Even if Quarry had come in somewhat weaker than advertised, Frazier had a new lease on his career. Given his poor performance against Foreman in Jamaica, Frazier had hoped to get another crack at him and win back his championship. But Ali upset Big George in “The Rumble in the Jungle” in an eighth-round knockout, and a rubber match between the two rivals was now inevitable. To get his work in, Frazier hooked up with Jimmy Ellis in Melbourne before an announced crowd of only fifteen thousand at St. Kilda Junction Oval; press reports placed the attendance at less than half of that. Five years removed from the drubbing Frazier had handed him at the Garden, Ellis, thirty-five, had won only one of his previous six bouts. Notwithstanding, he gave Joe trouble in the early rounds before Frazier stopped him in the ninth on a technical knockout in an altogether lackluster showing. Three months later, Ali was in Kuala Lumpur and had just beaten Joe Bugner when he announced what would be one of his many “retirements,” only to reconsider when he saw a tape of the Ellis fight; he laughed and said he was sure Joe was finished. But Frazier was far from that. He told reporters: “I want Clay like a hog wants slop.”
* * *
Weeks before Ali left for the Philippines in September 1975, the writer Nik Cohn dropped in to see him at his training facility in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. On assignment for New York magazine, Cohn happened upon a scene that underscored the genuine hostility that engulfed the impending encounter with Frazier. As a hundred or so spectators looked on from folding chairs that had been set up in rows surrounding the ring apron, Ali toweled off at the end of his workout and turned to the crowd, which he engaged with what had become his now-tired boast of superiority. “I am Ali,” he announced. “I outshine the sun.” Sensing a certain torpor pervading the room, Ali dug deeper into his repertoire and produced a word that caused the largely white audience to stir.
Gorilla.
Pick up Cohn:
“‘Joe Frazier,’ said a salesman in the front row, plump and pink.
“‘The ape-man,’ said his wife, faded sexy, in a halter top.”
Cohn continued: “‘Gorilla,’ said Ali one more time, and he began to disclaim. Mouth angry, eyes blank, he stared above the massed heads, focusing on infinity, and he screamed, he preached, he ranted. He said that Joe Frazier was so ugly, he should donate his face to the Wildlife Fund. So ugly that mirrors paid him not to look in them. Ugly, ugly, ugly. How could we have a gorilla for a champion? What would the people in Manila think, the people all over the world? That all Americans looked like that? That all black brothers were animals? Ignorant, stupid, ugly? If Frazier stood as our champion, what would other nations think of us?
“‘Degenerates,’ said the salesman.
“‘Right on,’ said Ali. ‘Freaks.’”
Cohn concluded: “The crowd loved every moment. Jammed tight in their rows, they rocked and stamped their feet, roared at each new sally. . . .”
Foreign governments were now eager to get involved with Ali. With the emergence of promoter Don King, the former Cleveland numbers kingpin who had served a prison sentence for stomping a man to death, the seat of promotional power no longer resided at Madison Square Garden. Sporting a Bride of Frankenstein hairstyle, King had solidified an inside position with Ali and his manager, Herbert Muhammad, by producing a five-million-dollar guarantee for the Foreman bout in Zaire, where King and his copromoters linked up with corrupt President Mobutu Sese Seko. While the Garden had been in the early running for Ali-Frazier III, King joined forces with rival promoter Bob Arum to bring it to the Republic of the Philippines, where President Ferdinand E. Marcos had declared martial law three years before. By staging an international sporting event—the “The Saga of Our Lifetime,” according to King—Marcos hoped to offset the image of the Philippines as a third-world country steeped in crime and soul-crushing poverty. For Ali, the champion, it would be another eye-popping payday: $4.5 million. Frazier, the challenger, would receive two million dollars (plus one hundred thousand dollars in training expenses). At the July 17 press conference held in Manhattan at the Rainbow Room, Ali produced a rubber toy gorilla he had found in a novelty shop and began batting it in the head, as the roomful of guests erupted in glee. Having promised himself (and Futch) that he would not blow his cool again, Frazier looked on impassively as Ali announced, “It’s gonna be a chillah and a thrillah and a killah when I get this gorilla in Manila.”
