Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  Joe followed him to the junkyard. There, Michael introduced him to his father, who told Joe: “We have the rear for your car. Back your car up to the gate.” Michael would remember, “Shoulder to shoulder, Joe was gigantic. He was like a friggin’ rock.” To pay for the part, Joe produced a knot of hundred-dollar bills that Michael said “had to be three to four inches thick.” But Sonny was not having it. He told him “the rear” was on him, enthusing: “I loved you as a champion and what you did for boxing.” When Joe pressed his willingness to pay, Sonny told him, more firmly now: “The rear is nothing, Joe.” Joe looked over at Michael and said, “Come on, get in the car.” With the differential stowed in the trunk, Joe pointed the limousine back to North Philadelphia and drove him to the gym. Inside, he told the young man: “Pick anything you want.”

  “What?” Michael asked in disbelief.

  “Go on,” Joe said. “I’m gonna give it to you.”

  Michael would say years later, “Right off the bat, I knew what I wanted—this big heavy bag. Brown leather, the biggest one you could get. It wouldn’t move when you hit it. Bang! It was like hitting a cinder block wall. He said, ‘Ahhh, I train on that one.’ He pointed to another one: same bag but smaller. He said, ‘How would you like that one instead?’ I said, ‘I love it.’” One of his guys unhooked it and he autographed it.”

  The junkyard owned by Sonny Averona became a favorite hangout for Joe, a place where he could kick back and swap stories. “Every day,” Michael said years later. “He was down here every day.” Sonny became not just a friend with whom Joe would come to share occasional holiday dinners but a partner onstage as the years passed. Along with running the junkyard, Sonny fashioned a singing career when he was well into his forties by doing a lounge act in tribute to Frank Sinatra, which Sonny advertised as “the sound of Sinatra with the Averona style.” Until his death at age fifty-five, in 1992—at which point Michael inherited the show, which he expanded to include a tip of his hat to Dean Martin—Sonny starred on the casino circuit in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. When he asked Joe to join him onstage, he did not have to ask him twice. Together, they appeared at the popular South Philadelphia spot Palumbo’s and the Claridge Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, among other venues. Michael Averona would say, “When Joe stepped onstage, you paid attention.”

  With Marvis up and running as an amateur, Joe revisited his love affair with music. Hard work had enabled him to overcome his physical shortcomings to ascend to the pinnacle of boxing, and he was certain that the same hard work would help him to overcome his deficiencies as a singer and forge a second career. Carlo Menotti had given him some valuable pointers, yet his breath remained too short, his range too narrow, and his phrasing too imprecise. But with the announcement of his retirement, he recommitted himself to showbiz, giving it his full attention. With Florence and their five children back in Whitemarsh Township, he moved into a penthouse apartment in Manhattan and opened an office. To sharpen his skills, he worked for two or more hours a day with Eddie Jones, the jazz double bassist who played with the Count Basie Orchestra in the 1950s. Of his sessions with Jones, Frazier said: “Over and over. Up and down. Hit the wrong note, do it over.” Jones told him: Be yourself. Not everyone can be Sam Cooke or Nat King Cole. Jones helped him assemble his group of backup performers: three disco dancers, a trio of pop singers called “Smoke,” and an eight-piece band. Stan Hochman attended their November 1976 debut performance at the Northeast Hilton in Trevose, Pennsylvania. Not an easy critic, Hochman came away impressed, writing in the Philadelphia Daily News: “Frazier has made incredible strides as a singer. He is twice the performer he was four years ago, slicker, smoother, more in control. If only his voice was a little mellower, a touch richer . . .”

