* * *
With the 1960s at a close and a new decade at hand, the chaos that had engulfed the heavyweight championship since the expulsion of Muhammad Ali nearly three years before came to an end with the showdown between Joe Frazier and Jimmy Ellis on February 16, 1970, at Madison Square Garden. Given that ring protocol accords the champion preferential treatment, the Garden found itself in something of a quandary in that there were not one but two champions. Financially, they quickly came to terms: both fighters would receive the same guarantee of $150,000 against 30 percent of the total revenues. But who would receive top billing on the show cards—Joe or Jimmy? Who would get first use each day of the training facility at the Felt Forum? Who would get first pick in choosing trunks? Garden boxing director Harry Markson resolved to “split everything down the middle.” There would be two posters—one with Joe on top, the other with Jimmy on top. The workout schedule was agreed upon—each moved their preferred time slot by a half an hour to accommodate the other. The dressing-room doors would carry a sign that recognized each as champion.
Jimmy Ellis had lingered for years in the shadow of Ali. They grew up in Louisville on opposite ends of the city, Jimmy on the integrated east side, Ali on the segregated west side. As the two of them came through the amateur ranks together, they became close friends and would remain so, as did their parents and siblings. Along the way, Jimmy and Ali fought each other twice in the amateurs, with each winning one. Ellis won the Golden Gloves and fifty-nine of his sixty-six amateur bouts. Somewhat smaller in build than Ali, he turned pro as a middleweight in 1961, a year after his friend had come back from Rome with the Olympic gold medal. As Ali reeled off a string of easy victories under the Louisville Sponsoring Group and Angelo Dundee, Jimmy struggled under a far less advantageous arrangement with manager and trainer Bud Bruner. By 1964, he had a record of just 15-5, had lost three of his last four bouts, and was on the verge of quitting when he wrote a letter to Dundee in Miami that ended with the plea: H-E-L-P! Angelo agreed to take him on and by a year later had moved him up to the heavies. To throw a spotlight on him, Dundee would remember that he had “the brainstorm” to have him spar with Ali, by then deeply into his conversion to the NOI. Members of the sect leaned on Jimmy to join, according to Jerry Ellis, his younger brother. But Jimmy was the son of a Baptist pastor and sang in the church choir. Jerry told me, “Ali finally told them, ‘Hey, man. Leave Jimmy alone.’”
Close to a year and a half had elapsed since Ellis had fought. He had defended his title only once since he had won the WBA Elimination Tournament, beating Floyd Patterson in Stockholm. Hampered by a broken nose in the second round, Ellis eked out a narrow fifteen-round decision over Patterson that Stan Hochman would later claim “had the aroma of limburger.” While the Garden angled to set up a title-unification bout between Ellis and Frazier, Dundee seemed in no hurry to take on Joe, if only because there appeared to be far easier paydays on the board to be scooped up. But there would be unforeseen obstacles. Scheduled bouts against Henry Cooper in London, Bob Cleroux in Montreal, and Gregorio Peralta in Argentina ended up canceled—Cooper due to an injury, Cleroux due to an unexpected loss, and Peralta due to what the promoter called “a total lack of public interest.” Dundee moaned, “What do you want me to do? Throw rocks at myself?” As 1969 neared an end, the WBA ordered Ellis to fight Frazier or surrender his title. Contracts were signed that December 29. Frazier eyed Ellis at the press conference in New York and said, “I’m gonna have a ball givin’ you the worst lickin’ anybody ever got.”
Camps commenced in Miami in early January. Frazier had planned to set up headquarters on the Jersey Shore, but a blizzard dropped a foot of snow on the area. As Ellis worked out at the Fifth Street Gym in Miami Beach, Frazier began preparations across Biscayne Bay at the Dinner Key Auditorium, where he had trouble adjusting to the Florida humidity. “I hate it here,” he told Denise in a phone conversation. Sparring partners tagged him at will as Yank Durham looked on glumly. “You were pulling away while trying to throw a left hook,” he snapped between rounds. “Where’d you learn that?” A report in the Miami News claimed that Durham had become “edgy” with how slowly Frazier was shedding the extra pounds he had picked up since the Quarry bout the previous June. He had ballooned to 232 pounds. He got down to 222 by the start of training, but two weeks later had only dropped six pounds, with still another eleven pounds to work off to get down to his 205-pound fighting weight. But no one worked harder or with more enthusiasm to get in shape than Frazier, whose mood improved when he decamped from Florida at the end of January and came north to finish training at the Felt Forum. The cold weather appeared to revive him. One of his sparring partners was Ken Norton, a six-foot-three heavyweight with a 13-0 record who had flown in from California with Eddie Futch. With one eye on the gate and the other on the 4–1 odds that favored Frazier, Garden matchmaker Teddy Brenner contrived to inject a measure of uncertainty in the outcome by spreading the word that Frazier had “overtrained,” that Norton and his other sparring partners were hitting him “with everything!” “Look at that!” Brenner exclaimed. “You could stick out your left hand and Frazier would run into it.” Told what Brenner had said, Durham roared, “Overtrained? What does that mean?” Futch observed, “He looks about perfect to me at this point.”
