The legendary Ali-Frazier fight still thrills 50…
“Looks like your little face, don’t it?”
As he taunted Joe Frazier, former heavyweight champion of the world, Muhammad Ali, current champ, pointed at the customized black T-shirts he and his entourage sported as they crashed the Aug. 26, 1975, buffet luncheon in Frazier’s honor at Manhattan’s Four Seasons.
Ali and his minions thought the T-shirts — with the phrases “MANILA” and “GORILLA” framing a gorilla — wealthy stuff. For years, Ali, possessed of lighter pores and skin, prettier face and hypnotic type, had cruelly mocked Frazier, squatter and darker, his pug nostril and crouched ring posture emblems of an infinitely more durable life as the twelfth youngster of a South Carolina sharecropper.
The New York Post’s Vic Ziegel reported how Ali, at the luncheon, abused his opponent from two earlier fights, a proud man dressed that August afternoon in a tomato-red three-piece swimsuit.
“He pushed Frazier. He rested a straight-arm against Frazier’s forehead. He threw carefully wild lefts and rights. He let himself be held back. He turned to the television cameras, yelling for his T-shirted followers to join him. ‘Let’s take a team picture,’ he said. And they did. And then they were off,” Ziegel wrote. “ ‘How can that bother me?’ Frazier told the people who kept asking if Ali’s tactics were winning the cold war.”
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As central to the early Seventies as Watergate and “The Godfather,” Ali-Frazier debuted March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden. Each man, promised the then-astronomical sum of $2.5 million, entered the “Fight of the Century” undefeated. In 1967, Ali had sacrificed his boxing profession to his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. After an illegally imposed exile of three-and-a-half years and a landmark Supreme Court victory, Ali was three fights into his comeback, keen to reclaim his crown. Frazier — like Ali, a former Olympic champion — had received the belt in 1970, in a event staged in Ali’s absence.
Formerly Cassius Clay, Ali had transformed to the Nation of Islam and advocated racial segregation; to promote tickets that would have bought out anyway, he employed black stereotypes to assault Frazier, punching a rubber gorilla at press occasions, urgent an index finger to his nostril.
Frazier, on his off time, fronted a rock band. Yet the left aligned behind the gorgeous and fiery Ali — pacifist pugilist, Louisville Lip turned warfare dissident — while conservative hardhats and other members of Richard Nixon’s Silent (*50*) rooted for Smokin’ Joe. Only the Thirties Louis-Schmeling fights, freighted by Adolf Hitler’s assertions of Aryan racial superiority, carried better symbolism.
Joe Frazier (left) and Muhammad Ali pose at Frazier’s Philadelphia fitness center. From the Lens of George Kalinsky
Ali dominated the early rounds in that first fight, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, snapping Frazier’s head with left jabs and sharp rights. Joe smoked the center rounds, driving Ali into the ropes with roundhouse lefts. The motion was ferocious. In the fifteenth spherical Frazier’s excellent left hook to Ali’s jaw dropped the ex-champion. Ali rose immediately; Frazier received the choice.
At their second fight, a Jan. 28, 1974, 12-rounder at the Garden, neither man was champion. Frazier had been dethroned the yr before by George Foreman, who had canvassed him six instances in two rounds.
“Down goes Fray-zhuh!” yelled Howard Cosell. “Down goes Fray-zhuh!”
In Ali-Frazier II, the dancing grasp simply outclassed the bobbing, weaving slugger; certainly, Ali may need KOed Frazier in the second spherical had been it not for the referee prematurely ending the spherical.
Nine months later, Ali, 32, reclaimed the crown by gorgeous Foreman, in the African nation of Zaire, with an eighth-round knockout.
So the third and decisive match with Frazier was set for a coliseum in Quezon City, exterior Manila, in the Philippines, Oct. 1, 1975.
Each man had bested the other once; only Frazier had dropped Ali. The time for stunts, for mockery, was over.
“It must be 100 degrees here,” said announcer Don Dunphy.
Muhammad Ali (proper) lands one on Joe Frazier in Manila. Getty Images
The capability crowd of 30,000, some 10% reporters and photographers, was joined by a global satellite-television and closed-circuit-theater viewers of another billion or so. Thus the “Thrilla in Manila,” as Ali dubbed the bout, was one of the most widely anticipated and consumed occasions of the millennium coming to its close. Heavyweight contender Ken Norton, who cut up two bouts with Ali, once breaking his jaw, predicted “a very epic battle,” “one of power versus technique.”
