Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin carried the reassuring headline in June 1980: FINANCIALLY, FRAZIER STILL A HEAVYWEIGHT. Perhaps, yet it seemed as if he was working his way down to a lightweight with abandon. Day by day, “the love” just dribbled away on this and that. For years, the gym had been bleeding him for five thousand dollars a month in upkeep and utilities. The Joe Frazier Revue had been what Hochman called “a six-figure wipeout.” Under the supervision of his brother Tommy, the limousine service was scarcely a break-even proposition. Along with the cost of running his house in Whitemarsh Township, he had additional expenses connected with the South Carolina plantation, which was occupied by his mother and two sisters. Moreover, there were his five children with Florence to care for and child support for a son—Joseph—he had in September 1980 from a relationship with real estate agent Joan Mahoney; Frazier had offered child support for the two children in New York that he had with Rosetta, but she rejected it. Off the books, there was his fondness for blackjack, which he played heavily and not well. According to Ali aide Gene Kilroy, “Joe was the worst blackjack player in the world. He would split picture cards.” Although income came via a seventy-thousand-dollar annual pension Wright had set up, personal appearances and commercials—along with Miller Lite, he had done ads for Mennen Skin Bracer and Blue Bonnet Margarine—he launched yet another comeback. Jokingly, Joe said he had to “pay the rent.”

  Boxing does not protect its aging stars from themselves. For Ali—perhaps its greatest star—it would be a long and painful good-bye. In September 1978, with Frazier on hand to sing the National Anthem at the New Orleans Superdome, Ali captured the title back from Spinks in a unanimous fifteen-round decision to become the first man to win the world heavyweight championship three times. Although Ali surrendered it when he yet again announced his retirement in June 1979, he came back just over a year later to challenge Larry Holmes for the WBC portion of the crown. In a ring set up in the parking lot at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, the far younger Holmes pummeled a more or less defenseless Ali in the blazing heat for ten horrifying rounds. In his book Ali: A Life, author Jonathan Eig observed that as Ali was outpunched 340 to 42, his manager Herbert Muhammad “sat at ringside with his head down, unable to watch yet unwilling to stop it.” Only when Angelo Dundee caught his eye at the end of the tenth round did Herbert give a brief nod for him to stop the slaughter. In December 1981, eight days before Ali dragged his thirty-nine-year-old body through a final beating, at the hands of Trevor Berbick, in the Bahamas, Frazier had an appointment in Chicago for what would be his own sad denouement.

  Five and a half years had elapsed since Foreman had beaten Joe on Long Island. With Wright removed from the picture, Joe handed his business affairs over to Sharon Hatch, who had once worked at Madison Square Garden and with whom he would have a relationship; they had a son together in December 1982—Joseph Jordan Frazier. The opponent Hatch lined up was an ex-con, Floyd “Jumbo” Cummings. While Hatch would then say that Joe was not in any urgent need of the eighty thousand dollars he would receive from promoter Bill Cooley—Cummings was paid ten thousand dollars—George Benton said, “Why else would he be doing this except for money?” Benton would not accompany Joe to Chicago. Nor would Eddie Futch, who said it saddened him to see Joe come back. Futch told Lewis Freedman of the Philadelphia Inquirer: “The legs start to go. You see punches and adjust a split second too late. You see openings just a split second too late. Age does dim the reflexes. There are no exceptions.” The evening before he was to leave for Chicago, Joe drove down to Rio Grande to pay a visit to Denise. When Joe attempted to break the ice with small talk, asking her what she thought of the Cummings fight, she gave him the cold shoulder. “If I had any say in it, that fight would never have happened,” she later said. “It was beneath him.”

  “Guess what kind of bird don’t fly?” Joe asked at the mock weigh-in the day before the bout. From nearby, nephew Rodney Frazier squawked: “A jailbird!” Cummings had served twelve years of a seventy-five-year sentence at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, on a murder conviction. Only sixteen years old and just up from his birthplace of Ruleville, Mississippi, he had been the wheelman in a grocery store robbery with five accomplices. One of them shot and killed the grocer. Cummings, known as “the barn boss” in stir because of his unchecked appetite for brawling, spent the better part of his early days in prison in the isolation cell, only to shape up when the prison started a boxing program. Jumbo said, “Boxing was a natural for me ’cause all it is, is street fighting with a little polish.” Eight years younger than Frazier and two years out of prison, Cummings packed 2231/2 pounds in a six-foot-two sculptured physique and had a 17-1 record. Fearful not that he would hurt Frazier but that he would kill him in their ten-round bout, Jumbo said he planned to bring along his two attorneys in case he had to appear at an arraignment.

