joe frazier goes to war

coolegrain

this was posted on another forum i frequent and i thought it worth re-posting here.

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"God, let me survive this night. God protect my family. God grant me strength. And God...allow me to kick the **** out of this motha****er!."
-Joe Frazier

1971

On March 8, 1971, according to Muhammad Ali, the planet would stumble in its axis, billions would hold their breaths, including every last ice-covered Sherpa and sand-swept Bedouin, and ecumenical constituency that he claimed as his, and his alone, in contrast to Joe Frazier, "a little old ****** boy who ain't been anywhere 'cept Philly, never done anything for nobody 'cept rich people that back him and politician crooks, never had a thought in his dumb head 'cept for himself."
Frazier was up North, yet his shadow rolled heavily over the sun streaked walls of the Fifth Street Gym in Miami. Celebrities like Sammy Davis and Elvis Presley, to the sound of whirring cameras, moved in and out of his glow as if seeking reaffirmation of their own rank. "You cool brother?" Elvis asked, embracing him. "Cool as you." Ali smiled. "And gettin' cooler."

Frazier Goes to war

The fight of the century

"Anybody black who thinks Frazier can whup me is an uncle tom," said Ali at the time. "Everybody who's black wants me to keep on winning."

"The only people rooting for Joe Frazier," he remembers Ali saying ," are white people in suits, Alabama sheriffs, and members of the Klu Klux Klan."

"Frazier is too dark and too black"
-Muhammad Ali

"For the light skinned Ali and his fans, Joe Frazier was both too black and not black enough"
-Jack Cashill

"Joe's such a decent guy," veteran trainer Futch said of Frazier before the fight, "but when he beats Ali, Joe is going to be to go down as one of the most unpopular black champions of all time."

The war of words

Ali had launched into the war of words. He was relentless and brutal. In a divided nation, Ali had assigned an unlikely role to Frazier, that o a traitor to his race and titular leader of the forces of reaction. With his greater rhetorical kills and his access to an increasingly friendly broadcast media, Ali painted Frazier into a corner. "Anybody black who thinks Frazier can whup me is an uncle tom," said Ali at the time. "Everybody who's black wants me to keep on winning."

The black media piled on. Jet magazine described Frazier a an "unheralded white-created champion." Even more telling was the slight delivered by future today show host Bryant Gumbel, then writing for Black Sport. Gumbel asked in his headline, "Is Joe Frazier a white champion in black skin?"

Moved to the anger by the media and Ali, the hardcore faithful threatened Frazier and his family by mail and phone. The police put a watch on Frazier, his wife, and his children. History had proven that Ali's Muslim colleges were capable of killing.

Even in Philadelphia, the black community turned against the imagined race traitor, Frazier. Schoolmates teased his son, Marvis, that his father was an Uncle Tom. Young blacks bought the whole hog, not knowing or caring that the Muslims had him in a choke collar and a leash, taking no notice that he had, with great arrogance, betrayed another hero of great appeal, Malcolm X. Black magazines, confused about whether they were MLK passives or Stokley Carmichaels troopers, slew Frazier's blackness at every turn

"I grew up like the black man-he didn't", Frazier wold tell Sports Illustrated William Nack. "I cooked the liquor. I cut the wood. I worked the farm. I lived in the Ghetto. Yes, I tommed; when he asked me to help him get a license, I tommed for him. For him!" The irony stung. "He had a white man in the corner and those rich plantation people to fund him," Frazier writes bitterly of Ali. "A white lawyer kept him out of jail .An he's going to Uncle Tom me?"

Ali and his supporters abused the people who pulled for Joe Frazier even more than they abused Frazier himself. Fight manager and former sorts editor Dave Wolf watched Ali on TV one night with Frazier. "The only people rooting for Joe Frazier," he remembers Ali saying ," are white people in suits, Alabama sheriffs, and members of the Klu Klux Klan." Enraged, Frazier smashed his fist mutely into his hand as he watched. Says Wolf, "It was cruel. That's all."
Wolfs memory on this core is accurate. The image of Frazier fans has not appreciated much over time. "The people who wanted [Frazier] to beat Ali,"writes Marquese in 1999, "were the die-hard racists, the love-it-or-leave-it brigade, the people who resented everything that Ali stood for." A more reflective Bryant Gumbel would tell Hauser twenty years later, "Joe Frazier became the symbol of our oppressors."

