A wrong word on the wrong day could activate his hot button. While driving down to South Carolina with Joe in the 1990s, Burt Watson offhandedly commented, “Whatever they said about Muhammad, true or not, he was one heck of fighter.” Joe did not reply and appeared to let it pass. At South of the Border, Joe stopped at a gas station and remained in the car while Watson used the lavatory. When Watson came out, he discovered that Joe had left. “I’m thinking, ‘He’s staying at the pumps to get some gas,’” said Watson. “He got the gas. He got the gas and took off.” Since cell phones were not yet in common use, Watson had no way of calling him. So he just stood there, perplexed. Finally, Joe drove up. When Watson got in the car, it became clear to him what had happened: By complimenting Ali, Watson had so infuriated Frazier that he had to drive around to cool off. Joe looked over at him in the passenger seat and told him, “Coach, if you think it, or ever feel it, keep it to yourself. I never want to hear it again.”
Early in his history with Ali, Joe had said, “Let’s see who will wind up the better man in his older age. Let’s see who will wind up with the larger piece of the cake.” By the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fight of the Century, in 1996, the years weighed on both of them. Well along in his battle with Parkinson’s disease, Ali had become enfeebled, his speech slurred almost to the point of being unintelligible. On legs that had once carried him with the elegance of Nureyev, he now shuffled with the labored gait of a man in his eighties. With hands that had once blinded opponents in a blur of leather, his grasp was now so unsteady that he had trouble picking up a glass. With each birthday that passed, he had become farther removed from the Ali that the world once knew and appeared in even worse shape than Joe Louis, who as a young man Ali had sworn he would never end up like. As he traveled the globe on behalf of humanitarian causes, Ali became beloved in a way that had seemed inconceivable during his stand against the Vietnam War. But Joe had no pity for him and said so. In far better shape than Ali physically—even as his own speech became harder to understand—he assumed authorship of the condition Ali was in and pointed to it as evidence that he had come out on top. I remember hearing him say so one day at the gym.
“Him and me had three fights,” he told me. “He won two of them. I won one. But if you look at him now, you can see who won them all. Me!”
Rage spilled from him in Smokin’ Joe, the autobiography that he penned with Phil Berger, the former New York Times boxing writer. Published in April 1996, it heaped thirty years of scorn upon “Clay” in a slim 213 pages. Frazier wrote: “I had fought my way up from nothing. I’d earned my way with hard work, work that was owed respect. But this scamboogah thought nothing of talking about me as if I was some head-scratching dumb nigger.” Moving on: “Well, to hear it from Clay, I was a lame specimen of a black man, a kind of Stepin Fetchit in boxing trunks.” Elsewhere: “It never ended with this chump. Nonstop bullshit. While the public found it amusing, I guess, and came to view him as a good guy, I knew different. This was a nasty, envious, mean-spirited egomaniac. . . .” On and on it flowed, a virtual Niagara of bile. “Truth is,” he continued, “I’d like to rumble with that sucker again—beat him up piece by piece and mail him back to Jesus.” He would have even more to say, and he would do so in July at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, where Joe had a young boxer, Terrance Cauthen, in the lightweight draw. (Cauthen won the bronze.)
An unexpected and deeply moving scene unfolded at the opening ceremonies. With eighty thousand spectators in attendance at Olympic Stadium and 3.5 million viewers looking from around the world, U.S. swimmer Janet Evans carried the Olympic torch up a steep incline until she came to a halt on a platform. There, a roar went up as Ali stepped from behind a wall, his hands shaking as Evans passed the flame to him. As Ali lit a wad of flammable material at the bottom of a pulley, which would carry the flame to the cauldron atop the stadium, NBC announcer Bob Costas observed from the broadcast booth: “Look at him. Still a great, great presence. Still exuding nobility and stature, and the response he evokes is part affection, part excitement, but especially respect.” But Frazier did not feel any of that. That Ali had been chosen to light the Olympic cauldron was galling to him. And when Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Bill Lyon came to him for comment three days later, he said so. He growled: “If I’d been up there with him, I’d have pushed him in the fire.”
