Dedication
FOR CORY AND OLIVIA
Epigraph
A CHAMPION IS SOMEONE WHO GETS UP WHEN HE CAN’T.
—JACK DEMPSEY
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: The Love
Chapter One: Billy Boy
Chapter Two: The Hammer or the Nail?
Chapter Three: Cloverlay
Chapter Four: Asswhuppings
Chapter Five: Sky Larking
Chapter Six: “Give Me a Hamburger”
Chapter Seven: The Fight of the Century
Chapter Eight: Down Goes Frazier
Chapter Nine: May Pops
Chapter Ten: Boogie, Boogie, Boogie
Chapter Eleven: Sons
Chapter Twelve: Man to Man
Acknowledgments and Sources
Index
About the Author
Also by Mark Kram, Jr.
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
The Love
Joe Frazier, 1968. AP Images
His straw fedora tipped at a jaunty angle, Joe Frazier shuffled through the door of his upscale apartment with a pocketful of lottery tickets and something for Denise, his loyal companion of forty-one sporadically stormy years. Whenever he would go out to play a number at a convenience store—typically ten dollars a throw, now and then more if he had a hunch the stars were favorably aligned—he would spot an item as he strolled through the aisles, impulsively buy it in bulk, and bring it back for her as a small acknowledgment, the way an appreciative house cat drops an expired mouse at the feet of its owner. A week before, he had exited the elevator behind a handcart bearing eight cases of soda pop. Today, he showed up with enough paper towels under his arm to sop up an oil spill. “Look what I got for you!” he said, his weathered face unfolding into a wide smile. Forever amused by these impromptu deliveries, Denise Menz would think of how she and Joe always had paper towels with them whenever they crisscrossed America by car. Afraid of planes but not of weaving in and out of tractor trailers on the highway at upwards of 110 mph, he would use them to swab himself down with rubbing alcohol instead of stopping at a hotel to take a shower. Denise would later say, “Funny what you would remember.”
The apartment was on the twentieth floor of a building that overlooked the Ben Franklin Parkway, at the far end of which the Rocky statue stood sentry at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With her background as an interior designer, Denise had given the space an eclectic look that embraced a masculine color scheme. While Joe found it amenable enough, he yearned for the five-thousand-square-foot loft above his North Philadelphia gym, which Denise had decorated in the style of a 1970s bachelor pad and had outfitted with accents that included a leopard-spotted chaise lounge in the bathroom. For the better part of three decades, he had holed up amid the consoling shadows of 2917 North Broad Street, the very place where he had whipped his body into shape for his epic showdowns with Muhammad Ali and where years later he would still don an old robe and pad downstairs to paw at the heavy bag. But Joe was in uncertain health, the abode was cold and damp, and Denise and others were concerned that he could no longer climb the steep stairs to his quarters without falling. Plus, there were unending tax hassles. So Denise had procured the spot in Center City where the two now lived.
By virtue of a reportorial acquaintance with Joe that dated back to my father, Mark Kram, who covered him for Sports Illustrated from the early days of his career, I stopped in to see him one day in June 2009 for a piece I was thinking of doing for an overseas magazine. At sixty-five, his handshake was still firm, scarcely the grip of a man rumored to be in declining health. Word was that he was battling diabetes and high blood pressure, and that he still had not recovered physically from a car crash in 2002. Surgeries had followed on his back and neck, yet he remained in some degree of pain, which his eyes betrayed as he lowered himself to sit. Even so, he appeared full of cheerful contentment, far removed from the enduring portrayal of him as an angry and unforgiving man so incapable of letting go of the hatred he harbored for Ali. That Joe was elsewhere on this spring day.
