Joe agreed.
Sure, it was “sad to see a gallant guy like Joe go out,” Futch conceded. And yet, he added: “All careers come to an end.” On the upside, he added that Joe “still has his marbles and is financially secure.” At his press conference, Frazier announced that he would now “nail the gloves to the wall and boogie, boogie, boogie.” He met the press again the following morning, stopping on the way out of his hotel suite to catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror: his shaved head was covered with lumps, and a patch covered five stitches alongside his right eye. Downstairs by the pool, he assured the gathered writers, “There’ll be no more fights.” To which he added, “I’ll just go back to the gym and watch the young men grow.”
* * *
On the heels of his victory over Ali five years before in the Fight of the Century, between his stop at the White House and his abysmal European tour with the Knockouts, Joe stopped in for an appearance with Dinah Shore on her daytime TV show, Dinah’s Place. In the greenroom following the program, during which he and Shore whipped up a batch of mashed potatoes and sang a duet of “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” Frazier sat with reporter Joan Crosby for an interview in which he pondered the hopes he had for his then-eleven-year-old son, Marvis. Unequivocally, he said there was no way he would allow him to become a boxer. Beyond the physical perils that accompanied the career he had followed, Joe observed that it was just too lonely. “A fighter lives like an animal,” said Frazier, who spoke of the hardship of being secluded in training camps for weeks on end. Given the choice to do it over again, he would have chosen a profession that did not take him away from his wife and children for as long as boxing had. For someone who found himself increasingly restless at home, it seemed to be an odd statement, doubly so in light of the wealth that boxing had brought him. Even so, if he had an aspiration for his sons, it would have been that they “go some other way.”
Quite a fine athlete from an early age, Marvis excelled in junior high school in football, basketball, baseball, and wrestling. But when he began to struggle academically, Joe and Florence transferred him to Wyncote Academy, which did not have an athletics program. Ostensibly, he began showing up at the gym in the fall following the second Foreman bout as a way to stay in shape, confining himself to hitting the bags. Soon, he was asking his father, “How about a fight?” Joe narrowed his eyes and replied, “No, this is no plaything.” When he asked a year or so later and his father gave in, he stopped his sparring partner in the second round. Though he assured his disapproving mother that boxing was “just a hobby,” it quickly became far more than that to him. It drew him closer to his father, gave them a commonality they would not have had otherwise. “At first, I came in the gym and messed around,” Marvis would later tell Stan Hochman. “But I could soon see that it brought us closer together. Now, he was here with me, helping me out. He was spending more individual time with me, away from Mom and my sisters. So much of the time, when I was younger, he was out on the road, making the bread. I know how it sounds, selfish maybe, but I wanted him closer to me. But most of all, I wanted him to be proud of me.”
Now, at the end of his career, it had to seem to Joe as if it were beginning again. When he looked at Marvis, it was as if he were looking at a still-flowering version of himself. Even Joe had to say with a chuckle, if Hollywood ever did his life story, they would not have to look for an actor who looked like him to play his part. He pointed to Marvis and said, “They got a guy . . . identical.” And yet that was true only to a point: the 185-pound Marvis was taller, at six foot one, and had grown up in an atmosphere of wealth and privilege, far removed from the disadvantaged circumstances that his father had climbed out of in Beaufort. With big brown eyes and a wide smile, he conveyed a soulfulness that seemed to argue against a successful career in the ring, which has always been the purview of young men hardened by need. Amateur heavyweight Jimmy Clark would comment that Marvis was “subsidized just like the Russians. All he has to do is stay in shape and dream.” Upon hearing that, Marvis replied that he “kind of resented it.” While Marvis conceded that he did not have to work in a slaughterhouse “like Daddy did,” he pointed out that he also had responsibilities, noting: “I go to school, just like Jimmy Clark does. I have choir rehearsal every Monday, Bible classes every Wednesday, homework and chores around the house. I cut the grass, take out the trash, feed the dogs; anything my mom and daddy think I ought to do. And I have to train like any other boxer.” By then a student at Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School, he passed up playing school sports to remain focussed on boxing. Though he glided up to the door in a Cadillac Seville his pop had given him, he worked just as hard as if he had just stepped off a city bus.
