Had he fought in a less complicated era, chances are he would have had that leverage. But what Frazier would find and could not bring himself to accept—not then, not ever—was that it was not enough to just be champion. Even in defeat—perhaps especially so—Ali had galvanized his base, which looked upon him as something more than just an athlete. In his column in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin the day after the fight, Sandy Grady observed: “Ali lives too deeply at the heart of our troubles to vanish.” Literal tears were shed at his undoing by Frazier, whom writer Hunter S. Thompson chopped into pieces in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. For Thompson, the outcome was “a very painful experience in every way.” According to Thompson, the victory by Frazier was “a proper end to the Sixties. . . . [with] Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death. Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand.” For Northern Ireland activist Bernadette Devlin, Ali’s loss was nothing short of “tragedy.” When the journalist Jimmy Breslin told her immediately afterward, “You act like you lost yourself,” the forlorn Devlin replied, “I did.”
Jerry Izenberg dropped in on Joe at his gym a few weeks after the fight. “He had steam coming out of his ears,” the Newark-Star Ledger columnist would remember. Ali had been on television giving his assessment of the outcome and, as Izenberg observed, “Only he could convince America that he actually won.” On one of the walls of the gym was a blown-up photograph of Ali on his back in the fifteenth round. When Izenberg commented on it, Frazier started to say, “That motherfucker . . .” But he stopped himself and said instead, “Come on, we’ll get some sandwiches. Then we’ll come back and I’ll tell you what I really think.” They hopped in the car and drove to a nearby deli, where one of the assistants who had come along went inside for the sandwiches. As Frazier, Izenberg, and another assistant stood outside on the sidewalk, three young black boys came running toward them.
“Joe Frazier! Joe Frazier! Joe Frazier!”
Frazier turned to the other assistant and said, “You gotta go to the car. Get the autographed pictures. Bring them back. Hurry up. I want to help these kids.” He then turned to the boys.
“What are you doing out?” he said. “You should be in school.”
“It’s lunchtime,” said one of the boys.
“Jeez,” Frazier said, handing them each a picture. “I never thought of that.”
One of the boys then said: “My daddy says Muhammad Ali was drugged.”
Izenberg would remember, “Joe came as close as he had ever been to turning white.” Frazier bent down, looked the boy in the eye, and said, “You run home and you tell your daddy, he’s right. He was drugged. I drugged him with a left hook.”
Chapter Eight
Down Goes Frazier
Joe and Dolly, shelling beans on the porch at Brewton. Philadelphia Bulletin
Live Oaks draped with Spanish moss engulfed the weathered house he lived in as a boy. In the front yard were bare patches of dirt and the rusted remains of a broken-down car. Out in the back, where some digging would surely unearth the odd jug of corn liquor that had been buried beneath the hog pen years before and long forgotten, a clutch of chickens pecked at the ground and clucked. Not far from the oak tree where he had hung his do-it-yourself heavy bag, which he had loaded with rags and corncobs and bricks, Joe knelt down on one knee, took aim with a .22-caliber rifle, and began squeezing off rounds at a row of bottles and cans. Mostly, he missed; Joe was always erratic with guns, once accidently discharging one into the leather upholstery of one of his cars. With an eye on the laundry she had hanging on a line nearby, Dolly warned him not to shoot holes in her only set of good sheets.
Twelve years had passed since he had shoved off on a Greyhound bus with a change of clothes and a sack of fried chicken. In the wake of his victory over Ali, he had come back in April 1971 with Florence and their five children in two Cadillacs, and with an invitation to speak before the South Carolina State Legislature. He would become the first black male to do so since Reconstruction. In an interview with reporters upon his arrival back in Beaufort, he said he just planned “to rap with those fellas” at the statehouse, not deliver a political speech. The previous fall, South Carolina had overwhelmingly elected a moderate liberal governor, John C. West, who had promised in his inaugural address that under his administration the government would be color blind, but Frazier had visited enough through the years to know that whatever change had occurred had been small, and that “some damn people never gonna change.” Were it not for the fact that, as he said, “I got a mommy down here,” he was not certain if he would ever come back. Seeing her baby boy again, the old woman would say with a gleam in her eye, “Dolly Frazier, mother of the Champ. How sweet it is.”
