by Phil Pepe
“If Ellis comes to fight, like Quarry did, it will be a good fight but it’s going to end the same way.”
Meanwhile, Angelo Dundee was carefully planning Ellis’ strategy. In the privacy of his hotel room he pored over stacks of still photographs. “There are some things you can see in photos that you can’t see in movies,” Dundee explained. “Sometimes the movies are too fast. Does Frazier drop his right when he throws a left? Does he turn his body behind the hook? Little things.”
If there were weaknesses in Frazier’s style, however well disguised, Angelo Dundee would find them. But the people who make their living at such things decided Dundee would not find enough flaws in Frazier to help Ellis. They made Joe a solid 6 to 1 betting favorite.
If there were any doubts as to the differences in the two men, they were dispelled once the bell rang for the first round of their fight and they met before a Garden crowd of 18,079. Ellis was leaner and taller, 6 feet 1, to Frazier’s 5 feet 11, and he stood straight, creating the impression that his advantage in height was even greater because Frazier came at his man in his characteristically severe crouch.
When they had met that morning for the traditional day-of-the-fight weigh-in, Frazier had come in at two hundred and five pounds. Ellis was a surprisingly heavy two hundred and one, heavier than he’d ever been for a fight. It was obvious he was willing to sacrifice a little speed to be able to match Frazier’s power.
“You look a little flabby to me,” Frazier said when they met at the scale that had been placed in the middle of the Garden ring.
“You better worry about yourself, not me,” Ellis fired back.
“I’m going to be so close to you tonight,” Joe said, “every breath you take will be right down my neck.”
Jimmy Ellis had said he knew how to handle Frazier’s smoke. “My guy,” Angelo Dundee said many times, “is the best first-round banger in the heavyweight division.” That should have been the clue, the tip-off on Ellis’ strategy. He was going to work early, to try to put over one of those sneak right hands in the first round, before Joe Frazier got revved up.
And that’s the way it happened . . . but not with the expected results. The bell rang, they met, and Ellis fired the sneak right . . . then he ripped a left hook to the head and the right again, square on the button. Nothing happened. Joe Frazier didn’t back up. He didn’t budge. He didn’t stop coming. He didn’t even blink. Right there, Jimmy Ellis lost the fight. Joe Frazier bared his teeth at his opponent and he sneered.
“You can’t hit,” Joe Frazier said. “You threw your best shot, man. I’m takin’ everything you got and you ain’t hurtin’ me.”
Ellis had said he would use the ring as a checkerboard, trapping Frazier, backing him into squares on the board and doing his damage. “If you’re gonna play checkers,” Frazier had replied, “you gotta jump.”
Jimmy Ellis never jumped. And when his best shots bounced off Frazier like bullets off a thick steel slab, Jimmy had to know, deep in his heart, that his task that night was an impossible one.
The round ended, Ellis’ round according to the official scorecards. He had landed more punches, but he didn’t really win anything substantial. He lost it all when he banged Frazier with his best punch and got an insult in return.
During the rest period between the first and second rounds, Yank Durham was yelling into Frazier’s ear.
“Don’t give him any room,” Durham commanded. “Smother everything. You’re giving him too much room. You’ve got to crowd him.”
In the second round, Frazier began to open up, content in the knowledge that Ellis could not hurt him even with his best punch. Joe caught Ellis in close and wore him down with hooks to the body. Ellis, who had started the fight standing tall, slowly began to lower his body and cover up in a protective stance. He got lower, lower and slower, slower and closer, and, inevitably, when that happened, Joe Frazier’s hooks always found their mark. And now they were right on target.
“He’s changed his style,” Frazier thought as he went on the attack. “He’s not as aggressive. He’s not standing straight up. His body is coming down a little and that means he’s fighting defensively. And he’s not as fast as I thought he was. I can see every punch he throws. He’s all mine.”
In the third round, Frazier drove a left hook home and Ellis pivoted on his heel, reeled and almost went down, but didn’t. He looked like a kid balancing on a fence as he tottered but didn’t fall. The bell sounded and Ellis was saved further damage, but that was the beginning of the end.
