Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  With each year that passed during the 1980s, drugs ate deeper into the neighborhood surrounding the gym. Crack vials were scattered along the soiled pavement. Razor wire was coiled atop high fences. Although he still had his home in Whitemarsh Township, the gym was now not just where Joe worked but had become a convenient crash pad. On friendly terms with the cops, he always kept the gym door open during the day and never had a problem other than the day he was outside working under the hood of one of the limousines. It was a Saturday, broad daylight, and there he was, wearing three diamond rings and a gold pendant that sparkled in the sun, when a large man jumped out of nowhere and tackled him in an apparent robbery attempt. Joe grabbed for the gun he had tucked under his belt, but the assailant got his hands on it first. He aimed it at Joe and yanked at the trigger. The gun jammed. As Joe wrestled him for it, the gun clattered to the ground, whereupon Joe picked it up. By now, a crowd had formed, and his brother Tommy raced out of the gym. As Joe stood back and took aim, Tommy leaped on his back and held his arms, shouting: “No! No! Think of Momma! Think of Momma!” The assailant ran off. Joe was uninjured except for cuts on his leg that had come from scraping it on a piece of fallen razor wire.

  Gypsy Joe roamed these sad, sick streets until the end of his days. Never one to wear an eye patch over his dead eye, he remained the uncrowned champion of Philadelphia, still remembered in the pool halls and bars by those who were old enough to have once caught his colorful act. “Yo, Gypsy Joe!” they would cry. “Man, I used to see you at the Arena. You were something else.” Occasionally, he would still wander in off the street and into the gym, where he would grab a chair and shout instructions to some young man up in the ring. “When you back up, keep throwing punches!” Frazier used to point to him and tell young fighters, “See that man over there? That man was the fightingest scamboogah to ever put on shoes.” In and out of the hospital in the 1970s, Gypsy Joe cleaned himself up and got a janitorial job at City Hall that was set up for him by Mayor Rizzo. By the late 1980s, he had had three heart attacks and was subsisting on the $87.50 welfare check he received every two weeks. One morning when Joe showed up at the gym with his son Hector and two other fighters from an out-of-town trip, he found Gypsy Joe sleeping in the doorway.

  “Whatcha doin’, man?” Joe asked him.

  “I’m hungry as a motherfucker,” his friend replied.

  Joe unlocked the gym door. “Come on in,” he said, leading the way. “You got love?”

  “I ain’t got a fucking dime.”

  Joe eyed him and said, “Get a shower and we’ll get you something to eat.” Frazier told the three fighters to go around the corner and pick up some Kentucky Fried Chicken. Gypsy Joe took his shower and dressed in fresh clothes and sneakers Joe handed him. When the fighters came back with the food, they all sat down at a table and tore into the bags. Gypsy grabbed a chicken thigh and began gnawing on it.

  “I love you, Joe, man,” he said.

  “I love you, too,” said Frazier, as he slipped some bills from his sock and folded them in his hand. “But you gotta do better, man. You gotta do better.”

  Gypsy Joe died of a fourth heart attack in March 1990. He was forty-four. Relatives chipped in enough to buy him a blue suit, an inexpensive coffin, and a $105 burial plot at Merion Memorial Park in Bala Cynwyd, where he was lowered in an unmarked public grave with two other people who had passed away that week. Sixteen years later, John DiSanto, who as a boy had written Frazier that cautionary letter at the Woodbine Inn, discovered that no headstone sat atop the grave and set to correct that by collecting two thousand dollars for a proper memorial. When it was done, it simply said: GYPSY JOE HARRIS 1945–1990. For anyone who remembered him in the ring, it did not have to say any more.

  * * *

  Five months before his untidy farewell against Jumbo Cummings in Chicago, Joe appeared with Marvis on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the headline: CHIP OFF THE OLD CHAMP? Less than a year before, on his twentieth birthday—September 12, 1980—Marvis had set out to answer that question when he launched his pro career at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden against Roger Troupe, a former wide receiver for the Philadelphia Bell in the World Football League. Under a one-year promotional contract with the Garden that paid him a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus, Marvis overcame some early jitters and acquitted himself well. Though Troupe buckled his knees at the end of the first round, Marvis walloped him with a left hook in the second round that had the scribes on press row wagging their pens. He followed up with a right hand that sent Troupe through the ropes. A round later and Marvis was standing with his gloves in the air, the winner by technical knockout 2:08 of the third round. Working the corner with George Benton and Val Colbert, Joe was not pleased by what he had seen. “You gotta breathe on him, son!” he had told Marvis between rounds. “Get close!” Later, Joe told the press, “Right now, we’re in grammar school. Then you go to junior high, high school, and then college.” Going forward, he would replace Benton and take charge of his boy himself.