Eleven days before the bout, Jack Dempsey sauntered into the Felt Forum on a promotional errand on behalf of the Garden and chatted with reporters. Now seventy-four years old, elegantly attired in a blue suit, red sweater, and red-and-gray tie, Dempsey had held the heavyweight championship at the height of the Roaring Twenties, during which he shared space on the American sports pages with a galaxy of stars that included Babe Ruth, Red Grange, and Bill Tilden. As a boy of just fifteen, he saw Jack Johnson train in Reno for his bout against Jim Jeffries in 1910. Nine years later, he battered the behemoth Jess Willard to take the heavyweight championship, prior to which he had some two hundred of what he called “saloon fights” across the Far West. “We had gloves [but] there was no ring,” Dempsey told Dave Anderson of the Times. “The people would step back and we would go at it until the crowd decided there was a winner. And then they would pass the hat for your money.” As Frazier pummeled his sparring partner, Pete [Moleman] Williams, up in the ring, Dempsey looked on with a gleam of appreciation in his eyes.
“He’s a rough, tough kid,” Dempsey observed. “He can take you out with a punch. He’s on top of you.”
More than five hundred press credentials were handed out to journalists from across the world. While Dempsey would not venture a prediction on the outcome, former heavyweight James J. Braddock did in a series of articles commissioned by the Associated Press. “The Cinderella Man,” who in 1935 had upset even longer odds to win the championship from Max Baer at the old Garden, stood with the underdog Ellis, calling him “the better, smarter, more mature fighter.” To offset the pressure that Frazier would apply, Braddock expected Ellis to “move in and out, keep Frazier off balance with a good left hand and always be ready with that ‘sneak’ right of his.” Braddock referred to that right hand as a “deadly punch,” and said Ellis “used it better than I have ever seen.” But Ali was not sure if Ellis could handle Frazier, even as he picked his old pal Jimmy to win when the press came to him for a prediction. In a conversation with Hochman in early January, during which he seemed to drop his showy dismissal of Joe and revealed his admiration for him, Ali said that Frazier is “too strong.” He observed how Ellis had scuffled with Quarry, while Frazier had “annihilated him.” Ellis had his hands full with Patterson and had been given the decision, which Ali conceded had been “a robbery.” Solemnly, Ali added, “Well, Frazier is much stronger and rougher than Patterson.” Durham shared his own prediction with “Two Ton” Tony Galento at the weigh-in: “I’ll knock him out in seven.” Nodding to the front row, he then added: “I hope you’re sitting there. I’ll knock him right into your lap.”
One by one during the prefight introductions, Galento, De
mpsey, and others paraded into the ring and gave a wave to the near-capacity crowd, the old sluggers from a finer day who by their very presence seemed to confer a benediction upon the proceedings at hand. Though Ellis gave away just five pounds to Frazier—at 201, he was three pounds heavier than he had ever fought—he appeared far slighter in build than the sharply contoured Frazier once he shed his robe, his body that of an overfed middleweight. Ellis had said beforehand that he planned to use the ring “like a checkerboard,” stepping from side to side in an effort to upset the rhythm of his opponent, who figured to come at him with the throttle wide open. Ellis did just that in the first round of the scheduled fifteen-round bout. Circling the perpetually slow-starting Joe with caution, he scored with left jabs and right leads to the head. Ellis won the round on all three scorecards. From his vantage point in the corner, Dundee liked what he saw. He would say later, “I thought I was in like Flynn.” Ellis continued to hold his own in the second round, but Frazier picked up the tempo, driving Jimmy from the center of the ring into the ropes, where he pummeled Ellis to the head and body with unanswered left hooks. Frazier sneered, “That as hard as you can hit, sissy?”
