This was not only the biggest “live” gate for any indoor fight; the loot was almost twice as great as the previous record, established in the same Madison Square Garden by a double-header featuring the same Joe Frazier (with Buster Mathis). Chances are it will be weeks before the swag from television is counted up, for the match was shown on closed-circuit all over the United States, Canada and Great Britain and on network TV in thirty-two other countries.
It was the most hysterically ballyhooed promotion of all time, and not only because of the obscene financial figures. If these men had been fighting on a barge for $500 a side it would still have commanded extraordinary attention, for never before had a single ring held two undefeated heavyweights with valid claims to the world championship—Ali unfrocked but still a champion because he had never been whipped for the title, Frazier his rightful successor because he had whipped everybody else—both at the peak of youth and strength.
So great was the interest that a bad fight would have left the Sweet Science sick unto death. A performance that left any shadow of suspicion behind might have destroyed boxing. This one destroyed nothing but Muhammad Ali.
It didn’t do a thing for Frazier’s health either. It did, though, prove Joe just about as close to indestructible as a fistfighter can be. He walked into hundreds of clean, hard shots, flashing combinations that drilled home with jolting force, and never for an instant did they halt his remorseless advance.
Outpointed as expected in the early rounds, he hurt his adversary in the sixth, batted him soft in the eleventh, knocked him into a grotesque backward slide along the ropes in the twelfth, and wrecked him in the fifteenth. Not many men could have survived the attack. But then not many athletes have Ali’s armor of arrogance. Even in his deepest trouble, the loser pretended he wasn’t losing, shaking his head to deny that a punch had hurt him, beckoning Frazier in to slug him again, trying by every trick of the theater to support the “secret” he had confided just before the start to a closed-circuit microphone:
“I predict, first of all, that all the Frazier fans and boxing experts will be shocked at how easy I will beat Joe Frazier, who will look like an amateur boxer compared to Muhammad Ali, and they will admit that I was the real champion all the time. Frazier falls in six.”
Before these men ever saw Madison Square Garden, the English music critic Ernest Newman wrote of something he called the magic chemistry of genius:
What is the artistic faculty? Is it just a knack, which some people are born with and others are not, for moving the counters of art—words, sounds, lines, colours—about in a particular way? We do not expect of a great billiards player or boxer that he shall have read Kant or Aeschylus, or understand the political problems of the Balkans. We do not even expect Mr. Joseph Louis to have studied the rudiments of that science of the impact of forces upon moving masses, upon the correct application of which his success depends. Indeed, were he and his like to try to get their results by reason, by “culture,” they would find themselves in the company of Mr. Belloc’s nimble water-insect:
If he ever stopped to think
how he did it he would sink.
Joe Frazier has now fought twenty-seven boxing matches as a professional and won twenty-seven. The Olympic heavyweight champion of 1964 has won the championship of the professional world three times—by knocking out Buster Mathis when Cassius Muhammad Ali Clay was ostracized as a draft-dodger, by knocking out Jimmy Ellis, whom the World Boxing Association called champion, by knocking Muhammad Ali down but not out.
All his fights were cut to the same pattern, yet he could not tell you how he does it any more than Beethoven could.
Joe can talk a little about tactics, about “cutting the ring,” which means advancing obliquely on a circling opponent to cut off the escape routes. As for his own bobbing, ducking attack: “I’ll be smo-kin’,” he says. “Right on.” A witness within earshot of his corner Monday night could have heard his manager, Yank Durham, enlarge on this:
“Down, Joe, down . . . for the body, Joe, the body . . . Bring the right over . . . Don’t wrestle him, Joe; let the referee do the work.”
What Joe says and Yank says merely brushes the surface. These two don’t begin to explain what makes Joe the best fistfighter in the world at this time. Neither truly understands it. Yet one thing they do know.
If they fought a dozen times, Joe Frazier would whip Muhammad Ali a dozen times. And it would get easier as they went along.