The complete world understood the historical past in the making. “In a few moments we will either have the greatest heavyweight champion of all time,” joked comic Flip Wilson at ringside, “or another sensational comeback and a setup for what will unquestionably be the greatest fight ever in history.”
Round 1 started with Ali flat-footed, left glove outstretched to glaze Frazier’s head: a demonstration of his great benefit in attain that both taunted his adversary like an older brother and aided in measurement. Ali threw punches in blinding flurries of mixtures, main with proper crosses and following with left hooks, snapping Frazier’s head and stirring the group. “Frazier keeps smiling as Ali beats him to the punch,” Dunphy said. “That was a big round for Muhammad Ali.”
Midway in Round 2 Ali used the left probe to set up a sharp proper that twisted Frazier’s head, briefly lifting him off the canvas. It ranks among the cleanest, most excellent rights of Ali’s profession; certainly, relatively than observe up, the Great One took a step back and lowered his gloves to savor the second.
Round 3 introduced the return of rope-a-dope, the tactic Ali had used against Foreman in Zaire: laying on the ropes, weathering 40 unanswered blows to arms, kidneys and skull before unleashing a flurry of 30 counterpunches at Frazier.
By Round 5, Frazier, historically a slow starter, started to smoke. “Ali really got nailed!” Dunphy shouted after a traditional Frazier left. Two more adopted, and the group started chanting, “Fray-zhuh! Fray-zhuh!”
Ali was shedding steam. His punches carried no zip. It appeared to Dunphy and many others that the motion constituted “almost a replica” of the 1971 bout, with Ali dominating early, Frazier coming on strong halfway.
But early in Round 6 an Ali proper stripped Frazier’s mouthpiece. Then Ali drained again, retreating to rope-a-dope, Frazier scoring routinely.
Muhammad Ali (left) and Joe Frazier (proper) meet with Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos before fight night time.
Sports Illustrated via Getty Images
The next spherical Ali rediscovered a main device: dancing. On show once more, slower than a decade earlier but still charming, was the clockwise prancing from which left jabs and proper crosses sprang like cobras. Four-punch combos, a jaw-crunching uppercut: the champ reclaimed control. “Ali, fighting a smart fight now, picking his spots, breaking off the action when he wants to, resuming it when he wants to,” Dunphy noticed.
Both males had withstood each other’s best. But the toll on Frazier was growing. “Frazier is unbelievable,” marveled actor Hugh O’Brian. “The amount of times that he got hit on the head, that he got clocked. . . . That he could stand there and keep comin’ at him — it’s just fantastic, the punches that he’s been taking.”
“Joe has to find some way to stop getting hit so much,” Ken Norton agreed.
The last rounds witnessed almost unrelenting motion, as savage a contest as any heavyweight title bout has ever produced: the unceasing trading of blows, of mixtures of blows, the fighters’ heads snapping left and proper as they slugged each other at will, the group, riotous, standing and screaming like none before. “This is one of the great ones!” Dunphy shouted.
Two minutes into Round 13, another excellent Ali proper despatched Frazier’s mouthpiece flying. The champ poured it on, scoring 10 unanswered blows. The challenger was now cut on his lip and below his proper eye. “Joe has taken a lot of punishment,” Dunphy lamented.
But Smokin’ Joe wouldn’t go down.
In Round 14 the champ danced and went proper to work. “Ali is going out for a knockout, I think, in this round,” Dunphy said. Two minutes in, an Ali flurry — whup-whup-whup to the face — despatched Frazier staggering. Ten more Ali punches related. Referee Carlos Padilla — the native Filipino who had labored the bout skillfully, warning each fighter at instances for guidelines violations — guided Frazier back to his nook.
He stayed there. Trainer Eddie Futch refused to enable his fighter, his face swollen like a lumpy potato, to reply the bell for the fifteenth spherical.
Ali had received the collection, two victories to one; Frazier remained at once the only man to put the other down and the only fighter unable to end a bout.
Ali collapsed amid the group that flooded the ring. “It was like death,” he said later. “Closest thing to dying that I know of.”
For the billions around the world who cherished Muhammad Ali, the great thriller of his life is why he fought 10 more instances after Manila.
For all those who cherished Joe Frazier, it provided scant consolation that Ali, 10 years before Frazier’s death in 2011, apologized for the racial taunts.
Their names be linked forevermore.
James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax and the writer, most just lately, of “Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.”
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