by Jonathan Eig
Frazier hated Ali for treating him this way. The wounds ran deep, and he would carry them the rest of his life. “I’m gonna eat this half-breed’s heart right off his chest,” Joe told his trainer, Eddie Futch. “I mean it,” Joe said. “This is the end of him or me.”
Ali didn’t seem to care. He approached conflict the way he had approached George Foreman in the biggest fight of his life, improvising, counting on his good instincts, good looks, and good luck to get him through. Would it matter if he made Frazier mad? Maybe. Maybe not. Who cares? Anyway, boxing was never intended to be polite. Ali and Frazier had something bigger than the heavyweight championship on the line. They were competing for their own championship, to see once and for all which one of them was the greater fighter.
The day of the fight, October 1, 1975, was another day of scorching sun, high humidity, and cantankerous heat. The Araneta Coliseum in Manila had air-conditioning, but not enough. Even at 10 a.m., as a crowd of 28,000 packed the arena tight, everyone felt the ferocious heat. In the United States and Canada, the fight was shown live on a closed-circuit telecast in 350 arenas and theaters. The vast majority of boxing fans listened to the action on the radio, as they did for most big fights. But for this fight, a new option became available, if only for the 100,000 or so American homeowners who subscribed to Home Box Office, the fledgling cable TV station. On the night of the fight, HBO became the first network to broadcast nationally via satellite. To make it work, a transmitter in the Philippines bounced a signal across the Pacific Ocean via satellite to a station in Jamesburg, California. The station in Jamesburg transmitted the signal by AT&T land lines to a telephone switching center in Manhattan, where it was rerouted to the HBO studios on 23rd Street, and then relayed by satellite to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania; beamed to a station in Fort Pierce, Florida; and delivered by microwave link to cable providers. As Ali and Frazier appeared live via satellite in HBO subscribers’ homes, a new age of television began. Suddenly, it became much easier and much less expensive for cable TV operators to reach big audiences with live and original programming.
Ali wore white satin trunks, Frazier blue denim. Both men were in excellent condition. Even so, the heat was so oppressive that it was impossible to know how either boxer would hold up if the fight went more than a few rounds.
The bell rang, and they were going at it for the third time in four and a half years.
Ali moved to the center of the ring and kept his hands up in front of his face, displaying the perfect boxing form that had escaped him most of his career, although he maintained it only briefly. He threw five left jabs before launching his first right. After about thirty seconds, he stopped moving around the ring, dropped his hands, and began throwing powerful hooks aimed for Frazier’s head, one after another. Frazier bobbed and barreled his way inside but Ali moved out of danger. He wasn’t dancing out of the way. He wasn’t dancing at all. But in the early rounds, he nonetheless set the pace for the fight. Ali stuck out his left hand, taking advantage of a big edge in reach, to keep Frazier at a distance, and then whipped the right cross when Joe tried to swat away the left. Ali threw far more punches than Frazier in the first two rounds, and he was landing many of them — big, solid, thudding shots, his face taut in a sneer, his feet solidly planted, body corkscrewing to bring maximum force. Ali wanted a knockout. He wanted to end it before Frazier or the heat could get to him.
Frazier wobbled at times. The sweat flew from his face. At the end of round two, he looked like he was going to fall. But he didn’t. He grunted and burrowed in on Ali and flayed the bigger man’s ribs with punches that sounded like big mallets on a bass drum.
The third round opened, and Ali resorted to his rope-a-dope technique, curling up in the corner and letting Frazier in so close Ali could feel the heat of his breath. After about forty seconds of pounding, Ali stood tall and went after Frazier. He threw right-hand leads that jerked Frazier’s head back. The round ended with both men in all-out attack, arms flying, heads spinning, Ali shouting at Frazier, Frazier grunting at Ali. Ali won the round but not before Frazier caught him with a nasty left to the chin.
“Stay mean with him, Champ!” someone screamed from Ali’s corner.