When the bell rang for the fourth, Jimmy Ellis did not leap off the stool to meet his man as he had done in the first three rounds. This time he got up slowly, took a few hesitant steps and waited for Frazier to come to him near his corner. Ellis grabbed Frazier’s head with his left hand and brought up his right with an uppercut that clipped Frazier on the chin. The tactic seemed to anger Joe. Snorting like a bull, Joe hooked two solid lefts to the body that made Ellis grunt and then Joe brought up a left that connected with Ellis’ chin.
Sensing his man was hurt, Joe moved in for the kill. He ripped another left to the head and Ellis fought back with two rights to the head, but there was no stopping Frazier now.
Two short, powerful hooks to the head by Frazier stung his man and then he doubled up on the hook, first to the belly, then to the head. The body punch almost broke Ellis in two and the left to the head sent him reeling into the ropes. Jimmy had the good sense to work his way into a corner where he could use the ropes for support. But it hardly mattered. Frazier followed up with two murderous hooks to the jaw and Ellis toppled, face first, onto the canvas. He slumped first on his knees, then the knees straightened out and he was prone, on his belly.
Ellis struggled to pull himself up. He was back on his knees at four, then he was three-quarters of the way up and then he was on his feet at the count of eight. He didn’t seem to be hurt badly but his eyes were glassy. Now he was desperate. Abandoning defense, Ellis turned reckless and fired wild punches at his opponent, hoping they would hold off a raging Frazier. But Joe was an animal, pouncing on his man in the center of the ring and firing the big bomb, the vicious left hook to the head. Later, Frazier would say, “It felt like when you hit a baseball and you send it sailing out into the open field.” There were only two seconds left in the round as Ellis flopped over on his back, doubled up. Instinctively, he threw his gloves up to protect his face. He didn’t seem to know he was on the floor, flat on his back.
Slowly, Jimmy Ellis stirred. At the count of five, the bell rang ending the round. But it did not save Ellis. Under New York State rules, the bell cannot save a man from a knockout except in the final round. If Jimmy did not get up before the count of ten, he would be a KO victim.
Somehow, Ellis managed to find the strength to crawl to his knees and, painfully, reeling like a drunken man, Jimmy got to his feet at the count of nine, barely avoiding a knockout. He wobbled to his corner and plopped down on his stool, and his trainers, Dundee and Chickie Ferrara, worked feverishly to revive him in those crucial sixty seconds. While Ferrara tried to clear Jimmy’s head by waving smelling salts under his nose and soaking his head with cold water, Dundee was slapping the calves of Ellis’ legs to get the feeling back into them and yelling into Jimmy’s ears.
The bell rang for the fifth round and, instinctively, Ellis began to rise to go out for more punishment. But Dundee wouldn’t permit him to leave his corner. He put his left hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, gave a gentle shove and Ellis sat right back on his stool. It was over. Officially, it would go down as a TKO in the fifth round because Ellis failed to answer the bell for the round. It was over and Joe Frazier was now recognized as the one and only heavyweight champion of the world.
No doubt thinking of the punishment Frazier had handed out to Quarry and Mathis, Angelo Dundee had enough compassion and good sense to stop the fight to protect his m
an. “I love my fighter,” Dundee explained later. “He had enough. He wanted to come out, but I wouldn’t let him. He wasn’t responding. He wasn’t glib with me like he usually is. He wasn’t saying things like ‘I’ll get him this round.’ The guy didn’t have it anymore. He could have been badly hurt. I want him to fight again. I still got a fighter now. The name of my game is fighting.”
“Are you disappointed, Angelo?” somebody asked.
“I’m not disappointed,” he answered. “I’m brokenhearted.”
And Jimmy Ellis sat with his head in his hands. “I blew it all,” he said sadly. “I let you down, Angie. I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t let me down,” Dundee said. “Don’t ever think that.”