  History would have told him what a poor idea that was. Had Joe been paying close attention to complications that unfolded between the Quarrys—father Jack and sons Jerry and Mike—it would have acquainted him with the countless ways that the relationship between a father and son in the ring can go wrong. For a father, there is a line to walk between being too protective and not protective enough. Hard-nosed Jack Quarry exemplified the latter. Eddie Futch called him “the bravest manager in the world when it came to matches for his son Jerry.” According to Futch, fathers tend to amplify the ability of their sons, who they “imbue with special powers, special qualities.” From the perspective of the son, there are issues of ego, identity, and measuring up, perhaps some underlying pathology unique to the relationship itself. Perceptions can become clouded. Because money is also changing hands, it can become an even more convoluted partnership, with the potential for off-the-book arrangements and unfulfilled obligations. Nothing good has ever come of fathers taking over the ring careers of their sons.

  Even as Marvis commenced his career with fanfare, there were problems at the gym that steeped Joe in gloom. To help curb his losses, Joe increased the gym dues for pros to a citywide-highest sixty dollars per month. Fighters picked up and went elsewhere. Some of the better young talent he developed, including 1984 Olympic gold medalists Tyrell Biggs and Meldrick Taylor, followed Benton out the door and signed with Lou Duva at Main Events, where Biggs became a heavyweight contender and Taylor won the welterweight championship. Angrily, Frazier accused rival trainers of swooping into his gym and stealing fighters. Without naming names, he said that “today fighters are like whores. They go to whoever offers the biggest bankroll.” Gone were the days when young fighters possessed the same loyalty that he had for Yank Durham. Stan Hochman wrote of Frazier in March 1982: “He stalks the gym like a brooding Othello, sensing Iagos in every corner. He calls anyone who disagrees with him a ‘snake’ and vows to get rid of them. . . . He forgets that a man chasing phantom snakes can beat the meadows down to parched stubble.” But as the 1980s unfolded, boxing would become something of a family business, with Marvis followed into the gym by his half brother Hector and cousins Rodney and Mark; even Joe’s boyhood friend Isaac Mitchell’s son got in on the act, fighting under the name Tyrone Mitchell Frazier. Joe had management contracts with each.

  The papers called them “The Fighting Fraziers.” While Marvis lived at home with Florence and his sisters and would later marry, Hector, Rodney, and Mark stayed at the gym with Uncle Billy, where they trained, ate, and slept. None of them would go on to have more than an average pro career, yet Rodney remembered that the experience afforded him a chance to develop a close relationship to his uncle Billy, who Rodney would later say possessed three sides: “He could be loving. He could be compassionate. And he could be a tyrant.” Rodney would say that while he was “generally a good guy, he could snap and become very accusatory of people.” But Rodney would look back on their days together
as a fine time that was often full of laughs. When he once prepared to spar with Marvis, Joe told him: “Rod, Marvis called your momma a bitch.” Marvis grinned and said, “Awww, Pop, I never said that.” On the road together, Joe would sit up talking with them in his hotel room, where he would sleep with the light on. Rodney remembered that they talked about “a lot of off-the-wall things.”

  “Rod!” Joe once said.

  “Yeah, Uncle Billy?”

  “Boy, if I die, don’t let ’em take me to South Carolina and bury me there. Don’t let ’em put me in a hole in the woods.”

  On another occasion, years later, they got into a conversation over a photograph Joe had seen in Jet magazine. “It was a picture of Olympic track champion Jesse Owens in his coffin,” Rodney remembered. “And Uncle Billy said, ‘Rod, if I die before you do, never let anybody take a picture of me in my coffin and put it in Jet magazine.” Rodney shrugged and replied, “Okay, Uncle Billy.”

