena and ducked through the ropes. Across the globe, thirty million viewers tuned in on the closed-circuit hookup, the largest television audience in history. Richard Nixon had it piped into the White House; Ali had joked in the weeks prior that the president would probably call Frazier to congratulate him if he won, but never Ali. Covered in a long red robe with white trim, Ali bobbed up and down on his toes, sliding this way and that. At one point, he brushed by Frazier and said, “Chump.” Frazier scowled at him. When referee Arthur Mercante summoned the two men and their seconds to ring center for the prefight instructions, they stood with their eyes locked on one another in a hard glare, Ali yapping, Frazier nodding and grinning. According to Newsweek, Ali warned Frazier, “Look out, nigger. I’m gonna kill ya.”
That was precisely what Ali set out to do as the bell summoned them to action. Aware in some part of himself that the three and a half years away had taken something from him, even if it was unclear exactly what, Ali intended to capitalize on the vulnerability Frazier had displayed during the early rounds of his previous bouts. As Frazier advanced toward him in the first round, Ali stood flat-footed and hammered him with the first seven blows, including two solid left hooks. With a three-and-a-half-inch height advantage and six-and-a-half-inch edge in reach, Ali peppered Frazier with jabs in the second round, which opened up room for him to punch down on Frazier. But just as he had vowed that he would, Frazier closed the space between the two, taking blow upon blow from Ali in order to get inside and work his body. Near the end of the round, Frazier backed Ali into the ropes and tagged him with a clean left hook to the head. Ali turned to the crowd and shook his head, “No,” as if to say that the blow had not had any effect. From ringside, announcer Don Dunphy observed: “Frazier has been hit with solid right hands that would have felled an ordinary man.”
But Frazier was no ordinary man on this evening. Down low in that bob-and-weave, he drove Ali to the ropes in the third round and caught him with a solid left to the head. Ali used his superior speed to beat Frazier to the punch in their exchanges in close, but Frazier landed a textbook left hook that staggered Ali. He covered up on the ropes and again shook his head “no” to the crowd; he would do that often. As Joe pressed the action again in the fo
urth, Ali punished him with a volley of combinations, then walloped him with a triple hook to the head. “Joe is taking a battering,” exclaimed Dunphy. “Anyone else would be on the floor.” But Joe battled back and unleashed a violent body attack, closing the round with a solid left hook to the head just before the bell. As Angelo Dundee leaned over him with energetic instruction between rounds, Ali sat on his stool and gulped for air.
Some reconstituted version of the old Ali was back in the fifth round. Up on his toes and moving side to side, he created space between himself and Frazier and sent out that jab. But he was soon down off the balls of his feet, as Frazier backed him to the ropes and whacked him with body shots. As Frazier fired away, Ali appeared to be tiring somewhat, his arms now perceptibly heavier. He caught Joe with a stiff one-two to the head, whereupon Frazier dropped his hands, pointed his left glove at Ali, and laughed, as the former champion himself had taunted opponents in his younger days. “I wanted him to know that I could take everything he had and then some,” Frazier said later. Ali backpedaled as Frazier followed, his hands still down as Ali swung at him wildly. At the bell, Joe shook his glove in the air in defiance. Ali saw it out of the corner of his eye and flinched. Although in his commentary Dunphy had observed that Ali was “piling up points,” Frazier was ahead on all three scorecards.
Only hours before, Ali had opened his sealed envelope and revealed his prediction that he would take out Frazier in the sixth round. Ali later conceded to fight film collector Jim Jacobs that he had only prepared for a six-round bout; Ali also said, “I hit him with everything in the fifth round and he didn’t fall. . . . I knew I was in for a long night.” With Ali against the ropes in the sixth round, Frazier nailed him with not one but two left hooks to the side of the head. Ali spun free but Joe again backed him into the ropes, where he pounded Ali along the beltline again and again. Dunphy observed, “Ali is almost like a sitting duck.” Content to lean back on the top strand of the ropes, Ali peppered Frazier with taps to the top of the head as he allowed Frazier to whale away at him, certain that Frazier would punch himself out and fold up in exhaustion. Jacobs said that Ali fought 60 percent of the bout with his back to the ropes.
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