Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  Joe was old school when it came to parenting. Step out of line and he would threaten to send you back to Jesus. When it came to handing out discipline, he had more Dolly in him than Rubin. Like Dolly, he was not one to spare the rod. In an interview with the Scripps Howard News Service in 1993, he explained his views on parenting, saying, “What I know mostly is that we need to put our foot down a little more, at home and everywhere else. Kids today need leadership.” He even called on Washington to get involved: if a child was caught out after a certain hour, he believed that the parents should receive “a little summons” and a fine. As the years passed, he would become intolerant of the evolving fashions of urban youth. In laying down the law with his own children, he drew the line at cornrows, piercings, tattoos, and, as he told his youngest son, Derek, “wearing your pants down over your ass.” Derek would remember challenging the prohibition on body art when he stopped into a tattoo parlor with some friends and found that he did not have the full fee. “So I called him and he rolled up in the Cadillac just as the tattoo artist was inking the last ‘R’ in ‘Frazier,’ said Derek. “He was so furious at me that he could barely get out the words.”

  Tensions would emerge over the years with his children: Though they loved him—and he them—he had divided himself in a way in which none would get more than a piece of his attention. But when Joe was with them, he could be the same loving man that Rubin had been. He had that in him. Derek would speak of “the joy” his father had ushered into his life, and Joe would “drop everything” to be with him whenever he was called upon. When Derek was growing up, “Dad did not miss one event,” said Derek. “Pick me up. Drop me off. Pick up my friends. Did everything.” Observed Sheri Gibson, his mother: “Joe gave Derek more love than any man could give a child.” Son Joseph Jordan Frazier (Joe Jr.) grew up in New Jersey with his mother, Sharon Hatch, and saw less of him yet said, “He would always call and check on me to see how I was doing. Or he would come over and see me. I still had him as a father figure, but just not as a daily presence.” Hatch said, “Joe loved his children. As my son grew older, he and Joe spent more time together and got closer.” But there would be quarrels, jealousies, and resentments among his offspring. Derek observed: “The problem was, there was only one of Joe, six women, and all kinds of kids. Everybody wanted to be the center of attention.” Only four of his nine living children participated in interviews for this book, and only two of the five he had with Florence.

  Conscious of the fissures, Joe had a jeweler carve up his Olympic gold medal into charms and gave them to his children. “He understood that not all of us were on the same page,” said Joe Jr. “But his intention with the medal was that when he passed away, we would come together with our individual pieces and form a whole.” Unmarried with a young daughter, Joe Jr. worked both in sales and with emotionally disturbed children. He supplemented his income by driving for Uber. “Sometimes when people hear who I am, they’ll think I should have all this money and say: ‘What are you doing driving for Uber?’” he told me. “On the other hand, people are very open to hear whatever ideas I have because of who I am.” To unlock the door to his own potential, Joe Jr. immersed himself in personal-growth books and spotted aspects of his father in himself. Commitment and handling money were challenges for him, yet he would come to understand that his father and he were “links in a chain” that was forged across generations. “Unless someone comes along and breaks it, it just keeps growing longer,” said Joe Jr. He paused and added, as if to clarify: “My father loved the only way he knew how.”

  Joe knew only what had worked for him when it came to rescuing Hector: get him off the streets and into the gym. Bringing Hector to Philadelphia, Joe also believed that Marvis would be a positive influence on him. Along with Rodney and Mark, Hector lived in the back of the gym, ran in the morning, and honed his boxing skills in a workout later in the day. He turned pro in February 1983 after a brief amateur career. Joe Verne, the owner of a wholesale furniture chain who teamed up with Joe to promote “The Fighting Fraziers,” held a press event at Fuller Wholesale Meats, at Glenwood and Front Streets. There, in a setting similar to the slaughterhouse where Joe once worked, Hector, Marvis, and Rodney donned white overalls and protective gear as photographers snapped shots of them playfully swatting at the slabs of beef that hung from hooks. Fighting as a junior welterweight under the name “Joe Frazier Jr.,” Hector beat a more-or-less average slate of opponents but would be stopped in his big test by future champion Vinny Pazienza in a nationally televised bout. He finished with a career record of 23-7-4 (nineteen KOs). “Hector was a helluva fighter,” said Burt Watson. “He looked like Joe. He talked like Joe. He moved like Joe. He was Joe.”