Only the date on the calendar had changed in South Carolina. Philadelphia Daily News columnist Tom Cushman discovered that when he joined Joe on his trip back home. With a night to kill, he stopped in a tavern on Parris Island to sop up a beer and absorb some local color. Having once served in the Marine Corps, he had heard Parris Island was one of the worst places on earth, given to unbearable heat and swarms of mosquitos. At the bar was a group of drill instructors. “We got into a conversation,” Cushman told me. “Once they discovered I had been in the Marine Corps, I had no trouble talking with them.” Upon hearing that he had come down from Philadelphia with Frazier, it quickly became clear to Cushman that they looked upon Joe as “almost a national hero” for beating “Clay,” whom they despised for his evasion of the draft. From 1962 until 1973, two hundred thousand recruits passed through Parris Island on their way to Vietnam, while “Clay” hid behind lawyers and shot off his big mouth. These leathernecks loved Frazier. “Now, there is a tough guy,” one of them told Cushman. “He gave that nigger the whipping he deserved.”
A standing-room-only crowd of five hundred people came to hear Joe speak at the South Carolina State House in Columbia. He had come up from Beaufort in a six-car caravan led by a police escort that morning. In a meet-and-greet, Governor West presented him with a silver jewelry box, as Florence and her five children looked on with pride. Ushered into the House chamber to a thirty-second ovation, he was introduced before the joint session of the legislature by State Senator Ralph Gasque, a champion of underprivileged blacks who, as a former amateur boxer, held the distinction of having leveled a fellow pol with a one-punch knockout in a quarrel on the senate floor. By way of setting the scene, it did not go unnoticed by Cushman, Dave Anderson of the New York Times, and other reporters in attendance that the Confederate “Stars and Bars” was displayed along with the American and state flags; and that there were only three blacks among the 124 representatives in attendance and none among the forty-six senators. While Frazier did not write the speech he would give (it was penned by his publicist, Joey Goldstein), it expressed his deepest beliefs in that it called for unity between the races. And he delivered it with an aplomb that would have seemed improbable for someone who just a few years before had been recommended for elocution classes.
“I say, we must save our people, especially the young ones,” he said. “There’s this drug thing now. Sometimes I’m driving around and I see kids, moving through the streets of Philly, heading for trouble, and I wonder to myself, ‘Where’s Mom and Dad?’
“I come back to my hometown of Beaufort, and I can see some things have improved. But too many things haven’t. Mostly, it has to do with people and the way they think.
“I sit down and ask myself, ‘Why does this have to go on, and on, and on?’ We don’t have time for it. We need to work together, play together, pray together, and do everything together.”
To advance the ideals he had spoken of, Joe volunteered to build a playground in Beaufort. According to Joe Hand Sr., who stayed behind in South Carolina to iron out the details, the offer fell apart after an awkward exchange with a city official, who pointedly asked: “So who’s going to use this playground?�
� Once Hand had explained to him that it would be used by children of both races, and that Joe was adamant that there would be one and not two separate water fountains, he received a call in his motel room from a detective with the Beaufort police. Genial yet firm, the man said, “Look, you would be doing me a favor and yourself a favor if you took the next plane out of here.” Hand peeked through his window blinds and saw two unmarked cars idling in the parking lot. He packed his bag. A plainclothesman then picked him up and dropped him at the airport. Hand later told me, “They did not want a black person building a playground in a white neighborhood that was going to be racially integrated.” Hand flew home to Philadelphia and reported back to Frazier.
“Fuck ’em,” Joe snapped. “We won’t build it then.”
Was Joe surprised?
“Not at all,” Hand said. “He was more surprised that I was surprised.”