Near the corner of North Broad Street and Glenwood Avenue, the three-story, twenty-thousand-square-foot building that housed the gym dated back to the 1890s, when it was used as a factory that produced window sashes and blinds. Railroad cars clattered by at any given hour, stopping to discharge and board passengers at the North Philadelphia station. In the underpass below the tracks on North Broad Street, hookers would congregate in the shadows and yell across the noisy traffic at Joe when he parked his car on the sidewalk outside the gym door. “Heeeyyy, Smoke! How ya doin’, honey!” Some of the top trainers around set up shop at the gym, including Howard and Quenzell McCall, Sam Solomon, Willie Reddish, Bouie Fisher, and Milt Bailey, who in the early years convened high-stakes crap games once the work of the day was finished. Along with them came a plethora of talent over the years, including Larry Holmes, Ken Norton, Leon and Michael Spinks, Jimmy Young, Randall “Tex” Cobb, Matthew Saad Muhammad, Dwight Muhammad Qawi, Bennie Briscoe, Willie “The Worm” Monroe, Eugene “Cyclone” Hart, Bobby “Boogaloo” Watts, Stanley “Kitten” Hayward, Meldrick Taylor, Tyrell Biggs, “Smokin’” Bert Cooper, Tyrone Everett, and Jeff Chandler. With gang activity then rampant in the city, the gym served as a safe haven for the youth of the community who, even if they were not talented enough to be pro fighters, found that the workouts acquainted them with structure and discipline. Joe said of the gym, “I keep it here for the boys. We got so many. I lose count. Not professionals. Some not even good amateurs. Just neighborhood boys. . . . One gym like this does more than a whole squad of cops.”
Upon opening its doors in 1970, the Cloverlay Gym was the “nicest, cleanest gym in Philadelphia,” according to promoter J Russell Peltz. Cloverlay had invested $160,000 in renovating the building and constructing the gym itself, which would be called “the Cloverlay Hilton” by virtue of its posh appointments. Even before the Thrilla in Manila, Joe began setting himself up for the day he would retire by forming Joe Frazier Incorporated. With the assistance of attorney Bruce Wright and Eddie Futch, he planned to help aspiring young boxers the same way he had been helped by Cloverlay. “I got good treatment from a lot of people, who saw to it I got something from fighting,” Joe said. Along with the array of amateur talent he hoped to groom, he arranged to purchase the contract of former Olympian Duane Bobick, of whom Hochman observed: “Eleven brothers. From Bowlus, Minnesota, of all places. Two bars, three stores, 275 people, a blinking yellow light. White. Handsome. White. Young. Strong. Polite. White. Ambitious. White. White.” While Frazier would have other pros in his stable early on—including Willie “The Worm” Monroe, who had beaten a young Marvin Hagler at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 1976 but came to feel overlooked by Frazier in years to come—none of them possessed the earning potential of Bobick, the latest incarnation of the Great White Hope. Whether he had the talent to capitalize on it was quite another question.
Whatever the redheaded young heavyweight lacked in ability, he charmed the press with an abundance of personality. He told Douglas S. Looney of Sports Illustrated that he began boxing “when the doctor slapped me on my rear and I hit him with a left hook.” Growing up in poverty in rural Bowlus, he came from the same hardscrabble environment that had spawned Jerry Quarry. He helped his father dig graves and found himself in more than an occasiona
l donnybrook with his brothers. He became a champion boxer in the navy and beat the premier Cuban boxer Teófilo Stevenson at the 1971 Pan American Games, only to lose to him in the quarterfinals a year later in the Olympic Games in Munich. He turned pro in 1973 under Denver cable-television pioneer Bill Daniels, a former World War II and Korean War fighter pilot who signed Bobick for a bonus of twenty-five thousand dollars and 50 percent of his gross purses less expenses. For both owner and fighter, it was far from a remunerative partnership. While Bobick ran off twenty-five consecutive victories under Daniels, he did so for loose change against opponents that St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Dan Riley called “old ladies, roundheeled has-beens and clowns moonlighting in the Shrine Circus.” Bobick opted out of his contract for a fee of between $107,500 and $150,000. Daniels said he was sorry to see him go.
