Tom English: Smokin Joe takes his grudge against Ali to grave

Joe Frazier had plenty reason to despise great rival, but it is tragic feud was never resolved, writes Tom English

For two hours Joe Frazier had been talking about his life. Oh sure, much of it was about Muhammad Ali and Madison Square Garden in 1971, Muhammad Ali and the Thrilla in Manila in 1975, Muhammad Ali and the blood feud and the resentment that would never die, but in the midst of all this he spoke about the desperate poverty of his youth in Beaufort County, South Carolina, the love he had for his mother, who lived to be 100, the fear and respect he had for his father, a bootlegger, womaniser and all-round bad-ass, who checked out a whole lot earlier. He talked about his brothers and sisters, all 12 of them. One sister, in particular. There were tears in his eyes when the then 64-year-old Joe spoke of the long-gone Flossie.

In his youth, Joe would string a bag over a tree, punch it to hell and imagine a better life. Flossie would saunter by and poke fun. “She’d be like, ‘What you doin’, champ? Champion of nothing, more like’. I’d say, ‘Flossie, why you keep talkin’ like that, why can’t you support me?’ ‘Support you?’ Then she’d laugh. She never thought I had it. Poor Flossie was one of the first of us to die and every once in a while when I was world champ I’d go to the graveyard to see her, just to say hi and tell her how I’m doing. ‘Here I am, Sis. Here I am. I made it’.”

Joe was sitting in the corner of a hotel in, of all places, Aberdeen. It was the autumn of 2008 and Smoke was on a speaking tour of the UK, trying hard to sell the brand and make some jingle. He was fightin’, but times were tough. A few months before, he’d closed down his gym. Told nobody, not even his sons. For 40 years, Frazier’s gym stood big and proud near the railway track in an area called the Badlands in northern Philadelphia. He lived in a room out the back that he called the Dungeon. In Philly, Frazier’s gym was the salvation of many kids.

It was costing too much dough, Joe said. Didn’t pay its way. All those kids he helped over the years? Nobody ever got in touch. Nobody ever phoned. “They don’t call me. Gym cost me $150,000 a year in electricity. Time to move on.”

At the time, Joe had plans. Business interests. There was talk of a restaurant, some chat about Smokin’ Joe merchandise and the reformation of his band, Joe Frazier and the Knockouts. There was rumour, too, of a statue being erected in his honour in Philly, his adopted city. Clearly, this was something he longed for. Acceptance by his own people, he felt he never had it. Ali took that from him. To his greatest rival went a world of tributes and monuments and money. Even when Ali lost it all, a company was prepared to pay him $50m for his image rights. Joe got nothing, not even in his own city.

There’s a statue to a boxer in Philadelphia, he said, but it wasn’t him, it was Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone’s fictional character who, in the movie, pounded meat in the slaughterhouse, just as Joe had done, who had sprinted up the steps of the art museum, as Joe did years before. The Rocky people spoke to Joe before they made the film and borrowed the scenes from his life but gave him no acknowledgement. Oh yeah, Joe was bitter, but most of all he was sad.

Three years since the interview and there’s still no statue, no recognition of who he was and what he did. And now, tragically, there’s no Joe either. Liver cancer got him in the end at the age of 67. So many quotes come to mind, but it’s fitting in many ways that we go with one from Ali, the man he fought three times, the person he barely went a day without thinking about, the second half of sport’s greatest rivalry. Speaking in the early 1990s, when his Parkinson’s Syndrome was beginning to take a terrible toll on him, Ali attempted to build a bridge to Joe’s door: “I’m sorry Joe Frazier is mad at me. I’m sorry I hurt him. Joe Frazier is a good man. I couldn’t have done what I did without him and he couldn’t have done what he did without me. And if God ever calls me to a holy war, I want Joe Frazier fighting beside me.”

JOE AND ALI, ALI AND JOE. As Thomas Hauser, author of the seminal work on Muhammad’s life and times, once said: “They weren’t really fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world, they were fighting for the heavyweight championship of each other.” This wasn’t just boxing, it was hate borne out of racial politics of 1970s America, it was the battle for the soul of black America and Ali won it even though he had no right.