THRILLA IN MANILA
MANILA, 1975
A gaggle of pretty girls got aboard an elevator for the press center in the Bayview Plaza Hotel, where they had been working for the last ten days. “It’s over,” one of them said, “and we’re glad.” Were they satisfied with the way it had ended? “No,” they said, “no,” every one of them. “How about you?” a girl asked a man on the lift. “I’m neutral,” he said, “but I’ll say one thing: Joe Frazier makes a better fighter and a better man of Muhammad Ali than anybody else can do.” “Right,” the girls said, all together, “that’s right.”
A small, strange scene came back to mind. It was two days before the fight and Ali lay on a couch in his dressing room, talking. If this had been a psychiatrist’s couch it would not have seemed strange, but he wasn’t talking to a psychiatrist and he wasn’t talking to the newspaper guys around him. He just lay there letting the words pour out in a stream of consciousness.
“Who’d he ever beat for the title?” he was saying of Joe Frazier. “Buster Mathis and Jimmy Ellis. He ain’t no champion. All he’s got is a left hook, got no right hand, no jab, no rhythm. I was the real champion all the time. He reigned because I escaped the draft and he luckily got by me, but he was only an imitation champion. He just luckily got through because his head could take a lot of punches. . . .”
Why, listeners asked themselves, why does he have to do this? Why this compulsion to downgrade the good man he is going to fight? It had to be defensive. He was talking to himself, talking down inner doubts that he would not acknowledge. He will never feel that need again, and he never should. If there is any decency in him he will not bad-mouth Joe Frazier again, for Frazier makes him a real champion. In the ring with Joe, he is a better and braver man than he is with anybody else.
Muhammad Ali loves to play a role. He is almost always on stage, strutting, preening, babbling nonsense. But Frazier drags the truth out of him. Frazier is the best fighter Ali has ever met, and he makes Ali fight better than he knows how.
They have fought three times. In the first, Ali fought better than ever before, and lost. In the third he fought better still. This one ranks up there with the most memorable heavyweight matches of our time—Dempsey-Firpo, Dempsey’s two with Tunney, both Louis-Schmeling bouts and Marciano’s first with Jersey Joe Walcott.
It was really three fights. Ali won the first. Through the early rounds he outboxed and outscored Frazier, doing no great damage but nailing him with clean, sharp shots as Joe bore in.
The second fight was all Frazier’s. From the fifth round through the eleventh he just beat hell out of Ali. When the champion tried to cover up against the ropes, Frazier bludgeoned him remorselessly, pounding body and arms until the hands came down, hooking fiercely to the head as the protective shell chipped away. WhenAli grabbed, an excellent referee slapped his gloves away.
Then it was the twelfth round and the start of the third fight, and Ali won going away. Where he got the strength no man can say, for his weariness was, as he said, “next to death.” In the thirteenth a straight right to the chin sent Frazier reeling back on a stranger’s legs. He was alone and unprotected in midring, looking oddly diminished in size, and Ali was too tired to walk out there and hit him. Still, Ali won.
This evening Ali dined with President and Mrs. Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Antique House. Frazier was also invited but he begged off, sending his wife and two oldest children instead. Afterward the winner disappeared but the loser had several hundred guests at a “victory party”
in the penthouse of his hotel. Like a proper host, he shaped up, trigged out in dinner clothes with dark glasses concealing bruises about the eyes.
“There was one more round to go, but I just couldn’t make it through the day, I guess,” he told the crowd. “Hey, fellas, I feel like doin’ a number.” That quickly, the prizefighter became the rock singer. “Lemme talk to this band a moment, because I sure don’t want to get in another fight tonight.” In a moment he had microphone in hand.
“I’m superstitious about you, baby,” he sang. “Think I better knock-knock on wood.” He did a chorus, he urged everybody to dance, and then a member of the Checkmates took over. The Checkmates are a trio and at the fight they had sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” in relay.
“We are all here tonight,” one Checkmate said, “because we respect a certain man.”
He got no argument from listeners. They all stood smiling, watching Joe Frazier dance at his own funeral.