Eighteen days before the fight, Frazier embarked from Philadelphia on the twenty-six-hour flight to Manila, with stopovers in Los Angeles and Honolulu. Even before he stepped on the plane, he had trained more than a hundred rounds, punishing the usual lineup of sparring partners to a fare-thee-well. As he worked out, he was serenaded on the loudspeaker by a song he had written, “First Round Knockout.” (“He was down, he was down. Lord knows he was down.”) “Man,” Frazier said, “I love that song.” But Frazier said he had no intention of taking out Ali quickly if he could help it, not in light of the hard feelings that had bubbled up again. “If he goes down early, I plan to run over and pick him up,” said Frazier, who had been hearing reports that Ali had been amusing crowds in Deer Lake by taunting a large stuffed gorilla. “I just want to beat on him for fifteen rounds.” By the looks of him, Frazier appeared in tip-top condition when he boarded the plane, yet Denise Menz remembered he had a scare one morning with his back. Upon waking up in his room at the Philadelphia Marriott, he could not move enough to get out of bed. “I helped him into a hot tub. He could barely walk,” said Menz, who summoned orthopedic specialist Dr. Joseph Fabiani to administer a cortisone shot. Concerned that his back would flare up again, Frazier asked Fabiani, “Go with me to Manila, would you, doc?”
But Frazier was plagued by a potentially worse problem as he flew across the Pacific: his eyes. Although his deteriorating vision had been rumored in the press, Frazier had always said that his eyes were fine and the subject was more or less dropped. But as Yanoff had observed, the vision in his left eye had become particularly poor due to the repeated trauma it had received. Menz would remember that the cataracts on the eye were visible. “There were bumps on the surface of the eye, one big one and three small ones,” said Menz. “You could see them. It was as if someone had dabbed Vaseline on his eye.” Menz said that he was unable to read the small print in a newspaper and that she had to label his eight-track tapes in big block letters. Even so, he did see well enough to somehow obtain a license to drive a car, and he did somehow pass his physical to box. Beyond Yanoff and herself, Menz said only a handful of people in the inner circle knew the extent of the problem, presumably including Futch. Joe himself downplayed the potential peril, telling Menz: “I would rather be rich and blind than poor and blind.”
Welcomed to Manila International Airport by a Filipino security force with automatic weapons and sidearms, Frazier told reporters that he was as “sharp as a razor.” Typhoon season was under way upon his arrival that September 13, yet an even bigger wind swept into the Philippines two days later as Ali showed up on the red-eye from Honolulu with his entourage in tow. “The great annihilation of Joe Frazier will take place here!” Ali announced from the tarmac, where a member of his receiving committee draped a garland of flowers around his neck. Also on hand to greet him was Marvis Frazier, then fifteen, who presented Ali with a “Smokin’ Joe” T-shirt. Playfully, Ali clenched his hand into a ball and waved it in front of Marvis’s handsome young face, telling him: “I’m so anxious to get my fists on your father’s nose.” Until then, he would have to content himself with his daily barbs at Frazier, of which he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply. Although words never failed him, he occasionally even employed visual accompaniment, flattening his nose with his index finger in a crude characterization of Frazier as a cauliflowered pug. A wire photo of Ali in this pose appeared in papers across the world.
Crowds on the order of three thousand or more Filipinos poured into the Folk Art Center for the workouts. By now, Frazier was going easier on his sparring partners. According to Benton, t
hey were “working on the little things, polishing,” with particular emphasis on shoring up his defensive tactics. “Before, his only defense was his offense,” said Benton. Otherwise, Benton assured the press that Frazier would pour on the same pressure that had been his hallmark, noting: “The meanness is still there.” Publicly, Ali claimed Joe was no longer the same “little, slick-haired” dynamo who had beaten him four years before. Although Frazier was two years younger at age thirty-one, Ali claimed that Joe was actually five years older than him physically due to the many blows he had absorbed through the years. Ali said, “When I start hitting him in the head, it will be the one million, eight hundred thousandth time he has been punched in the head.” Privately, Ali knew that he would be in for a long evening and that he could not prepare himself for Frazier in the same cursory way he had for some of his lesser opponents. Observed Gene Kilroy, his business manager: “Ali trained his ass off for Joe Frazier.”