Whatever carefully laid plans Ellis had designed for Frazier were upended in round 3, as Joe flipped the checkerboard in the air with a stunning left hook near the end of the round. Ellis held on, the legs beneath him uncertain as Joe backed him into the ropes. Announcer Howard Cosell brayed at ringside, “One stupendous left hook did it!” At the end of the round, Frazier walked back to his corner with a pleased grin on his face, certain that it was now only a question of when, not if. Up off his stool to begin the fourth, Frazier trapped Ellis in his corner and hammered him with both hands. Jimmy fell face-first to the canvas. Cosell bellowed: “Down goes Ellis! Down goes Ellis! He is beaten. Jimmy Ellis is trying to get up! He is worn to a frazzle! He is a game, game young man!” Up by the count of eight, Ellis once again found himself engulfed in a wave of left hooks. Five of them pounded into his body and head, the last a long, looping wrecking ball that collided with his jaw. Frazier would later compare it to squarely hitting a baseball with a bat and sending it “for a ride into the open field.” Ellis toppled to the floor. Hysterically, Cosell shrieked: “Oh, a tremendous left hook! And he cannot be saved by the bell!” As the bell clanged at the end of the fourth round, referee Tony Perez had come to the count of six. Three seconds later, Ellis once again labored to his feet, staggered to his corner and flopped on his stool, where Dundee worked frantically to revive him.
He soaked him with cold water.
He applied ice to the back of his neck and slipped some down the front of his trunks.
He waved smelling salts under his nose.
He slapped him on his thighs.
Jimmy just looked back at him with a blank expression. He did not even blink. As Angelo signaled to Perez that he was calling it, Frazier flew into the arms of Durham, who held him suspended from the ground in joy. By then Ellis had come around enough to issue a plea to his corner not to stop it.
“Look, I like Jimmy as a human being,” Angelo told the press later. “If I had sent him out there [for the fifth round], he would never be the same. Frazier would have destroyed him. . . . What about his six kids? What about his wife? What about his wonderful mother and father? And what about me? I mean, how do I live with myself?”
Someone at the press conference asked Ellis a question about the second knockdown.
Confused, Ellis said, “There was only one knockdown.”
“No. Two, Jimmy,” the reporter corrected.
“Oh,” Ellis said.
Dundee interjected, “That was why I stopped the fight, gentlemen.”
“Free at last!” Frazier boomed as he entered the press conference. Only eleven years had passed since he had come up from Beaufort on the Dog, that bag of fried chicken in his lap. Out of that flabby young man who looked out the bus window with apprehension at the passing scenery had emerged the heavyweight champion, the greatest individual title in sports. With it came a level of acclaim that would have once seemed beyond him, and it was accompanied by a degree of wealth that liberated him from the childhood poverty that had seemed so certain to be his destiny. With the more than four hundred thousand dollars he received for the Ellis bout, he had now earned well in excess of one million dollars. With the help of Denise, he dressed himself at the finest clothiers, given to daring fedoras, long furs, and jewelry galore. Very soon, he planned to move into a sprawling house on the Main Line, where in the driveway would be parked his Cadillacs, Harley, and other vehicles. Only Ali now stood between him and the only summit yet to scale, but who knew if that would ever happen? Joyfully, Frazier announced that he would quit and become a rock ‘n’ roll singer unless something with Ali could be worked out. Other than “Clay,” Frazier had no one suitable left to fight.
Ali had told the world that he was now retired. To prove it, he had volunteered to hand over the championship belt in the ring to either Frazier or Ellis. But the New York State Athletic Commission rejected his offer. So instead, Ali slipped into a closed-circuit venue in Philadelphia and watched the bout there. When it was over, he stood on a car outside and told the buzzing crowd that Philadelphia was not big enough for two champions. By telephone, he spoke with Frazier later to extend his congratulations, only to get an earful back from Joe. Frazier told him he would stand for no more foolishness, no more shoving and slapping, “the sort of stuff kids do when they are trying to pick a fight.” He told Ali to grow up, and perhaps one day they could settle it in the ring. Until then, he told him to stay in his part of Philadelphia, and he would stay in his. Frazier did not reveal what Ali had said in reply, but a week later, when the city held “Joe Frazier Day” in honor of him, there was some speculation that Ali would do something to upend the event. But Ali did not show up. Surrounded by city officials, sports personalities, and assorted guests who included former heavyweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott, Frazier received a proclamation at City Hall, rode though Center City in a twelve-car motorcade, and ended up at a dinner at the Civic Center, where he was given a silver punch bowl with twenty-four cups, one for each of the twenty-four fallen opponents who had paved his way to the championship.