BENNY PARET’S DEATH
1962
The pitiful case of Benny Paret moves each according to his nature. The habitually hysterical raise the scream of “legalized murder,” and their number includes some who are equally quick to revile any fighter who, unlike Paret, quits under punishment. The politicians fulminate as politicians must, like that cluck in the South Carolina Legislature who wants a law requiring circular or ten-sided rings so a fighter can’t be trapped in a corner.
Prodded perhaps by fear or maybe by conscience, Manny Alfaro, Paret’s manager, gave a disgraceful performance trying to pin the blame on Ruby Goldstein, the referee. Nobody involved has any right to blame anybody else for a tragic accident, least of all a manager who gets his boy cruelly beaten by Gene Fullmer, then sends him back against a man who has already knocked him out.
To me boxing is a rough, dangerous and thrilling sport, the most basic and natural and uncomplicated of athletic competitions, and—at its best—one of the purest of art forms. Yet there is no quarrel here with those who sincerely regard it as a vicious business that should have no place in a civilized society.
They are wrong, of course, those who think boxing can be legislated out of existence. It has been tried a hundred times, but there were always men ready to fight for prizes on a barge or in a pasture lot or the back room of a saloon. It is hard to believe that a nation bereft of such men would be the stronger or better for it.
Still, if a man honestly feels that boxing should be abolished, he has every right to cite the Paret case in support of his position. The quarrel here is with the part-time bleeding hearts, the professional sob sisters of press and politics and radio who seize these opportunities to parade their own nobility, demonstrate their eloquence, and incidentally stir the emotions of a few readers, voters or listeners.
Some of the fakers now sobbing publicly over Paret have waxed ecstatic over a Ray Robinson or Joe Louis. It must be comforting to have it both ways.
Sometimes it seems there are more frauds outside boxing than in it. At least, the professionals are realists who recognize the game for the rough business it is, and accept the stern code which demands that a beaten man go on fighting as long as he is able to stay on his feet.
This doesn’t mean that all card-carrying members of the fight mob are cut to the Hollywood-and-pulp-fiction pattern—scheming, selfish, dishonest mercenaries devoid of all decent feeling. A gentleman like Ray Arcel, the great trainer, can spend a lifetime in the dodge without dishonor, but he must subscribe to the code.
One night Ray was in the corner of a boy pacifist whose innate repugnance of violence was aggravated by the shots his adversary kept bouncing off his chin. Between rounds the boy expressed a devout wish to be elsewhere.
“Hang in there,” Ray said. “He’s as tired as you are.”
Reluctantly the young man returned to the conflict. With a most unneighborly scowl his opponent advanced and the boy backed off warily, into his own corner.
“Ray,” he said from behind a half-clenched glove, “throw in the towel, will ya?”
“Just keep punching,” Ray said. “You’re all right.”
The tiger fled backward, buffeted and breathless. His knees were wobbly but he managed to stay up for a full circuit of the ring.
“Please, Ray,” he gasped, passing his corner, “throw in the towel now.”
“Box him,” Ray called after him. “Stick him and move.”
The pursuit race continued for another dizzying lap.
“Ray,” the hero begged, “please throw in the towel. I won’t be around again.”
It should not be inferred that Arcel is impervious to punishment or in any degree lacking in compassion. Among the hundreds of fighters he has handled, a special favorite was the gallant Jackie Kid Berg, whom he called by a pet name, Yitzel.
Crouching in Berg’s corner one night, Ray winced and shuddered in vicarious pain as a ferocious body-puncher poured lefts and rights into Jackie’s middle. Sometimes the whistling gloves seemed to disappear altogether, bringing a gasp from Berg and a groan from his handler. Still up and fighting back when the round ended, Jackie did an about-face at the bell and marched back to his corner.
“Yitzel!” Ray said shakily. “How do you feel?”
“Fine, thank you,” the Kid said. “And you?”
THE LITTLE CHAMP
1945
“You hafta talk to the little champ,” Chick Wergeles said. “He makes a good interview on account of his Southern brawl.”