  But the North Philadelphia streets called to Hector in the same way they had Gypsy Joe. At night, he would grow bored and sneak out of the gym in search of a thrill. Along with the Corvette he flipped, he would tear up the engine of every car that his father handed over to him. Like Joe, Hector possessed a wild craving for speed and loved to race. Rodney would remember he had a friend with a 1969 GTO Judge. “Whoever got out first usually won,” said Rodney. “He and Hector would race all day long. Even before he flipped it, Hector beat that Corvette to death.” Concerned that he was hanging with the wrong crowd, Joe told him, “Hector, if you don’t stay away from those people, you’re gonna write a check that your ass ain’t gonna be able to cash.” On that cold winter day in December when Joe stopped on North Broad Street and picked up the legless man, he meant to give Hector and Kevin Dublin a glimpse at authentic manhood. “Look at that man, out getting kerosene to heat his house and keep his family warm,” Joe told them. “And look at you two scamboogahs. You got your arms and legs. Do something with them.” What was Joe thinking as that tear slid from the corner of his eye? Of his own father and the courage he had shown in face of his disability? Or was it that even then a part of him knew that Hector was too far gone?

  Some years would elapse before Dublin would come to appreciate the lessons that Joe had imparted to him. But when an eye injury ended his career, he began dealing drugs. “It was trifling and lazy,” he told me. “But at the time I looked at it as a way of supplementing my income.” Joe knew what Dublin had gotten himself into. Suddenly, Dublin was wearing an expensive fur and a watch, and was driving around in a Cadillac. “Where you get that watch?” Joe asked him. Dublin replied, “My girlfriend gave it to me.” Joe eyed him and said, “Girlfriend. Okay, girlfriend. Remember son, there is the watch and the watchman.” Joe had always been square with him. When he had gotten a girlfriend pregnant early in his brief career and was thinking of quitting, Joe had told him, “Let me worry about the Pampers. You get your ass back in the gym.” Joe had given him a small weekly draw. But whatever friendship the two had was challenged when Hector once dropped out of sight and Joe came around to the corner looking for him.

  “Have you seen Hector?” asked Joe.

  “No, Smoke. Not for a while,” replied Dublin.

  “I know you know where he is,” said Joe, his eyes blazing. “Look, if I got to shut down this corner, I will. This is about family.”

  Coolly, Dublin replied, “You do that and then it becomes a problem. Not just between you and me, Smoke, but for other people.”

  “I found Hector and sent him back to the gym,” said Dublin, who ended up serving four years in prison. “Joe came by later and thanked me.”

  Hector tumbled into drugs himself. Over an eight-month period in 1989, he was arrested seven times for small-time burglaries. Burt Watson would remember that Hector once called the gym while in lockup and spoke to his father on speakerphone. “He talked of how tired he was of other inmates pushing him to the wall and fighting because of who his father was,” said Watson. “Joe was stern with him. He told him, ‘Nobody put you there but yourself. You got to come back to the gym.’” Weatta remembered that when Hector did show up later, her father vented his fury upon him. “What are you doing with your life?” he raged, as Hecto
r stood chastened. “You’ve got the world by the balls and you’re shitting on it. This is not who we are. We are not criminals. We’re better than this. We’re good people.” But more trouble followed. On probation for a previous burglary, Hector was picked up by the police in January 1990 for stealing a bicycle from a ten-year-old boy and robbing him of three dollars. Hector told the court that he had a serious drug problem. He was sentenced to two eleven-and-a-half-to twenty-three-month prison terms plus five years of probation. When Common Pleas Judge Anthony J. DeFino asked why Hector had not been accompanied to court that day by his father, Marvis replied, “Our father is a hard man.”