The things Ali did and said about Joe were racist, hateful and hypocritical almost beyond words. When Ali lost his licence after refusing, as a conscientious objector, to go to war in Vietnam, Joe was on his side. Joe spoke up for him, lent him money, went to the White House and asked Richard Nixon to use his influence to get Ali back in the ring. “Ain’t right to take away a man’s pick and shovel,” said Joe.

Just as soon as Ali was back in the game, he turned on Frazier, selling a line about Joe being an Uncle Tom, about Frazier being the white man’s fighter and Ali being on the side of the downtrodden black man, a complete fallacy but one that was accepted far and wide on account of Ali’s magnetic personality and his mesmeric oratory.

To be an Ali fan was to be young, black and liberal, pro the civil rights movements and anti-war in Vietnam. To be a Frazier supporter was to be white and conservative. Ali shaped it that way. And Joe despised him for it.

“Any black person who’s for Joe Frazier is a traitor,” Ali preached. “The only people rooting for him are white people in suits, Alabama sheriffs and members of the Ku Klux Klan. I’m fighting for the little man in the ghetto.” The lost irony was that Joe, raised in horrendous poverty, knew more about the ghetto than Ali and that Ali, in the grip of the Nation of Islam, knew more about white people in suits, Alabama sheriffs and the Ku Klux Klan than most black men.

Ali even met the Klan. He spoke at a KKK rally before the Thrilla in Manila in 1975. The Nation of Islam and the Klan believed in the separation of the races and would meet regularly to talk about their shared mission. “It was a hell of a scene,” said Ali not long before his third meeting with Frazier. “These white hoods and the bonfire and me on the platform. I said, ‘Black people should marry their own women’. I said, ‘Blue birds with blue birds, red birds with red birds, pigeons with pigeons, eagles with eagles. God didn’t make no mistake’. They said, ‘Yeaaaah!’ They said, ‘You teach the rest of the niggers and then we’ll be all right’.”

Joe saw that side of Ali clearer than anybody. “Plain and simple,” he wrote in his autobiography, “he was a nigger when it was in his interest and when he could get folks fussing about him. Yeah. He’d go into the ghetto and create a stir. Block streets and bring the cops out. And after he caused a traffic jam, it was back to Sugar Hill, or Cherry Hill, or whatever Hill the joker lived up on. What did he know about hard times? He never had to do real work. Spent his summers on a white millionaire’s estate. And later as a pro everything was greased for his success. He had a white man in the corner and rich plantation people to fund him. A white lawyer kept him out of jail. And he’s going to Uncle Tom me.”

The first fight in The Garden was the biggest thing to hit sport’s history. “Don’t you know I’m God,” Ali taunted. “God, you’re in the wrong place tonight,” replied Joe. “I’m kicking ass and taking names.”

It was a night of monumental ferocity, a near-death match that Joe won by unanimous decision. He was still the heavyweight champion of the world, but most of the time it didn’t feel like it. Ali never gave him the credit and so, neither, did black America. “White people say I lost,” said Ali, “but all black people know I won.” The feud between the fighters grew ever darker.

They fought for a second time, back at The Garden in 1974, but it was something of an ant-climax. George Foreman had the title and looked like he had total dominance over the ageing Ali and Frazier, who Foreman had beaten to a pulp to win the belt. The Thrilla was borne out of Ali’s storied victory over Foreman in Kinshasa in late 1974 and his certainty that Joe was washed-up and easy prey.

“The fight might not go two minutes,” Ali boasted. Joe, meanwhile, was telling anybody who’d listen, his trainer Eddie Futch, his corner-man Georgie Benton, his children, his friends, that he was ready to die in the ring of the Araheta Coliseum in Quezon City on that boiling hot Philippines morning of 10 September, 1975.

Joe got to hear of the things that were going on in Ali’s training camp. Ali stood in the ring in the gym one day and asked his people: “Who am I?”