In the postmortem, they were talking about what went wrong. “He fought the other guy’s fight,” said Chickie Ferrara, the trainer who had spent forty years in the boxing business. “He forgot the jab. He didn’t jab after the second round. He fought the guy in close. You can’t fight him like that. You can’t let him crowd you.”
And yet, it was not so much what Jimmy Ellis did not do, but what Joe Frazier wouldn’t let him do. Others have tried to jab against Frazier. Others have tried to keep him from crowding. None has succeeded.
Now they were sitting side by side, Joe Frazier, the winner, Jimmy Ellis, the loser, on a platform set up in a huge room in the bowels of the Garden, submitting to one of those mass interviews. And to Angelo Dundee’s credit, his concern, his quick thinking, there was not a mark on his fighter’s face, no evidence of the pounding he had taken in four rounds. Dundee had got his man out of the fight before any physical damage could be done.
“Jimmy punched good,” Frazier graciously acknowledged because after the fight, there’s no need to put down one’s opponent; after the fight, it’s good form to compliment one’s opponent. “He loaded up, tryin’ to take me out with one shot. But you’ve seen me work out. You know I got good sparrin’ partners. Ken Norton. Charlie Polite. Ray Anderson. Moleman Williams. They take good shots at me. Those guys really smoke. They made me ready for him.”
“Jimmy,” a reporter asked, “did you think you’d get up after the second knockdown?”
“How many times did I go down?” Ellis asked.
“Twice,” he was told.
“I thought I was down only once,” he said. “What round did the fight end?”
“You see, gentlemen,” Angelo Dundee interrupted, “that’s why I wouldn’t let him go out for the fifth round.”
Dundee had proved his point. So had Joe Frazier.
When it was over, when Angelo Dundee pushed Jimmy Ellis back onto his stool, when referee Tony Perez signaled the end of the fight, Frazier, on his feet in the opposite corner waiting to continue his assault, had leaped uncontrollably into the arms of Yank Durham.
“Free. I’m free at last!”
But Joe Frazier wasn’t free. Not as long as there was one man going around the country calling him “a pretender, not a real champion.” Not as long as there was a man named Muhammad Ali.
My Way
“Ladies and gentlemen, Caesar’s Palace is proud to present the heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Frazier.”
There is polite applause at first as the large room is penetrated by a single beam of light knifing through the blackness and focusing on the stage. There is music, loud, raucous music, too much music, too much noise, it seems, to be coming from the four guitars, drums, tenor sax and trombone which make up the group called The Knockouts.
Now, onto the stage runs the stocky black man in tuxedo and it appears as if the muscular arms and shoulders are straining to split the material of the jacket and you are blinded by the flashing light from the 3-1/2 carat diamond ring he wears on the pinky of his left hand.
We’ll find a place out in the sunshine,
No man should be a rolling stone.
Now ain’t that truly, truly lovin’ me,
Truly, truly lovin’ me.
The voice is rough and untrained. Joe sings the way he fights. It’s rock ‘n’ roll or hard rock or soul. Call it what you will, to Joe Frazier it’s “smokin’ ” just like in the ring. There’s no difference, really, between Joe Frazier, fighter, and Joe Frazier, singer. He comes right at you, nothing subtle, no finesse, no frills, everything uninhibited, everything slam-bang.
On stage, as in the ring, he is a worker, moving all the time, work and move, work, work, work.
When he had polished off Jimmy Ellis, when it was over and he had become the one and only recognized heavyweight champion in the world, Joe Frazier was asked, “What next?”
“I can beat any man in the world,” he boasted, a modern-day John L. Sullivan. “I’ll fight the best man they can get for me. I want to do what’s best for boxing.”
The dream match, the one promoters fantasized about, was Joe Frazier vs. Muhammad Ali. But it could never be, not with Ali suspended from boxing and facing a five-year jail term for draft evasion.
“I’d like to make that fight,” said Teddy Brenner, matchmaker for Madison Square Garden. “I’d like to make it and put it on a ship and beam it all around the world.”
“I’ll fight Clay,” Yank Durham said. “I’ll fight him anytime and anyplace in the United States and no place out of the United States.”
But now the Dream Match was just that . . . a dream.
