Off to a commanding start, Ali would more or less have his way through the early going. Extending a gloved hand to hold the charging Frazier at bay—the same “yardsticking” tactic he had used against Liston to buy time in the fifth round of their first bout—Ali snapped off a hard right cross to the chin that caused Frazier to dip toward the canvas. The crowd gasped. But Frazier recovered and plowed ahead, working the body as Ali clutched Joe by the back of the head. Unlike the referee in their second bout, Padilla would have none of it; he stopped the action and gave Ali a warning. Ali opened the fourth round with more “yardsticking” and then unleashed four left hooks, scoring heavily with three of them. He then backed into the ropes, covered up, and summoned Joe to come in and get him, just as he had done against Foreman, in a strategy he would come to call the Rope-a-Dope. Foreman had punched himself to exhaustion in Zaire, but Frazier had promised that he would “embalm” Ali on the ropes if he opted to challenge him there. With Frazier firing away with both hands, Ali stepped to the right and turned Frazier, who now had his back to the ropes as Ali strafed him with right hands. But Frazier battled back, belting Ali with a solid left hook to the head and forcing him into the center of the ring. Late in the fourth round, as Ali used his superior hand speed to beat Frazier to the punch, announcer Don Dunphy observed: “This has been a one-sided fight so far.”
On his stool at the end of the fourth, Ali was breathing hard and leaning back on the ropes behind him for support. But prior to the bell, he stood up and pumped both gloves in the air to lead the crowd in a chant of “ALI! ALI! ALI!” For the better part of the fifth round, Ali planted himself on the ropes, as Frazier snapped his head sideways with a short right hand and then caught him with another. Ali asked, “Where did you get that right hand?” Frazier replied, “From George Benton.” Ali covered up. Frazier pounded him on deltoids and biceps in order to weaken his jab, which had been another tactic shown to him by Benton. When Ali lowered his gloves, Joe stepped in and pummeled him underneath his heart and to his ribs. From his corner, Angelo Dundee shouted at Ali: “Get off the goddamn ropes!” As Ali opened himself up in the process of throwing a right uppercut, Frazier hammered him with a left hook to the jaw reminiscent of the shot with which he had floored Ali in the fifteenth round of their first meeting. That had also come on the heels of a right uppercut from Ali. Given the peril it invited, Ali had rarely thrown it in their second bout but found himself forced to employ it again as Frazier poured on intense pressure. By the end of the fifth round, the crowd was now chanting: “FRAZIER! FRAZIER! FRAZIER!”
Chroniclers of the Thrilla in Manila would later write that it was a drama in three acts. Ahead on two of the scorecards 3–0–1 and on the third at 3–1, Ali had prevailed convincingly in act 1. But act 2 would belong to Frazier. He captured the fifth round on two of the three scorecards and won the sixth unanimously as he pressed the pedal to the floor. He walloped Ali with a left hook to the head, followed him into the ropes, and then walloped him again with another one. Later in the round, as Ali effected a counterclockwise retreat, Frazier shook him again with a long right hand to the jaw. When Ali came out for the seventh round, he told Joe: “Old Joe Frazier, why, I thought you were washed up.” Frazier replied, “Somebody told you all wrong, pretty boy.” Up on his toes now, Ali peppered Frazier with long left hands. Even as Frazier remained the aggressor, Ali controlled the action, breaking it with clinches and resuming it as he pleased. Between the seventh and the eighth rounds, analyst Ken Norton observed that Frazier was “in better condition” than Ali, who was breathing hard on his stool in the corner. Round 8 saw Ali plant his feet in the center of the ring and go for the knockout, but Frazier covered up and drove Ali to the ropes, where Joe pummeled him to the body and head. Frazier again drove Ali to the ropes in the ninth and tenth, grunting as he dug in with body shots. By the end of the tenth round, two of three scorecards were even (4–4–2), with Ali ahead on the third (5–3–2).
My father wrote in Sports Illustrated: “Ali sat on his stool like a man ready to be staked out in the sun. His head was bowed, and when he raised it, his eyes rolled from the agony of exhaustion. ‘Force yourself, Champ!’ his corner cried. ‘Go down to the well once more!’ begged Bundini, tears streaming down his face. ‘The world needs ya, Champ!’”