Uncle Tom

"It's a damn shame what Clay's doin' to my boy,"
-Yank Durham

The Uncle Tom epithet tripped so incessantly from Ali's lips and now from the crowd around the gym, that Joe might as well have been wearing a sign. His son, Marvis had to defend himself and his father at school. The phone calls came day and night, some calling him a tommin' dog, others vowing that he would never see another day if he beat Ali. The label hadn't stuck with Patterson or Terrel, but it was isolating him to a speck of a man, right in his own town, in his own gym. Frazier had police guarding him around the clock, and it seemed remarkable that he did not teeter into disoientation, that the job stayed fixed in his mind. It got to Durham finally. One day, without warning, the gym almost empty, Yank picked up a water pail and slammed it repeatedly against a ringpost. "It's a damn shame what Clay's doin' to my boy," he said then kicked the smashed pail with full force up over the ropes.

Racial Identity

Young white men, Jews, Italians, Irish, Hispanic, never have to fret much about their racial character. In these times, perhaps always so, young blacks were forced to dwell on the steps to be taken on the wavy line of their existence, of going along or burning down, and this was no time to be neutral. In this regard, where had Frazier failed the test, a young kid run out of town by his mother in fear for his life, while the young Ali, understandably, sucked and slurped the big orange of the Louisville rich and fingered the laurel wreath of the wide recognition from hometown whites? Move back three decades, and Frazier had a ring DNA similar to that of Joe Louis , self effacing, reticent , and worshiped by all blacks . Long after his career , he would ask say on the subject of Ali: "I don't believe in the separation of the races." Where, then, was the justice? "There aint none," Frazier said. "Not for me. It eats at me, but I dont let on and I dont forget. He uses his blackness to kick up stir, get people excited, maybe convince him self of something, then he's gone. He thinks no hurts left behind. What he ever do for people but give them a lot of silly words?"
He added: "He's no martyr. The heroes are them kids with their pieces of body all over Vietnam, a lot of poor blacks. I don't care about his draft thing. His politics. His religion But he aint no leader of anything. He stop the war? How do people buy his ****?

Yank Durham

Well fed lawyers with intricate traps in their attache cases who saw big money in boxing were up ahead and lay in wait; boxing was a double breasted suit. Fighers were properties, managers had become hirelings,
but yank Durham thought of Frazier as his own, so what if Cloverlay had his contract, merely a matter then of insufficient funds. He had been there through his ring infancy, he had his heart and mind, had hacked his way through all the nonbelievers. He had and his trainer Eddie Futch, had gone first class with the fighter, did things the right way, produced a machine as carefully as he used one of his old welding torches. Yank had got his chance, too and proved he was more than just an amateur who specialized in turning street layabouts into prelim boys. He was a cagey old schemer, but not the like most o the pickpockets on their way out; he had a trust and, though soaring in a fantasy present, the future intruded on the edge of consciousness. If Joe won, then, maybe, there was a fight or two left in him. If he lost, he'd have to set him down, close him down, it wouldn't be easy. Fighters like Joe climbed to the top out o breathtaking will, got there inch by inch, leaving mounting pain on each rung. he' have enough money to quit. Yank didnt want him hurt, he qas not a fighter of longevity. He knew Ali was going to be a mean night. Too mean, the kind of fight that might cut Joe to a scrap. and he'd have to shut him down.
his nerves, he said, jumped at the sad prospect.

coolegrain

The Fight

When Frazier broke camp five detectives rode shotgun with him to New York, underlining how serious they had taken the many death threats to the fighters life. Joe didn't say much, said one, and he "looked so distant we joked that he was sitting there waiting for us to give him the menu for his last meal."

