“Joe was slapping at it like a girl,” said James, who was at the Twenty-Third PAL that day. “But when he hit it with that left hook—BOOM—you could hear it across the street. Yank and Willie just looked at each other and said, “Wow.”
* * *
Even though his previously transplanted relatives had welcomed Billy with open arms when he stepped off the Dog two years before in New York, the “cold-faced North” that Langston Hughes had warned of did not. He moved in with his brother Tommy, sister-in-law Ollie, and their two children in their three-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Tommy had gone to New York a few years before and found work in the garment district. Billy’s cousin Ginger Bolden escorted him to the Employment Agency Center at 80 Warren Street, a five-story building on the southern end of Tribeca that housed dozens of low-end employment agencies that were the first point of contact for many migrants up from the South. In his 1962 book The Other America, author Michael Harrington referred to it as a “slave market” that provided “the work force for the economic underworld of the big city.” Of the abject crowd of humanity that congregated there, which included alcoholics and the mentally challenged, Harrington observed: “Most of the people at 80 Warren Street were born poor. They were incompetent as far as American society is concerned, lacking the education and the skills to get decent work.”
Work was hard to come by and even harder to keep. Unable to hook up at the Employment Agency Center the day Ginger took him there, Billy roamed the city and found odd jobs, including one in a sheet metal factory. “He had little jobs—none of them for too long,” Ollie Frazier told me. To get by, Billy borrowed money from Tommy and dipped into his old Beaufort playbook by stealing idle cars parked along the street with his friend B. A. Johnson, who was bedding down with relatives in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In his autobiography, Frazier recounted how he and Johnson discovered a junkyard in Far Rockaway that paid them fifty dollars a car without asking any questions. They averaged one heist a week. “Late-model beauty or old bomb, them junkyard boys didn’t care. ‘Here’s fifty bucks, see ya.’” On the weekends, there would be house parties across the city that distracted him from the aching displacement he endured. “He could never get settled in New York,” said Ginger. Sensing that his brother was perilously adrift, Tommy suggested that he move to Philadelphia, where Mazie, Bec, and others had settled. In looking back on it years later, Mazie said, “Tommy knew that if Billy stayed in New York any longer he would end up in trouble.” His aunt Evelyn Peeples agreed to give him a room in her three-story house in North Philadelphia.
Beyond the problems he had squeezing into his clothes and, as he would explain later to Playboy, the even more pressing concern of not having his “way” with women, he was encouraged by Mazie and her husband, James Rhodan, to utilize the Twenty-Third PAL as a safe haven. Both were concerned Frazier would fall under the spell of his paternal uncle Oliver. Known fondly within the Frazier clan as “Uncle Cadillac”—he always seemed to be behind the wheel of a new one—Oliver was a tall, sharply dressed street hustler whose eyes were always hidden behind dark shades. “Unc never seemed to have a job but always had money,” said Lisa Coakley. His chief pleasures were playing cards and running with women, one of whom owned a speakeasy in North Philadelphia. “Billy was just like him,” said Mazie. “They were fancy free.” Only too aware of how easy it would be for him to end up with the wrong crowd—and how devastating that could be, given that drugs were taking hold in the city—Mazie sat down with Billy to express her concerns.
“Look, if you get in trouble, I don’t know anyone who could help you out,” she told him. “I wouldn’t know where to go or what to do. But I do know that the way you are going is not a good way. You have your children to think of, not just yourself. So, you have to do something to better yourself.”
Billy nodded and replied, “Okay, I want to do better.” Mazie would remember, “He was just like a little boy again.”
James Rhodan took an enthusiastic interest in Billy. “They fell in love with one another,” Mazie said. “They were so close you would think they were brothers.” When James came home from his job as a welder at the shipyard, the two would go jogging in Fairmount Park. And while James was in no way an aficionado of boxing, he accompanied his brother-in-law to the Twenty-Third PAL, which both he and Mazie hoped would help him form a protective alliance with the police force—just in case.