Unseemly and beneath a man who himself had been beloved, it was a stunning comment that had people wondering if they had heard him correctly. But there would be more. “You think he represents the Olympics or America? He hates whites.” He groused that Ali had been a draft dodger and again pointed to the disparity in their physical condition, noting: “They said I was the one who was beat up by him, but look at me compared to him. Look at us.” Lyon said in his column, “I have known Joe Frazier for more than two dozen years and I was floored by his attitude toward Ali. I suggested, almost urged, that he reconsider what he had said. . . . But Frazier not only refused to recant, or reconsider or soften what he had said, he repeated it, and then added: ‘Say it loud and proud, brother. Tell it straight, what I said, the way I feel.’” One of the letters that poured into the Philadelphia Daily News called Joe “a washed-up has-been” and “a bitter, jealous old man who wishes he could have gotten the respect Ali gets.” Even Joe Jr. later told him, “Dad, you can’t do that. That’s not right.”
Joe would apologize in an interview with the Associated Press in October. He explained, “A man calls you all kinds of names, what are you supposed to do, stand up and take it on the chin? No. I had to fight back.” Of his ongoing feud with Ali, he said he hoped the two of them could bring it to an end, adding, “We got to do it, before we all close our eyes, because I want to see him in heaven.” Talks were under way for their daughters Jacqui Frazier and Laila Ali to face one another in the ring, and he looked forward to seeing that happen. (Laila beat Jacqui in June 2001.) But Joe still harbored a grudge that only seemed to become inflamed when Ali apologized to him in the New York Times in March 2001. Close friend and promoter Butch Lewis advised Joe to bury his grievances with Ali, if only to create business opportunities for the two of them. Others urged Joe to let go of his anger at Ali because of the example that he would set: if these two embittered rivals could settle their differences—if that was possible—it would invite others to do the same. But Ali still had not come to him face-to-face, and it was an omission that preyed upon Joe. When agent Darren Prince told him that Ali and his wife, Lonnie, had invited him to walk the red carpet with them for the January 2002 premiere of the biopic Ali, Frazier blew up at him, shouting, “You tell that SOB that if he wants to make up and shake my hand, he has to come to my turf to do it!” Prince would say that he had never seen Joe so angry.
“We should do this, Pop,” said Marvis, who always had a fondness for Ali. He had once said, “Deep down, I believe they both love each other.”
Prince called back later to see if Joe had reconsidered. Marvis told him, “Prince, I think we better back off. Pop is real, real angry.”
* * *
One year back in the 1990s, promoter Joe Verne arranged to bring Joe and former champions Michael Spinks and Joey Giardello to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for a Christmastime visit. None of the youngsters were old enough to know who Joe was, but their parents did and were delighted to meet with him and chat. For as long as he had been in the public eye, Joe never said no when it came to giving of himself with hospital visits and other charitable causes. “He would have done it every day if he could,” said Verne, who placed Joe on salary to do appearances for his chain of furniture stores because of his way with people. “Nobody had to ask him to go. He would go on his own.”
Over a three-hour period at the hospital that day, Joe and his group stopped in rooms to sign autographs and pose for snapshots. When a doctor approached Verne and asked if he could take them to another floor of the hospital, Verne replied, “Sure. I’ve got to call somebody. Go ahead, and I’ll catch up to you.”
Only when he finished his call and found the floor they were on did Verne realize the doctor had escorted them to the cancer ward. Verne looked around but saw no sign of Joe or the others. He found a nurse.
“Where are the guys?” Verne asked.
Gesturing to a door that led to a fire escape, the nurse replied, “In there.”
“The fire escape? What are they doing in the fire escape?” Verne asked.
Verne walked over and opened the door.
“All three of them were in there crying like babies,” said Verne. “Joe grabbed me and said, ‘Please get me out of here. Whatever you need me to do—go to another part of the hospital, go have lunch with the parents—I will do it. But not this. Young kids should never have to go through this.’”