Joe relaxed at his dining room table and picked at a bowl of cherries. As Denise checked on the ribs she had in the oven, Joe and I found ourselves on the subject of his old R&B group. With Joe as the lead vocalist and principle financier, Smokin’ Joe and the Knockouts played the club circuit back in the 1970s. Overhearing this turn in the conversation, Denise chimed in: “Joe had a deal with Capitol. He cut some forty-fives. We have a stack of them around here somewhere.” The act never climbed to the heights Joe had hoped, yet the songbird in him was still apt to soar with unbidden spontaneity, even given the presence of an audience of just himself. With a raspy voice, he launched into a rendition of “My Way,” the lyrics of which had been personalized for him.
I’ve come a long, long ways
And like they say
It took some doin’ . . .
I fought them fair
I fought them square
I fought them my way. . . .
“Remember that one—‘My Way’?” Joe asked, his eyes crinkled with merriment. “Paul Anka rewrote some of the words to it just for me.”
His way was the hard way. In the ring, he lived and died by the simple yet daring principle of engagement that in order to deliver one bone-crunching blow, it was frequently necessary to absorb three in exchange. With a left hook that was by acclamation an instrument of doom, he would leave behind a crimson trail of swollen eyes and broken jaws in his quest for his place in history. One opponent would say that the volume of punches Frazier had battered him with was so unrelenting that it was “like getting hit by four hands.” When another was revived back in his dressing room, he began tying his shoes on again until one of his handlers had to break it to him that he had already been knocked flat. Even Ali would say of his war with Frazier in Manila: “It was like death. Closest thing to dying I know of.” For his legions of fans, he possessed the raw power of Rocky Marciano—the Rock—who had set the standard for perfection when he retired with a 49-0 record in 1956; others claimed he swarmed his opponents with the intensity of Henry Armstrong, who fought 181 bouts in the 1930s and ’40s and won championships as a featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight. Whoever one supposed his antecedents were, Joe exuded an atavistic joy inside the velvet ropes that was his and his alone. Only one outcome seemed certain whenever Joe charged into action: someone would end up in the emergency room.
On his excursions across Philadelphia in later years, he had a prepared answer for anyone who asked how he was doing. With an air of playful exasperation, he would shake his head sadly and reply with a shrug, “They’re tryin’ to get me!” No one ever knew to whom he was referring, but it could have been anyone—the taxman, a woman he had been with the evening before, or perhaps some phantom of a bigoted world that was never far away. He had grown up in Jim Crow South Carolina, where African Americans remained entrapped in a plantation culture that subjected them to indignities not so far removed from the experience of their enslaved ancestors. When he came to the North as a young teenager, he endured degradations no less oppressive than the ones he had encountered back home in Beaufort. Even as he came into his own as a professional athlete in the 1960s and ’70s, which afforded him the proximity to white money and the sanctuary it provided, he came face-to-face with “black-on-black” hate language in his exchanges with Ali. From cradle to grave, it would be a journey galvanized by conflict.
Unimposing for a heavyweight, at just under six feet tall, he was a beloved overachiever who once said of himself, “I’m a small piece of leather, but I’m well put together.” In an era
that would come to be looked upon as the golden age of the heavyweights, Joe did not back up an inch as he battled his way toward a place at the top. Even as his opponents pummeled his head again and again, he advanced upon them with a gallantry that thrilled crowds. Fans could see themselves in his clock-in-early, leave-late work ethic. While he did not possess the height or personality of some of his peers, no one would ever have cause to question the size of his heart or his courage under fire. Few men in the annals of the ring produced moments as indelible.
Far more than just an appealing athletic proposition, the rivalry that commenced between Frazier and Ali on March 8, 1971, was a cultural happening that exposed the deep fissures in American society. By an accident of circumstances, they ended up in the crosshairs of an argument far larger than themselves. Ali: exiled from the ring for his evasion of the draft during the Vietnam War and scorned for his conversion to the Nation of Islam. Frazier: up from the abject poverty of the South Carolina Lowcountry and later a dead-end job in a Philadelphia slaughterhouse, the involuntary hero to that sector of society in lockstep with the “white chauvinist” ethic of TV character Archie Bunker. By the end of their trilogy four years later, we would learn as much about ourselves as we would about either of them.
