Still the heavyweight champion of Philadelphia

THE fight game continues to crumble in the City of Brotherly Love.

Just over two months ago, Philadelphia’s North Broad St, the centre of that town’s blue-collar boxing spirit, lost The Blue Horizon, a 1,500-seat sweatbox through which so many fighters passed on the way to notoriety or greatness: ‘Gypsy’ Joe Harris, George Benton, Bobby ‘Boogaloo’ Watts, famous for taking down Marvin Hagler, Bernard Hopkins, Sugar Ray Leonard, Matthew Saad Muhammad and Meldrick Taylor.

Progress gobbled up boxing’s favourite venue during a year that had begun sadly with the death of another Philly legend, ‘Bad’ Bennie Briscoe. Little did they know that another giant of Broad St, Smokin’ Joe Frazier, would join him before winter’s deathly grip.

Although the former heavyweight champion of the world (and still — always — the heavyweight champ of Philadelphia) took a few standing counts over the weekend, the speed with which liver cancer took him, shocked most of America.

News of his passing filtered through during the Philadelphia Eagles’ dismal defeat to the Chicago Bears, NFL’s Monday Night Football showcase. As fans left early, unable to watch their punch drunk team stumble through one more failed play, they walked out on to streets and into cabs and onto trains, stripped of one more hero to whom they could cling for hope and reassurance. Truly, this is a town that offers its chin to knockout blows, laps them up with craven relish, then reemerges for the 15th round, ready to show its true worth.

Frazier was born into and brought up on South Carolina’s grimmest prejudices. It shaped his world view but never poisoned it. Escaping to Philly, just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, was a shot at greatness. Ten years later in 1971, the Madison Square Garden saw that greatness flourish. Rewatching the two then-undefeated heavyweights is a lesson that needs relearning. When the stakes were higher, when the build-up was more hateful, when the venue was more authentic than some dictator’s playground and when the two men in the ring were closer to the peak of their respective powers, it was Frazier who wiped away the goading smiles and dismissive shakes-of-the-head of his opponent with vicious left hook after vicious left hook.

For all the abuse he had shipped, “Uncle Tom”, “ignorant”, “ugly”, it was Frazier who flashed the more attractive smile whenever a blow landed, it was Frazier who called Ali back to the centre of the ring between the later rounds and it was Frazier who waited with deceptive patience until the 15th round to knock him down — though not out. And it was Ali who clung to his cornermen as they clung to him, trying to keep him from walking out of the ring while the unanimous decision (8-6, 9-6, 11-4), was called out.

It was Ali who was left defeated in every sense. No matter what happened after — and it’s hard to ignore how far Frazier fell, both during and after his career — that was the making of a man whose relative lack of eloquence left him with the only pure option available to the purest fighters.

TRY AS I might to avoid Ali in the story of Joe Frazier, examining one through the prism of the other is an essential curse that landed heavier on Frazier. Mark Kram, writing for Sports Illustrated in October 1975 after their third and last fight, reported the following encounter with a bruised, dazed, barely victorious Ali after his defeat of Frazier, whose corner refused to let him out for another 15th round of brutality. “In his suite the next morning (Ali) talked quietly. ‘I heard somethin’ once,’ he said. ‘When somebody asked a marathon runner what goes through his mind in the last mile or two, he said that you ask yourself why am I doin’ this. You get so tired. It takes so much out of you mentally. It changes you. It makes you go a little insane. I was thinkin’ that at the end. Why am I doin’ this? What am I doin’ in here against this beast of a man? It’s so painful. I must be crazy. I always bring out the best in the men I fight, but Joe Frazier, I’ll tell the world right now, brings out the best in me. I’m gonna tell ya, that’s one helluva man, and God bless him’.”