by Mark Kram
Frazier began to train his son Marvis; no problem with the dogma there. Marvis was a heavyweight, a good boxer who Joe tried to turn into a prototype of himself. Eventually, he’d get out of the ring with $1 million in total earnings. But Joe was having trouble with other young fighters. They didn’t want to be told what to do, when to do it. He lost a couple of good amateurs to others, and didn’t like it much; so much for loyalty, they didn’t even allow him to make an offer. He had not charged managers for training their fighters in his gym, now he would. “You don’t go to General Motors,” he said, “build a car and say it’s yours. Same thing at my gym. If you come here and learn, I want to make money back.” He had a young phenom, Bert Cooper, “a natural hitting machine.” Big things were ahead, then he lost Cooper to coke and the streets. Joe began to despise drugs, and would find how close to home they could touch.
One of his prizes was Chandler Durham, a light-heavy and the son of Yank. He threw himself into the shaping of Chandler. “The boy could fight,” says Burt Watson, Frazier’s business manager. “But Joe just couldn’t bring him into line. He called Joe names, and Joe took it. He thought he was Joe’s equal. Joe would shake his head and say: ‘Your daddy’s spittin’ in the grave at the things you’re doin’. Chandler, too, was gobbled up by the environment. Chandler was a friend of Joe Jr., whom Frazier guarded like a Doberman. Joe Jr. was five-five, 147 pounds, and everyone who saw him not only thought he was a duplicate of Joe, but also found him better; his ring record was 15–0. “He positively walked through people,” says Watson. “One of the greatest talents I’ve ever seen.” Frazier knew it, his heart pounded with recognition of himself; he was alive, back at the hunt again. Until Joe Jr. slipped into a haze of drugs, with Frazier cruising the night streets in his car, looking for him, desperately trying to break his fall; he couldn’t. Joe Jr. got into trouble and was sent to prison for three years. Mentally, it leveled Joe to his knees.
Marvis was the opposite of Joe Jr., listening to his father’s every word. Joe once told him: “If the speed limit is thirty, you do twenty-five. If you’re ever stopped, step out of the car with your hands up. If you’re with buddies, tell ’em to cut out the laughing and pay attention to the officer. Say yes sir, no sir.” Marvis was stopped and got out with hands up. The cop just looked at him, asking: “What’re you doing, son?” Marvis said: “What my daddy told me.” Who is Daddy? Smokin’ Joe Frazier. The cop said, laughing: “Get back in the car…and give him my best.” Always practical, Marvis knew that he did not have the motivation and the destructive instinct of his father, and he sensibly left the ring early after being bopped quickly by Mike Tyson; he became a preacher. Florence, Joe’s wife, was never keen on Joe fighting, let alone Marvis. The two argued often over Marvis as a fighter and Joe’s nightlife, and the final break came when Joe told the family he had had two children by another woman. “When a marriage is gone,” Joe said, “it’s gone. Hey, I wasn’t easy. I know that.”
A Gullah himself, Burt Watson first met Joe in 1990 at a wedding. Aside from his gym, Frazier owned a limo business and was filling in for a driver with a hangover. The two became fast friends, hit the clubs every night until Burt couldn’t handle it anymore. “I was showing up loaded at work, bent out of shape,” says Burt. “So I couldn’t keep up with him anymore. I jokingly told him: ‘Hire me, or leave me the hell alone.’” Burt joined him as business manager. Joe fired the remaining people from Cloverlay, saying: “These are people who have not done me justice.” Frazier’s name had not been in circulation. Burt got him on the autograph circuit, where he’d make three thousand dollars a session, packaged him for commercials, got him into the money flow. “We worked together for ten years,” says Burt, “and I was his shoes and his pants. But nothing seemed to make him happy.”
Joe had a reputation as a two-fisted drinker around town. “Sure, he drank,” says Burt, “but, you know, I never saw him drunk. Four or five of us would be in a place, and he’d take all the drinks, a wine, a vodka, whiskey and brandy, then put them in one big glass and belt it down. He called it his Man or Mouse drink. Joe was a real accessible guy. There’s not a legend you can walk up to and be friendly. I saw Dr. J. out one night, and if you got near him you’d get your leg broke. Not with Joe. Some places were rough. I’d say, ‘Let’s get outta here…I don’t care how good your left hook is.’ Nothing to get a call from Twenty-third and Columbia, the roughest area in Philly, and there he is sitting there and buying drinks for people with no teeth, with wigs on and twirling guns. Nobody gave him trouble. He has the body of a freak, very hard. I accidentally ran into him in the gym, and I saw stars.” What about his eyesight? “He couldn’t see past my fingers. I had to be right on top of him. In the gym, he worked the light and heavy bags with bare fists. You know how that feels? He once got an inch and a half cut on his hand, not in the gym, and he just poured booze on it. He’s settled back now, though. Thank the good Lord.”