Dugent would remember the day he showed up, in an unmatched suit coat and trousers with an open-collar shirt, just prior to Christmas 1961: “It was late afternoon. He said he had just come from New York and he was out of work. He weighed 240 pounds. Most of it was in his rump and thighs. He said he wanted to fight.” Never one to discourage the dream of an underprivileged young man in search of a break, even if it seemed to his eye an improbable undertaking, Dugent escorted Frazier into his office and handed him a membership form. A relative who owned a North Philadelphia barbershop gave Joe some money to buy some boxing shoes, hand wraps, and a gym bag. With the arrival of 1962, he began working out.
Frazier found a job as a butcher at Cross Brothers Meat Packers, a kosher slaughterhouse where once an eleven-hundred-pound Lancaster-bred steer escaped from a boxcar and led a rollicking parade of fifty children through the North Philadelphia streets before a plant supervisor cornered it in a schoolyard and plugged it with ten rifle shots. In a safety helmet and apron, his biceps jutting from beneath his sleeveless uniform, Frazier spent long days in the refrigerated chill handling unwieldy pieces of animal flesh and hosing pools of blood off the slippery floor. “I never minded seeing [the animals] cut,” Frazier would say. “Some of ’em looked like they wanted to keep living, though. They’d try to run out of the room, throats cut and everything. It didn’t bother me none.” Even if the pay was poor—twenty-five dollars a day—it was dependable employment that steered him away from any temptation to stray into illegal activities. “It made him more of a man,” said Mazie. “He could live like a person should live—buy food, clothes, even a car. With some money in his pocket, he could stick his chest out.” But the job was not without hazards, particularly for someone who used his hands for boxing. The blades he used were so sharp, it seemed as if they could cut through tempered steel. When he sliced off the tip of the pinkie on his left hand, the wound required a skin graft and nine stitches to repair.
Florence showed up unannounced in Philadelphia in the spring of 1962. By then, she and Frazier had had their second child, daughter Jacquelyn. “I remember it was a rainy day,” said Frances Morrall, who was then rooming with Aunt Evelyn. “She pulled up in a taxi and rang the bell.” Florence had passed up an opportunity to attend college two years before. She had been scheduled to begin classes on the very day their first child, Marvis, was born—September 12, 1960. The acceptance letter she received would remain among her belongings as a reminder of the alternate path that had once called to her. But she loved Billy, saw the good heart in him, and remained devoted even as he wavered in his commitment to her. Aunt Evelyn invited Florence to stay with her, but only on the condition that she and Billy occupy separate bedrooms. She was not one to allow casual sexual activity under her roof. But Aunt Evelyn was away the better part of the week working as a domestic and could only police their behavior so far. When Florence became pregnant with Weatta, she and Billy were married, on June 25, 1963, at the home of a local minister, with only Frances and her boyfriend in attendance. Billy was so strapped for cash that Mazie gave him her own wedding ring to use in the ceremony.
Whatever wayward impulses he had yielded to during his young life, Frazier found an overriding purpose in boxing and applied himself to it with extraordinary discipline. To accommodate his work schedule at Cross Brothers, he would get up before dawn to run in Fairmount Park and end his day with a two-hour session at the gym. With him always during this period was James, who learned how to wrap his hands and carried his bucket and water. To help him get his weight off, Dugent would remember, “We put him on a
diet. Nothing severe. Just green vegetables and steaks and stuff like that. And cut out the sweets.” Along with countless push-ups and sit-ups, Dugent would get him to stand on his toes for long periods in order to develop his balance. Dugent schooled him in the proper way to throw combinations and found that Frazier had an aptitude for instruction. “At first he was bad, the next day he was great,” Dugent said. While Dugent appreciated Frazier’s exceptional “short power,” which “came down from the shoulders through the chest,” he also thought the fighter’s physical shortcomings would always outweigh whatever intangibles he possessed. For a heavyweight, he was simply too small, with arms that were too short and legs that were too heavy. Moreover, he was initially a southpaw, which was frowned upon during that era; he would not convert to an orthodox stance until late in his amateur career. But when Durham saw him slam the heavy bag, he was just intrigued enough to ask: “You think we can work together?”