For forty-one rounds of concentrated, pedal-to-the-floor action, they pushed each other to the very edge of human endurance. Frazier won their initial encounter at Madison Square Garden, the celebrity extravaganza that was billed as “The Fight of the Century.” Ali claimed their January 1974 rematch at the Garden in a somewhat less compelling tactical effort. Then there was the final act: Manila. On a scorching morning in October 1975, Ali prevailed in their rubber match when Frazier, battered and unable to see, was stopped by his cornerman from answering the bell for the fifteenth and final round. For his strivings to end in capitulation was no more agreeable to Frazier than asking him to swallow a cup of lye, particularly in light of the rumors that would persist for close to forty years that Ali himself had been on the verge of quitting.
Whatever heights of athletic achievement they drove each other to inside the ring, they dragged each other down in a running feud outside of it. For Ali, it began as a showy ploy to draw attention to himself and pump the gate. Even as he poked at his opponents in disparaging ways and could be boorish in the eyes of his decriers, his act was looked upon by his devotees as the greatest show on earth that did not employ a trapeze artist. Loud, funny, and irrepressibly original, Ali peppered his oratory with amusing doggerel that heightened the fervor of his fans, if not his standing in literary circles. But he crossed a line when it came to Frazier, who grew irritable as Ali turned from playful to hostile. With the cameras rolling, Ali called him “ugly,” a “gorilla,” and an “Uncle Tom.” Frazier shot back and called Ali by his “slave name”—Cassius Clay. Increasingly furious as Ali branded him a pawn of white establishment figures such as Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo, Frazier brooded that Ali had turned some portion of the black community against him. Privately, Ali told him that he was only whipping up fan interest that would reap a big payoff for both of them. But it annoyed Joe when Ali settled down in Philadelphia during his exile and began showing him up in public. When Ali heckled him on the street one day in Center City in 1970, Frazier became so incensed, two of his associates told me that he threatened to take a tire iron to him and finish him off before they ever stepped into the ring.
The hard feelings Ali had stirred in Joe waxed and waned in the years that followed. On the day I was with him at his apartment, he had slipped behind the public face that those closest to him had encouraged him to wear and laughed off “the Butterfly” with an air of letting bygones be bygones. On other days, I was with him when his annoyance spiked like a fever, his voice full of anger and hurt that some say he carried to his grave. As the years unfolded and Ali grew infirm with Parkinson’s disease, as his speech became slurred and his hands increasingly quivered, Frazier appeared to take cruel pleasure in the adversity that had befallen “Clay.” “Look at him, and now look at me,” he told me and others. “Who do you think came out the winner?” Somehow, he had convinced himself that his signature was embossed on the physical wreck Ali had become. Even as his friends reminded him that Ali was a sick man and implored him to back off, Frazier could not help himself from battering his erstwhile rival with verbal haymakers. For those who had followed the dips and curves in the acrimony between the two, Joe seemed like a Japanese soldier on some island in the Pacific who had not yet heard that World War II had ended. Incisively, author David Halberstam observed in an essay, “Technically the loser of two of the three fights, [Frazier] seems not to understand that they ennobled him as much as they did Ali, [and] that the only way we know of Ali’s greatness is because of Frazier’s equivalent greatness.” Whatever truth there is in that, there was no equivalency between them when it came to the accumulation of what Joe called “the love.”