Act 3 began with Ali on his toes again. Frazier backed him into his corner in the eleventh round, where he banged him to the head and body, yet Ali spun back into the center of the ring. Somehow, he found another gear, while Frazier began to flag, both of his eyes beginning to swell. From his seat at a closed-circuit venue in Philadelphia, his ophthalmologist began to grow worried. “At the time, I was one of the very few people in the world who knew how poor his vision was in his left eye,” Yanoff said later. “I was horrified when, toward the tenth round, his eyelids started to swell over his one good eye, his right eye. In the last three rounds, the lid was swollen shut. He could see only out of his mostly blind left eye.” With Frazier unable to see, he labored to get inside, where he could track Ali by the sound of his breathing. Through the twelfth round, Ali scored heavily as Joe was now bleeding from the mouth. Midway through the thirteenth, Ali pivoted to his right and began dancing away from Frazier, counterclockwise. As Joe followed, Ali battered him with a left-right combination that sent his mouthpiece sailing into the sixth row of the ringside seats. A chopping right appeared as if it would topple Joe in ring center, but Ali was too exhausted to press his advantage. Ali landed punches at will as Joe plodded forward, feeling his way.
From his vantage point in the corner during the fourteenth round, Eddie Futch could see what Yanoff had spotted from more than eight thousand miles away: the end was near. Right hands caromed off Frazier, sending sweat flying into the ring lights. By now the blows of both men were landing even harder, as their gloves had become waterlogged to the consistency of wet cement. With his field of vision compromised, Joe became a stationary target. “Frazier is hurt!” Dunphy alerted. “Frazier is badly hurt.” Exhausted himself, his arms now heavy, Ali could not bring Frazier down. Joe would not capitulate, not now or ever, not if he had a single breath remaining in his heaving lungs. Futch knew that the outcome could be unforgiving. He had seen seven fighters die in the ring, including that one in Detroit in 1949: Talmadge Bussey, whose brothers had squabbled over whether to send him back out to meet his fate in the ninth. One had wanted to throw in the towel, the other had wanted to gamble and give him another round. For Futch, in this moment that called upon him to display nothing short of moral courage, there was never a question which brother he would be. Guided back to his corner by Padilla at the end of the fourteenth round, Frazier sat on his stool, bracing himself on the ring rope behind him. He was breathing hard as Futch leaned down to speak to him.
“Joe,” he said, “I’m going to stop it.”
“No, no, Eddie, ya can’t do that to me,” Joe replied. He began to rise.
“You couldn’t see in the last two rounds. What makes ya think ya gonna see in the fifteenth?”
“I want him, boss.”
“Sit down, son,” Futch said. “It’s all over. No one will ever forget what you did here today.”
Ali stood up from his stool and raised a weary arm in victory. Surrounded by Dundee, Pacheco, Brown, and the others, he collapsed in exhaustion to the canvas. Someone helped him back onto his stool. Others began fanning him with towels. Ali sat with his head down, his elbows on his knees. With his gloves now off, Frazier walked over and told him solemnly: “Good fight.” Dunphy leaned in and asked if there had been a point where he had any doubt that he would win. “Round 10,” said Ali, still breathing hard. “I was surprised Joe had so much stamina.” President Marcos found his way to Ali, congratulated him, and presented him with the trophy that was now legitimately his and his alone.
* * *
When Bob Goodman came to get Joe for the press conference, he found him sobbing on a bench in his dressing room. Futch had his arms around his shoulder,
consoling him. “Guys, you have nothing to be ashamed of,” the publicist told them. “It was one of the greatest fights in history. Come on, the press is downstairs.” His eyes embedded in swollen flesh, Joe looked up and replied, “Okay. Get my shoes.” Quickly, Goodman stepped away and hurried across the hall to convey this piece of information to Ali, who had previously told him that he was in no shape to attend. Goodman would say years later, “He was stretched out on a couch and could barely move. I had never seen him so exhausted.”
Goodman now told Ali, “Muhammad! Muhammad! Frazier is going. And he lost!”
Ali perked up and said, “Frazier is going?”
Gingerly, Ali lifted himself up and told Goodman, “Get me my comb.” Goodman would remember, “Ali always had to look good.”
