A Champion Who Won Inside the Ring and Out

By Dave Anderson
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
November 7, 2011

Some people mean more together than they do apart, whatever the stage. Churchill and Hitler. Bogart and Bacall. Ali and Frazier. And for all the deserved accolades for Muhammad Ali, I’ve always believed that each at his best, Joe Frazier, who died Monday night at age 67, was the better fighter. And the better man.

After both entered the Madison Square Garden ring undefeated in 1971 for what was called the Fight of the Century, Frazier flattened Ali with a left hook and earned a unanimous and unquestioned 15-round decision that Ali didn’t wait to hear. His jaw swollen, he hurried out of the ring on the way to a nearby hospital. He knew who had won.

The Thrilla in Manila in 1975 was awarded to Ali when Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, wouldn’t let him answer the bell for the 15th round because “he couldn’t see the right hands coming” out of his closed left eye, but Frazier soon talked freely in the interview area. When an exhausted Ali finally arrived, he described their epic in brutality as “next to death.”

That evening, at a party in an old Filipino palace, Ali, his ribs battered, walked stiffly and sat stiffly, painfully offering a finger or two instead of shaking hands.

At his hotel, Frazier sang and danced. Seeing them both, if you didn’t know what had happened in the fight, you had to think Frazier was the winner.

Not long after that, Ali had a party for his autobiography at the Rainbow Room high in Rockefeller Center. Frazier was invited, but would he show up?

For years, Ali had insulted Frazier, calling him a “gorilla” and “stupid.” Frazier seethed; he once grappled with Ali briefly — and seriously — in a television studio before they were separated. But the night of the book party, he greeted Ali with a smile and “Hiya, champ” — the ultimate compliment from one boxer to another. Class.

To me, Joe Frazier won that night, too.

But the Joe Frazier I’ll always remember wasn’t in a boxing ring or at a book party. Soon after the Garden triumph, he was back home in Beaufort, S.C., where, one of 12 children, he had grown up picking vegetables for 15 cents a crate when not helping his father, a handyman who lost his left arm in an auto accident.

“I was his left arm,” he said.

Ten years earlier, Joe had left Beaufort with about $200 in his pocket on a Greyhound bus bound for New York and a better life. He soon settled in Philadelphia, where he sometimes worked in a meat locker, battering a side of beef as if it were a punching bag — the inspiration for a scene in the “Rocky” movie.

Now, as the undisputed heavyweight champion who had earned $2.5 million at the Garden, he had returned to Beaufort in a maroon Cadillac limousine. He was there to buy a new-home site for his 62-year-old mother. “Dolly Frazier, the mother of the champ,” she introduced herself. “How sweet it is.”

That day they drove over to a nearby farm: “Trask and Sons, Fancy Vegetables,” where Mrs. Frazier had picked radishes. “Four lots right here,” said the land owner, Harold Trask, known as Beanie. “At $1,500 a lot, that’s a good price. Or if you want twice as much property, from the corner down to that bend there, it’s $3,000 an acre. And I’ll sell you four acres for $9,000.”

Joe and his mother listened and thanked Trask for his offer. On their way back to her shingled home between drooping moss trees, she said: “It’s nice, high land. No swamps. And we owe him first choice for showing it to us.”

“You say give him first choice, Momma,” Joe said, his voice rising, “but he can’t be first choice if he don’t give the right price. He ain’t giving you nothin’. He’s selling it to you. He ain’t giving you nothin’ at all.”

Back in his mother’s home, Joe talked about how he had watched fights on their little television. “Sugar Ray, Hurricane Jackson, Floyd Patterson,” he said. “Joe Louis was my idol. Down in the South, the black goes for the black.” But soon he was talking about Trask’s land offer.

“He’s talking that white talk,” Joe said. “He was saying that he wouldn’t mind if I came over to his house for a cup of coffee. And tell me that I could come back down and live. I’ll forgive, but I’ll never forget.”

I never learned what happened with that land deal for his mother, but Joe Frazier sure won the conversation about it. The next day, South Carolina state troopers escorted him in a high-speed motorcade to Columbia, S.C., where he was the first black man to address the State Legislature since the Civil War. Joe won that day, too. Just as he won at the Garden and “won” in Manila. Won that book party, too.

The record shows that Joe Frazier lost four fights — two against Ali (a mostly forgotten 12-round decision in a nontitle fight between their two classics) and two knockouts by George Foreman. But to me, somehow he always won.