Watson could never understand Joe’s attitude about money. He was an easy touch in the gym, even loaned guys five thousand dollars, then complained about only making eight thousand one long day for doing autographs. “Joe,” Burt said, “I bring the money in the front door, and you send it out the back.” Says Burt: “One time Joe was peeling off a few bills for a guy in the gym. The guy went for the whole roll, but turned the wrong way. Right into Joe’s left, and there he was on the floor moaning and unable to walk.” The pair traveled constantly, and Burt remembers an afternoon when a trooper stopped them in North Carolina. Joe promptly showed him his license and registration.
“Are you Joseph Frazier?” the trooper asked.
Joe nodded.
“Do you know you were speeding?”
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Doin’ a 120.”
“Where you from?”
“West Philly,” Joe said.
“Spell it,” the trooper said.
“That’s not my job. I get paid for beatin’ people up.”
Joe took the ticket, got back in the car, mumbling: “Smart mothafucker.”
When a lion no longer hunts or roams, the smallest insects begin to eat it alive, reducing and devouring. Frazier, Watson observed, was being torn up inside. He couldn’t let Manila or Ali go. “On a five-hundred-mile trip,” says Burt, “that can get mighty tiring, hearing about Ali. We were on our way to Florida once, and I happened to pay a small compliment to Ali. Joe squealed a turn into a gas station. I got out, looked up and he’s speeding away. Where was he going? I was in the middle of nowhere. Do you know, I waited two hours there. Finally he comes back and says, ‘Get your ass in here. Some things best left unsaid.’ This was, mind you, almost twenty years since Manila. For a long time, I didn’t understand what was eating at him, then I did. Ali doesn’t know how deep he cut into Joe. You don’t do to a man what he did to Joe where we come from. You never have to wonder what Joe’s thinking. He never mopes or gets depressed. He says what’s on his mind. To Joe, it was total betrayal by Ali. The acclaim Ali gets eats at him. Joe is the only legend still disrespected. Ali robbed him of who he is. To a lot of people in this city, Joe’s still ignorant, slow-speaking, dumb and ugly. The tag never leaves him. Ali can’t even talk, and he’s still the prize. I saw it at Joe’s Hall of Fame induction in 1989. Ali was there.”
Watson adds: “It was Joe’s night, and here it was all about Ali. The crowd acted like it wanted Joe to go away. He just couldn’t shake Ali, not even in the museum display where their paychecks from the first fight were together, their gloves, everything. Watching the evening progress, Joe just lowered his head and shook his head. It hurt. People have only seen one Joe, the one created by Ali. If you’re a man, that’s going to get to you in a big way. It would me. Look at Philly, murals are all over the place. Dr. J. Patti LaBelle. Marion Anderson. Frank Rizzo. Where’s Joe? What’s worse, they wanted to erect a monument to a fighter to reflect the struggle of the common man. What do they put up? A statue of Sylvester Stallone, Rocky, not even real, when they have
a total example in Joe Frazier. You tell me. A movie character big as life next to the sports arena. Part of it is racism and disrespect for Joe. Funny thing. Joe is like Ali now. Doing all the talking. Odd. If I could get them together, Joe wouldn’t forgive, and Ali, in his condition, wouldn’t know how.”
Burt remembers the coldness of Frazier at the Night of a Thousand Stars, a ceremony for athletes at Radio City in New York. Everyone was there: Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Dr. J., Wilt Chamberlain, Mickey Mantle, and so on. “I was helping Joe get dressed,” says Watson. “So many names there. And there was Ali, over in a corner by himself, no one talking to him. DiMaggio looked over, then quickly turned away. But Joe kept a view of him out of the corner of his eye. You know those vests for formal dress? Ali had it in his hand and was trying to tie it around his neck like a tie. I wanted to help him. But I couldn’t, not with Joe there. So I finish with Joe, and show him his place in line. I go back, and Ali’s still trying to tie the vest around his neck. I gotta tell ya, I almost lost it, looking at him. I went over and said: ‘Here, lemme help you, champ.’ I put the vest on properly, then his jacket. He mumbled something and left. Had Joe seen that, I’d’ve been out of a job.”