On the recommendation of Wright and with the approval of Futch, Frazier signed Bobick to a contract that would pay him 47 percent of his gross purses in addition to a pension benefit; Joe would pick up the tab for boxing-related expenses. To assess his potential before inking the agreement, Frazier banged Duane around in some sparring sessions. Although he liked what he saw well enough, he did not fall in love with it: Bobick had a passable straight right hand but was slow afoot, had below average hand speed, and had no left hook to speak of. Joe would give him a tutorial on his signature punch, but first he hit the road with his new act and handed off the day-to-day supervision of Bobick to Futch, who told Looney upon taking a longer look at Duane: “I’m a trainer, not a magician. If a fighter doesn’t have it, only God can help him.” As Futch worked him up the ladder, careful not to place him in over his head yet eager to see what he had, Bobick continued to win, yet in an unimpressive manner that disappointed Joe. Of the thirteen opponents he had beaten since joining Frazier, none of them were more than journeymen, and only former Ali foil Chuck Wepner had any name recognition to the general public. After a proposed bout against Ali fell apart when Ali temporarily retired, Futch arranged for seventh-ranked Bobick to face third-ranked Ken Norton, whom Futch had guided to that upset victory over Ali in 1973 and with whom he had since parted ways. Although Frazier was against the pairing with his close friend Norton—perhaps holding out for a more lucrative Ali bout to reappear—Futch claimed that Bobick had come to a crossroads. He had to prove himself against someone of stature.
The bout was scheduled for May 11 at Madison Square Garden, with Norton set to earn $500,000 and Bobick $250,000. Down in Landover, Maryland, the thirty-five-year-old Ali said he was going to get down on his hands and knees and pray that Bobick beat Norton to set up an Ali-Bobick bout. (Ali was in Maryland for a title defense against Alfredo Evangelista, a fifteen-round unanimous decision that Howard Cosell called “an exercise in torpor not to be believed.”) Ali rhapsodized: “The white boy against a big, bad nigger like me. I’ll be talking. The Klan will be marching. The brothers will be dancing in the streets. The cash register will be ringing.” But when Bobick stepped into the ring and placed his 38-0 record on the line against Norton, the big payday Ali envisioned vanished like a tendril of smoke in a gust of wind. Less than a minute into the bout, Norton clubbed Bobick with a half-dozen overhand rights, then drilled him with a right uppercut to his Adam’s apple. Under the barrage of blows that followed, the defenseless Bobick fell to all fours. He was counted out at fifty-eight seconds. Over at the Riverboat Club in the Empire State Building, preparations were still under way for the “win or lose” party, where the entertainment would be provided by the Joe Frazier Revue. Denise Menz remembered, “I was still handing out comp tickets when the fight ended.” Frazier consoled the woozy Bobick in his corner before heading off to sing. Chagrined over the choice of Norton as an opponent, he had no immediate comment to the press on the outcome, saying only: “I’ve been quiet ’til now. So I’ll stay quiet.” But Ali said what Frazier was surely thinking: “Bobick lost a chance for ten million dollars in that one round.”
As the unrealized expectations of Bobick circled the drain in the ensuing years, during which he eventually cut his ties to Frazier before retiring in 1979, Marvis set a course for the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. Under the supervision of Benton, head trainer Val Colbert, and amateur coach Sam Hickman, Marvis had his first amateur bout in March 1977 at the Blue Horizon in Philadelphia, where he beat an opponent who was sixty-six pounds heavier en route to the Pennsylvania Golden Gloves Novice Heavyweight Championship. From there, he won the state Golden Gloves Open Heavyweight Championship the following year. He won it again in 1979 by planting one Ed Bednarik on the canvas with a right hand at 2:59 of the first round. Hochman reported: “Bednarik went splat, like a load of wet plaster.” Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission Chairman Howard McCall projected stardom for young Frazier as a pro, assuring the only way he would not earn big money was “if they stopped printing it.” That year, he also won the Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions in Indianapolis and the World Junior Amateur Championship in Japan.
Early in the morning as he did his roadwork with light middleweight James Shuler, Marvis would occasionally holler: “The winnah and newwwww champeen of the world . . . Marvissss Frazzzzzier!” By early 1980, Benton had shaped him into what his cousin and later stablemate Rodney Frazier called a “beautiful boxer.” Futch extolled his “good left hand,” of which he added: “He gets inside, he rips ’em off just like his daddy.” With each victory, his daddy was increasingly impressed, exclaiming with a big smile: “The chip did not fall far from the stump.” As the star attraction of the Joe Frazier Amateur Boxing Club, Marvis won forty-four consecutive bouts before he was beaten at the Summit in February 1980 by Tony Tubbs, who represented the Muhammad Ali Amateur Boxing Club and whom he had outpointed in a split decision the year before in team action at Resorts International Hotel Casino in Atlantic City. Only weeks later, he had an invitation to join the U.S. Amateur Boxing Team on a trip to Poland, only to decline when his father had a dire premonition. Subsequently, fourteen boxers and eight others accompanying the team perished when their jet crashed short of the runway in Warsaw.