In the fourth and fifth rounds, Ali leaned back in the corner as Frazier fired shots at his arms and hips. In the sixth, Frazier wedged himself under Ali’s chest and began banging like a man trying to get out of a locked trunk, the only difference being that the trunk hit back from time to time. Seemingly in defiance of possibility, the temperature in the arena was rising, the cigar and cigarette smoke forming a dense cloud that clung to the ceiling, the scent putrid. Ali was drenched in his own sweat and Frazier’s. It was difficult to imagine either of these men, or any human, lasting fifteen rounds in these conditions and under this sort of attack. Two left hooks seemed to daze Ali, but he kept fighting. Another left hook rocked Ali’s head. One veteran sportswriter said it was the hardest punch he’d ever seen, harder than the one that had knocked Ali to the mat in 1971.
“Old Joe Frazier,” Ali said, as the men came off their stools to begin the seventh, “Why, I thought you were washed up.”
“Somebody told you all wrong, pretty boy,” Joe answered.
In the eighth, Ali tried again to end it. He abandoned defense, gritted his teeth, and reached back to throw the biggest punches he could. But Frazier didn’t fall, and Ali couldn’t keep it up for a full round. When Ali returned to the ropes to rest, Frazier squatted down and dug into his opponent’s ribs again. He did what he did best. He ripped at Ali’s midsection with eight or nine straight shots before trying the left hook that might end it all. Ali swayed but never went down.
The fight stayed even through the ninth and tenth. Frazier was the more aggressive of the two fighters. He accepted that he would have to take Ali’s best punches to muscle his way inside. For part of each round, Ali let Frazier punish him. If boxing is ultimately a test of strength, Ali was betting that he would be the stronger man in the end, that he would endure to win. All his life, Ali had made his body answer his call. As a boy, fighting Corky Baker, he’d jitterbugged and flicked jabs and eluded the big, strong neighborhood bully until the bully quit in shame. Against Sonny Liston, when Ali had been expected to run and hide, he’d come out firing missiles no one knew he possessed. Against George Foreman, he’d turned himself into a sponge, absorbing his opponent’s energy. He had always had a great talent for exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents, but now he relied heavily on a different talent: simple endurance. Against Frazier, he made up his mind he would triumph by suffering, by accepting more pain than Frazier could. Ali had always been willing to suffer — for his sport, for his religion, for his pleasure — but he had never suffered physical pain like this.
“It was like death,” he would say when it was over. “Closest thing to dyin’ that I know of.”
Ali spoke often of death, as many religious men and women do. Although he had been blessed with one of the most handsome and graceful bodies anyone had ever seen, he had always accepted that body’s limitations, always acknowledged that no one lived forever. As the Muslim prayer says, “Surely we belong to Allah, and to Him we return.” For now, it was clear that Ali was willing to pay a phenomenal cost to keep fighting, willing to push himself beyond anyplace he had ever gone.
Between the tenth and eleventh rounds, Ali sagged on his stool. He looked beaten, finished.
“The world needs ya, champ!” Bundini shouted, tears streaming down his face.
Ali rose and gazed across the ring at Frazier. Both men’s faces were swollen, empurpled around the eyes, and soaked in sweat and blood. All around them, agitated men shouted for more.
In the eleventh, Ali somehow found a new store of energy. He threw more punches, harder punches, faster punches, seventy-six punches in all, one punch for every 2.37 seconds. Most of the shots found their target — which was Frazier’s head. Gobs of blood flew from Frazier’s distorted face. Still, punch after punch, Frazier moved forw
ard.
“Lawd have mercy!” Bundini screamed.
In the twelfth, Frazier finally slowed down. Ali stretched his arms long and wide and landed his best blow of the night. Bumps rose from the bumps already on Frazier’s brow. He looked like someone had just scraped him off the highway. In the thirteenth, Ali knocked out Frazier’s mouthpiece, and that accomplishment seemed to give Ali another surge of adrenaline. Standing in the center of the ring, he threw a right that nearly floored Frazier. Somehow, Frazier remained vertical. He found Ali through closing eyelids, shoved him in the corner, and slammed his fists again and again into Ali’s gut. Ali’s eyes rolled to the heavens, as if to ask, How is this man still hitting me?