“The love” was money. In terms of sheer earning power, Joe was no more in the same league with Ali than he was with Otis Redding as a singer. But Joe did well for himself during and in the aftermath of his career, far better than he could ever have dreamed of when he was a boy helping his father cook moonshine in the woods. By 1970, even before he and Ali each earned a colossal $2.5 million for the Fight of the Century, he had become ensconced in the comforts of the upper middle class. He and his wife, Florence, had five children, all of whom attended good schools; they lived in a $125,000 house on two and a half acres in a fashionable Philadelphia suburb; he had four hundred thousand dollars in cash in the bank and a variety of investments; and he had indulged himself with the acquisition of assorted automobiles, including a gold Cadillac with not one but two telephones; a Corvette Stingray; and a 1934 Chevrolet, with which he was forever tinkering. To the everlasting horror of the consortium of Philadelphia businessmen who backed him, he also owned a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide, which he tricked up and boasted that he “got up to 110 mph” on a straightaway. Forty years later, he was still bringing in a handsome living from appearances and such, yet there would never be enough “love” on hand to offset his swelling obligations to the Internal Revenue Service and others. With the exception of assorted pieces of memorabilia, he died in 2011 with no assets to speak of and only a few dollars in the bank.
Given the penury from which he sprang and the disadvantage of just a ninth-grade education, nothing had prepared Frazier for the vast sums of money that would come into his life or the international fame he would achieve. Early on, his day-to-day affairs were overseen by his investment group, Cloverlay, which saw to it that his taxes were paid. But once he parted ways with them in 1974 at the end of an eight-year run, it was not long before his finances fell into disarray. And as his marriage to Florence unwound over a period of years, he answered the siren call of the opposite sex with alacrity yet endeavored to be a vigilant provider. By Florence and five other women, he had a total of eleven offspring—six daughters and five sons. Whatever ephemeral comfort Joe found in the arms of others, however it eased the pain that had settled into his bones from years of being hit, it came at a price that converged with his yen for gambling and certain investment reversals to leave him in the red. At the suggestion of a confidant that he declare bankruptcy, Joe said flatly, “No, I’ll pay back every penny I owe.”
Even though he would fight two more times after Manila, clubbed into submission by George Foreman in their 1976 rematch and dragged to a draw five years later by the obese ex-jailbird Floyd “Jumbo” Cummings, he turned with renewed gusto to singing and began managing young boxers at the gym. Chief among them was his son Marvis, who had shown promise as an amateur heavyweight and who had escaped death when he sat out a scheduled trip to Poland in which fourteen American boxers perished in a plane crash. Joe had a premonition and commanded Marvis not to go. But Joe could not save his oldest son from swift annihilation in the ring, which came first at the hands of reigning champion Larry Holmes and later by the buzz saw that was ri
sing star Mike Tyson. By disposition a sweet man who possessed none of the raw killer instinct that Joe had, Marvis became an ordained minister and remained a ubiquitous presence at his father’s side. He accompanied him to his appointments and acted as a voice of caution in his ear. When an occasional well-intentioned friend would buttonhole Joe and talk up the possibility of a comeback—which would leave his father with a gleam of temptation in his eye—Marvis would take the friend aside and gently say, “Please, leave Pop be.” Joe told me more than once, “Every father should have a son like Marvis.”
Big-hearted in ways that the crowds would seldom see, Joe looked upon the work he did with the boys and girls at the gym as more than just boxing instruction. Only a few would have any chance in the sport in which he had distinguished himself, yet he understood that his calling was far larger. For the ones with nowhere to go but the streets when school let out, he provided a place to work off the simmering rage that poverty breeds. For those who came to him with some ability and the same dream he once had, he provided a bed to sleep in at the gym and a couple hundred dollars each week to get by on, the way Cloverlay had given him a leg-up years before. Along with Marvis, he worked with his other sons, daughters, and assorted nephews and nieces, who would come to appreciate and indeed love him not just for his hallowed accomplishments in the ring but also for how he gave of himself to them in large and small ways. As he sat with me that day in his apartment, it did not escape him that the way forward for him had been paved not just by his own hard work but by the help of others.
“I was born into animosity, bigotry, hatred, and white water/colored water,” he told me. “I look back on those days and I think: Well, you are a better man because of them. The world has changed to the point where we now have a black president. But the youngsters still need to be shown that someone cares.”
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