  Immodestly, Joe told his fighters they were blessed to have him in their corner, given his bona fides as a former champion. But even in an era of alphabetized “cheese champs,” during which there was an expansion in weight classes and champions were crowned in the WBA, WBC, IBF, WBO, WBU, WBF, IBO, IBC, and IBU, Frazier did not develop a single champion in the 1980s and ’90s. When it came to passing down his know-how, he only knew the way he had done it. He was not adaptable to fighters’ individual skill sets in the way top trainers such as Durham, Futch, and Benton were. When he worked with young fighters, it was as if he saw within them the potential to re-create himself. The problem was, there was only one Joe Frazier. Few fighters have come along who have had “the whiskers” to battle in the trenches as Joe did and “breathe” on his opponents. Of the fighters Joe trained, Smokin’ Bert Cooper came the closest to replicating him in build and style. For a heavyweight, Cooper was an undersized hustler with the same big heart Joe had inside the ring but none of the same discipline outside of it, where he battled a drug problem that undermined his career. Like Cooper—albeit taller and leaner—Marvis was on the smallish side for a heavyweight and would have been better suited to campaign as a cruiserweight. But Marvis was an exceptional athlete, and Benton had equipped him with the technical skills to take care of himself in the ring.

  George James saw Joe work with Marvis at the gym. The Philadelphia trainer, who had once been stopped by the cops with Sonny Liston and had worked as a caretaker to Gypsy Joe, questioned Frazier on the approach he was taking with Marvis. “Why you got him down there crouching?” James asked. Frazier replied, “So he can get in there and roughhouse.” James told me years later, “Marvis was over six feet. He should have been standing up and jabbing. But Joe had him fighting like a short guy—the way he used to fight. Like he was trying to put his own body inside of Marvis.” According to James, the sparring sessions between Joe and Marvis were “unreal.” Joe would tell him, “Get your hands up!” When Marvis took too long to get them up, Joe would slap him with an open glove. By undoing the work of Benton and rebuilding his son into his own image, Joe foreclosed on the promise Marvis had shown as an amateur. Larry Holmes told me, “Joe knew how to fight. His way.”

  No sooner had he gotten his career under way than Marvis found himself in a hospital gown. As he was preparing for his third bout in November 1980, he experienced a recurrence of the same issue that had been so alarming when James Broad stopped him at the Olympic trials in Atlanta. When Canadian heavyweight Gaston Berube landed a blow to his forehead and snapped his head back during a sparring session at the gym, Marvis spiraled to the canvas and remained there, conscious yet unable to move his limbs. As he had said in Atlanta, he was overcome with the same sensation that accompanies being hit in the funny bone, except that it spread across the length of his body. Surgery would be performed to correct the problem, which was genetic in origin. Doctors opened his neck and pulled a nerve away from his spine. With a six-inch scar descending from his hairline down his back, Marvis came back the following April. Among the eight victories he clicked off, he avenged his amateur loss to Broad and beat Joe Bugner in ten-round unanimous decisions. The thirty-three-year-old Bugner told the New York Times, “With time I think Marvis will become a very good fighter.”

  For a young man with just ten pro bouts behind him, Marvis had become a hot property. Along with the fact that he was the son of universally beloved Joe Frazier, Marvis possessed an array of attractive qualities. He was handsome, well spoken, and performed acts of charity in the community. He was a deacon at his church and visited prisons to conduct Bible studies. He even played Santa Claus at the gym for the children in the neighborhood. Though he had fallen short of his Olympic dream, he commanded early paydays that were commensurate with those of 1976 gold medalist Sugar Ray Leonard. As it once had for his father, “the love” poured in. The networks courted him. CBS bankrolled the Broad and Bugner bouts, paying him $150,000 and $200,000 respectively. Under the contractual agreement he signed with his father, he took home half of that, less taxes; Joe paid all expenses. According to Sharon Hatch, who oversaw contract negotiations for Joe Frazier, Inc., Marvis received a weekly draw similar to the one his father had received from Cloverlay, beginning at a hundred dollars a week and escalating as his purses increased. With the offers pouring in, Joe accepted one from NBC that would prove to be calamitous.