“The greatest,” replied his corner man Drew Bundini Brown. “The king of all he see!” Ali spread his arms like a preacher man. “Joe Frazier,” he started.

“Ape, ape, ape,” went the crowd.

“Joe Frazier should give his face to the Wildlife Fund! He so ugly, blind men go the other way!”

“Ugly! Ugly! Ugly!” chuckled Bundini.

Ali again: “He not only looks bad! You can smell him in another country! What will the people in Manila think? We can’t have a gorilla for a champ! They’re gonna think, lookin’ at him, that all black brothers are animals. Ignorant. Stupid. Ugly. If he’s champ again, other nations will laugh at us.”

“Call us pig farmers,” shouted one of the faithful. “Can’t have it.”

“Jist niggers!” said another. “’Ain’t that the truth.”

“Jist niggers and freaks,” Ali replied. “They gonna say that ‘bout me?”

“Noooooo,” they all screamed.

Frazier went to Futch and told him something. “Eddie, listen up! Whatever you do, whatever happens, don’t stop the fight! We got nowhere to go after this. I’m gonna eat this half-breed’s heart right out of his chest. I mean it, Eddie. This is the end of him or me.”

The horror of the fight does not lessen over time. Ali controlled the first four rounds but then Joe came on strong and landed some seismic blows to Ali’s body and head. A hate-fuelled barrage descended on the champion round after round. Bundini began to cry. As his man was getting beaten up on the ropes he turned away. “Lawd have mercy!” he said. Beside him, Herbert Muhammad, Ali’s manager, opened a bottle of gin.

Ali and Joe were as exhausted as two prize-fighters ever were, only Joe was worse because he could barely see. Since an accident in 1964, Joe had only partial vision in his left eye, something he never mentioned to anybody. Now his right eye was closing fast. He was in there and yet he could barely see. In the 14th round, Ali landed blow after blow, punches that Joe couldn’t see coming. At the end of the 14th, Ali was in such a state of physical torture that he was about to quit when Futch decided enough was enough. “It’s over, Joe,” he said, famously. “No-one will forget what you did here today.”

That time in Aberdeen, Joe told me that God sent him to earth to fix Ali, to silence him for all the hurtful things he’d said about people, most notably about Joe himself. “Ali did a lot of dumb stuff in the sight of the Lord and the Lord didn’t like it. See what the Lord did? He sent me to get him,” he said, talking about Ali’s Parkinson’s. “I don’t think that, I know that. There are some things you don’t say. He called himself Thee Greatest. Not The but Thee. Thee Who? There’s only one Thee in this world and that’s the Man above. So the Lord God tried to slow him down but he didn’t listen. He kept on doing the same old thing, preaching the same old hate. Then you see what the Lord did?”

Then Joe turned an imaginary key on his mouth and threw it away. “He (God) fixed it so Muhammad can’t talk anymore. It ain’t my fault or your fault. I haven’t seen him in a few years but I don’t wish him any bad luck. I wish there was something I could do to help him but when the Lord speaks upon you ain’t nobody gonna get a word in, right? Oh yeah, I forgive him. We both forgive each other for all the slurs and the slaps and the wrong-doing. We forgive. But fight-wise? You can’t take that away. That’s a dead-end. Ain’t no way through that. That stays, know what I’m saying.”

It didn’t sound like Joe forgave Ali. His mobile phone message at the time was another window to his soul. “My name is Smokin’ Joe Frazier. Sharp as a razor. Yeah, floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee. I’m the man who done the job. He knows, look and see. Call us. Bye-bye...”

Ali apologised to Joe a few times over the years and on occasion Joe came across like he’d accepted it and moved on and on other days the bitterness would bubble again and it was like he was back in the Philippines in ’75. He felt that Ali and his Uncle Tom attacks denied him his place in the affections of his city and his country and he was right. By the time people started to realise that Ali’s words were trash-talking racism, Joe’s time had gone and he was in the Dungeon in the back of a gym he could not longer afford to maintain and living in a city that didn’t want to acknowledge his name. They will now, surely. The tragedy is that it is too late.