Frazier was still on top of Ali in round 7. When they were tangled in a clinch, Ali asked Joe, “Don’t you know I’m God?” Frazier replied, “Well, God, you’re gonna get whipped tonight.” As his fans joined in chanting “ALI! ALI! ALI!” Ali once again began throwing heavy leather at Joe in the eighth. Frazier again forced him to the ropes. Ali stood there, his hands at his sides, as Joe teed off on him, the crowd now chanting, “JOE! JOE! JOE!” When Ali returned to the corner at the end of the round, Dundee laid into him. “Stop playing!” he said. “Do you want to blow this fight? Do you want to blow everything? You’re giving away rounds and letting him build not only a lead but his confidence.”
Moving again in round 9, Ali clipped Frazier in the head with his jab, as Joe appeared now to be tiring himself. But Frazier once again backed Ali into the ropes and strafed him with a left hook to the head, then another to the body. When Ali extricated himself, Frazier pursued him to ring center and landed another left hook to the head. The blow wobbled Ali, whose eyes appeared to lose focus. Ali battled back by throwing wild rights as Frazier continued to advance on him. But just when it appeared that Ali was tottering on the edge of a cliff, he somehow found a second wind. Ali let go a quartet of left hooks, three of which landed solidly and staggered Joe. Ali winged him with combinations and then a left hook to the head as the round came to a close.
Early in round 10, Joe drove Ali to the ropes again and scored heavily to the body, only to be accidentally poked in the eye by Mercante as he was separating them from a clinch. Joe turned away briefly, looked over his shoulder, and gesticulated angrily as Durham cursed Mercante from the corner. Seizing upon this opportunity, Ali began firing off more combinations. From his corner, Dundee shouted, “Go, baby, go!” Just before the end of the round, Ali poked his head out of a clinch and shouted out to the crowd, “He’s out!” As the two men found their corners at the close of the tenth, Frazier was now ahead on only two of the three scorecards.
Joe took command in round 11. With Ali backed up against the ropes, Joe lunged at him with a left hook to the head that dazed Ali. Quickly, Joe followed with a left hook to the chest and another to the head. Ali began to sag to the canvas. Certain that Ali would go down for the count, Joe turned toward a neutral corner, only to turn back again and discover that Ali had abruptly straightened himself. Slack-jawed yet now clear-eyed, Ali backpedaled in an exaggerated wobble, his hands down at his sides, as if inviting Joe to come in and finish the job. Was Ali actually hurt? Or was he luring Frazier into a trap? Across the ring, Frazier held his own hands down at his sides and balked, unsure if Ali was laying a con on him. Futch would tease Joe for years for not pressing his advantage at that point and taking what he called “The Long Walk” across the canvas to reengage Ali.
Ali sat down on his stool in his corner at the end of the eleventh, where Dundee pleaded with him over the din in their ears. “Get off the ropes! Use your jab! Get back on your toes!” But Ali did only some of that in the twelfth and not much more in the thirteenth, as his jaw began to show signs of swelling. Frazier pinned Ali against the ropes and pounded on him. Ali staged a rally in the fourteenth, during which he pushed Frazier back with an array of hooks and combinations. Physically, Frazier looked as if he had been in a car crash and had gone through the windshield. His face was an abstraction of bruises and welts, his left eye now beginning to close.
Pushed by each other to the very edge of their endurance, Ali and Frazier lugged what remained of their strength and stamina to ring center and touched gloves as the fifteenth and final round commenced. Ali went to work quickly, throwing combinations to the head, as Frazier backed him to the ropes. Twenty seconds into the round, Frazier doubled up with a left hook to the body and the head. The first blow struck Ali on the elbow; the second one caught him on the jaw, jacked him into the air as his legs flew out from under him, the red tassels on his shoes fluttering under the hot ring lights. The crowd roared.
Quickly, Ali got up at the count of two. Dundee would later say, “He was out when he was hit and he was up when he hit the floor.” The roar grew louder. When Mercante concluded giving Ali the mandatory eight-count, Frazier rushed in to finish the job, firing off shots to the head and body. Frazier tagged Ali with another left hook to the jaw that caused Dunphy to gasp, “Ohhhh, what a shot.” But Ali would not go down again. With Joe on top of him, Ali finished the round, even staging a small rally as it drew to a close. At the bell, the roar grew louder still.