There were only a handful of people in Frazier's room, Durham, Futch, an assistant, Les Peleman, and a Philly cop bodyguard. Joe was gloved and ready. Durham took him to the far corner of the room, put his hands on his shoulders, looked him straight in the eye and in his signature voice said: "Well, we're here. I want you to know what you've done, boy. There will never be another Joe Frazier. They all laughed. You got us here. There's not another human who ever lived. I'd want to send out there, not even Joe Louis. Win tonight, and the road will be paved with gold.

Joe knelt in the corner of the room and prayed aloud: "God, let me survive this night. God protect my family. God grant me strength. And God...allow me to kick the **** out of this motha****er!."

The decision was unanimous Frazier raised his hands in victory thanked the Lord, and with a bloody mouth sneered at Ali," I kicked your ass." Referee Arthur Mercante thought it was the most vicious fight he had ever seen. Mark Kram calls it the most skillful. And by all accounts, it was the most dramatic. "I was twenty seven years old, and there would never be another night like it in my life,"
"It was wild," Les Peleman said. "He was still out there in the ring. "Tears ran down his face as he kept walking in frantic circles, shouting:" "I want him over here! I want him to crawl to my feet! Crawl, crawl! He promised, promised me! Crawl to me crawl! Why aren't you here?" Durham embraced him.

A more just world would have celebrated Frazier a the "Cinderella man" of his era:the so twelfth child of a rural Gullah family, who highlighted it out of the South on his own at age fifteen, developed his superior strength hauling carcasses in a slaughterhouse, and prevailed over a more privileged, more popular, more physically gifted opponent through an iron iron display of will not seen before or since.
From the beginning, however, careful observers knew that the story want going to play out like that way. "Joe's such a decent guy," veteran trainer Futch said of Frazier before the fight, "but when he beats Ali, Joe is going to be to go down as one of the most unpopular black champions of all time." Futch was right as rain.

Next:

Joe Frazier goes to war part 2

"Joe Frazier became the symbol of our oppressors."

-Bryant Gumbel
http://www.eastsideboxing.com/forum/showthread.php?t=321789

Sources:

Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier

- Mark Kram

Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King’s Dream- Jack Cashill

coolegrain

A Frazier fan goes to watch the fight

"As much I respected Joe Frazier, I wasn't about to die for him."
-Jack Cashill

On March 8, 1971, my friends from grad school-Rick, Stanley, and Joan-and I drove from Purdue in y yellow VW bug to watch a large screen presentation of the first Ali-Frazier fight. The moment we walked into the theater, however, I understood what the other did not: five bucks or no, Gary was a mistake We were the only white people in the joint. Many times, before and since, I have found myself in venues with comparable ratios, but never one in which the Racial tension was so raw and palpable.

I was pulling for Joe Frazier

I was the only Frazier fan I knew at Purdue. The night before the fight, when we gathered at our habitual watering hole, my grad school buddies vied with each other to express their passion for Ali. Among their profession of fealty, one stuck with me, if only for its crudeness.
"I would stand on this table and piss in my pants if Ali were to walk in that door," said Ron, a fellow not usually known for his crudeness. Still if Ron's emotion was extreme, his attachment was the norm. I suspected that on the more excitable campuses-Bloomington and Madison and Boulder and Berkley- the Ali juju was surging even moire feverishly.

On the way to the restroom before the fight, several large gentlemen blocked my way and inquired rather bluntly into my choice of boxers.

"Who you for, mother****er?"

I didn't hesitate. "Ali," I said.

They let me pass. As much I respected Joe Frazier, I wasn't about to die for him.

In Gary and beyond, no fight had so racially polarized America since Jack Johnson squared off against Jim Jeffries in Reno sixty years earlier. This, I thought, is what Ali had wrought. He had crowd not so much pulling for him as against the imagined race traitor, Joe Frazier, and anyone, black or white, who dared cheer for him. Gary, that night , was a cauldron of hate, a harrowing. violate place to be. Still, the fight proved to be worth the risk. It was brutal and brilliant, as only great fights can be. Going into the fifteenth, it seemed to all of us too close to call.

