by Mark Kram
Cold and too exploratory, too tentative, but ever shoveling forward, Joe was up too straight. Durham and Futch wanted him down, gloves rotating at eye level in front of a bobbing head and a swaying torso. They had worked on it in the gym when Futch stretched a line of rope from corner to corner, an effort to force his body down and his head mobile. Over and under, over and under the rope, he swayed and popped at a quick tempo; he must have done this repetition two thousand times. They also concentrated on three areas they thought could put them over: the kind of conditioning that Ali had never seen before; a steady hammering of Ali’s deltoid high on the left arm that would ultimately drop his jab to half-mast; and a body attack where “I pull his kidneys out, make that pretty head fall into his lap,” Joe said. None of it was working. At the end of the third, Yank told him: “You gonna get us both killed the way you going.” Ali, up 3–0, returned to his corner and just stood there, declining a seat.
Frazier picked up the pace in the fourth, fifth, and sixth, down low and slinging, and he began to look like the fighter whose punches could mount to fifty-six a round. He was almost dismissive of Ali’s razoring jab, which, if you can get under it, was an invitation to a left hook, his money shot. He tagged him in the fourth with that hook, saw Ali’s eyes grow big. Ali was still getting off—but not with abandon; Joe was making him pay with an entrance fee. By the fifth and sixth, Ali was down off his toes completely as Frazier continually boxed him on the ropes and snatched at his organs, and he could feel, as he would say later, “the flower wilt” and seep its bold color. It was here that Ali tacked to a new slant. He knew his own body in a fight, knew that if he kept trying to break Frazier’s will, trade with him recklessly, he’d be bankrupt; he’d have to try to bag him in a sly game of points.
In the seventh and eighth, part defensive, part theatrical, Ali went after Joe’s spirit and the favor of the crowd and the millions watching, and tried to deactivate the ticking bomb of the fight. He wanted Joe to know that he could do nothing to hurt him, wanted him to know frustration, wanted to seize control by stealth. To that end, he became lost in comic theatrics while Frazier blasted him on the ropes. He wanted the crowd to know that the ropes were cozy to him, and Joe wasn’t delivering hurt. He’d roll off the ropes and go into mime. Noooooo contest. He’d flick disparaging waves at Joe, the king playing with his fool, especially when he’d tap, tap, tap jabs lightly to the head as if testing for termites, sign language that he could do what he wanted. Frazier kept coming. “Don’t you know I’m God!” Ali shouted at him. Ali returned to his corner, sitting for the first time, and behind 5–3. “Stop playin’,” Dundee shouted over the din in his corner. Frazier asked Yank: “What’s holdin’ him up?”
With the ninth, Ali fought one of the best rounds in history and brought the crowd to its feet with a shock and to such a roar that you couldn’t hear the bell. Joe’s head seemed stuck to Ali’s gloves as rights and lefts, cringing rounds of volley, caromed off Frazier’s head, then uppercuts, often used against low fighters, that jerked his head up as if it were being snapped up by rope. His face was melting into ruin, his eyes closing like shades being drawn ever so slowly. Joe wasn’t just being hit, he was taking beast licks. Just past the middle of the round, Ali nailed up a picture for the ages. In the center of the ring, with Joe rolling in like an angry wave, Ali got off a design of punches that can only be called incomparable, took the breath away from any student of the game. While backpedaling, the worst, most ineffectual punching position, he loosed a quartet of flush hooks like perfectly timed and blurring explosions, the kind of fire patterns talked about but never before seen; these weren’t just punches; it was dark, magnetic Goya. Joe was stopped dead in his tracks, just stood there straight up, absolutely stunned and fogged by what he had just felt and seen.
Give Frazier this: if that kind of round, that quartet of hooks, didn’t drop him headfirst into a well of despair, what in heaven or hell would—point-blank fire from a gun muzzle? But Ali had emptied his wallet in that ninth. He moved through the tenth with hesitancy, a kid on broken roller skates, and Joe rallied, ever pressing, moving him now steadily to his own right with his left hook, while Ali was far too languorous on Joe’s perimeter. He was still making Joe pay up in spurts, and Joe’s features looked as if a child had had at it with modeling clay. Joe accelerated the tempo in the eleventh. Except for the ninth, Joe was now beating Ali to the punch, 3–1 in heavy punch traffic, and in the eleventh, ahead 6–4, maybe 6–5, he sought an ending. With both feet in the air (as pictures would show), Joe sent a murderous hook to Ali’s jaw, sending him reeling along the ropes and, eyes open wide, searching for balance; had the hook been to the chin, the true, sensitive button for a knockout, Ali would have been gone. With his jaw bubbling up, Ali rode out the round, moved with a wobble back to his corner as Dundee and assistant Chickie Ferrara rushed out.