  Forty days shy of his thirty-eighth birthday, Joe tipped the scale at 229 pounds, the highest he had ever weighed for a bout. To dispel any concern that Frazier was unsound, the Illinois Athletic Commission had promised to have him undergo a physical examination. When they settled for looking at records supplied by a Philadelphia doctor who had cared for Joe, Hochman creamed them in his column, asking: “Who are these guys? The same people who sold tickets to The Who concert in Cincinnati?” Unconcerned, commissioner Bob Goodsitt said with a shrug: “An X-ray is an X-ray, a doctor is a doctor.” None of the three networks would get near it. CBS boxing advisor Mort Sharnik told Frazier personally: “Joe, my memories are sacrosanct, and you should be treated like a national treasure. You put on the greatest sports event in history and when you retired five years ago, I agreed wholeheartedly. In the five years since, nothing has caused me to change my mind.” On the day of the bout, Joe received a telephone call from Ali in the Bahamas. The two proceeded to cook up plans.

  “We gotta make all the old men proud,” said Ali.

  “I hear you,” said Joe. “I’m gonna hold my end of the deal up.”

  “I’m gonna do my best down here, too,” said Ali.

  “I don’t want to hear none of that I’m-gonna-do-my-best stuff,” said Joe. “I’m talkin’ about you holdin’ your end up.”

  “Yeah, we’re old men and we gotta show the world we can do it,” said Ali.

  “Don’t call me old,” Joe said.

  Situated across the street from the Union Stock Yards—which had closed in 1971 yet still somehow seemed to discharge a foul odor—the archaic International Amphitheatre had to seem a million miles away from Madison Square Garden to Joe. With a crowd of sixty-eight hundred squarely in his corner—“Boogie, Joe! Boogie, Joe!”—the man who once wore a bloody slaughterhouse apron himself charged from his corner at the bell and began throwing what had once been his Hall of Fame left hook. He missed. Then missed again. Even when Joe connected with it, it did not appear to faze Cummings, who stood back and sneered. Scoring with right uppercuts yet breathing hard by the third round, Cummings had his way in the early rounds, while Frazier seemed to have ten-pound weights attached to his ankles. Seated at ringside, John Condon, his old friend from the Garden, was overheard by Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Daley: “No legs. Joe is going to have to get awfully lucky.”

  Had he ever stooped to bring on Jumbo Cummings as a sparring partner back in his prime, Joe certainly would have hospitalized him. But on this evening, still possessed by gallant pride but with none of the untamed savagery that used to accompany it, Frazier was indeed too old and too slow and too heavy, his once-hard abdomen now jellied with a layer of flab. Working the corner along with Val Colbert instead of Futch and Benton, Marvis Frazier urged his father on between rounds. Frazier marched out and won the fifth, landing a solid left hook that seemed to jar Jumbo, but only briefly. “Atta boy, Joe!” shouted someone in the crowd, now beginning to lean to Cummings. The erstwhile “barn boss” pinned Joe in a neutral corner in the eighth and hit him at will as Frazier stood there unable to move. Blood poured from his cu
t lip, both eyes now beginning to swell. Only guile enabled him to escape back into the safe harbor of ring center. As the bout came to a weary finish two rounds later, it appeared that Joe would go home with the fourth loss of his career against thirty-two victories.

  The judges called it a draw. Boos rained down on them.

  Jumbo slammed his glove on his forehead in disbelief.

  “You know I was robbed, man,” he said later at his press conference. “Joe Frazier is a great fighter, but he knows in his heart I won.”

  Frazier said it could have gone either way. Then, he added: “Most people think I’m an old man, but I don’t think you saw an old man out there tonight.”