Watson got caught in the financial crossfire between Joe and Florence, and got fired for it. “I hold no grudge,” says Burt. “He’s a lonely, bent guy in some ways, close and then not close, cheap and then not cheap. He trusts no one. Ali’s influenced Joe so much he’s determined the man he is today. A couple of ghosts, if you ask me. One is still in the ring in Manila, the other doesn’t even know there was a Manila. It was a bad reckoning for both, that day.”
Frazier had years before tried to break a sword on the head of Eddie Futch, too; not easy to do. Eddie had opposed his return with Jumbo Cummings and drew Joe’s anger when Eddie, as just an adviser, told Joe that Marvis was too green to face Larry Holmes. Joe told others: “He never did anything for me except collect fifteen percent of my purse. Eddie can’t train nobody. He was just there to wipe me down.” This was not about Marvis, Eddie knew, it was the Frazier-Ali thing, that last round in Manila that Joe wouldn’t forget. Eddie bided his time.
In Vegas for the Marvis-Holmes fight, they went on a radio show together. Eddie refused to confront him, then Joe got bolder and bolder, until Futch opened up on him. He told him of his relationship with Yank Durham, how Yank followed what he said on all matters. “But Yank was my friend and your manager,” he said, “and I never wanted to take credit. I made more money than you think.” By now, Frazier was off balance, he was hearing new information. “And why did you call me every time a decision was needed?” Eddie asked. Joe backed off, and they just skirted the edges of Manila, neither now wanting to escalate the argument. Even so, when Frazier was in a mood usually brought on by a comment about Ali, he would excoriate Futch. He had been too soft to have been in charge. Yank would have sent him out for the fifteenth in Manila. “Don’t talk to me about Eddie Futch,” Joe said. “He became a big hero with the press. Such a caring man. Don’t talk to me about him.” Nobody had; it was as if he had been talking to himself.
Frazier seemed to have become increasingly unpopular in Philly. Marvis and Joe’s daughter Jacqui, a lawyer, handle his business, and they have alienated the local press and organizations with their demands attached to access and money. For his part, he feels the press gives him no respect. He was much ridiculed over an action he took concerning a land deal Cloverlay made long ago. Joe had received $80,000 from the syndicate as his share of the sale. Now, he was claiming in a suit that he had been robbed of the land. He sent letters to seven hundred homeowners, for years entrenched in a township, saying that he owned the land and wanted payment for it. They had a lot of fun with that one, some of them parading with signs reading: “Hey, Joe, we won’t go!” It was a frivolous action that reinforced the idea that he was none too bright.
In 1998, at 3:30 A.M., he was arrested for driving under the influence. He was acquitted the same year. Then he filed a civil suit against the city for racial profiling. At trial recently, Joe took the stand. “What have I done to deserve this?” he asked. “Philadelphia police and I have grown up together.” He began to sob. He said he had had root canal surgery earlier in the day, and he was taking pain medicine, cough drops and Listerine to keep his mouth fresh. Handcuffed, he said, he was made to kneel for thirty minutes in back of the police car, causing pain and aggravation to old boxing injuries. The cop said he had bloodshot eyes, “slurred speech” (an upset there; did he expect to hear an ancient Greek orator?), and was incoherent. “He swayed back and forth,” the cop said. “It appeared he was going to fall over.” A witness for Joe testified that he “stumbled” because he had had a toe amputated. The jury, six whites and two blacks, returned with a defeat for Joe, quickly short-circuiting a sellout of the Merck Manual of Symptoms to potential DWI candidates.