Even as he revealed the worst of himself in his angry entanglements with Ali, Frazier remained connected to his more virtuous self. Through the years, it was almost as if there were two Joes. One remained at the command of his ego, of which his daughter Weatta once said, “Being a boxer, you have to have an ego. You have to believe that no one is your equal.” But the other, away from the ring, was driven not by his granite will to stand apart but by the belief that he was one of many. When he once spotted a motorist stranded along the highway and his nephew Rodney encouraged him to just drive on, Joe’s reply seemed to sum up how he perceived himself in the world: “Whoever that is could be your father or your mother, your son or your daughter.” And when he slipped that “love” out of his sock and into the hand of that legless man in the wheelchair or did the same with Gypsy Joe and countless others along the way, it animated an aphorism that he was fond of using: “Never look down on a man unless you are helping him up.”
In a city that developed and cherished a fantasy crush on the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa—the South Philadelphia white heavyweight who, portrayed by Sylvester Stallone, emerges from obscurity to claim honor, if not victory, in a bloody showdown with the audacious black champion Apollo Creed—Frazier inhabited the ethos of the underdog in ascent. Even certain scenes from the original film appeared to have been extracted from his life. When he was a young unknown, he also slammed his bare hands into the animal carcasses at the slaughterhouse where he worked, and it was not uncommon for him to the run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. While it would sometimes seem that every boxer who ever walked into a gym saw themselves in Rocky—including Chuck Wepner, the journeyman white heavyweight who stood toe-to-toe with Ali in 1975 before losing by a knockout with nine seconds left in the fifteenth round—Frazier would say of Stallone, only half joking: “That scamboogah stole that stuff from me.” Joe had a cameo in Rocky and auditioned for the part of Clubber Lang in Rocky III. Stallone would remember on Instagram that he had a sparring session with Frazier but soon discovered it was “very foolhardy, hazardous and homicidal.”
Stallone continued: “Once in the ring, I figured I [would] just move around and avoid his punches. That idea worked well for about two seconds. Simply because the next thing I knew there was a thunderous left hook that was planted extremely deep in my body. And an overhand right that resembled a falling piano landing just below my left eye. The world was now spinning in several directions.”
Stallone ended up with six stitches.
Mr. T ended up with the part.
And the city of Philadelphia would end up with the statue of Rocky that appeared in the picture. For years, there was a public debate over where it should be located. Given that it was a movie prop that was donated to the city by Stallone and not actual art per se, it was not looked upon by as worthy of a place atop the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which Rocky had scaled in triumph. The piece was moved around before it was ultimately placed in an area adjacent to the base of the steps, where visitors have come from across the world to run themselves and stand with the statue for a snapshot. Only after his death did Joe himself get the long-overdue statue that now stands in the South Philadelphia stadium complex.
Underdog Joe would have given a leg up to Rocky had he been an actual person. Whenever Frazier came upon someone who reminded him of himself, a guy in search of a break as he had once been, he found a way to fold him into his life. “Joe collected strays,” said Burt Watson, one his business managers. “He befriended people along the way.” Kevin Dublin, his former fighter, would remember that in the neighborhood surrounding the gym, Joe became “a kind of Pied Piper” as he roamed from stop to stop. On any given day, he could be spotted picking up his cleaning, going for chicken wings, or hanging out with the firemen at Engine 50, Ladder 12, where in the summer he would play half-ball in the street. At the corner tavern, he would occasionally drop by, throw down some bills, and instruct the bartender, “Pour everybody a drink!” Up on North Thirteenth Street, he would show up every day to play the “street number.” In a booming voice, he would announce his play, which would always be the same: 11111 00000 5555. “He hit now and then,” said Darren Renwrick, who booked his action. “Once for four thousand dollars. When he won, he always gave us a handsome tip.” Unable to get there on a particular day, he sent around his driver, Legrant Presley.
Dublin cracked up in laughter as he told the story. “The number hit but when it came time to get paid off, Legrant was nowhere to be found. He disappeared. Smoke was furious. He said, ‘I know that scamboogah took that money and spent it.’ Finally—two weeks later, I guess—Legrant got the courage up to come around. He swore to Joe that he never got around to playing it. Legrant probably just figured that the number would never come in. . . . Smoke forgave him, but it took him a while to get over it.”