  Crowds were so big the following February at the Rainbow Grill, on the sixty-fifth floor of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center, that he was held over for a second week. He performed two shows nightly—9:15 and 11:30—and altered his offerings for the second set in the event someone stayed on. Striding onstage in a silver-and-black warm-up robe—which he stripped off to reveal a tux with sparkling lapels—he planted his feet, turned to the audience, and unpacked his repertoire, including “Knock on Wood,” “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” “Proud Mary,” and—as always—“My Way.” The crowd loved him. Syndicated columnist Earl Wilson enthused, “He kayoed every song.” In an interview with Wilson in advance of his opening performance, Frazier said ebulliently: “Can’t get nobody to sleep with me anymore, ’cause I sing in bed all night. I sing ridin’ in the car and get stopped by the police.” He then took a playful poke at Ali, asking Wilson: “Can you imagine Muhammad Ali tryin’ to sing ‘Proud Mary’?” At the end of his second set, Joe was so pumped up that instead of taking a car back to his apartment, he would get into his workout clothes, ride the elevator down to the ground floor, and run up Fifth Avenue and back down Eighth Avenue before heading home.

  Administrative responsibility for the band fell to Denise, who had come to New York to live with Joe. With Frazier footing the bill and fourteen or more personnel to pay and keep track of, his music career quickly became what she called “an organizational nightmare.” Agents lined up bookings for the group at small venues up and down the Eastern Seaboard and beyond, some of which Denise said had to be “burned” because they simply did not pay enough to break even. “Our performers were not what you would call top-tier professionals,” said Menz. “It was like babysitting a kindergarten class. Who needs a taxi to the airport? Who needs ten or twenty dollars for this or for that? They even stole pillows from the hotel! And then there were the costumes to see to. It never ended.” Money that came in from the show dates was used to cover expenses, which included a weekly payroll of more than forty-five hundred dollars. Down in Philadelphia, Bruce Wright fielded the bills that came in and grew concerned, asking, “Denise, what in the world is going on up there?” Given the overhead that running a band entailed, Menz contended Joe would have been far better off if he had confined himself to personal appearances and commercials. For a Miller Lite commercial in 1978, he was paid twenty-five thousand dollars plus royalties for a single day of work. “Joe had to sign a paper with Miller Lite that he was retired, because they only used retired athletes for those spots,” said Menz. “I remember we did forty-five takes.” The spot aired in 1978 and revealed a droll Joe: In a tuxedo and big red bow tie, he boogies into a swanky saloon with his backup singers on his heels, snapping his fingers and singing a jingle for the beer, only to finish and encounter stone silence by the other patrons until he gives them a menacing frown. Only then do they erupt in cheers, at which point Joe dissolves into a satisfied smile.

  Tension began to grow between Joe and Denise. Even though she never wavered in her affection for Joe, she found herself becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the pressures of the band. Joe himself began to discover that he had been spoiled by the more or less dependable way business had been conducted in boxing, where his contracts were typically letter-perfect and the money that was due him was always placed in escrow. Show business operated in a far more haphazard way that invited an array of unexpected snafus. Whenever Joe would become irritable, Denise found herself bearing an ever-larger burden. Borrowing a phrase from James Brown, “The Godfather of Soul,” Joe would remind her with cutting brusqueness: “I pay the cost to be the boss.” Annoyed, Denise would think: Yes, you do. You do pay the cost, but I am dying here. She would remember years later: “Along with the problems with the band, we always had trouble with other women. They would come up to me and ask me to hook them up with him. And the party life. He could never get enough of it.” As she weighed what to do, she remembered what her father had always told her: “Stand on your own two feet, Denise.” Eventually, she gave up her apartment in Philadelphia and moved back home to Rio Grande, New Jersey, where she and her brother Jay owned a restaurant. She remembered, “I did it for self-preservation.”

  Even as he applied himself to his si
nging career with vigor, Joe could not bring himself to let go of boxing—or Ali. When Ali said offhandedly in an interview that he would consider a fourth match with him, Frazier seized upon it. “You know I ain’t got no rabbit’s blood in me,” Joe told the Associated Press in August 1977. “If a guy wants to take me on again, you know I’m not gonna run.” Family and friends shuddered. Only fourteen months had elapsed since Joe had staggered from the ring after Foreman throttled him a second time. To get his comeback under way, he began training in September and advised Bruce Wright to begin lining up an opponent. With Joe in the office, Wright called Eddie Futch in California and placed him on the speaker. For a half an hour, Futch found that as hard as he tried to dissuade him, Frazier only dug in his heels deeper. Finally, Joe said: “Do me a favor. Come back and take a look.” On October 17 and 18, 1977, Futch stopped in at the gym and did just that. To his surprise, he was impressed by what he saw. Joe appeared to have his old zest back and looked better than he had before the second Foreman bout. Though he told Frazier that he would prefer that he reconsider and stay retired, he agreed to work with him again, telling Philadelphia Inquirer writer Skip Myslenski: “Fighters are the last ones to realize the truth. So . . . so, what can you say?”