The little champ, Beau Jack, was in one of the smaller salons in Stillman’s Social and Reading Club getting ready for his ten-round drawl with Willie Joyce tonight. His broad, flat face was intent watching his trainer, Sid Bell, bandage his hands. He said he felt fine and had found Army life fine.
“Fine,” he said. “First eight-nine months in the Army I just dig, dig all the time. Then they make me an instructor. When I went in I figure I gonna have fun. I did. A lot of fun.”
“He went in on account of he wanted to,” Wergeles said. “He wasn’t grafted or nothin’.”
“I just boxed only once in the Army,” Beau said. “At Benning in Jojah. They’ve five hundred paratroopers going overseas wants me to box, so I boxed for ‘em and afterwards after they got over there I kep’ gettin’ letters from ‘em how they always remember what I done.”
“He reads his own letters himself,” Wergeles says. “He amazes me how he improved one hundred percent reading and writing in the Army. He reads his own newspaper stories by himself now.”
Beau said he didn’t know how much he weighed and didn’t care, had no plans or preference for any weight division.
“Lightweight, welterweight, I doan know,” he said. “Just so I keep on fightin’ somewheres. I love to fight.”
“He loves to fight,” Wergeles said. “If he didn’t get no pay for it, he’d still wanta fight just to relieve the monopoly. With him money is secondary. ‘Money,’ he says, ‘is for givin’ away.’ How about that? Besides, he’s got his family to think about.”
“I got three little Beau Jacks,” Beau said, grinning. “Ain’t none of ‘em gonna be no fighters, though. Nossir.”
“He loves to fight,” Wergeles said, “and he’s strong and he’s just coming along. He’s only twenty-three.”
“Twenty-five,” Beau said.
“No,” Wergeles said, “you got it wrong again. You was nineteen when you started fightin’ and you been fightin’ four years. Twenty-three.”
“Look,” Beau said stubbornly. He lifted an index finger and ticked it off as though counting. “April the first, 1921.”
He and Wergeles and Bell were silent a moment, pondering. “Twenty-four,” Bell said.
“Okay,” Wergeles said, “twenty-four. Raisin’ twenty-five.”
Beau stood up and flexed his hands and walked upstairs to punch the small bag. He worked hard and tirelessly, flailing from all angles and laughing when he landed with extra violence.
“He’s a bad bag fighter,” Wergeles said. “
I mean, punchin’ the bag. I don’t mean bag fights. I wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with anything wasn’t on the level. I used to work for Jack Curley, the rassling promoter. Then one day I heard there was something funny about rassling. After twenty years I found out it wasn’t on the level and I couldn’t stand it. When Curley died I told a guy: ‘He heard a couple of his guys was fakin’ and the shock killed him.’ “
He laughed uproariously. “What I mean, the little champ don’t look good punchin’ the bag,” he said. “He has got to have another guy to punch. Then he loves it. Only thing, I’m afraid he might get a little tired going ten rounds with Joyce on account of he ain’t boxed. But he’s good and strong.”
Bell said “All right” and started to detach the small bag, but Beau kept punching at it. “Quit it,” Bell said, “you’ll bust the bag. Quit, I tell you.”
He turned Beau loose on the big bag for a while, then stepped in to swab him with a towel. Beau buffeted his trainer as he worked, slamming light punches into his middle and cutting loose now and then with a whistling hook that barely missed. Bell worked patiently, backing away. “Keep horsin’ around,” he warned, “and you’ll bust these glasses.”
“Look at him,” Wergeles said. “He’ll get down to a lightweight again easy, the way he loves to work. He’d work nights if I’d leave him do it. He loves to fight. He’s illiterate.”
DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE
1951
Billy Graham whipped the whey out of Kid Gavilan the other night. He earned the welterweight championship of the world. He got a favorable vote from one of the three officials, and that minority ballot went to him by a margin of one point. Not one round, but one miserable point-within-a-round. Let’s get it on record right away. The score here was eleven rounds for Graham, four for Gavilan.
So Billy was robbed, and not even Frank Forbes, the judge who called the rounds even but scored a one-point edge for Graham, gave Billy anything near the credit which, in this view, he deserved.
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