"OK", I said to my friends between rounds, "We're out of here." They thought me daft and resisted. I explained patiently that if Ali lost a fight that the crowd expected him to win, there would be hell to pay, and we'd likely do the paying.

"But we're for Ali," Stanley protested.

"We had better get out of here, before they take their anger out on us"

End Interlude

coolegrain

Frazier goes to war part 2

The fight of the century

"Anybody black who thinks Frazier can whup me is an uncle tom," said Ali at the time. "Everybody who's black wants me to keep on winning."

"The only people rooting for Joe Frazier," he remembers Ali saying ," are white people in suits, Alabama sheriffs, and members of the Klu Klux Klan."

"Joe's such a decent guy," veteran trainer Futch said of Frazier before the fight, "but when he beats Ali, Joe is going to be to go down as one of the most unpopular black champions of all time."

The aftermath

Nothing near being so tenebrous in Joe's quarters. He was spending the last adrenaline of the fight that had been a tourniquet for the pain, the last rush still directed at Ali. "It was wild," Les Peleman said. "He was still out there in the ring. "Tears ran down his face as he kept walking in frantic circles, shouting:"I want him over here! I want t him to crawl to my feet! Crawl, crawl! He promised, promised me! Crawl to me, crawl! Why aren't you here?" Durham embraced him



A more just world would have celebrated Frazier a the "Cinderella man" of his era:the so twelfth child of a rural Gullah family, who highlighted it out of the South on his own at age fifteen, developed his superior strength hauling carcasses in a slaughterhouse, and prevailed over a more privileged, more popular, more physically gifted opponent through an iron iron display of will not seen before or since.

From the beginning, however, careful observers knew that the story want going to play out like that way. "Joe's such a decent guy," veteran trainer futch said of Frazier befire the fight, "but when he beats Ali, Joe is going to be to go down as one of the most unpopular black champions of all time." Futch was right a s rain.

The next day Ali was public again, the X-rays were negative. He wanted his legions to know that he didn't lose, it was a bad decision, and that he had only trained for a six-round fight. He had shown remarkable heart and endurance, now with cameras grinding he was trying to steal the fight back from Joe, issuing some subtle, dippy call for a referendum, and he was succeeding. Privately, he was of another mind: "We been whupped. Maybe I'll get some peace now. We all have to take defeats in life." Joe watched on television at the Pierre, had Ali's comments read to him as he lay in bed. "It's not like I even won," he said. "He's robbin' me. Like nothin' changed!" He struggled to his feet. He tried to lift the TV set, to hurl it across the room. He was too weak. Durham guided him back to bed, saying: "Now, now, Joe. You know he aint got any sense." Nevertheless, Frazier continued to seethe. A commission doctor came by, suggested he be moved to a hospital in the Catskills. "What?" Joe said. "So he can make more headlines, show how he beat me so bad I gotta be put in a hospital?" Joe slipped out of the Pierre, to St Luke's Hospital in Philly. For twenty-hours, Dr James Guffe had him lay in a bed of ice. Joe dreamed a spirit had taken his hand, said he would be okay. "I could feel his touch. He was right there. "They told him the next morning there had been no visitors.

Let him live

His life hung out there for several days. His blood pressure was in another galaxy, and he had a kidney infection. Day and night, every five minutes, doctors scurried in and out of his room. They thought they would lose him to a stroke. Durham was in London on business, and quickly hustled back. But for a time, only Joe Hand, a cop and stockholder, sat out the nights with him.

"Let him live," Joe said to no one in particular. Joe stayed in a deep sleep, almost a coma. When he awoke, he mumbled over and over:" Don't say a word, Joe. Don't let Ali find out I'm here." At one point, four doctors lingered ominously over his bed. He awoke one time, and said: "All the money I made for people, and you're the only one here, Joe." Hand tried to comfort him, what could he say to a man on the brink? Finally, Joe broke through, like he had through Ali's mechanized jab, and he began to stabilize. One doctor sighed and said: "It was close." Joe stayed in St Luke's for three wekks.