Wearing a pair of sunglasses perched atop his puffy face, Frazier was gracious in his praise of Ali. “My man fought a great fight,” he said. When he was asked if he was upset that Futch stopped it, he said candidly that he was “not very pleased about it,” quickly adding: “But as you know, Ed is the boss.” Another reporter asked: “How beat up were you?” Frazier replied, “Not beat up. . . . My eye closed on me.” New York Times reporter Dave Anderson said years later, “He sat there and took his questions and was very cognizant of everything. Then everybody began to wonder, ‘Where is Muhammad?’ . . . It was a good forty-five minutes before Ali came out. And when he did, he just kind of wobbled out and sat down. And somebody asked—I think it was the first question: ‘What was it like in there?’”
“Gentlemen, what you saw tonight was next to death,” he said. “I always knew Joe Frazier was great, but he was even greater than I thought he was. I could not take those punches he took tonight.”
As Ali fielded questions, it occurred to Anderson: If you had just come off the street, looked at the two men and had to guess which won the fight, “you would have thought, ‘Hey, Frazier won it!” Had you arrived at that conclusion, it would only be because while Frazier looked as if he had been worked over in an alley on the wrong side of Manila, Ali called to mind a colorful kite that had gotten caught on a high-tension wire, its tangled pieces flapping in the wind. Quietly, Ali said: “My arms hurt. My hips hurt. My eyes hurt. My brain hurts. Everything hurts.” He said the late rounds were so hard “you want to throw up.” Asked what was next, he said, “There is a great possibility that you saw the last of Ali. . . . Let Norton, Foreman, Frazier, or whoever fight for the title. I want to get out of it.” Newark Star-Ledger columnist Jerry Izenberg told me, “It was such a brutal, brutal fight that Ali pissed blood for a long time.”
Ali attended the celebration held in his honor at the Malacañang Palace. Anderson described the scene: “It was gorgeous. You walked in and there were two staircases going up to the second floor. And in the area between the staircases, there was this huge mother-of-pearl chandelier.” While Don King danced with Imelda Marcos to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” Ali “kind of shuffled into an upstairs room and sat in a chair very stiffly,” according to Anderson. “He just sat there with his hands cupped in front of him, as if he were holding a small bird. And you could see he was sore. He could just hardly move. And everybody came up to talk to him and, you know, he could not even shake their hands. He just kind of touched their hands. He looked up at them and smiled, hardly said a word other than ‘hello’ and ‘thank you.’” In his piece for Sports Illustrated, my father captured Ali as he was eating from a plate of food that Imelda had earlier filled: “Ali never appeared so vulnerable and fragile, so pitiably unmajestic, so far from the universe he claims as his alone. He could barely hold his fork, and he lifted the food slowly up to his bottom lip, which had been scraped pink. The skin on his face was dull and blotched, drained of that familiar childlike wonder.” Every organ in his body had been pulverized.
Upon seeing her father immediately after the fight, young Weatta Frazier and her siblings were alarmed. “We were in tears,” she said. “Except for Marvis. You know how he is. He said, ‘Pop’ll get him next time.’” Frazier told his children, “Nothing to worry about. Daddy is fine.” Even with the bruises that covered his face, which he soaked in a bathroom sink full of ice back in his suite, Frazier showed up later at the party held for him on the roof of the Hyatt House full of cheerful exuberance. He jumped onstage, grabbed the microphone, and asked the audience, “What’s happening?” Along with the band, he sang an old favorite, “Knock on Wood.” Then he posed for photographs and did a spin on the dance floor before calling it an evening. The following day, he held court with reporters as he reclined on his bed. Both of his eyes were swollen to the point that he was unable to see who had asked him a question. Denise Menz would remember, “He told me to call out their names so he knew who he was addressing.” In his coverage in Sports Illustrated, my father observed: “The scene cannot be forgotten: This good and gallant man lying there, embodying the remains of a will that had carried him so far—now surely too far.” Even so, Frazier would think he had not been permitted to go far enough, that if he had only been allowed to come out for the fifteenth round, the outcome could have been written far differently.
