Enemies for Life: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali

by Guest Sun Aug 21, 2016 10:49 pm

Ali and Frazier will forever be linked; the rivalry between them was both legendary and caustic: Ali won two of the three fights, including the grueling classic “Thrilla in Manila” in 1974 while Frazier won the “Fight of the Century” in 1971.

The shared physical pain should have made them fishing buddies for life. Instead, it seemed to do the opposite. Ali referred to Frazier as a gorilla and his black supporters as Uncle Toms. Frazier, upon seeing Ali light the Olympic flame at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, said he would have liked to have “pushed him in.”

The two reconciled somewhat over the years. Ali told The New York Times in 2001 he regretted calling Frazier names before their first fight. Frazier seemed to appreciate the gesture at first before rejecting it, saying Ali had not spoken to him personally. Ali responded by calling Frazier a gorilla again.

http://ringtv.craveonline.com/news/424403-muhammad-alis-family-reached-out-to-frazier-clan-after-his-death

by Guest Sun Aug 21, 2016 10:54 pm

In his 1996 autobiography, Frazier described Ali’s verbal salvos as a “cynical attempt to make me feel isolated from my own people.”
“He thought that would weaken me when it came time to face him in that ring. Well, he was wrong. It didn’t weaken me, it awakened me to what a cheap-shot son of a bitch he was,” Frazier wrote.
Frazier exacted a measure of revenge by flooring Ali in the 15th round of their first fight before going on to take a unanimous decision victory.
The animosity of that first fight came to define Ali and Frazier’s relationship thereafter.

Following a second bout won by Ali in 1974, the invective took an uglier turn in the build-up to the “Thrilla in Manila” the following year, with Ali zeroing in on Frazier’s physical appearance, repeatedly referring to him as a “gorilla.”
“Joe Frazier should give his face to The Wildlife Fund! He’s so ugly, blind men go the other way. He not only looks bad, you can smell him in another country. What will the people in Manila think? That black brothers are animals. Ignorant. Stupid. Ugly and smelly,” Ali told reporters.

Frazier responded by stating that he wanted to “take Ali’s heart out” and in metaphorical terms over the course of the fight that followed, he nearly did.

Ali eventually triumphed after 14 grueling rounds when Frazier, eyes swollen to near-blindness, retired before the 15th round.
“Don’t let me ever again hear anybody put Joe Frazier down,” the shattered Ali said. “He is the toughest man in the world. If I’d taken the punches he took in there, I’d have quit long before he did. He is a man.”
Ali’s paean to Frazier’s bravery did little to heal the rift however.
In his autobiography two decades later, Frazier laid bare his resentment, suggesting that Ali’s Parkinson’s disease was divine retribution.
“People ask me if I feel sorry for him. Nope. Fact is, I don’t give a damn. They want me to love him, but I’ll open up the graveyard and bury his ass when the Lord chooses to take him,” he wrote.

http://indianexpress.com/article/sports/sport-others/hero-legend-villain-muhammad-alis-ugly-feud-with-joe-frazier-2835761/

by Guest Sun Aug 21, 2016 11:24 pm

He has known for years of Frazier's anger and bitterness toward him, but he knows nothing of the venom that coursed through Frazier's recent autobiography, Smokin' Joe. Of Ali, Frazier wrote, "Truth is, I'd like to rumble with that sucker again—beat him up piece by piece and mail him back to Jesus.... Now people ask me if I feel bad for him, now that things aren't going so well for him. Nope. I don't. Fact is, I don't give a damn. They want me to love him, but I'll open up the graveyard and bury his ass when the Lord chooses to take him."

Nor does Ali know what Frazier said after watching him, with his trembling arm, light the Olympic flame: "It would have been a good thing if he would have lit the torch and fallen in. If I had the chance, I would have pushed him in."

Nor does Ali know of Frazier's rambling diatribe against him at a July 30 press conference in Atlanta, where Frazier attacked the choice of Ali, the Olympic light heavyweight gold medalist in 1960 and a three-time heavyweight champion of the world, as the final bearer of the torch. He called Ali a "dodge drafter," implied that Ali was a racist ("He didn't like his white brothers," said Frazier) and suggested that he himself—also an Olympic champion, as a heavyweight, in 1964—would have made a better choice to light the flame: "Why not? I'm a good American....A champion is more than making noise. I could have run up there. I'm in shape."

And while Frazier asserts at one turn that he sees "the hand of the Lord" in Ali's Parkinson's syndrome (a set of symptoms that include tremors and a masklike face), he also takes an eerily mean-spirited pride in the role he believes he played in causing Ali's condition. Indeed, the Parkinson's most likely traces to the repeated blows Ali took to the head as a boxer—traumas that ravaged the colony of dopamine-producing cells in his brain—and no man struck Ali's head harder and more repeatedly than Frazier.

"He's got Joe Frazier-itis," Frazier said of Ali one day recently, flexing his left arm. "He's got left-hook-otis."

http://www.si.com/vault/1996/09/30/208924/muhammad-ali-joe-frazier-war-of-words

by Guest Sun Aug 21, 2016 11:31 pm

During his exile Ali, who had to earn his money on the college lecture circuit, began to knock at Frazier's door, seeking help to get back his license to fight, saying that an Ali-Frazier match would make them both rich. "He'd come to the gym and call me on the telephone," says Frazier. "He just wanted to work with me for the publicity so he could get his license back. One time, after the Ellis fight, I drove him from Philadelphia to New York City in my car. Me and him. We talked about how much we were going to make out of our fight. We were laughin' and havin' fun. We were friends, we were great friends. I said, 'Why not? Come on, man, let's do it!' He was a brother. He called me Joe: 'Hey, Smokin' Joe!' In New York we were gonna put on this commotion."

For Ali, the most gifted carnival barker in the history of sports, the commotion was father to the promotion. So when Frazier stopped his car in midtown Manhattan and walked into a store to buy a pair of shoes, Ali leaped out, his eyes bulging, and cried, "It's Joe Frazier, ladies and gentlemen! Smokin' Joe! There he is! He's got my title! I want my title! He ain't the champ, he's the chump. I'm the people's champ!"

Frazier, a proud and soft-spoken rural Southerner, had never witnessed anything like this. It rattled him at first. Butch Lewis, a companion of Frazier's and later a promoter himself, explained to him what Ali was doing: "He's not disrespecting you. This is Ali! This is what will make the payday. This is not personal."

http://www.si.com/vault/1996/09/30/208924/muhammad-ali-joe-frazier-war-of-words

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Enemies for Life: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali

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