Ali was composed for the twelfth and tried to take it to Joe again as Joe advanced behind a hail of clubbing of his own. “He was empty—tired, man,” Joe said later. “I could feel it. But I couldn’t pull his wings off. I didn’t want just to beat this guy, I wanted to destroy him. Hit me, I hit you. I didn’t give a damn.” Booed for trying to buy time in earlier comic posturing, Ali tried a new angle for time, laying on Joe like a sack of mud after exchanges as Joe repeatedly pushed him off for punching room. In the thirteenth Ali was up on his toes jabbing, trading then clinching, holding his own, a style that paid off. For in the fourteenth, Ali’s movement was his best in the fight, stinging Joe with jabs and spinning out as Joe tried to burrow into a firing zone. Frazier’s face was a mess now. But visual decomposition isn’t—or shouldn’t be—a factor on the scales of ring justice; if so, Marciano would never have won. Put the other man in a dark room, make him bleed to the point of intervention, or drown him in points, that’s it. Punch-stats, so lazily abused today as measurement of a close fight, mean zero.
Going into the fifteenth and final round in a fight that caused two hearts in the crowd to stop forever, call it 7–6 Frazier, 8–6 Frazier, or 7–7 and nobody would skull you with a chair. Each had to break the tape with fury. Ali, sensing crisis, opened with a left and right that sent spit flecking from Joe’s mouth. Joe pushed forward, located him with a nice right, and there it was—bam! The crowd, on its feet from the ninth, couldn’t get any higher as a Frazier left hook lifted Ali into the air. He landed on broken, stumbling wheels, careened back to the canvas, his red tassels jumping, his head bouncing in the air, with the ref Arthur Mercante counting. How he got up from that blackjack—who knows? He staggered to his feet, his right jaw now double its size, as if he had a bad toothache. Ali searched for life in his legs. Worn out and with a pitiable face, Joe could not drop him; the most dramatically fought fight in history, its most skillful, was over. Fans swarmed toward the ring.
The crowd beaten back by Garden police, the results could now be heard with decorum. Mercante came in 8–6–1 Frazier, the middle judge 9–6 Frazier, the final call 11–4 Frazier; this latter view from a head certainly made for a flying chair. Ali didn’t flinch, said to Dundee: “Let’s get outta here.” Mercante said: “It was the most vicious fight I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen so many good punches thrown so often.” As Ali left, Joe’s brother Tom, tears in his eyes, screamed at him: “Crawl! Crawl on your knees over here to Joe Frazier!” Ali wouldn’t be coming out to the press conference. He was getting dressed to go to the hospital for X rays. Jerry Perenchio, the copromoter along with Jack Kent Cooke, walked into a scene in Ali’s dressing room that dropped his jaw. He had seen a lot in show business. No doubt he had had, with no boxing savvy at all, vision for this fight, saw in it an amalgam of high-test performance and Hollywood glitter. Memorabilia was not a craze then. But when Judy Garland’s pump went for a high price, he saw the future. His idea was to try to gather items from this memorable night—robes, gloves, trunks—especially if they had blood on them. Was he now on such a search? He said he had gone to the room to congratulate Ali.
The quarters were empty and dim. He couldn’t believe his eyes. On the rubbing table was Ali, and before him on her knees, her head in his lap, arms wrapped around his hips, her long hair spilled over his torso…. No, it couldn’t be, not after fifteen rounds with Joe Frazier. There was no movement, though; the woman seemed to be in silent grief. Jerry spun back for the door. Ali said: “You know who this is?” Jerry drew closer. Ali turned her head toward the promoter. Diana Ross! “Diana,” Ali said, “meet the man who paid me two and a half million to get my ass whupped.”