Though Durham drove his fighters hard, he only did so with those he was certain had the potential to grow and thrive. Caution guided him in his assessment of talent. In a column in the Philadelphia Bulletin years later, Claude Lewis shared a conversation he had had with a former would-be fighter named Billy Johnson, who came to Durham with the same ambitions that Joe had but none of his raw skills. “I worked my tail off and I went to Yank and I asked him to take a look at me in the ring,” Johnson said. Durham took a look at him, but as Johnson remembered, “It wasn’t a long look.” Durham walked over to Johnson with his head down, placed his arm over his shoulder and said in a confiding voice, “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.” Johnson quit boxing on the spot and became a presser in a tailor shop, where he remained safely and happily employed. Durham understood that the ring was no place to fool around, that it could be unsparing in the price that it exacted. For this attention to such ethical concerns, it was once said that Durham stood out in the unprincipled realm of boxing “like a healthy thumb on a leprous hand.”
Beyond the raw power he spotted in Frazier, Durham ascertained that there was a big engine inside him. Given the here-today, gone-tomorrow level of commitment of the young aspirants to whom he had been accustomed, Durham sized Frazier up as just “another fat kid” who would disappear as quickly as he arrived, even if he did have thunder in that left hook. But it became clear as Frazier shed pounds that he had his eye on the eagle and attended to the drudgery of training with uncommon focus. On those days when Durham was traveling and Frazier had to work late at Cross Brothers, Frazier would use the key to the Twenty-Third PAL that Dugent had entrusted him with and work out to the accompaniment of forty-fives on a portable record player. Each song was more or less three minutes, the length of a round of boxing. As cars swished by on Columbia Avenue outside the gym window, he would stab his gloved hands into the heavy bag and give a grunt, as his sweat dripped to the floor and the walls echoed with songs of Cupid and chain gangs and twistin’ the night away.
* * *
At the 1964 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York, one of the more popular attractions was Walt Disney’s “It’s a Small World,” a cheerful singsong display of three hundred animatronic dolls arrayed in costumes from around the world. But across the way at the outdoor Singer Bowl that May, there was nothing small about the anatomical specimen who stepped into the ring to face Joe Frazier in the Olympic boxing trials. With layers of flab spilling over the waistband of his hiked-up trunks, the six-foot-three-inch Buster Mathis wrecked the scales at 296 pounds, trimmed down from the 340 pounds he had lugged around prior to the commencement of training that spring. Boxing out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, he was light on his feet for a man his size and had impressive hand speed. Going into the three-day tournament, he was projected as the odds-on favorite to go to Tokyo and bring back a gold medal, if only because it appeared that no opponent he was likely to encounter here or abroad would be able to offset his colossal size. Observed Sports Illustrated writer Robert H. Boyle in his piece “At the Fair with Fat Buster”: “Sitting in his corner, he looks like a melting chocolate sundae.”
By 1964, Frazier had evolved into a 196-pound heavyweight with promise. Early on, as Durham would remember it, Frazier “thought he was a boxer” and acquitted himself as such. Lightweight “Classy” Al Massey worked out with him at the Twenty-Third PAL and told me he once gave Frazier some boxing tips while Durham was away, only to be admonished the following day by Dugent. Massey remembered, “Yank saw what I had done and asked Joe, ‘Who showed you that?’ Frazier told him. So Yank approached Duke, and next thing I hear is Duke: ‘Massey!’ I go over and Duke tells me, ‘Joe is a puncher. NOT a boxer.’” Do it again, Dugent warned him, and he would be tossed out of the gym. To counterbalance Joe’s physical shortcomings, Durham was of the belief Frazier only had one way to go and that was “straight ahead” into the chest of his opponent—chin down, eyes up, always on the attack. PAL trainer George James explained that Durham had envisioned Frazier as “a fullback.” James said, “The thinking was, Joe would charge in there, like a fullback hitting the line, and never give his opponent a chance to set his foot to throw a punch.” Frazier was not immediately receptive to the strategy of walking into punches. Durham would say, “He thought I was a damn fool.”
