The greatest heavyweight championship fight in history took place on October 1, 1975, in Manila, and the combatants were Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. And despite the result—Frazier’s magnificent cornermen refused to let their man, blinded by the welts around his eyes, go into the ring for the fifteenth round—no one would ever call Frazier a loser. “It was like death,” Ali admitted after the fight. “Closest thing to dyin’ that I know of.”
How Frazier managed to fight blind in those late rounds is beyond imagining. In Mark Kram’s classic account, Frazier rested afterward in a villa in downtown Manila. When Kram arrived to speak with him, Frazier was confused. “Who is it? I can’t see! I can’t see! Turn the lights on!” The lights were on. “His eyes were only slits,” Kram wrote. “His face looked as if it had been painted by Goya.”
Frazier despised his quicksilver rival, while Ali thought of Frazier as a usurper, an instrument of The Man. Ali rightly believed that he had been robbed of the best years of his fighting life by the United States government and the boxing authorities, who stripped him of his title because he refused to go to Vietnam. Ali went beyond his usual taunts and poetical predictions of doom with Frazier. He verbally humiliated him, mocking him as dumb, as a “gorilla.” Frazier, who was born in rural South Carolina and then became a resident of Philadelphia, running a gym in a tough neighborhood, was no one’s lap dog. He was immensely prideful. In fact, his childhood was vastly more deprived than anything Ali, as Cassius Clay, experienced in Louisville. The racial way Ali framed their rivalry—casting himself as the glamorous enlightened new black man and Frazier as retrograde, an Uncle Tom—rightly infuriated Smokin’ Joe.
But despite their prolonged and wounding war of the spirit, Frazier did not fail to pay tribute to Ali after the fight in Manila, just as Ali had done for him. “Man, I hit him with punches that’d bring down the walls of a city,” Frazier said. “Lawdy, lawdy he’s a great champion.”
In 1998, I published a book about Ali’s self-creation, the years of his embrace of the Nation of Islam, his refusal to fight in Vietnam, and his fights against Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. It was a book as much about race in the fifties and sixties as it was about boxing. But despite all the psychological and racial dimensions of the Ali-Frazier fights in the seventies, I now see that struggle on an almost purely individual level, as a pure contest of inner strength, athleticism, and will.
The third fight, the “Thrilla in Manila,” as Ali dubbed it, was an epic in three acts, with Ali taking the initiative in the early rounds, strafing Frazier with left jabs and right-hand leads; then Frazier dominating in the middle rounds; and, finally, Ali, worn and body-weary, summoning the strength to wear Frazier down, belting him at angles that Frazier, sightless, could no longer defend. Frazier, of course, won their first fight, in March, 1971—the most glamorous sporting event ever (with Frank Sinatra shooting photographs for Life!). He iced that fifteen-round decision with the best millisecond of his career, a leaping left hook to Ali’s jaw that put Ali down and ballooned his face. But somehow Frazier was even more stunning in Manila. In the seventh round, as Frazier started to get to Ali, Ali looked at him and said, “Old Joe Frazier, why I thought you were washed up.”
“Somebody told you all wrong, pretty boy,” Frazier replied and went to work with left hooks to the head and body.
I’ve watched the fight more times than I can count. I rarely watch boxing much these days, mainly because it’s hard to countenance a sport that I would never let my kids take part in. And yet I can’t resist this spectacle of will. As Frazier sat on his stool after the fourteenth round, a round in which Ali had punched him so hard with a right hand that Frazier’s mouthpiece went flying into the seats, a round in which it became obvious that he could no longer defend himself, his manager Eddie Futch had to insist that it was over. He would not allow his man to die in the ring—which, if you watch the video, seems like a distinct possibility.
“Joe,” Futch said, “I’m going to stop it.”
“No, no, Eddie you can’t do that to me,” Frazier said softly.
“You couldn’t see in the last two rounds,” Futch said. “What makes you think ya gonna see in the fifteenth?”
“I want him, boss,” Frazier said.
“Sit down, son,” Futch said, placing a hand on his fighter’s shoulder. “It’s all over. No one will ever forget what you did here today.”
Frazier died of liver cancer yesterday. He was sixty-seven. He never really gave up his resentment of Ali, despite Ali’s periodic apologies and gestures of respect. When Ali lit the Olympic flame at the 1996 Summer Games, in Atlanta, his arm trembled with Parkinson’s. Frazier was unmoved. He said he felt like throwing Ali into the fire.
In Philadelphia, Frazier ran a gym. He burned through his fortune. His health declined. Occasionally, he would say he had no bitterness toward Ali, though in 2006 he claimed that he had won all three fights, when in fact he had only won the first. When a Times reporter asked him about his persistent bitter feelings, Joe said, “I am what I am.”
Ali, who lives with his wife Lonnie on a farm in Michigan, released a statement today. It said, “The world has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration.”
Frazier and Ali in Manila, in 1975. Photograph courtesy Bettman/Corbis.