Burt Watson was asked if Joe might have been drinking. “I don’t know,” Watson said. “He has a lot of serious health problems. I don’t think he drinks much anymore.” He was also asked about Gypsy Joe Harris, how he later emerged in Frazier’s life. “Joe,” he said, “always had a soft spot for Gyp. He felt bad about his life. Homeless. Just short of being totally blind. He was kicked out of the gym over and over for having drugs and booze. He finally kicked cocaine, and Joe let him back in to help train fighters. Joe said: ‘The first time I see a bottle…you’re out.’” Did Joe help him with money? “I guess so,” Burt said. “But sometimes Joe never looked to help people close to him. Anyway, he was kicked out again, and several days later he was seeking to get back, and he died of a heart attack just steps from the gym door, damn near in Joe’s arms.” Frazier should have been thankful to Gyp. If it was true that Joe had been blind in his left eye his whole career, that Gypsy knew and never sold him out as he so easily could have done out of bitterness over his own aborted career. With one word, Joe would never have come to be haunted by Ali or Manila, would have been sentenced for life to chopping heads off of cattle.
In the late eighties, Ali was in Utah in political support of conservative senator Orrin Hatch, which meant he showed up in a crowd and waved; he was certainly not politically literate. He had the urge to move while staying at his inn, went outside, looked up at the jewelry of the big night sky, and began walking. He could see the cars, not many at 3 A.M., crawl toward him on the blacktop, until their headlights would fill up his eyes, and they’d swoosh by and vibrate his body. It was “scary” out there, he said. “So dark. A wolf out there? Wild dogs? Can’t see anything. Gotta look down at the white line in the middle of the road. Soooo quiet, it’s really scary.” On the way—where was he going?—he’d kneel and pray for his mother, or do exercises. Five miles out, he turned back for his hotel, arriving with the sun coming up. What was he doing out there? Any guess will do. It may not even have happened, could be he just wanted to tell himself a scary story.
What he was doing with Orrin Hatch, a politician who at one time would have put him in Leavenworth on bread and water, was not much clearer. Ali’s life now, beyond the circus, seemed a cratered dreamscape. And out of each crater popped a manipulative figure to lead the most dedicated of followers, an unorganized manipulator himself (any scheme used to gather his attention), into a newer reality. The old entourage was a child’s diversion, a game compared to the new ones that jerked his strings. Arthur Morrison, among others, comes readily to mind, Ali’s deal-a-minute sidekick for a while, who ended up in a Manhattan court trial for making threatening phone calls to former girlfriends and bomb threats to institutions, including a police station. Ali, the seeming professional friend of the accused, did not testify for him, though he would for many others, including Mike Tyson. Ali and Morrison had been together in cologne, shoe polish, and powdered milk business, all of which lost money—other people’s. But Morrison dropped Ali’s name while on the stand, repeatedly bringing up their unproductive trip to Iraq in 1990 to secure the release of hostages held by Saddam Hussein as hum
an shields. Arthur was found guilty and sentenced to seventeen years.
But Morrison was a piker next to Richard Hirschfeld, the reason why Ali was out there allied with Senator Hatch. Hirschfeld was a fast talker, a lawyer who liked to play with a yo-yo, had extensive Middle East connections, and was generally viewed and passed off by himself as one of those endless men with the secrets in Washington, almost an international Harry Lime in The Third Man—without the false penicillin. The SEC knew him well. He had been in front of its tribunal a number of times for allegedly improper business dealings, and in 1986 was permanently barred from practicing before the SEC. He was a close friend of Mohammad Fassi, the Saudi sheik who had shot to fame with a wild divorce and his talent for painting genitalia on the statues on his Beverly Hills lawn. He was also a good friend and lawyer to Ferdinand Marcos, whom he secretly taped. Marcos had been driven from the Philippines, and now, according to Hirschfeld, was mounting an invasion of the country. He took the tapes to Capitol Hill. Marcos claimed a breach of lawyer-client association and extortion. Nelson Boon, a partner with Ali and Hirschfeld in an auto factory construction, said: “Hirschfeld uses Ali as a prop, a door opener to big operators.”
In June of 1988, the Washington Post ran a news account of Ali, out of nowhere, talking to one of its reporters on the phone. He appeared to have a hard grasp of politics, current states’ rights issues, and federal judgeships being contested. Noses of reporters who had known Ali for a long time began to twitch, particularly that of Dave Kindred, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal. How could this be? Ali had had the political insight of an infant. Kindred investigated. What or who was behind the new Ali, the wily Washington lobbyist who seemed to have the ear of everyone from Strom Thurmond (their only common ground was Dr. Mendenica) to Orrin Hatch and Arlen Specter? Specter’s wife even baked Ali a double-chocolate–mousse pie. For a while, Ali was known only as a brilliant phone presence to the senators—that is, until he began to show up on Capitol Hill.