  Acid poured from the computer terminals on press row. Hysterically, Cooper Rollow shouted in the Chicago Tribune: “It may have been the worst decision in the history of professional boxing.” In a more minor key yet no less critical, Chicago Sun-Times columnist John Schulian observed: “Jumbo Cummings cried a river when the news hit him harder than the forlorn ex-heavyweight champion had in ten rounds, and a sweating, stinking mob belched up its anger with him. But the point that should be made in the haunted aftermath has nothing to do with justice in a sport that never had any to start with. The point that should be made is that Joe Frazier never should have been out there in the first place.” Down in the Bahamas for the upcoming Ali-Berbick bout, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Bill Lyon worried that the unjust draw would only encourage Joe to come back yet again, perhaps even with the hope of pairing up with Ali a fourth time. Lyon wrote: “No, no, a thousand times no!”

  To the relief of those who loved and admired him, there would not be another bout, not with Ali or anyone else. Contrary to what Joe would say in the days that followed, he was finished when he exited the International Amphitheatre into the cold and rainy Chicago night. Only days later, it would end for his enduring rival in Nassau, Bahamas, where Ali was beaten in a ten-round unanimous decision by the plodding Berbick in a setting just as unseemly. Far older in appearance than his thirty-nine years, one of the greatest champions of any era closed out his career in a ring that had been set up on a high school baseball diamond. A cowbell was used to signal the beginning and end of each round, which only underscored the words uttered by Gypsy Joe Harris years before and now applied to both Ali and Frazier: once hammers, they were now nails.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sons

  The Fighting Fraziers (L to R): Hector, Rodney, Joe, Marvis, and Mark, 1983. Getty Images

  Gypsy Joe Harris stood on the Ben Franklin Bridge and looked down at the churning currents. For years, he had traveled by foot over the walkway on the bridge from his boyhood home in Camden to Philadelphia and back again. Standing at the apex of the span, he had a panoramic view of both cities: Camden, its shoreline scattered with warehouses and water towers, and Philadelphia, its stunted skyline then still no higher than the statue of William Penn atop City Hall. One hundred thirty feet below, the Delaware River flowed between the two banks and under the bridge. To the occupants of the cars and trucks that whizzed by, the forlorn figure who stood at the railing would have been no more than a blur that passed by in the blink of an eye.

  Some years had elapsed since the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission had discovered Gypsy Joe was blind in one eye and stripped him of his boxing license. Certain that they knew of his condition all along and had overlooked it, Gypsy could not help but view his ouster as a cruel irony: By purportedly saving him from the perils of the ring, they consigned him to an even worse outcome on the street. With no skills to call upon other than boxing, he ended up in the stranglehold of drugs and alcohol. “Heroin is just like sugar, man,” he told Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Robert Seltzer years later. “It relaxes you. It takes all your problems away.” Only when friends began dying off did he seek hospitalization, yet the treatment he received only addressed his cravings, not the aching hollowness that would lead him up on that bridge. As he stood there and weighed his alternatives, it occurred to him that years before he had won “a little medal” for swimming at a recreation center as a boy.

  “I told myself I was going to jump,” said Gypsy Joe. “But then I thought, ‘Hey, I can swim!’ It seemed kind of funny later. Here I was, I wanted to drown myself, and could swim.”

  Chances are he would not have survived that fall any better than the one that claimed his boxing career. For years, exactly what happened remained a puzzle. One theory that has circulated is that Gypsy Joe, overshadowed by Joe Frazier and upset by the lack of attention he had been receiving from Yank Durham, was planning to leave Durham and sign with Bernard Pollack, a wealthy mink farmer and furrier who owned the property Ali later converted into his training facility in Deer Lake. Gypsy Joe had befriended Pollack and had been a frequent visitor at the farm, where the two would take long walks and talk; Pollack also was blind in one eye. According to Gypsy Joe’s younger brother Anthony Molock, Gypsy and Durham had a “big blow-up” over it at the Twenty-Third PAL prior to his scheduled bout against Manny Gonzalez on October 14, 1968. “Gypsy stormed off at the end of it,” said Molock. “Next thing you know, they ‘discovered’ he had one eye.” Gypsy Joe had become his own worst enemy even in the eyes of those who cared for him, and he believed that either Durham, his associate Willie Reddish, or promoter Herman Taylor had dropped a dime on him. Even Molock could see where Durham or the others had a point (if indeed they did it): “All the trouble Gypsy was? And now he was up and leaving? I would have dropped a dime on him.”