Nothing near being so tenebrous in Joe’s quarters. He was spending the last adrenaline of the fight that had been a tourniquet for the pain, the last rush still directed at Ali. “It was wild,” Les Peleman said. “He was still out there in the ring.” Tears ran down his face as he kept walking in frantic circles, shouting: “I want him over here! I want him to crawl to my feet! Crawl, crawl! He promised, promised me! Crawl to me, crawl! Why aren’t you here?” Durham embraced him, led him sobbing to the table. “Easy now, easy,” Yank said. Dr. Harry Kleiman entered with his black bag. Joe lay sprawled, his chest heaving, his face a frieze of a lab experiment that was a disaster. Kleiman traced a light through eyes that were busted shutters as he looked for concussive signs. He felt gently for shattered bone. “Can you gimme somethin’ for the pain, Doc?” Joe asked. Kleiman shook out several tablets. Joe asked: “Did he fall?” Yank said: “You dropped him in the last round. They took him to the hospital.” Joe thought, then said: “Yeah, yeah, that’s right. They took him to the hospital?” Eddie Futch advised: “You should have some ice on that face, Joe.” He eased himself up, went over to a sink filled with ice, and kept burying his head into it. Yank, his face exhausted, dark circles under his eyes, pulled on a champagne bottle. Like a child, he asked: “Can I have some, Yank?” After a long shower, he hobbled out like an old man; his aides took a long time getting him dressed.
The next day Ali was public again; the X rays were negative. He wanted his legions to know that he didn’t lose, it was a bad decision, and that he had only trained for a six-round fight. He had shown remarkable heart and endurance, now with cameras grinding he was trying to steal the fight back from Joe, issuing some subtle, dippy call for a referendum, and he was succeeding. Privately, he was of another mind: “We been whupped. Maybe I’ll get some peace now. We all have to take defeats in life.” Joe watched it on television at the Pierre, had Ali’s comments read to him as he lay in bed. “It’s not like I even won,” he said. “He’s robbin’ me. Like nothin’ changed!” He struggled to his feet. He tried to lift the TV set, to hurl it across the room. He was too weak. Durham guided him back to bed, saying: “Now, now, Joe. You know he ain’t got any sense.” Nevertheless, Frazier continued to seethe. A commission doctor came by, suggested he be moved to a hospital in the Catskills. “What?” Joe said. “So he can make more headlines, show how he beat me so bad I gotta be put in a hospital?” Joe slipped out of the Pierre, went to St. Luke’s Hospital in Philly. For twenty-four hours, Dr. James Giuffe had him lay in a bed of ice. Joe dreamed a spirit had taken his hand, said he would be okay. “I could feel his touch. He was right there.” They told him the next morning there had been no visitors.
His life hung out there for several days. His blood pressure was in another galaxy, and he had a kidney infection. Day and night, every five minutes, doctors scurried in and out of his room. They thought they would lose him to a stroke. Durham was in London on business, and quickly hustled back. But for a time, only Joe Hand, a cop and stockholder, sat out the nights with him. “Let him live,” Joe said to no one in particular. Joe stayed in a deep sleep, almost a coma. When he awoke, he mumbled over and over: “Don’t say a word, Joe. Don’t let Ali find out I’m here.” At one point, four doctors lingered ominously over his bed. He awoke one time, and said: “All the money I made for people, and you’re the only one here, Joe.” Hand tried to comfort him; what could he say to a man on the brink? Finally, Joe broke through, like he had through Ali’s mechanized jab, and he began to stabilize. One doctor sighed and said: “It was close.” Joe stayed in St. Luke’s for three weeks.
Frazier had no reason to cower, to shrink from what he had done in that fight. He had nearly paid with his life. He won with the kind of conditioning that, to attain it and keep it at such a keening level, would destroy most men. He had won with a fortitude only surpassed by men in war. And he won with left hooks that often seemed, to play loosely with poetic license, capable of dazing a rhino. “Damn evil thing,” Ali said, for a moment throwing out the ad copy. “Underestimated it.” Mostly, now, he spent volumes of breath on turning a funereal end, so carefully constructed with his brag and vow, into a wedding. Aside from that last left from Frazier, he ignored the crucial—a defeat by strategic misstep or gamble. By dropping into farcical pantomime (no points for showy hubris in the ring during a shoot-out) to coax distance from his legs, he had squandered at least two vital rounds. No matter, for even with a loss the irony was that he had undeniably produced the masterpiece that he had sought so long. When he put on gloves, the word inauthentic never again could spill out of a critic’s quiver.