From South Carolina, it was on to Washington and the White House, where President Nixon invited him for Sunday services. Speaking in the East Room before an assembly of three hundred was Reverend Carl W. Haley, of the Arlington Forest Methodist Church; joining him were the Singing Cadets, a fifty-seven-member choir from Texas A&M University. In introducing Frazier, Nixon observed: “Nothing comes easy in life. Not everyone can be Champ; not everyone can be athletic. But everyone can be the best and try to make something of himself.” Frazier and Florence stood in the receiving line with Mr. and Mrs. Nixon. When a reporter asked Frazier for his impressions of the sermon by Haley—the thrust of which was how “compassion is the cardinal principle of progress”—he said it was “beautiful,” yet noted: “The reverend was a little long-winded.” Florence told another reporter that she hoped Joe would give up boxing, observing: “I want him to be a husband and work like a regular man.” Told what she had said, Frazier said with a shrug, “All wives are like that.” In a conversation later that day with White House counsel Charles W. Colson, Nixon called Frazier “a fine guy.”
COLSON: Well, he apparently is, uh—
PRESIDENT NIXON: Strong.
COLSON: —from all the reports we got, he is sympathetic to you.
PRESIDENT NIXON: Well, whether [or not], he certainly is good with young people. I mean he—
COLSON: Is that right?
PRESIDENT NIXON: —he had the young blacks, he says, “Look, you’ve got to work, kids.” Well, that’s why we had him.
COLSON: Well, we have Sammy Davis, who is—
PRESIDENT NIXON: Yeah.
COLSON: —smelling around—
PRESIDENT NIXON: We’ll see. Wait just a little while and then we’ll do it. [Laughs.]
COLSON: If we, if we pick up a few fellows like that, uh, it has quite an effect.
From the South Carolina Legislature to the Nixon White House and on to Philadelphia, it seemed to be raining politicians. On his way back from Washington, he stopped at the Shack Restaurant for a fifty-dollar-a-head fund-raiser for Rizzo, who announced to his nine hundred partisans in attendance: “I couldn’t let the city fall into the hands of the lefties.” And there he was the following day, atop the back seat of an open convertible with Mayor Tate in a motorcade through Center City in celebration of “Joe Frazier Day,” the fourth such event in his honor since he had come back from the Olympics. Upon canceling an appointment the following Tuesday to speak before the Pennsylvania State Legislature in Harrisburg, he turned his attention from political glad-handing to singing. To get his voice back into shape, he hopped back down to Charleston for some shows with the Knockouts at the Porgy and Bess Club. There, he conceded to a reporter that Florence was not pleased with his vocation. “To her, it’s one big headache,” he said. “She would like me to stay home and be a gardener, or a bellhop around the house.” From Charleston, it was off with the Knockouts for a three-day engagement in Lake Tahoe and then to Europe, where in May and June 1971 he had a six-week slate of concerts in twenty-nine cities.
The tour was a flop. Fewer than one thousand fans showed up for their first performance, at the seven-thousand-seat Pellikaan Hall outside Amsterdam. Only 250 people came out to see him in Cologne, and Frazier had to be persuaded to go on by the concert organizer. Five hundred patrons came to see him at the eight-thousand-seat West Berlin Sport Palace, which caused one cynic to observe that “it looked like there were almost as many persons onstage as in the audience.” Joe shrugged it off, saying: “It looked like a crowd to me.” When his traveling party of twenty-six moved on to Vienna, Joe was nowhere to be found, which caused a fair amount of consternation. What happened to Joe? He failed to show up for a luncheon with U.S. ambassador John P. Humes and a group of Austrian sportswriters. When he showed up the following day, he explained, “Yesterday was my day off.” Only three hundred fans came to see him in Vienna at the two-thousand-seat Stadthalle. The show in Copenhagen was canceled when only twenty-eight seats were sold. When he was two hours late for an appointment with Lord Mayor Joseph Cairns in Belfast, Cairns huffed: “I am a very busy man and there is a limit to how long I can hang around.” Apparently, Frazier had been stopped in his Rolls-Royce and searched by British troops. At an engagement in Limerick, Frazier walked off the stage when only sixty people showed up, leaving the annoyed theater manager to announce that the show would not go on. Upon his arrival back in the United States, Frazier observed plaintively, “Man, you can’t club people over the head to make them come out.”