Overwhelmed with pride at how far they had come, Durham cradled Frazier in his big arms as a sea of commentators, cameramen, and boxing officials filled the ring in anticipation of the decision; Joe had the appearance of a frail child. Someone slipped a robe on Ali as Dundee snipped the laces of his gloves. Then announcer Johnny Addie stepped to the center of the ring and said, “Ladies and gentleman . . . Referee Arthur Mercante scores it eight to six, one round even, for Frazier. Artie Aidala scores it nine to six for Frazier.” The crowd erupted in wild cheers, as Ali lowered his head. “Bill Recht has it eleven rounds for Frazier, four rounds for Ali. The winner by unanimous decision and STILL heavyweight champion of the world, Joe Frazier!”
Joe stopped to see Ali in his dressing room. Seizing upon the physical ruin he had visited upon Frazier, Ali murmured, “You’re beautiful. You’re the real champ for now.” Ali was then taken to Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital to have his jaw X-rayed; he would not talk to the press until the following morning, when he sat in a curved-backed, upholstered parlor chair at the Hotel New Yorker and claimed he won “nine rounds.” He pointed out that the referee and two judges who voted against him had been appointed by the very same commission that had stripped him of his title. Of his fifteenth-round knockdown, he observed: “I saw the hook coming and I figured I would ride with it. But it was hard.” He added that he had no recollection of falling. “Boom, it was that quick,” he said. In terms of the overall importance of the defeat he had just suffered, he minimized it, explaining to Robert Lipsyte, of the New York Times: “News don’t last too long. Planes crash, ninety people die, it’s not news more than a day after. . . . World go on.”
The previous night, after the fight, cameras had whirred and clicked as Joe sat at his press conference and answered questions, his soggy green robe draped over his shoulder as beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. Welts had risen over both his eyes. Dry blood appeared alongside his left nostril. Pelemon held an ice bag to his swollen left cheek; Durham fed him pieces of chipped ice. Of Ali, he said, “He takes some punch. That shot I hit him with, I went down home and got that one. From out in the country.” Joe called him “a good man” yet thought Ali should apologize for the ghetto slurs with which he had showered him. Joe said that when Ali told him during prefight instructions, “Look out, nigger, I’m gonna kill ya,” he replied, “That’s what you’re gonna have to do.” Although Frazier was skeptical that Ali would even want a rematch, he claimed he would be all for it if the occasion arose. First, though, he planned to take some time off, perhaps even a year. “Me and Yank, we got to go home and take it easy for a while. Live a little,” he said. And then added: “God knows I whipped him.”
* * *
Only a few days later, Gene Kilroy, Ali’s business manager, was with Ali at the Essex House in New York when he received a call from the writer Budd Schulberg. “Gene,” Schulberg said, “I just heard that Joe Frazier has died.” Stunned, Kilroy looked over at Ali and passed along what Schulberg had told him. “What?” Ali replied, his eyes wide with consternation. When Kilroy hung up with Schulberg, Ali told him, “I will never fight again.” To confirm the report, Kilroy called Frazier’s physician, Dr. James C. Giuffre, at St. Luke’s and Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. Giuffre told him that Frazier had been admitted to the hospital with high blood pressure and related issues. The doctor said “it had been a little touch and go” at first, but that Joe was doing better and would be fine. Kilroy relayed the good news to Ali, who replied. “All praises to Allah
. I’m glad he’s okay.” Kilroy said later, “Ali really cared for Joe.”
Beyond his horrific facial wounds, Frazier was experiencing internal issues that only worsened in the hours and days that followed. Amid the chaos in the ring prior to the announcement of the decision, Don Dunphy reported, “Joe Frazier seems to be sick in his corner.” According to Durham, he and Frazier went back to the dressing room and finished off a bottle of champagne between them. At 1:45 A.M., they dropped by the victory party at the Statler Hilton, which drew one thousand revelers at thirty-five dollars a head and where Florence sat at a table signing autographs. As Duke Ellington and His Orchestra played in the ballroom, Joe found a secluded spot in the hotel kitchen, where he sat behind a pair of sunglasses and sipped from a glass of water; he confessed to a United Press International reporter that he was feeling “weak.” Later that Tuesday, after Florence had gone back to Philadelphia, he opened a bottle of champagne with Denise at the City Squire. “We did it, baby!” he said. And with a laugh, he took two long pulls and immediately threw it back up. Denise had never before seen him have trouble holding down alcohol. “He could eat nails and wash it down with white lightning and be fine,” Denise would say. “So yes, I could see he was not himself.”