* * *
Heads turned whenever Frank Rizzo walked down the street in Philadelphia. In a conservative blue suit, a pressed white shirt, a tie, and shoes polished to a regulation shine, he would leave his desk at the Roundhouse at noon or so and stroll over to the nearby Ben Franklin Hotel, where he would eat lunch each day with a group of underlings on the force. From patrolman to inspector to deputy commissioner to commissioner to mayor, the barrel-chested son of Italian immigrants would polarize the city as he ascended to power, during which he would be known variously as the Big Bambino, the Cisco Kid, the General—and, in less hospitable quarters, Ratso Rizzo. White workingmen and -women looked to him to keep order by cracking heads. Black Philadelphians feared and reviled him, as it was their heads that more often than not ended up cracked. Reporters had a ball sparring with him, once even baiting him into taking a polygraph test. He failed it.
Given his fraught relationship with the black community, Rizzo figured Joe Frazier could be of some help easing any apprehensions toward him as he revved up his mayoral campaign. Rizzo told Joe Hand, “I would like his support. What do you think the chances are?” Hand replied, “Great! He would do that for me.” Ever since his sister Mazie steered him to the Twenty-Third PAL, Frazier had developed a fondness for the police and the work they did in the community. Cops had been supportive of him. So he told Hand that he would be happy to join Rizzo for lunch. At the big round table held in reserve for him in the hotel dining room, Rizzo sat surrounded by six of his men, each of whom wore the same blue suit, white shirt, and tie. Frazier looked on as Rizzo scanned the menu and announced, “They’ve got a great crabmeat sandwich here.” He then glanced up at the waiter.
“Let me have the crabmeat sandwich,” he said.
With his pad in hand, the waiter then went around the table and jotted down the other orders.
“Crabmeat sandwich,” said the first.
“Same,” said the second.
“Me, too,” said the third.
“Crabmeat sandwich,” said the fourth.
“Same here,” said the fifth.
“Crabmeat sandwich,” said the sixth.
All eyes then fell on Joe. He looked up from his menu and said, “Get me a hamburger.”
Hand would remember years later, “The mayor said to me, ‘I like that Frazier.’ I said, ‘I thought you would.’ And he said, ‘No, all these asses eat what I eat. He had the balls to stand up and say he wanted a hamburger.’”
The old detective held his forefinger and thumb an inch apart and added, “They became that close.”
Chances are that Frazier would have had a far different view of his dining companion had his circumstances remained unchanged from his youth. To begin with, he would have been busing the table, not sitting at it. But Frazier would not or could not see beyond the avuncular charm of Rizzo, who presided over a police force that was held in widespread scorn for its brutality. Upon his appointment by Mayor James H. J. Tate as police commissioner in May 1967, Rizzo announced, “Hoodlums have no license to burn and sack Philadelphia in the name of civil liberties and civil rights activities.” He labeled his predecessor, Howard Leary, a “gutless bastard” for his handling of the 1964 Columbia Avenue riots; Rizzo had urged him to allow the police to “unholster” their firearms. Although Philadelphia would be spared the havoc that engulfed Detroit (forty dead) and Newark (twenty-five dead) in the summer of 1967, Rizzo found himself at the epicenter of what would be called “a police riot” that November, as thirty-five hundred students protested in front of the Board of Education to demand courses on African American history. At the height of the disturbance, during which twenty-two people were injured and fifty-seven were arrested, the Cisco Kid shouted, “Get their black asses!” Charges of racism would anger Rizzo as the years passed—he promoted blacks on the force and said he counted them among his “friends”—yet in their 1977 book, The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo, authors Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen observed: “Rizzo sought to capitalize on the antagonism that his supporters harbored for black demonstrators. It was a tactic he would use again and again. Ignore the criticism. Attack the critics and their friends. Turn it into an us-against-them situation.”
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