  Eleven days after Futch performed his inspection, Ali faced Earnie Shavers at Madison Square Garden in a bout that stripped yet another layer of dignity from the hallowed champion. Ali was awarded a unanimous fifteen-round decision, yet it was a long and grueling evening for him, as the hard-hitting Shavers nearly knocked him out in the final round. Sitting at his home in South Jersey, then-fourteen-year-old John DiSanto found himself troubled by the beating Ali took, and how he seemed to age more with each passing round. “Grease from his face had gotten into his hair,” DiSanto remembered. “As the fight wore on, it appeared as if his hair had turned gray before our very eyes.” Toward the end of November, the young boxing fan pleaded with his parents to take him to see Frazier at a performance at the Woodbine Inn in Pennsauken, New Jersey. With the mournful image of Ali still front and center in his mind, DiSanto sat at the bar over a soda and jotted down a note for Joe on a piece of paper. The boy wrote: Dear Joe. I’m a big fan. I’ve followed your career. You’re a hero of mine. I read or heard that you are thinking about making a comeback. I would hate to see that because you’ve had a great career and there’s no reason to take that risk. With that, DiSanto folded the note and asked the bartender to deliver it to Joe backstage. DiSanto would remember, “They called me over later and introduced me to him. I shook his hand. But I have no idea if he read or even received the note.”

  Increasingly, Frazier had come to believe that he had retired too soon. Seeing Ali get dragged through fifteen inglorious rounds by the inexperienced Leon Spinks in February 1978 and lose his world heavyweight championship in a split decision only confirmed that. Even though Spinks had won the 1976 Olympic gold medal, he had entered the ring with only seven pro bouts. That Spinks had been trained by Sam Solomon and George Benton in his own gym had to have been even more vexing to Frazier, who told the press: “With the guys out there now, why shouldn’t I take another shot?” But there would be obstacles. For a potential Shavers bout, Frazier set his price at $1.1 million, well above the $750,000 that was on the table. When television balked at underwriting the promotion, it was scrapped. Teddy Brenner signed Joe to a contract for a potential bout with Scott LeDoux at Madison Square Garden on April 16, 1978, but he could not line up LeDoux, who had fought Spinks to a draw a year before and was now hoping to position himself for a rematch. While Brenner searched for a replacement—Jimmy Young? Stan Ward? Mike Weaver?—Frazier signed to take on Gerrie Coetzee in Johannesburg. For Frazier, it shaped up as an attractive payday—$460,000 plus another $170,000 in endorsements—yet it had problematic overtones. South Africa was then in the stranglehold of apartheid and had been banned from the Olympic Games since 1964.

  For an African American who had grown up in the Jim Crow South, and who had cultivated relationships with Frank Rizzo and others in the white ruling class, it could not have been a more ill-considered play. While Futch had gone to South Africa with Bob Foster for a bout against Pierre Fourie and later would accompany others, the Coetzee offer came at the height of the global anti-apartheid crusade. Although Frazier demanded that the seating for the bout be integrated, as it had been for the Foster-Fourie fight, it did not quell the outcry that erupted. The NAACP sent Frazier a telegram that Bruce Wright said “explicitly asked him not to go to South Africa, the plea being based on indignities to the black race that existed there.” Ultimately, the deal came apart when the Transvaal Provincial Boxing Board of South Africa vetoed the bout, reportedly due to a clause in the contract that sheltered Frazier from a 6 percent tax obligation. As South African promoter Hal Tucker worked behind the scenes to iron out the problem, Joe withdrew from the arrangement, and a chagrined Wright lamented that it was “reasonable to say that Joe kicked away seven hundred thousand dollars by not going.” Philadelphia Daily News columnist Chuck Stone excoriated him, observing: “Golly gee, think of how badly all those South Africans languishing in political prisons must feel. . . . No comeback trail should be littered with the tortured and murdered bodies of South Africans.”