For as long as Denise knew him, Joe did not call attention to any sicknesses that occasionally befell him, nor did he have any tolerance for even tender concern by others over the physical damage boxing caused. Whenever Florence or Denise would express any worry to that end, he would snap: “Cut the bullshit. This is what I do for a living; I don’t want to hear any more about it.” But in the days following the Ali bout, he would exhibit an array of alarming symptoms: elevated blood pressure, acute nausea, severe headaches, and a lowered pulse rate. On that Tuesday evening, Denise was so upset that she called Durham, who in turn summoned Dr. Edwin Campbell, the physician for the New York State Athletic Commission. Campbell would remember later that Frazier was “more exhausted than any fighter I had ever seen.” Upon giving him a cursory exam in his hotel room, he recommended that he order something light from room service and perhaps consider an enema. “A what?” Joe replied, his voice rising. Denise remembered, “Of course, he wanted no part of that. But I did order him some scrambled eggs and bacon.” By Wednesday evening, he could not keep any food down, urinate, or even walk. Again, she called Durham, who once again sent for Campbell. According to Denise, the doctor gave her “two red pills” and said, “Here, give these to him.” Not keen on taking drugs of any kind, Joe flushed them down the toilet. On Thursday evening, she placed a call to the Cloverlay suite in the hotel in search of Joe’s brother Tommy. She hoped he could spark Durham into action and get Joe to the hospital. Durham was still celebrating hard when Tommy told him, “Either you take him to the hospital or I am.” Denise would later say, “Oh yeah, they were all still drinking. Even the bellhops were loaded.”
Quickly, Durham hopped on the phone. For privacy, Campbell recommended that they go to a hospital in the Catskills, far away from any nosy reporters who would splash his condition across the front page. But Durham got ahold of Dr. Giuffre and arranged to sneak him into St. Luke’s. By car, they sped down the New Jersey Turnpike, dropped Denise off at her apartment, and proceeded to the hospital. Handing Joe off to Giuffre, Durham headed to catch a plane to the United Kingdom, where he was scheduled to do the color commentary for the Joe Bugner–Henry Cooper bout that Tuesday. Only Joe Hand Sr. stayed with Frazier during the harrowing weekend that followed. “His blood pressure was so high, they were concerned he was going to have a stroke,” said Hand, who sat by his bedside. “Doctors were running in and out of his room. His blood pressure would go up and then it would go down.” Hand prayed: Let him live. In his autobiography, Frazier would remember that Giuffre sent him to the recovery room, where he was placed on a bed of ice. “I stayed like that all night. Was it a dream that a spirit took my hand in the wee hours and told me I’d be okay? To this day I can recall His presence. His touch on my hand.” According to his daily diary, Richard Nixon placed a call from the White House that Saturday at 2:42 P.M. but did not get through.
Cloverlay denied that Frazier was in the hospital when first contacted by the papers. When asked why Joe had more or less dropped out of public view—he had canceled an interview with Howard Cosell and some other appearances—a spokesman said he had merely come down with a case of the flu. But when a reporter spotted Frazier on Monday in an anteroom at the hospital eating lunch, Giuffre provided a more accurate evaluation of his condition. He said that Frazier had a blood-pressure reading of 180/90, which he seemed to think had more to do with “tension” than any issue that emerged from the blows he had endured. Stable enough to leave the hospital on Monday, Joe stopped in to see Rizzo at his campaign headquarters, where the General wrapped him in a hug, then spent the evening at his home in Montgomery County. There, he took some aspirin for a headache and later took some more when he was unable to sleep. When he showed up at the hospital the following day, ostensibly to show films of some of his old fights to the patients in the drug clinic, Frazier appeared “sluggish and washed out,” according to Dr. Giuffre. To get his blood pressure under control—it was once again abnormally high—the doctor admitted him for a battery of tests and placed him on an intravenous feeding tube. Along with his elevated blood pressure, he had “transient hematuria” (blood in the urine). He would remain in the hospital for twelve days.