  Aware of the eye problems Frazier had as the 1970s unfolded, Gypsy Joe had to feel as if he had gotten shorted. When his appeal to have his boxing license reinstated was denied in 1972, his drug addiction spiraled out of control. He told Seltzer that “me and a buddy did twenty-five bags together. It kept us high for days. . . . You nod away.” Some speculated that while he was up at Deer Lake, he worked as a spy for Frazier yet also slipped information on Joe to Ali for some extra money. An insider told me, “Could be. The shape Gypsy was in, he would have sold out Jesus Christ himself for a fifth of whiskey.” When Gypsy Joe stopped by the Cloverlay Gym, he would spot Frazier and shout, “Hey, Joe Frazier! Gimme some of that money you have!” Joe gave him a job instead. But just as he had done during his career, Gypsy Joe showed up only when the spirit moved him. When he did come in for work, he was often late. In the biography he authored, Gypsy Joe: Son of Philadelphia, Molock said that Frazier summoned Harris to his upstairs office to discuss his poor work attendance. Frazier told him, “This is a business, Gyp. You understand?” Gypsy Joe said he would do better yet continued to show up late or not at all. When Frazier smelled alcohol on his breath, he again called him to heel.

  “Gyp, I know what you’re doin’ and where you’re goin’,” Frazier told him. “Remember, I live in North Philly, too. You need to get some help.”

  “Help for what?” Gypsy Joe replied. “The only help I need is money! Y’all made millions! I saw it in Time magazine y’all made $2.5 million! I get paid sixty dollars a day and now you hasslin’ me about what I do on my time.”

  Frazier shot back, “I don’t give a shit what you do on your own time! It’s what you ain’t doin’ here is what I care about. You drinkin’ and partyin’ all night and can’t get here to do your job. That’s what I’m talkin’ about! Gypsy, from what I hear, you need to get help!”

  “Well, help me then!”

  “Damn, Gyp! I gave you a job and I been payin’ you for nothing lately. What you gonna do about your own situation?”

  “That the way you feel? Then fuck you and your job.”

  Drugs frightened Frazier in a way no man ever did in the ring. Although he was no stranger to the party scene and drank himself, increasingly so once his career had come to an end, he gave drugs a wide berth and always worried that one of his children would get caught up in them. With an incredibly high pain threshold, he even waved off painkillers whenever he suffered a cut and there were stitches to be endured. To prevent colds a
nd other conditions, he relied on a concoction that had been favored during his youth in Beaufort. He would take Courvoisier, cod liver oil, lemon or some other citrus peel, and rock candy (or Hall’s menthol lozenges if he could not get his hands on rock candy), blend it together in a jug, and leave it to ferment for thirty days. When he could feel an illness coming on, he would reach for the jug and take a swig of what he called his “cure-all.” Out of curiosity, his friends tried it when he offered it to them—once but never twice. “Good God!” said Denise Menz. “I told him, ‘Keep that stuff away from me!’” But Joe abhorred drugs and often volunteered to speak out against them, once telling a school assembly in South Carolina: “Once you take something that will harm the body, you’ll never be champ of anything.”

  Strung-out junkies were always on the prowl in North Philadelphia. One cold winter evening, Joe and Denise stopped at a nearby fried chicken place for a drive-through order in one of the limousines. A young woman no more than eighteen walked up to his window. Denise remembered, “She was so skinny, and she was shaking. She had on a sleeveless dress but no coat.” The young junkie asked Joe for some money. He looked at her and replied, “Go home to your momma. Get off the street. You know what can happen to you out here?” Unsteadily, the young woman walked around the car. As Denise opened her purse and got out a bill, Joe flashed his eyes at her in anger, saying, “No! You give her that money, you know she’ll buy dope with it.” The young woman looked into the window at Denise and said, “Miss? Can you help me?” Denise jammed twenty dollars in her hand but told Frazier she had only given her five. As Frazier continued to vent his annoyance, Denise told him, “Maybe she’ll use some of it to get something to eat.” Denise would say years later: “Joe would have given her food if she had asked for that. He would have even driven her to see her momma. But under no circumstances was he ever going to give her a dime to buy drugs.”