In the fourteenth, Frazier could not see. With his left eye closed and his right eye damaged, he couldn’t aim his hook unless he straightened up and turned his head to the left. But when he did that, he couldn’t make out the right crosses flying at his head. Ali nailed him with nine straight.
Ali, emboldened, grew stronger. When he should have been exhausted . . . no, when he was beyond exhausted, he maintained a pace that defied not only the heat but also logic and perhaps physiology. And Frazier, practically blind, caught them flush. Plumes of sweat, mucus, and blood flew from his brow with every shot. Joe, hopelessly resisting, looked around with one eye for Ali. He stomped forward like an apparition, a haint, one that would haunt Ali the rest of his life no matter who won this fight. Frazier was hit and hit and hit, defenseless, but he would not fall. His feet slid forward, his arms churned. He tried to crash one more left hook, his only hope. But he couldn’t do it.
When the bell rang, he walked shakily back to his corner. He slumped on his stool, where he heard his manager, Eddie Futch, say, “Joe, it’s over.”
“No, no,” Frazier said, “ya can’t do that to me.”
But Futch had been a trainer at four fights in which a fighter had died. He said later he was thinking of Frazier’s kids when he insisted on stopping the fight with only one round to go. Later, some people close to Ali’s corner said they heard Ali tell Dundee he wanted to quit. Dundee never confirmed those accounts, but he did say he wasn’t sure Ali would have lasted another round.
It didn’t matter. Futch, mercifully, ended it.
Ali rose slowly from stool, the winner, or at least the survivor. He raised his right hand in the air. As Cash Clay, Rahaman Ali, Don King, and Herbert Muhammad climbed into the ring to celebrate, Ali fell to the mat.
That night, Imelda Marcos led Ali up a red-carpeted staircase to a party in his honor at Malacañang Palace. Ali sat quietly, gently sliding food past his scraped and swollen lips. Frazier was too badly beaten to appear at the same reception, but Ali insisted on carrying on in the image of the triumphant warrior, even if he felt more like a wounded one.
The next day, he was urinating blood (and would continue to do so for weeks). His eyes were red, his face misshapen, his right hand swollen and sore.
As he gazed out the window of his hotel room at a dark red sunset, he turned to a reporter and asked, “Why I do this?”
45
Getting Old
He was done. Finished. He meant it. He had beaten everyone worth beating. He had proven everything he could possibly prove. It was time to quit, he said.
But a few weeks passed.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he told Howard Cosell, “and I feel I can go another few years. The fans want to see it.” He said he had international business plans, “and being an active champion I can do more business and other things, and I just want to stay active so I can have more power doing things I’m doing on the side.”
He sounded like a man fighting for money. He also sounded, more than ever, like a man who was sacrificing his health and reputation for the pursuit of the next paycheck. Perhaps he was contemplating the possibility of another expensive divorce. Perhaps he had read his wife’s recent interview with Ebony, in which she had said, “I’m not going to break our marriage in any way. Nothing can come between us. I don’t care how many Veronicas come on the scene; I’m not leaving . . . I’ve got four children and I’ve got to look out for them, right?”
Sitting beside Cosell, Ali spoke slowly and somnolently. When asked why he had not fulfilled his promise to knock out Frazier in the first round, Ali seemed to need a moment to prime the pump before the words would flow. “Well, yes,” he said, “this is, uhh, psy . . . chological warfare on your opponent.”
Nearly five months after the Thrilla in Manila, Ali took on Jean-Pierre Coopman in a fight Ali couldn’t muster enough energy to rhyme about. The Belgian heavyweight was known as the Lion of Flanders, but Ali described this fight as a kind of a vacation, saying he deserved an easy opponent or two after his war with Frazier. Ali was slow and overweight, but he could have beaten Coopman sitting down. He chatted with the audience during the fight, played for laughs by wiggling his ass as he moved around the ring, and may or may not have broken a sweat. In the fifth round, he finished an easy night of work, knocking out Coopman with an unremarkable combination of punches. If the bout proved anything, it proved a thirty-four-year-old, overweight Ali was still far superior to a middle-of-the-pack heavyweight.