Seven months after the first fight, Bryant Gumbel, the editor of Black Sports, grafted on the temper of the day and stripped some more flesh from Frazier. He was a mediocre writer and thinker, excellent qualifications for the large success he would have on television’s Today Show with a shallow, hard-worked ultra-sophistication, a cool broker of opinion next to Howard Cosell’s weaselly conniving. Gumbel never let a bandwagon pass without jumping on it or trying to blow out its tires, depending on the mood of the day; the ultimate limo liberal. Durham said: “He’s got soft written all over him, a country club black.” Gumbel said he walked home after the fight with tears in his eyes for Ali; a hired, weeping pallbearer for the times and its temporarily stalled hero. Strapping up his backbone, he wrote a piece meant to further Ali’s campaign for victory by proclamation, to blur Frazier’s definitive prize: “Is Joe Frazier a White Champion in Black Skin?”
Talking about other champions, he alludes to Floyd Patterson as the “go-boy” of the whites, blithely sniffs at Joe Louis, and finds that, given the times, he can exonerate him as a model rep. He even manages to put some gloss on Sonny Liston, casts him as a “victim of society…hurt and angry…this was the black man of his day.” Was Sonny laughing, punching a cloud; short of a body, not bad, this behavioral reincarnation. But Frazier catches no slack. To Gumbel, he is pro-establishment, the E. coli bacterium of the sixties. Joe calls Ali by his birth name, Clay. He consorts with an enemy like the South Carolina legislature, where he spoke, saying: “We must save our people, I mean white and black. We need to quit thinking who’s living next door, who’s driving the big car, who’s my little daughter playing with, who is she going to sit next to in school. We don’t have time for that.” He added that he was hurt that “so few blacks had had a chance to speak here in over a century.”
That was far too passive for the likes of Gumbel; guilt by association was the gig, and it is doubtful he even saw or read the fairly long, sincere speech. Gumbel then pulls out some questionable associates. Undiscerning when it came to pictures, Frazier posed with Mayor Frank Rizzo, the Comissar of Philly police known for brutality—and Richard Nixon, the Old Nick of sixties evil. Gumbel would go on to a fat, privileged life in TV, with an ego and ambition that not even a mother could love, let alone colleagues.
Before the fight, Eddie Futch had summed up what was ahead for Frazier if he beat Ali. “Joe’s such a decent guy,” Futch said. “But when he beats him, Joe is going to go down as one of the most unpopular black champions of all time. I’ve seen it before, when Ezzard Charles, an excellent fighter, beat Joe Louis. When Ali’s defeat is a certainty, the bitterness is going to be indescribable.”
Now, two years later, Ali and Frazier were preparing for the middle frame of their trilogy. Yet the 12-round non-title bout floated toward New York like a melancholy fog, aided by the new stomp of
marketing that could not mute facts. Though it was still going to be a big night, the edge was gone. The old Ali-killer Futch, through the steady work of Ken Norton, had beaten Ali again, in March 1973, with some help from Ali. Harold Conrad said the morning of the fight he roused Ali from bed—with two women. The Norton fight sent Ali to the hospital with a broken jaw. Belinda, having to karate her way into the ring, ended up in the same hospital with emotional trauma. Dundee claimed Ali’s jaw was broken in the second round, and that it was miraculous that he finished the fight; always an angle for his public in Ali’s camp. “That’s ridiculous,” Futch said. “It happened in the eleventh. Anything to deny your fighter his day. No man alive could have gone so many more rounds with a broken jaw. It would have been turned into splinters.”
In the meantime, Frazier had lost his title, in January 1973, to George Foreman in Jamaica, a poorly selected opponent if there ever was one. If someone had consulted the holy dictionary of styles, big George would have leaped out as an unfortuitous choice. Might as well have placed Joe up against a wall. He was too small for George, who, before future modification, was a reclusive, semihomicidal sociopath in study. George had no arsenal of punches, and giving him Joe—always there, not hard to locate—was like throwing meat under the door. To the surprise of only those who thought Joe was invincible, Frazier was clubbed to the floor six times in the opening two rounds. But what was more interesting was what went on behind the scenes. Nobody in Joe’s camp wanted Foreman—except Joe, who approached the bout with a camp full of doubts about what was left of him and concern for his well-being. His attitude, highly anomalous for him, was that of a yacht owner ready to dive into the sun and fun. Yank was worried about him and had sought to cut his gloves off for good.