“I’m gonna retire,” Frazier said. “I’m gonna wait until that other fella, the one who was gonna give me that belt, until that Cassius Clay or Muhammad Ali or whatever his name is, can fight me. But right now, I’m gonna sing rock ’n’ roll. I got to do something for my boys, my musicians. They been waitin’ for me for a long time.”
Music has been a part of Joe Frazier’s life for as long as he can remember, all the way back to Beaufort when he sang hymns first in the Mount Carmel Baptist Church, then in the St. John’s Baptist Church. Later, when he started fighting, his training camps were never without music. He carries a phonograph with him everywhere and in the Cloverlay gym he has stereo components and they play constantly while he trains, while he spars, hits the light bag, hits the heavy bag, shadowboxes, does calisthenics. Loud, blasting sounds pour from the stereo, the sounds of soul, the sounds of Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin and Sly and the Family Stone . . . and the sounds of Joe Frazier and The Knockouts.
“Music has soul,” he says. “It gives you a feeling of belonging. It gets you with life. It’s power, strength, and don’t think it doesn’t take stamina. That song routine I do is like real, tough roadwork. It moves every bit of you and the audience, too. The best thing is it’s real, it makes you feel you’re going places. Singing. That’s what I want to do with the rest of my life. Singing is what it’s all about.”
That’s what Joe would like to do after there is no more fighting. He would like to sing. Capitol Records signed him to a five-year contract to record songs, many of which he wrote himself. Singer-composer Paul Anka wrote a special set of lyrics of his hit song “My Way,” which Joe recorded and adopted as his theme song.
“I pick each song by the things it says to me,” he explains. “It has to be real, the way people are. Nothing phony. When you sing a song that says, ‘Something is wrong with my baby,’ then you have something you can feel, or at least I can.
“I sometimes look out at an audience when I’m singing and I grow a little cold at the thought they might not like me. That would hurt more than a good left hook. Anyhow, I just keep my motor running because music is where I want to be.”
When he is onstage and the audience does like him, that’s the top of the world for Joe Frazier. It’s the same as fighting. Belting out a song is like belting out an opponent. Singing and being liked are like hitting another fighter with a good left hook, solid, right on the chin. It’s power, it’s making you feel you’re the bo
ss, you’re in charge. That’s what Joe Frazier is all about and it doesn’t make him any different from any one of us.
Singing is fun. So is fighting, but fighting can’t last forever and when there’s no more fighting, at least there can still be singing. When Joe Frazier got tired of fighting, when he had accomplished what he set out to accomplish—become undisputed heavyweight champion of the world—he took his Knockouts and he went singing. He sang before a Philadelphia Phillies’ baseball game and he sang at a concert at Temple University and he sang at Cheetah, the famed Broadway rock club, and he sang in Las Vegas before the most critical audiences in the world.
A reviewer from Variety, the theatrical weekly, offered this critique:
“Joe Frazier doesn’t exactly have a one-two punch as a singer, nor does his lumbering gait in novel terp get-arounds mark him as the most graceful in footwork, but he is enthusiastic.
“Not possessing one of those identity type vocal sounds, he is a copier of the many soul guys and blues-shouters that have sent influences along. It is doubtful that he’ll ever have a ‘Frazier Sound.’ Rather ordinary basic larynx equipment settles that, but the champ is a friendly fellow and has a ball shouting his tunes and chattering with ringsiders.
“Frazier found out in boxing how to pace himself. That training is carried over into this other, slightly less physically demanding life. At least, the only punches he may receive are verbal ones and Frazier is quite good at parrying these. Although verbose and not too scintillating, he lets go with eight tunes within almost an hour, which leaves plenty of time for interim gab. As for this device he will have to learn what to say quickly to his applauders and then give more time for the rock-shouts.
“His backgrounders, The Knockouts (8) are okay, with the congo man beating up a lead storm and shouting right along with Frazier. Occasionally there is difficulty in determining who is dishing out the tune, but this is a matter of balancing voices. Frazier expects that lead encouragement behind him.