Two months later, Ali fought again, this time against Jimmy Young at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland. Ali would make $1.6 million for the contest, while Young would get about $100,000. Ali said he planned to fight Young, Ken Norton, George Foreman, and then retire. He neglected to mention that he had already signed a contract to fight Richard Dunn in Germany on May 24, a mere twenty-four days after facing Young, meaning that he would be defending his title an astonishing three times in ninety-four days. Oh, and he also intended to challenge Japan’s heavyweight wrestling champion, Antonio Inoki, on June 25 in Tokyo, in a bout that would be a hybrid between boxing and wrestling and for which no rules had yet been determined. But that was it: Young, Dunn, Norton, Foreman, Inoki, and then retirement. Count on it, he said.
“I’m so far in my own class that I have to look for other things,” he said, explaining why he would fight a wrestler, someone who might kick him or throw him to the floor or twist his neck. “This is what I’m involved in — publicity, controversy, acting just to . . . draw crowds. Why am I me? Because I do things that are ridiculous.”
For his fight with Young, Ali’s face was moon-shaped, his chest and belly jiggling, his weight at an all-time high of 230 pounds, almost 40 pounds heavier than he’d been at the start of his career. Young was six-foot-two, quick but not too quick, strong but not too strong. He had been fighting professionally for nearly seven years and training at Joe Frazier’s gym in Philadelphia.
At this point in his career, Ali no longer believed he needed to be in top shape to beat most opponents. He counted on savvy and on the fact that he was almost impossible to knock out. As long as he remained standing, he figured, he would find a way to beat most men.
His explanations for his poor condition made little sense. All in the same press conference, he said:
“I’m heavy because I need energy.”
“I’ll fight only as hard as I have to until his resistance is low.”
“To me, it’s just another day of havin’ a little fun.”
“The only thing that can beat me is me.”
“If I got down to 215 for this one, I’d hate the gym.”
“I’ve been eating too much pie, too much ice cream.”
Ali was not only out of shape and overconfident; he had also failed to do his homework, had failed to watch film of Jimmy Young’s fights. If he’d watched, if he’d cared, he would have known he was in for trouble. Young was far from the best fighter Ali had ever faced, but he was one of the cleverest. He was also hungry and superbly conditioned. From the opening moments of the fight, the challenger shocked the crowd and broadcaster Howard Cosell by turning the tables on Ali, by fighting more like Ali than Ali was capable of fighting at that point in his career. Young recognized that Ali liked to counterattack. But what would happen if Al
i had no attack to counter? What would happen if Young waited and forced Ali to be the aggressor? What would happen if he forced Ali to fight fifteen full rounds, without resting on the ropes for long stretches? Young decided to find out.
Ali was flummoxed. In the opening round, he attempted only five punches, landing none. In the entire fight, he landed only about 110 punches, or about 7 per round. He found no rhythm. His punches flew soft and slow. When he circled the ring and waited for Young to come after him, Young circled too, waiting for Ali to attack. In round three, Ali, clearly frustrated, leaned back on the ropes and signaled for Young to come and get him. It was rope-a-dope time. Young calmly walked away, as if to say, no thanks, I’ve seen that trick before. Somewhere, George Foreman must have been weeping at the sight. Over and over, Young out-Ali-ed Ali, ducking jabs with a mere bob of his head, grabbing his opponent by the arms and shoulders to slow the action, even taking a knee and sticking his head between the ropes at times to disrupt his opponent’s rhythm. Ali had no answer.
“Go to work,” Bundini shouted in the sixth.
“You’re losing,” Rahaman screamed in the eleventh.
“You can’t be thirty-four and balloon up and not train . . . fighting only for the money,” Howard Cosell complained on the air.