Churning amid the scuttlebutt that circulated during this period—which included the speculation by a British doctor that Ali appeared to have been doped during the bout, perhaps without knowing it (Ali dismissed this as “silly”), it was rumored that Frazier had suffered a detached retina in his left eye at the hands of Ali. While that rumor would prove to be unfounded, he had been having trouble with his vision since he came back from the Olympics in 1964. According to Dr. Myron Yanoff, a Philadelphia-based ophthalmologist who examined him in July 1971, he had congenital cataracts. The condition was in its early stages, not yet affecting his right eye but “slightly more advanced with a mild decrease of his vision in his left eye.” Yanoff said he apprised Frazier of “the potential worsening of his cataracts with his continued boxing” and “the risks to his vision.” Even the small deficiency he had in his left eye at that point explained the undefended shots he took from Ramos, Ellis, and Ali, who threw long right hands that were delivered at a speed and an angle that were hard for Joe to pick up. As his vision in both eyes declined in the ensuing years, he would have corrective surgery, buy contact lenses by the boxful, and, as Gypsy Joe before him had done, pass his eye tests by memorizing the charts. None of this would be publicly known during his career.
As Frazier recovered in the hospital, United Press International broke a story that cast grave concern over his prognosis. The source of it was Dr. Campbell, who speculated with a reporter that based on his examination of Joe in New York, he could very well have suffered a severe head injury. According to Campbell, the symptoms Frazier presented were consistent with either a concussion or a subdural hematoma (a blood clot between the outer two layers of the brain). Upon hearing this off-the-cuff diagnosis, Dr. Giuffre scoffed and dismissed it entirely, saying that Joe had none of the symptoms that suggested either. Although he had been experiencing headaches, they were neither persistent nor accompanied by vertigo or a dilation of the pupils. Within a day of the report, Campbell claimed he had been misquoted and added that there had been “no findings present to indicate that [Frazier] suffered a severe head injury.” Had there been, Campbell said, he never would have allowed him to leave New York without having him evaluated in a hospital. Campbell said Frazier was “suffering from severe emotional and physical exhaustion.”
Visitors streamed in and out of his suite. Doctors stopped by to have their pictures taken with him in his faux-tiger-skin robe. Fruit and flower arrangements came in, which Joe dispersed to the nurses on the floor. Friends dropped by, often with their friends. Telephone calls flooded the ho
spital switchboard, including one from Bob Hope. For a special scheduled to air in early April, Hope asked if he could tape a segment with Joe in Philadelphia; Frazier told him he would be happy to do it. Hundreds of cards, letters, and telegrams poured in from across the world. A Cloverlay secretary stopped in and said they had received a call from someone at Columbia Pictures, who proposed doing a biopic that he claimed would be certain to gross $20 million ($115 million in 2018 dollars). To battle boredom, Joe sat across the two hospital beds that had been pushed together for him and strummed his guitar. As his blood pressure came down and he began to feel better, he would slip out of the hospital to buy clothes, do a television interview, or attend a car show; he even swung up to New York to watch the Knockouts perform and drove back the same evening. An emergency exit door in the stairwell at the hospital was always left ajar for Denise, who would show up in the evening with a piece of American Tourister luggage packed with fried chicken, her special potato salad, and the apple turnovers Joe liked. She would leave before the day shift came in at 7 A.M.
Upon discharging Joe from the hospital on March 27, Giuffre pronounced him “fully recovered.” In the near term, Frazier planned to embark on a trip down to Beaufort to find his mother a new house and was discussing a possible trip to Europe with the Knockouts in May or June. Although Durham had raised the possibility that Frazier would retire—“What does he still have to prove? Why push it?”—Joe was not yet prepared to walk away from boxing, particularly with the big money that was still out there to be scooped up. But he had no immediate plans to step back into the ring, if only because of his tax liability. Once his taxes, expenses, and payments to shareholders were accounted for, Frazier would clear something like $750,000 from his $2.5 million. Both he and Ali were aghast at the tax bite they incurred, including $350,000 each from the State of New York. By virtue of their 60-40 split, Cooke cleared $450,000, while Perenchio took home $350,000. While Cooke would entertain grandiose visions of a rematch at the Forum in L.A., Frazier told reporters that a second fight would happen only on his terms. Of his asking price of five million dollars, he told reporters that there would be no 50-50 split with Ali. It would be, as he put it, “All mine.”
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