  The sad tale of Hector Frazier would end years later in Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. Upon leaving Philadelphia in the 1990s, he headed back to New York, got caught up in a car-theft ring, and was sentenced as a “three-time offender” to twenty-five years. Weatta remembered that her father refused to visit him until 2010, when she finally told him, “This is your child. You were no saint. That could have been you in there. You used to steal cars.” Weatta, Marvis, and their father were joined by Renae at the penitentiary, where prison personnel and others spotted him and said, “Hey, Champ!” “My father was in pain,” said Weatta. “On the drive up, he talked about how hard it would be to see his child locked up in a cage like an animal.” Uneasily, they greeted each other in a public room, where tensions immediately boiled over. Joe told Hector he had no one to blame but himself for his predicament. Hector pushed back and asked him why he had not come to see him before now. But Weatta settled them both down and they spent two hours or so exchanging small talk. They then got some food from the vending machine and talked some more. When it was time to go, Joe hugged Hector and said, “Hold your head up, and keep the faith.” Six years later, Hector died in prison of a suspected heart attack.

  Chapter Twelve

  Man to Man

  Joe and Muhammad Ali at the 2002 NBA All-Star Game. Philadelphia Daily News, staff photo by George Reynolds

  Curbside at Tulsa International Airport in April 1993, the limousine driver suddenly found himself in a predicament: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali’s flights had unexpectedly arrived at the same time, and there was only one car to service them both. Ordinarily, that would not have been a problem. They could have hopped in the back together and he would have been on his way. But the driver had been told that under no circumstances was he to allow Frazier and Ali in the same enclosed space. Given the tense history between the two, the organizers of the charitable event that they had been flown in for were not taking any chances of a blowup.

  Concerned that he could have Ali-Frazier IV on his hands, the driver presented his dilemma to Richard Slone, the young heavyweight from England who had come along with Frazier on the trip. Slone told Frazier, “Joe, the driver is in a sweat over there. Ali just landed. Can he jump in the same car with us?” Joe shrugged in approval. But when Ali had not shown up a half hour later, Frazier began to get irritable. “Where is he?” he said. He sent the driver into the terminal to look for him. Inside, the driver found Ali swarmed by fans as he handed out pamphlets on Islam. Apparently, he had come in by himself and had no luggage other than the briefcase he held in his hand. When Ali finally got to the car, according to Slone, Joe was so angry that he only nodded when Ali greeted him with a smile and said, “Hey, Champ.” As Ali and Slone began chatting, Frazier turned up the volume on the cassette that he had slid into the car sound system, the rear of the limousine now filling with “Gina” by Bobby Womack. Joe began singing along.

  “What are you doing, white boy, hanging around with Joe?” said Ali, leaning over to Slone so he could be heard.

  Gina, only if I could turn back the hands of time . . .

  “Joe has taken me under his wing,” said Slone, then nineteen. “I’m one of his younger fighters.”

  “You run every day?”

  “Three miles.”

  I would erase some of your doubts and fears. . . .

  “You wear work boots when you run?

  “I do, yeah. Just like Joe says.”

  “Good,” said Ali. “Whatever Joe says, you do it. He is a great man.”

  That were put there by me, put there by me, my dear. Ahhh, Ginaaa . . .

  Hearing Ali speak of his affection for Joe warmed Slone to him. He told Frazier so when they got to his suite. “He doesn’t seem like that bad of guy,” Slone said. Joe shot him a look and asked, “What do you mean?” When Slone told Joe what Ali had said about him and that he had seemed genuinely respectful of him, Frazier told his young traveling companion that Ali had “bullshitted everybody” for years and now “you fell for it, too.” Instead of speaking with Joe himself, Ali had always sent some version of an apology through a third party. Even when Marvis stopped by his dressing room in the aftermath of the Manila bout, Ali told him, “Tell your daddy he is a great man.” When Marvis relayed the message, Joe told him, “Son, telling you is not telling me.” So when Slone came to him in Tulsa with yet another overture from Ali, Frazier was in no mood to hear it.

