Come Out Smokin' (12 page)

When the bell sounded for round thirteen, the fight had already gone further than most experts, including the two participants, had predicted it would.

The one minute allotted between rounds enabled Ali to find new stamina and when he answered the bell for round thirteen, he was dancing again. He was on the balls of his feet, dancing and jabbing, staying away from Frazier's crushing left, dancing and moving and popping his left.

He was very tired now. They were both very tired. But Ali used every device at his command to stay away from Frazier through the thirteenth. He circled and jabbed and danced when his legs would permit him to, and when they wouldn't, he fell on Frazier, clutched at his hands, held him, tied him up, pushing his head down and wrestling him into a corner. He did enough, not only to survive the round, but to win it.

It was the same in the fourteenth. Ali fought desperately to keep Frazier off him, and Frazier advanced relentlessly, trying to drive home the one punch that would end the fight. Ali was fighting most of the fight with his back to the ropes not, as he planned, as he hoped, in the middle of the ring where he could dance and move. Forced to fight back, Ali patted Frazier with jabs, then fell into clinches as Joe tried to push him off and resume his attack. Frazier got in some shots, but they were off-balance punches, lacking the force that comes when he plants his feet, digs into the canvas and bombs away.

When the bell rang for the start of round fifteen, they met in center ring and touched gloves and their faces told an inaccurate story of the first fourteen rounds.

Ali was unmarked. Frazier's face was chopped up. His eyes, just slits now, looked out from between huge ugly welts. His face was puffy and grotesquely misshapen. Yet, on the cards of all three officials, he was far in front in the fight—so far that only a knockout could steal the victory from him—and Ali appeared incapable of mustering the power to deliver a knockout punch. But, then, he had appeared incapable of mustering the same power in the fifteenth round against Oscar Bonavena just three months earlier.

Muhammad came out trying for the knockout, trying for the miracle that would save the fight. He opened up with a left and a right, another left-right combination and then from out of nowhere, Joe Frazier let go a long, looping left that caught Muhammad on the right cheek and he toppled backward and crashed onto the canvas on his back like a felled tree. He had been down only twice in his professional career. Sonny Banks did it in his eleventh fight nine years before and Henry Cooper did it, but they could not keep him down. This time, it looked like Ali would stay down.

The crowd was on its feet. The entire arena was standing—everybody except Muhammad Ali. He was on his back, too weary, too hurt, too spent, it seemed, to get up. And the fans, all of them seemingly Joe Frazier fans now, were yelling madly.

As Muhammad lay there for just a few seconds, you could see a bulge billowing on his right cheek, where the blow had landed, swelling before your eyes to grapefruit size.

Muhammad was hurt, he was beaten, but something within him made him refuse to take defeat lying on his back. It was pride that motivated him, pride that enabled him to spring to his feet at the count of four. And while referee Mercante picked up the count and tolled off the mandatory eight, Ali shook his head to clear the mustiness inside.

There were still two minutes remaining when Joe Frazier went back on the attack, trying desperately to put over the one final punch that would certainly end it. But he was arm-weary and peering dimly out of slits. His left eye was completely closed, his right eye was half closed and his lips were puffed and swollen. His face looked like a death mask.

Frazier threw everything he had left and he had little. He crashed two lefts to Ali's jaw, a right to the chin, a left to the body and Muhammad clutched and held. Frazier pushed him off and bombed two more lefts that drove Ali into the ropes, his legs flopping around under him. He was still throwing punches, the crowd on its feet cheering wildly, so wildly that even at ringside, ten feet away from the fighters, you couldn't hear the bell that was clanging, clanging, clanging to signal the end of the fight, to announce that after fifteen brutal, blistering, punishing rounds, it was over.

Arthur Mercante threw his body between them to stop the punching and Joe Frazier tapped Ali playfully on the head and they threw their arms around each other because now they were enemies no longer. Now they were just two badly beaten, emotionally and physically spent fighters. Now they were two weary warriors who had been through the fifteen-round war together and who had only respect and admiration for each other.

The crowd hushed in anticipation of the decision as Johnny Addie collected the cards of the three officials.

“Draw, draw,” sombody shouted and others took up the chant. “Draw, draw, draw.”

But the decision, when Addie announced it, was really no surprise.

“Referee Arthur Mercante scores eight rounds for Frazier, six rounds for Ali, one round even.”

There was a light smattering of boos, but mostly cheers.

“Judge Artie Aidala scores nine rounds for Frazier, six rounds for Ali.”

The final card didn't matter. Frazier was the winner. The crowd knew it and Joe Frazier knew it and Muhammad Ali knew it. For the record, Addie announced that Judge Bill Recht had scored eleven rounds for Frazier and four for Ali. But the announcement was drowned in the bedlam around ringside, fans attempting to get into the ring to clutch their hero, Joe Frazier, and Madison Square Garden police blocking the apron of the ring.

It's doubtful anybody heard Johnny Addie's announcement, “The winnuh, and still heavyweight champion of the worrlllddd . . . Joe Frazier.”

It's certain nobody had to hear it. Not the crowd, not Muhammad Ali and not Joe Frazier.

Ali took the news silently, stoically. He stood there, the grapefruit stuck in his right cheek, listening to the announcement that made him a loser for the first time in his professional career. He listened and then the next moment he was gone, hustled off to his dressing room with a cordon of police around him.

Joe Frazier listened quietly, too, and when the second card was read, he leaped into the air, then searched frantically for Yank Durham, picked his massive body out in the crowd in his corner, and leaped into Yank's arms. Their cheeks touched and Durham's voice was husky with emotion. “You done it, Joe,” he said. “You done it.”

This is what Joe Frazier had fought for, what he had lived for, what Rubin Frazier had predicted many years ago in Beaufort, South Carolina. And now it was his. Alone. He was Joe Frazier, the heavyweight champion of the world, and nobody could dispute that. Nobody.