  Twelve years later, in an event at the United Nations, Frazier would meet the noblest of those captives, Nelson Mandela, a former amateur boxer who served twenty-seven years in jail as a political prisoner. Joe would give him his jewel-encrusted championship belt that day in 1990, saying: “Mr. Mandela, you deserve this. This is from my heart.” But while Joe was still on the comeback trail, Stan Hochman ventured that “you could get 3–1 that Frazier couldn’t tell you what apartheid was.” With Coetzee now out, Frazier accepted a bout with Kallie Knoetze. Of all things, Knoetze was a South African police detective, which drew a howling objection from Don King—the very same Don King who divvied up swag with some of the worst authoritarian cutthroats on the planet. “Fighting a South African is helping those who support white supremacy,” boomed King—who would himself promote Coetzee years later. The bout was scheduled for May 14 in Las Vegas but had to be pushed back when Frazier came down with what appeared to be the flu. Only days later it was discovered that he had contracted acute viral hepatitis and would be sidelined indefinitely. Frazier said, “The Good Man must be trying to tell me something.” Atop a column by Dave Anderson in the New York Times on the day Joe had been scheduled to face Knoetze, the headline read: HEPATITIS DID FRAZIER A FAVOR.

  * * *

  Few fighters have ever looked upon retirement as the pleasurable escape that Archie Moore once envisioned it to be. The bewhiskered “Old Mongoose” used to say when he exited the ring at the end of his long career, he would hang his gloves way up high, burn his workout clothes, and eat whenever and whatever he pleased. He would stay up late and “inhale the fumes of good jazz in smoky nightclubs,” have his wife hide his scrapbooks and photo albums, and go over to the gym each day. There, he would shoot the breeze with the other old-timers and, as he cast an appraising eye on the youngsters in the ring, he would tell himself that he could have beaten any of them in his day. For Joe Frazier, letting go would not be so easy.

  Only thirty-four when hepatitis derailed his comeback, Frazier was old for boxing yet still in his prime, at a point in life when successful men in other fields are able to look forward to decades of productivity. Although he had the gym, occasional singing dates, the limousine service, and later a restaurant, none of it provided him the thrill that he derived from fighting, of which he once said: “In the ring you can get rough, rugged. I like that. I get a kick out of that.” For the action that he always craved, he stopped in at the casino that had just opened in Atlantic City, and not a day passed when he did not have a handful of lottery tickets jammed in his pocket. To pass the hours, he would stop by the junkyard, work on one of his cars, and sit with Sonny Averona. On some days he would set up a projector and go over films of his old bouts, which was what his niece Dan
nette found him doing when she unexpectedly stopped by. For hours they sat there together as his history unfolded before their eyes: George Chuvalo, both Bonavenas, Buster Mathis, Jimmy Ellis, both Quarrys, both Foremans, all three Alis—all the victories and defeats. Dannette would remember, “We sat there so long we had to send out for food.” How far away those years now seemed.

  Depression set in. Even if Joe could not bring himself to admit it, it showed up in his behavior. Heated words were exchanged with Bruce Wright over spending and expense practices, which had ushered in tax problems. When Joe fired him the next day, Wright would remember that “of all the things I said about him, the only one that upset him was when I called him old.” Stan Hochman stopped by to see him early one day at the gym and became alarmed at the condition he found him in. Wearing a jacket with the words ONE OF GOD’S MEN stitched on the back, he had two handguns shoved under his belt and smelled of alcohol. Unaware that Denise had moved back home, Hochman called her, told her what he had seen, and said, “As a sportswriter, I never get too close to the athletes I write about. But I have a special place in my heart for Joe and am hoping you can talk to him.” Denise told him they had split up and added sadly: “Stan, he would not listen to me anyway.” Hochman paused and replied, “Ah, I see. I am sorry to hear that.” Hochman would subsequently write: “He has become stubborn, moody, a poor listener. He has surrounded himself with people who nod and say, ‘You can do it, Joe. You can do it, baby.’”