One day in November 1989, Joe showed up at the “lottery house” Renwrick ran with talk show host David Letterman, who had come to North Philadelphia with a film crew to shoot a segment called “A Day in the Life of Joe Frazier.” Earlier in the year, Letterman had cooked up a comic sketch that involved sending Joe a hundred dollars to fill up his tank with gas and then checking back with him during the course of the week to see how he used it up. “Every show, Letterman would call Joe and adjust the level on a cardboard cutout of a gas tank,” said Watson. When Letterman came in from New York with his crew, Renwrick would remember that he had an L.A. Dodgers cap down over his eyes, waved a cigar, and wore a raincoat with an upturned collar, “just like Peter Falk in Colombo.” Joe was dressed in a sharp blue blazer over a red sweater, with chains around his neck. Letterman accompanied him on his daily errands, which included buying gas, dropping off his laundry, and having lunch. Over his plate of food, Joe said a prayer that ended with an appeal to the Lord to “keep the scamboogahs” off their backs. Letterman paused a beat and observed, “That was beautiful, Joe.” While Joe was no more of an actor than a singer, he handled the spot with charm.
People gravitated to Joe in the same way they did to Ali, perhaps not in the same swarms but with the same genuine affection. “Joe and I had a thousand dinners together, and I never saw him finish a meal,” said Verne. “When fans came up to him in a restaurant, he would shove his plate aside, sign an autograph or stand with them for a picture, and ask them to sit down for a beer.” When Verne once asked him why he was always so accommodating. Frazier told him, “Because these are the people who made me who I am.” Wearing a cowboy hat, an array of jewelry, and a spritz of his favorite cologne, Aramis, he would stride into a casino or a club and immediately feel at home. Occasionally, someone would step up and ask him to arm wrestle. “He beat everybody,” said Michael Averona, who remembered how he once challenged Frazier himself. Joe told him: “We don’t arm wrestle. We’re buddies. You don’t want to beat your friend.” But when he was so inclined, he could drink even his closest friends under the table.
The “game” was called Man or Mouse. “Say there were four people at table with four different drinks—gin, vodka, scotch, and brandy,” said Watson. “Joe would pour each of them into an empty glass, stir it up, and take a big swig. Then he would go around the table and ask, ‘Who’s gonna be a man and
who’s gonna be a mouse?’” To which Watson once replied, “Boss, I’m feeling like a mouse today.” Cardiologist Dr. Nicholas DePace remembered seeing Joe mix wine and bourbon together and drink it down. “He was drinking a lot when I met him in the 1980s,” said DePace, who owns one of the largest sports memorabilia collections in the world and purchased an array of pieces from Joe. “Drinking to him was more of cultural exercise that dated back to his youth in the South, where they used to pass around the moonshine jug as a way of socializing. But he was not what I would describe as a classic alcoholic, the way you would think of someone who ends up on skid row.” Denise agreed that he indulged in “crazy drinking” yet stopped short of characterizing it as “alcoholic drinking,” explaining, “When he partied, he partied hard. He is the only person I ever knew who could drink a bottle of vodka, get up, and not even have to take an aspirin.” Daughter Weatta said, “By the 1990s, he had cut down on his drinking dramatically. I think he just asked himself: ‘Why am I doing this?’”
Friendships were sacrosanct to Joe. Gloria Hochman was once in the hospital when he dropped by to see her unannounced. “Stan had told him I had gone in for a procedure,” said Gloria. “Joe showed up dressed in a long fur coat and sat on the edge of the bed. You should have seen the look on the face of the woman in the other bed.” Nephew Mark Frazier remembered joining his uncle for a drive to New York to see his old friend Emile Griffith, who Joe had befriended when they were in training camp together prior to the opening of the new Madison Square Garden in 1968. “Emile was in an extended-care facility and could barely speak,” said Mark. “But you could see in his eyes how happy he was that Uncle Billy dropped by.” George Kalinsky, the Garden photographer, would remember Joe as fiercely loyal. Kalinsky said that when his daughter was married back in the 1980s, Joe showed up at the reception because years before he had promised her that he would sing at her wedding. Some ten years later, Joe showed up again when Kalinsky buried his wife. “On the day of the funeral, there was an incredible snowstorm in New York,” said Kalinsky. “But Joe and Marvis got in the car and somehow got there in time for the service. Seeing them trudge into the church with snow on their shoes was extremely touching.”
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