Frazier had no reason to cower, to shrink from what he had done in that fight. He had nearly paid with his life. He had won with the kind of conditioning that, to attain it and keep it at such a keening level, would destroy most men. He had won with a fortitude only surpassed by men in war.

A bad white mans decision

Although instinctively gracious in defeat, Ali soon yielded to the dictates of his Muslim puppeteers and began to spin the sag of his loss in politically useful terms. On the Saturday after the fight, Ali told Howard Cosell on Wide World of Sports that he was the real winner of the fight. "He was declared the loser," Cosell recalls him saying, "only because of his religion and his attitude toward the draft."

Ali repeated this theme during the weeks and months that followed and started calling himself "The peoples champ." His supporters obliged by picking up the theme and merchandising it. Not content to strip Frazier of his authenticity as a black man, the Ali camp now tried to strip him of his authenticity as champion.

Is Joe Frazier a White Champion in Black Skin?"

"Joe Frazier became the symbol of our oppressors."

-Bryant Gumbel

Seven months after the first fight, Bryant Gumbel, the editor of Black sports, grafted on the temper of the day and stripped some more flesh from Frazier. He was a mediocre writer and thinker, excellent qualifications for the large success he would have on television's Today Show with a shallow, hard worked ultra-sophistication, a cool broker of opinion next to Howard Cossels weasly conniving. Gumbel never let a bandwagon pass without jumping on it or trying to blow out its tires, depending on the mood of the day; the ultimate limo liberal. Durham said: "He's got soft written all over him, a country club black." Gumbel said he walked home after the fight with tears in his eyes for Ali; a hired weeping pallbearer for the times and its temporarily stalled hero. Strapping up his backbone, he wrote a piece meant to further Ali's campaign for the victory by proclamation, to blur Frazier's definitive prize: "Is Joe Frazier a White Champion in Black Skin?"



Talking about the other champions. he alludes to Floyd Patterson as the "go-boy" of the whites, blithely sniffs at Joe Louis, and finds that given the times, he can exonerate him as a model rep. He even manages to put some gloss on Sonny Liston, casts him as a "victim of society...hurt and angry...this was the black man of his day." Was Sonny laughing, punching a cloud; not bad, this behavioral reincarnation. But Frazier catches no slack. To Gumbel, he is pro-establishment, the E.Coli bacterium of the sixties. Joe calls Ali by his birth name, Clay. He consorts with an enemy like the South Carolina legislature, where he spoke, saying:"We must save our people, I mean black and white. We need to quit thinking who's living next door, who's driving a big car, who's my little daughter playing with, who is she going to sit next to in school. We don't have time for that." He added that he was hurt that so few blacks had had a chance to speak here in over a century."

That was far too passive for the likes of Gumbel; guilt by association was the gig, and it is doubtful he even saw or read the fairly long, sincere speech. Gumbel then pulls out some questionable associates . Undiscerning when it came to pictures, Frazier posed with Mayor Frank Rizzo, the Comissar of Philly police known for the brutality-and Richard Nixon, the Old Nick of sixties evil. Gumbel would go on to have a privileged life in TV , with an ego and ambition that not even a mother could love, let alone colleagues.

coolegrain

Explanations:

Quarry was not the only white boxer refrained from abusing.. In truth, he spared them all. The deep soul, wounding abuse he reserved for his fellow blacks. "One of the many paradoxes about Ali," affirms historian Randy Roberts, "is that he embraced an ideology that disparaged white people, yet he was never cruel to the white people, only blacks."

Wrote Jimmy Carson: "It seemed right that Cassius Clay had a good time beating up another Negro[Terrell]. This was fun, like chasing them down with dogs and knocking them down with streams of water.

"Why do you pick on black fighters?" he was asked as the jet slogged on to Manilla.

Frazier almost surely represented a part of Ali's own cultural imagination he needed to suppress. "I had always hated being black," Ali once confessed to Jose Torres,"just like the other negroes, hating our kind instead of loving one another." The Muslims appealed to him in no small part because they addresses the issue of self hate. They assumed that by projecting that hate outward, at the devils, they could direct the love within, at themselves, a strategy that has never worked anywhere and certainly not with Ali. Malcolm's daughter Attallah understood the strategy well. The Nation of Islam "knocked things down in order to build," she tells Hauser, "and that's not a process that set right with me."