Given the long and complicated history of his warfare with Ali, the ending did not go down easily for Frazier, even if he concealed that in Manila. At one point later, Izenberg said that Benton had told him that when Eddie had advised Joe in the corner that he was stopping the fight, Frazier stated he would never talk to him again if he did. Even more upset was Menz. Of Futch, Menz would say more than once: “If I had had a gun, I would have shot him. Joe had worked so hard and had come so far and now to have it taken away from him, like, with just one round to go? You know what I mean?” Contrary to the widely agreed-upon opinion that Frazier was in big trouble by the end of the fourteenth, she contended that Ali was in no better shape than Joe and that neither had enough power left to inflict any substantial harm. “Ali was dead on his feet. So was Joe. What were they going to do to one another at that point?” Menz said. So noisy behind the scenes in her criticism of Futch, Menz conceded that Joe would become exasperated with her and growl, “Let it go, would ya?” But he himself would not let it go, not in that place deep inside himself where he contemplated alternate realities. Even though he was behind on all three of the scorecards and needed a knockout to win, Frazier could not help but believe Eddie had denied him his chance to pull it out. He was certain Yank Durham would have sent him out for the fifteenth.
Fueling any lingering belief that he had been somehow shortchanged was a story that went around that if Frazier had not been preempted by Futch, Ali would have tossed in the towel. A quote by Ali in the 1991 oral history Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, by Thomas Hauser, appeared to give energy to the speculation: “Frazier quit just before I did. I didn’t think I could fight anymore.” Can we take him at his word? Was he actually thinking of quitting? Or was Ali simply acknowledging the extreme to which both of them had been pushed? Only he himself would ever know, yet there are those who say to this day that they saw evidence of precisely that. Marvis Frazier told me that he and Cloverlay middleweight Willie “The Worm” Monroe were standing in the aisle not far from Ali’s corner and were convinced he was on the verge of packing it in. “We were waving across the ring at Mr. Futch not to stop it, but we could not get his attention,” said Marvis. Gordon Peterson, a publicist assigned by King to the Frazier camp, said that “when Ali came back to the corner at the end of the fourteenth round, he could barely walk. Of course, we will never know, but I would not have been surprised had he not come out.” He was not the only one.
And yet others would adamantly argue the point. “Total crap,” said Gene Kilroy, who was in the corner. While Angelo Dundee was still alive, he always discounted it as fiction. Given how he had shoved Clay out of the corner with his afflicted eye in the first Liston bout, it seemed highly unlikely that he would not have done the same in Manila when the bell called his fighter out for the fifteenth round. “Never happened,” Dund
ee said. Philadelphia Daily News columnist Tom Cushman told me that if there was a juncture where Ali was poised to quit, it occurred at the end of the tenth round, when Ali himself said he was uncertain if his legs would go out from beneath him and he would faint. Cushman observed, “It was the tenth, not the fourteenth, when Angelo more or less pushed him out of the corner.” Goodman concurred, saying more than forty years later: “Each round it became harder and harder for him to get off the stool. How in the hell he was able to do it is beyond me. But no, Ali would not have quit under any circumstances: if Joe was still standing to this day, Ali would still be standing there.”
Only seasoned observers of the sport would truly appreciate the act of bravery that Futch had performed on behalf of Joe. Given the big stakes that were on the table, it would have been very easy for him to overlook what his eyes were telling him and give Joe that final round. By stopping it when he did, Futch very easily may have saved Joe from an untimely and tragic death. “I think Joe would have won it if his eye had not closed up on him,” said Yanoff. “But as he could not see out of it, I think Futch probably saved his life.” For Larry Hazzard, the New Jersey Athletic Control Board commissioner who years before had boxed as an amateur with Joe, Futch “endeared himself forever to anybody who had any feelings for Joe Frazier” by the preventative action he took. Having worked as a referee for years, he observed: “I know a lot of guys who would have sent Joe back out there. Joe himself would have done it. See, fighters have a gladiatorial spirit. Real fighters, ‘quit’ is not in their vocabulary. He had to go back out there. But the punishment those two were putting on each other? In my opinion? Someone was going to die.” Although Hazzard was not in Manila, he watched the event on closed circuit. “I was screaming for somebody to do something,” said Hazzard, who has had losing fighters thank him years later for halting a bout while he was a referee. “Well, Eddie Futch did. And I tip my hat to him.”
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