Of the exceptional crop of amateurs who passed through the Twenty-Third PAL in the early 1960s, Dugent used to say that while no one was as dedicated as Frazier, or was more a “killer” than Bennie Briscoe, none surpassed Gypsy Joe Harris when it came to sheer talent. From his clean-shaven skull down to the tassels on his boxing shoes, five-foot-six Joseph Louis Harris was a virtuoso who never showed you the same move twice in the ring. Away from it, he was a free spirit who roamed the nightscape in a white cowboy hat. At the gym—that is, when he was there, and not in a pool hall or a bar—he would give away fifty pounds and spar with Frazier, who early on had flattened the number-two and then the number-one heavyweights in training there. Frazier remembered in his autobiography that he himself “handed out asswhuppings like lollipops” in his sparring sessions. But Gypsy Joe would back away from no man.
“Go get him, Gyp!” someone shouted from ringside. Massey remembered that Gypsy had Frazier trapped in the corner. When Gypsy stepped back to load up his punches with leverage, Frazier walloped him with a left hook that drove Gypsy clear across the ring into the turnbuckle. But Gypsy did not go down. Amid the exhortations of the onlookers at ringside, Gypsy stared daggers across the ring at Frazier and sneered, “Okay, you motherfucker, you want to fight?” Upon hearing that, Dugent dashed from his office, threw his arms around Gypsy Joe, and escorted him to safety.
Joe loved Gypsy. According to Denise Menz, he saw himself in Gypsy, perhaps that part of him that bridled in the presence of hard boundaries. One of four children who had been abandoned at an early age by their father, Gypsy was working as a delivery boy for a grocery store in North Philadelphia when he found his way to the Twenty-Third PAL. As he hustled out of the store one day toting a bag, he bumped into a man with an ice cream cone in his hand. When the cone splattered on the pavement, the man chased him down the street and into the gym. Gypsy later told Robert Seltzer of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “I ran like Jesse Owens.” For years, no one at the Twenty-Third PAL would know that he was blind in one eye. Only years later would he explain how it had happened: On Halloween in 1957, he had snatched a bag of candy from a friend and took off. When Gypsy turned and looked back, the friend heaved a brick that struck him in his right eye. Ten days in the hospital followed, but the eye could not be saved. He was eleven years old.
Gypsy Joe became skilled at covering up his impaired vision. In the ring, he compensated for it by concocting an array of daring moves that saw him dip, bend, and twist in order to keep his good eye fixed on his opponent. George James said, “It was amazing how he could protect himself and still fight with just that one eye.” By his own admission a coward out on the streets, where he armed himself with a four-and-a-half-inch switchblade that he called his sword,
Gypsy was fearless once his gloves were laced up and he bounced through the ropes. While he possessed none of Frazier’s discipline, he shared the same goal of a bigger and better life. Even as he would remain anchored in the unforgiving ways of the street, where he gorged himself on hoagies by day and shadowed the perfumed scent of the “foxes” until dawn, he saw a gilded future stretched out before him, one that included a wardrobe big enough that he could “change clothes twenty times a day.” He once said of boxing: “You can be the hammer, or the nail. I wanted to be the hammer.” Sadly, it would be his destiny to be the nail.
Only one of the two Joes would end up competing for a berth on the 1964 U.S. Olympic boxing team, and it would not be Gypsy. Though he had won the Middle Atlantic Golden Gloves the two previous years, he was beaten in the eastern regional Olympic trials in what was criticized by some observers as an unfair decision. But Frazier pushed himself harder than ever during his run for Tokyo. With the 1962, 1963, and 1964 Middle Atlantic Golden Gloves Heavyweight Championships behind him, he doubled his roadwork from three to six miles each morning. He wore special boots that weighed six and a half pounds each and carried eight-pound weights. He jabbed and whipped his hands out in a flurry of combinations as he jogged the sloping terrain of Fairmount Park. The extra effort led to an increase in stamina, which would enable him to pour on the pressure as he stalked his opponents. Moreover, his punching power seemed better organized. At the eastern regional Olympic trials, he stopped four opponents on back-to-back days. At the Olympic trials in Flushing, he added his fifth straight knockout by dumping the 1963 national Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) heavyweight champion Wyce Westbrook out of the ring in the second round with a left hook to the jaw, followed by a left/right combination; Westbrook required fifteen stitches in his mouth. In the semifinals the following day, Frazier floored Clay Hodges with a chopping right and won by technical knockout in the second round. That placed him in the finals against Mathis.
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