The romanticized Jack Johnson gave Ali the role model he thought he needed. As portrayed, Johnson was both scary and sophisticated. "I grew up to love the Jack Johnson image," Ali said after the first Jerry Quarry fight. "I wanted to be tough, tough, arrogant, the ****** the white folks didn't like." But the white folks liked him. They loved him because they saw themselves in him. As hard as Ali tried, he did not scare at all. Joyce Carol Oates, among other white Ali fans, believed Ali to be the "black man's black man," but Ali never quite belied it himself


Nor could Ali ever convince himself that Black was really beautiful. It showed in his choice of women. It showed in his treatment of Frazier and, before him, Patterson, Terrell, Bundini, and other black sparring partners and hangers on he routinely humiliated. "He thought [Frazier] was a pure ******," Aaisha Ali [1] recalls. "He says that Frazier didn't know how to talk, or look good, and that it was insulting if he became the heavyweight champ."


One need not to be a shrink to sense that Ali was projecting his own self hate onto Frazier and the others. He was sufficiently light and middle class to almost imagine himself something other than black. Joe Frazier had no such illusions. He always knew who he was. He did not have to imitate anyone to be rough and tough. He has thus always seemed much moire secure in his blackness than Ali.

"See," he says, "you gotta be black to appreciate just how pretty I am. The people all know that. Look at my skin. Look at how nice and bronze it is. Not Frazier. Frazier is real dark, real black. He’s just an ugly ******."-Muhammad Ali

1996

"God gave me this physical impairment," said a chastened Ali,"to remind me that I am not the greatest. He is"

One can forgive Joe Frazier for not knowing this or caring. As he could plainly see, the media were eager to canonize Ali for all that he was and had ever been, even the "ungrateful scamboogah" who had undermined his career and cheapened his entire existence. With his Christian sense of justice, Frazier expected contrition before canonization, publicly and objectively, but it was not forthcoming.

And so when Ali bent over the cauldron to light the Olympic flame, Joe Frazier rather wished he fall in. The reader of this thread[2] will understand why

"The only people rooting for Joe Frazier," he remembers Ali saying ," are white people in suits, Alamaba sheriffs, and members of the Klu Klux Klan." Enraged, Frazier smashed his fist mutely into his hand as he watched.

For the light skinnned Ali and his fans, Joe Frazier was both too black and not black enough

Always able to feel the lancing invective with which ali assaulted him, Frazier began to see it as an orchestrated campaign to crush any respect he had in the black community.

"unheralded white-created champion."

"Is Joe Frazier a white champion in black skin?"

Ali painted Frazier into a corner. "Anybody black who thinks Frazier can whup me is an uncle tom," said Ali at the time. "Everybody who's black wants me to keep on winning."

Moved to the anger by the media and Ali, the hardcore faithful threatened Frazier and his family by mail and phone. The police put a watch on Frazier, his wife, and his children. History had proven that Ali's Muslim colleagues were capable of killing.

" It eats at me, but I don't let on and I don't forget. He uses his blackness to kick up a stir, get people excited, maybe convince him self of something, then he's gone. He thinks no hurts left behind."-Joe Frazier

"You will never see the light of day if you beat Ali. You tommin' dog"

"Wheres the justice?"

-Joe Frazier
The winner of the fight of the century

Sources:

Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier

- Mark Kram

Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King’s Dream- Jack Cashill

Notes:

[1] Aaisha Ali was the 17 year old girl that Ali impregnated, she was married to him simultaneously while he was married to Belinda. After he got bored of her he left her to blow in the hard luck winds

[2] The word book was replaced with the word thread

coolegrain

Next:

The Ghosts of Manilla



Joe turned, gunned a hole in the thin wood in the wall, then flipped over his desk. Futch tried to calm him. Joe, rubbing his hand, fianlly said:"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 ou of his chest."
"Joe...." Futch said
"I mean it," Joe said. "This is the end of me or him."