Although he would say that he would “rather sing than fight,” there was no getting around the reviews. Even ardent admirer Red Smith once chimed in with a poke upon hearing him perform at the Concord Hotel, observing that the Knockouts “sounded like kitchenware falling down stairs.” Soon after Frazier returned from Europe, he played with the Knockouts at the Temple University Music Festival in Ambler, Pennsylvania, in a joint program with the Pittsburgh Pops, and was once again skewered critically. Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Samuel L. Singer observed, “There is no more reason to pay to hear the world boxing champion sing than there would be to pay to see Engelbert Humperdinck or Roberta Flack box.” Singer recommended that the Knockouts acquire a “coach,” lest they be destined to “run out of places to visit for the first and last time.” Although Joe said he never read the paper, he began taking voice lessons. Coach Carlo Menotti had him doing exercises that included singing while lying on his back with his legs up in the air. He quipped, “In a month, I’ll have him singing ‘La donna e mobile.’”
* * *
George Foreman would remember years later the fear Joe Frazier instilled in him. Given how the two bouts between them unfolded, it seems possible that he was merely giving a chummy nod to an old friend. But in a Playboy interview in 1995, he spoke of how “really scared” he had been of Frazier when they fought in Kingston in January 1973. Along with the fact that he knew Frazier never let up, that he pursued his opponent with the aggression of an unfed wolverine, it did not escape Foreman that Joe had “that look.” He had seen it before. It was as hard as steel, and it reminded him of the glower he had seen on the faces of some of the characters he used to tangle with as a strapping young juvenile delinquent in the Houston Fifth Ward, called “The Bloody Fifth” for the shootings and stabbings that regularly occurred there. Although he would betray no such anxiety in the days leading up to his encounter with Joe, assuring the press that he was “gonna knock him stone cold,” Foreman would concede years later that Joe was the only opponent who had ever intimidated him. “Nobody else,” he said. “Before or after.”
Big, strong, and dangerous with either hand, Foreman had endeared himself to the American public at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. In what would stand as a counterpoint to the provocative protests of sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who, during the medal ceremony, each famously raised a gloved fist in a salute to black power, Foreman waved a small American flag in the ring upon capturing the gold medal. He had only been boxing a year. With an amateur record of 22-3, the young man who turned his life around by joining the J
ob Corps at age sixteen found himself at the doorstep of a potentially lucrative pro career. Under the guidance of a trio of veteran boxing hands—Dick Sadler, who had worked with Archie Moore and Sonny Liston; his cousin Sandy Saddler (spelled with two d’s), the former world featherweight champion who would be remembered for his four brutal bouts with Willie Pep; and Moore himself, who held the world light heavyweight championship longer than anyone in history (December 1952 through May 1962)—Foreman debuted professionally on the undercard of the Frazier-Quarry bout at Madison Square Garden by knocking out Don Waldheim in June 1969 and clicked off thirty-six consecutive victories. Of the thirty-three knockouts he recorded, thirty-two came in fewer than five rounds, and ten of those came in the first round. But the quality of his opponents was something less than top tier. Only Gregorio Peralta (whom he beat twice) and George Chuvalo were ranked. Still, the WBA positioned Foreman behind only Ali as a contender, conveniently assigning him to the top spot when negotiations for Ali-Frazier II stalled and Frazier agreed to defend his championship against Foreman.
Neither Durham nor Eddie Futch was in favor of giving Foreman an immediate shot. Taller, heavier, and with a longer reach than Frazier, he was the type of opponent who, as Durham would say, “could leave you with your brain shook and your money took.” Plus, Ali would bring with him the certainty of a far better payday than the $850,000 Frazier would get for fighting Foreman. Ideally, Durham and Futch would have preferred to see Joe fight Ali a second time and call it quits while he was still in good health. But an obstacle stood in the way. Though Frazier had said again and again that “if Clay is ready tomorrow, I am ready today,” nothing happened. Through the press, they sniped at each other. Joe claimed that, since he was the champion, “Clay needs me!” Ali claimed that without him, Frazier would not be able to “draw flies.” “Joe needs me!” said Ali. According to Frazier, Ali would occasionally call him and say, in a conspiratorial whisper through the receiver: “We two big bad niggers, why don’t we fight?” But Ali demanded an even split of the purse, and as far as Frazier was concerned, that was not going to happen. He would die and go to hell before he gave Ali that. Frazier would later clarify his position, saying: “If he had conducted himself right and respected me as a man, it would be different.”
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