From the presidential suite at the Hyatt House, Frazier could look out on the big ships anchored in Manila Bay, beyond which loomed the World War II battlegrounds of Corregidor Island and Bataan. Nine days before the bout, Ali showed up below his balcony and shattered the peace of a late Sunday afternoon by calling out to Frazier: “Gorilla, I want you out of Manila by sundown!” According to Eddie Futch, Joe placed a foot up over the railing of the balcony, as if he intended to hop over it and go get Ali. “[Joe] was just kidding around, but we were nine floors up!” Futch said. Down below, as Ali tried to wrestle a pistol from one of the security people with him, another unloaded his gun and gave it to him. In a piece of silliness that could have easily gone wrong, Ali pointed the weapon at Frazier and began clicking the trigger. Only later did Frazier find himself growing annoyed, telling Philadelphia Daily News columnist Tom Cushman: “The more I thought about it the dumber it seemed.” At a press conference at the Folk Art Center, Ali produced a toy gun that he said he had purchased on the street from a small boy for fifty pesos ($6.50). Frazier said later, “That was no cap pistol he had with him the other day.”
While the gun episode was purely a comic play by Ali for headlines, there was nothing contrived about the quarrel he would have a few days later with his spouse Khalilah. Ali and Frazier had gone with a group of reporters to the Malacañang Palace for a visit with Marcos, who eyed the stunning model Ali had at his arm and complimented him on his “beautiful wife.” The woman was Veronica Porche, who had been with Ali in Zaire and Kuala Lumpur and had been the cause of continuing friction between Ali and his actual wife. “All of us cringed when Marcos said that, but no one corrected him,” said Patti Dreifuss, one of the publicists for the promoters. Upon learning what happened, Khalilah flew to the Philippines. She found Ali in his suite at the Manila Hilton, where she told him coldly, “We have a lot of things to talk about.” Talk they did. For an hour, Khalilah and Ali engaged in a heated row, with Khalilah underscoring her ire by hurling lamps at her roving spouse. In the hallway outside, New York Times reporter Dave Anderson had dropped by for an unrelated appointment with Ali, only to spot Khalilah leaving ahead of a bellman with six suitcases in tow. “Nobody wants me here,” Khalilah told Anderson, as she stepped on the elevator. Twelve hours after she had arrived, she boarded the exact same plane back to the United States.
Given how Ali had been taunting him, Frazier could not help but be amused. Reporters who saw him in the aftermath said he never looked so relaxed. In fact, he was perhaps too relaxed, given that his own dalliances would have left him similarly exposed. Of Ali, he said: “I guess he must be some superman like he says. I mean, I have enough trouble with one woman.” Later, he would playfully introduce Florence as his “wife” and his “girlfriend,” and allow that she brooked no foolishness from him. When his hometown Daily News arrived at the newsstands the following day, it carried a short article on the shipshape status of his marriage under the headline, JOE FRAZIER: 1-WOMAN MAN. Hearing Joe go on, Menz gasped: “What are you, crazy? You are no better than he is. Ali and his people know about me. What if he were to say, ‘The Gorilla has some nerve. Look at him over there with whitey.’” Joe shrugged. Although Ali would not discuss the subject of his own infidelity in any depth, shooing reporters away from it by saying his personal life was none of their concern, he hinted that his blowup with Khalilah had been a stunt. “We wanted to fill the newspapers and I imagine we got that done,” Ali said. “They told me the [closed-circuit] theaters was dying, so we had to do something.” No one was buying any of it.