  “He did it with Marvis, and now he has done it with you,” he told Slone. “But man to man, he cannot come to me. If he had come to me and said what he told you, I could respect him. But he has never, ever done that. And he has had a million chances.”

  Just as their three fights had been a triptych for the ages, the grudge that Joe held toward Ali in the years that followed seemed to have the half-life of uranium. Being mocked by Ali as an Uncle Tom, a gorilla, ignorant, ugly, and more had “cut me up inside,” Joe told me years later. Even when it came to autographs they penned on the same item, Ali would always sign above Joe, as if to remind him of his superiority. Ali always pushed him to the edge of his forbearance. But with the exception of the scuffle with Ali on the Cosell set, Joe suppressed his anger under a veneer of civility, content to settle whatever personal issues they had inside the ropes. “Joe hated what Ali had done to him,” said Newark Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg, who had a close relationship with both. “He hated that he did not have the verbal skills to parry with him.” Izenberg once conveyed to Ali how Joe had blamed him for the cruel teasing his children had endured at school. Izenberg told him, “Didn’t you think Frazier would be furious when his kids came home from school and told him their classmates had called their father a gorilla? Didn’t you think he’d have a beef?”

  Izenberg reported back to Joe.

  “You spoke to him?” said Frazier.

  “Yeah, I spoke to him,” said Izenberg. “Of course, I spoke to him.”

  “And he talked about me and ‘the gorilla’?”

  “Absolutely, he did.”

  “Oh, what did he say?”

  “He said that if he hurt your kids, or if he hurt your feelings, he was just trying to sell tickets and make money. He said he is very sorry.”

  “He said that?”

  “Absolutely, yes.”

  Frazier looked Izenberg squarely in the eye and replied, “Go tell him to take that apology and shove it up his ass.”

  Philadelphia Daily News columnist Tom Cushman found Frazier to be just as intractable. At a retirement party that was held for him at the gym after his second loss to Foreman, Cushman spotted Joe standing by himself at the ring apron as his guests clustered in groups and sipped cocktails. While Cushman had been assigned by his paper primarily to cover Ali, he had gotten along well with Frazier through the years. “We had some conversations, just the two of us, and I got a feel for him,” Cushman told me. “He was very straightforward.” Given the glad occasion, Cushman sidled up to Frazier and told him, “You and Ali should be proud of what the two of you accomplished, the way you elevated interest in your sport. Even though I know you would have preferred a better outcome in two of your three bouts with him, you were a part of history.” Frazier did not say a single word. He just fixed a stare on Cushman that had him “wondering if I would end up going down for the count.” Cushman added, “He wanted A
li on his back. That was it. Just having been a part of it was not acceptable to him.

  “Joe just did not understand where Ali was coming from,” said Cushman. “And Ali did not understand why Joe did not understand.”

  Given that that their purses had been guaranteed, Joe would say that the “garbage” Ali spewed prior to their bouts had been unnecessary. But Ali never saw an audience of more than one that did not bring out the performer in him, and he would not stop until he had worked it into a frenzy. On the day New York writer Nik Cohn showed up for his workout at Deer Lake before the Manila bout, Ali had the largely white crowd so in his thrall that when he called Joe “a gorilla,” they chimed in and called him an “ape-man.” Ali would always claim that he was only “putting asses in the seats,” but did he understand the power behind his words, how he had uncaged something primal and bigoted in his fans? Cushman would remember those scenes at training camp. “There would be a crowd of thirty, forty, fifty, or perhaps a hundred people at his workout, and he would be up in the ring screaming,” said Cushman. “And as soon as he was done with that part of the day, he would go back to his dressing room, lay down, and become an entirely different person.” But Joe had only one face that he showed the world, and it was an uncomplicated one, even if the inner man was far from that. Guided by the Golden Rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—Joe was not unforgiving and seldom held on to hard feelings, except when it came to Ali. The antipathy he harbored for Ali simmered just below a boil.