Joe told me years later, “I told him not to go. Two weeks before that plane crash, I had a dream of a big fire. My whole family was burned up. All of them—gone. It was a house, not a plane, but I just had a bad feeling.”
World events conspired to deny Marvis the Olympic gold medal that had been his guiding star. On March 21, 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced the U.S. boycott of the Olympic Games in Moscow in protest of the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Marvis won the National AAU Championship in Las Vegas in May and, in the slim hope that the boycott would be withdrawn, reported to the U.S. Olympic boxing trials in Atlanta. There, he won a closely contested decision over Mitch Green in the quarterfinals and moved on to the semifinals to face James Broad, who had won the All-Army Interservice and World Military Championship. Eleven seconds into the bout, the 215-pound Broad tagged Marvis with a right hand that traveled no more than six inches and toppled him to the deck. He was counted out at twenty-one seconds of the first round.
For a few terrifying moments, Marvis just lay there on the canvas. Though he would later say he was still conscious, he could not move his arms or legs. As he recovered, he was helped to his stool and then into an examination room, where he was seen to by an Atlanta neurosurgeon. According to Dr. Donald F. Grady, Marvis had come “very, very close” to ending up like Darryl Stingley, the New England Patriots wide receiver who was hit in a 1978 exhibition game and permanently paralyzed from the neck down. But Dr. Grady diagnosed a pinched nerve and told Marvis he would be fine. “I know exactly how that feels,” Joe told Ed Hinton, reporting for the Philadelphia Daily News. “When you get hit like that, it pops your head back and jams your neck into your spinal column, and it paralyzes the whole body.” Joe said he was not worried about it.
He then looked at Marvis and said, “Come on, son, let’s go home.”
* * *
Cars were more than just a lavis
h expression of wealth to Joe. They spoke to his desire to get up and go and were a remedy for the devouring restlessness that he found so unbearable. Even before he had the wherewithal to accrue the fleet of luxury vehicles that sat in his driveway, which Denise Menz encouraged and helped him to parlay into a limousine service to offset some of the expenses related to the gym, he loved popping open the hood and tinkering with them. One could even say that fixing automobiles was something of an obsession, given how he would stop to help fellow motorists who were stranded alongside the road. Scattered across Philadelphia and beyond were countless people who had found themselves looking on in astonishment as the former heavyweight champion got the jack out of his trunk and began changing their flat. Burt Watson, once his business manager, said that it was common for the two of them to be driving to an event when the Samaritan in Frazier would come out. As Joe hopped out from behind the wheel and investigated the problem, Watson would sit in the car just shaking his head, thinking: “Oh no, here we go again.” When it came to the upkeep of his own cars, it was not beyond him to a scour the junkyards of Philadelphia in search of an elusive part.
The junkyards in Philadelphia were hooked up to an intercom system called the “Hoot and Holler,” which enabled them to work together to locate parts for customers. Upon hearing on it that Joe was in the area and looking for a differential for a ’69 Caddy—in shorthand, “a rear”—young Michael Averona immediately informed his father, Sonny, who told him: “Get in your car and go get him!” Michael jumped in his car and began a search of Southwest Philadelphia, shooting up Passyunk Avenue and onto Essington Avenue until he spotted Frazier on the other side of the street driving a black limousine. Quickly, Michael pulled a U-turn. Then he pulled up alongside Joe and began shouting to get his attention. But Joe had the radio on with the volume up and did not hear him. So Michael swerved closer to him. Joe looked over at him in alarm. Michael yelled, “Pull over! Pull over!” When Joe did so, Michael pulled up in front of him, blocking his way to keep him from speeding off. Michael then hopped out of his car and approached Joe, seated behind the wheel in a cowboy hat. Michael said, “Joe, I hear you need a rear for your limousine. My father sent me to get you—Sonny Averona. We have one for you.”
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