  Overreaching with a young fighter can be perilous. Durham and Futch were assiduous in their choice of opponents, placing Joe in bouts where he could incrementally improve without undue concern about an unexpected setback. But when NBC dangled $1.2 million before his eyes for Marvis to face heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, Joe snapped it up. For Marvis, it would be like jumping from junior high school into a Ph.D. program. Undefeated in forty-four bouts, with thirty-one knockouts, Holmes was big, seasoned, and possessed a laser left jab. Even if one spotted some deterioration in his skills—as Joe did—or pointed to the fact that Leon Spinks had only had seven bouts when he beat Ali for the title—as Joe also did—it would not be under any circumstances the “picnic” Joe predicted it would be. Someone in the press corps looked up who Joe had faced in his eleventh bout. There it was, in the Ring Record Book and Boxing Encyclopedia: Billy Daniels, the barber from Brooklyn. Joe stopped him in six. Someone else asked Holmes if he had been prepared by his eleventh bout to take on the champion. He replied, “Are you kidding?” Now working with Holmes, Eddie Futch decried the pairing as premature by a year. “Why now?” he said. “Why risk a bad beating, the kind that could destroy him as a fighter?”

  For Holmes, it was about the money. Even with no championship on the line—the WBC would not sanction it, given that Marvis was still unranked—Holmes was offered $3.5 million in NBC dollars. While he was happy to have the payday, he found himself in the same position he had been in with Ali: trying to avoid irreparably damaging an opponent who was clearly outclassed. Like Futch, Holmes had known Marvis since he was a young boy. Holmes had worked for Joe as a sparring partner for $350 a week prior to his second bout with Ali. Joe cracked his ribs. When asked years later what he had learned from those sessions, he replied: “Not to get hit. He would get in there to knock you out. He used to call me ‘The Road Runner.’” As Holmes prepared to face Marvis at Caesars Palace in November 1983, Futch told him that young Frazier was like a son to him and that he did not want to see him get hurt, even as Joe himself still harbored hard feelings over Manila and the Bobick fiasco. Futch said, “Get him out of there as quickly as you can, Larry.” Holmes liked Marvis, yet that fondness could and would not eclipse the fact when they stepped into the ring together, it would be “his ass or mine.”

  The fight was the brutal, one-sided affair that almost all had feared it would be. Stripping out of his green and gold robe with the words IN GOD WE TRUST on the back—the same colors that Joe had worn in the Fight of the Century—Marvis appeared dwarfed by Holmes as they stood eye-to-eye in the pre-fight instructions, Joe looking on ominously from over his shoulder. Nineteen pounds hea
vier and two inches taller—the very picture of a man in the prime of his career—the thirty-four-year-old Holmes answered the bell with grim focus. Tentatively, Marvis held his hands up high as he poked for an opening, then lowered them in a foolish display of showmanship, his chin exposed as he wiggled his shoulders. Holmes hurled him into the ropes. With his hands up again, Marvis maintained a perimeter as Holmes pecked at him with left jabs. When Marvis lowered his hands again, Holmes swatted him with a long right hand that spilled him to the canvas. Up at the count of eight, Marvis covered up and backed up into the ropes, where Holmes pummeled him with twelve unanswered right hands. He told me years later, “They were open-handed. They were slaps.” With each one he threw, he glanced back at referee Mills Lane, at one point yelling: “Come on, man. Stop the damn fight.” Lane finally did, at 2:57 of the first round.

  Chagrined by the episode in which he had just participated, Holmes looked on glumly as Joe wrapped Marvis in a consoling hug. In an interview in the ring with NBC boxing analyst Dr. Ferdie Pacheco—who doubled as the matchmaker for the network and had ordered up this execution—Holmes said Marvis had not been ready and that he was glad he had not hurt him. While still in the ring, he stripped out of his trunks and robe and tossed them into the crowd. Later, with a sigh, he said, “This is a hard, dirty, rotten game.” Appalled by the exhibition they had just witnessed, the reporters on hand pilloried Joe, who fielded their questions in the press room by firing back hand grenades. The “tyrant” Rodney spoke of came out. When someone asked if it had “hurt” him to see his son absorb the beating he had, Frazier replied that he had not been the one taking the punches. When someone else asked if he had “made a mistake” by sending Marvis in there with Holmes, he replied, “I never make mistakes.” Overhearing that, Futch told Randy Galloway of the Dallas Morning News: “You’ll never be able to convince Joe he was wrong. And anyone who disagrees with him on anything becomes the enemy.” Uninjured, Marvis said in the dressing room again and again, “There is always tomorrow.”