Along with the humiliation he had heaped upon Khalilah and the awkward appearance with Veronica at the presidential palace, which a Roman Catholic priest later called a “national insult” in a column for the Philippines Daily Express, Ali continued to savage Frazier as apelike in appearance and intellect. When asked why he did it, Ali explained it was a form of “mental warfare” to incite Frazier to lose his cool in the ring; and by the way, Ali pointed out, why had Frazier continued to call him by his slave name, “Clay”? And yet even his devotees in the press would agree that the act had become unseemly. By referring to Frazier as a “gorilla,” he was casting him as subhuman in the same way that southern plantation owners had looked upon their slaves. Ironically, it was the same type of vile language that Cushman had encountered when he stopped by that tavern on Parris Island and shared beers with a group of marines who called Ali a “nigger.” Outwardly, Frazier had more or less held his peace since the studio scuffle, yet he seethed inside. Kilroy said, “Joe was like, you know: ‘That dirty motherfucker called me what?’” As he and Ali were leaving the Malacañang Palace, Frazier peered over the top of his sunglasses and told him, “I’m gonna whip your half-breed ass.”
* * *
The sun was just beginning to come up over Manila Bay on October 1, 1975, when Joe and his handlers stepped from the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Hyatt House for the short walk to his waiting car. Even at that hour the heat and the humidity were nearly unbearable. It reminded him of how it had been when he was a boy in Beaufort, where the asphalt would become so hot at the height of summer that he only drove his car in the cool of the evening to preserve his distressed tires, which he called “may pops.” (Why may pops? “Because,” he explained, “they may pop at any time.”) But Manila was hotter than he had ever remembered it being in South Carolina, and the Philippine Coliseum in suburban Quezon City was hotter still—114 degrees in the ring—due to an inadequate air-conditioning system, a tin roof, and the close proximity of television lights. Along with Marcos and his wife, Imelda, twenty-eight thousand spectators and more than one thousand foreign journalists squeezed into the arena. In sixty-eight countries across the globe, including 380 closed-circuit locations in the United States and Canada, millions more settled into their seats for the closing act of Ali-Frazier, the Thrilla in Manila: according to Newark Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg, fifteen rounds for “the championship not just of the world but of each other.”
In the center of the ring sat a gleaming trophy. When the ring announcer declared it would go to the winner and that it had been donated by Marcos, Ali sprinted from his corner, picked it up, and carried it off in the manner of a burglar. The crowd roared in approval at the introduction of Frazier yet greeted Ali with boos. Was it because Ali was Muslim and the Filipinos were a Christian people? Or had his antics and his cruelty toward Frazier become unsettling to them? In any case, Ali turned to the crowd with an expression of shock and feigned tears, rubbing them away with a gloved hand, before shedding his affected dismay and lighting up the building with a sunny smile that converted the jeers to cheers. The referee was Carlos Padilla, a Filipino who had been chosen from a field of three finalists that had included Philadelphian Zack Clayton, who refereed the Ali-Foreman bout in Zaire but whom Futch had opposed due to his close association with King. As Padilla reviewed the rules with Ali and Frazier in ring center, Ali blabbed: “You don’t have it anymore, Joe. You don’t have it. I’m going to put you away.” Frazier grinned and replie
d, “We’ll see.”
Ali had told his fans beforehand to take their seats early “because Joe Frazier may sit down before you do!” At the bell for round 1, he came out of his corner intent to capitalize on the fact that Frazier was a slow starter, as he had proved during his career again and again. Nine and a half pounds heavier, at 2241/2, than he had been in their 1971 bout—Frazier was ten pounds heavier, at 2151/2—Ali was no longer up on his toes as he had been years before. Moving counterclockwise as Frazier pressed forward, Ali set himself and unloaded heavy right hands. From his corner, assistant trainer Bundini Brown cried, “He won’t call you Clay no more!” Near the end of the round, Ali lured Frazier into a trap on the ropes, pivoted to his left, and popped Joe in the jaw with two left hooks. Though the first was a pawing blow that packed only scant power, the second, though it traveled no more than six inches, caught Frazier as he was lunging forward and sent him hurtling into the ropes. Ali followed with a straight right hand to the chin and left uppercut, but Frazier recovered enough to extricate himself from the ropes. In an arms-crossed defense to protect his chin, Frazier charged ahead as Ali battered him with whipping blows.
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