It is customary, after a big fight in Madison Square Garden, to deliver both the winner and the loser to a huge, open room in the bowels of the building where chairs are set up and a platform is provided on which there are two chairs, one for each fighter.

This is where the press—there were more than eight hundred representatives of the news media for Ali-Frazier—conducts its postfight interviews; this is where the winner tells how he won and the loser tells why he lost and both tell of the terrible war now ended.

As the press corps gathered, taking seats in anticipation of Muhammad Ali's first postfight press conference as a loser, outside in the main arena thousands of people still milled around a half hour after the final bell had sounded. They wandered aimlessly in disbelief, Muhammad Ali fans with nowhere to go, no victory party, no celebration to attend. Shock was on their faces and tears of disappointment streamed down their cheeks, their black cheeks and their white cheeks.

How could it be? How could Muhammad Ali lose a fight? And then, as if realizing it was true, they wandered out of the arena in a stupor, they wandered out into the gloom of night taking their disappointment and their shock with them.

In the press interview area, just about every one of the four hundred seats was occupied. The press waited, but no Muhammad Ali. Word came that he had been taken to Flower & Fifth Avenue Hospitals to have his swollen right cheek X-rayed.

Rumors spread through the room that Ali had suffered a broken jaw, rumors that would be dispelled as soon as the X rays were read. The swelling, it was determined, was the result of hemorrhaging in his cheek.

There were tears in Bundini Brown's eyes as he made the announcement: “Muhammad Ali will not be here,” he said. “But don't worry about it, we'll be back. We ain't through yet. It was one of the greatest fights ever held. The people got their money's worth. Muhammad was out for three years. He's not complaining. We're not complaining.”

Before he left for the hospital, Bundini said, Ali had one question. “Did I put up a good fight?”

“You put up a great fight,” they told him.

Joe Frazier was there at the press conference. His face was swollen and misshapen and he held an ice bag to the large, ugly welts that had popped up all over it, painfully responding to questions through puffed lips. But he answered them, he answered all the questions they threw at him.

Would he fight Ali again?

“I don't think he wants any more. He can have more if he wants it, but he's not going to want more, not after what I did to him. Nobody wants more after that.”

Will you retire now?

“Man, the fight's just over. I've got to live a little, man. I been working ten long years.”

How did it feel to be heavyweight champion of the world?

Frazier bristled.

“I always felt like I was the champ. I fought everyone they put in front of me, God knows.”

Why did he think Ali had stayed in the corners when his plan was to use the entire ring?

“He must have been crazy, but he had no choice. Man, he couldn't move. All those body shots hardened up on you.”

What was all the talking in the ring?

“It was just talk, but it gave me inspiration. And all the time he was jiving me it gave me time to get leverage for my left hook. I told him, ‘I'm gonna do the same to you.' ”

Finally, Frazier couldn't resist one solid left hook at those members of the press who had demeaned him as unworthy to wear the title.

“What can you say about me now?” he asked. “What can you say now? He underestimated me. He thought I was slow and flat-footed. He can punch me, but he can't hurt me.”

Still, there was room in his heart for some kind words about his opponent.

“You've got to give him credit,” Frazier said. “He takes one good punch. That shot I hit him with in the fifteenth round, I went ‘way back to the country to throw. He's got a good punch and he's a good man. God, he can take it.”

Now, Joe Frazier asked to be excused. He had fought fifteen brutal rounds and he was tired. He had absorbed hundreds of punches. He had traded his face for the heavyweight championship of the world.

“Now,” he pleaded, “let me go and straighten out my face. I ain't quite this ugly.”

As he rose to leave, the members of the press applauded him and in applauding Joe Frazier, they were applauding courage.

John F. X. Condon announced the figures. The crowd had drawn 20,455 and paid $1,352,951, both records for Madison Square Garden.

A small crowd of reporters had wandered into the dressing room of referee Arthur Mercante. “It was a great fight,” Mercante was saying. “The way they were hitting, I was surprised it went fifteen rounds. They threw some of the best punches I've ever seen.”

The corridor that led from the press interview area to Frazier's dressing room was clogged with people, fans, relatives, reporters. Special police pushed their way through the mass of humanity, enabling Frazier to walk through. They reached the dressing room and the door swung open and Frazier entered a room that was not big enough for the thirty or forty people crowded around inside.

When they saw him, they rushed to him, clutching him, throwing their arms around him, pounding his back, shaking his hand, planting wet kisses on his bruised cheeks.

Joe sank wearily on a bench, too exhausted to move, too weary to talk. He just sat there and somebody began untying the laces on his boxing shoes.

“Keep this room clear,” growled Yank Durham through the cigar in his mouth. “I don't want a lotta people in this room.”

Nobody moved.

Now the door swung open and a short, squat black man with a thin mustache stood there, begging the guard to let him in.

“Let him in,” Frazier ordered, “he's my brother.”

Joe rose and Tom Frazier rushed to him and the two brothers embraced and for a fleeting instant they were kids again, back on the farm in Beaufort, South Carolina.

“Did I do it?” Joe asked.

The words came hard for Tom Frazier. When they did come, they were hoarse and choked with emotion and there were tears welling in his eyes.

“You did it,” Tom Frazier said. “You are the greatest.”

Dr. A. Harry Kleiman entered the room carrying his little black bag. He began to examine Frazier's face, touching it tenderly to probe for broken bones, looking into his eyes to see if he could determine if there had been a concussion, asking him questions to see if there had been any severe head damage.

“Can you get me a pill to stop the hurting, Doc?” Frazier pleaded painfully.

Dr. Kleiman took out a small bottle and shook out several enzyme tablets to reduce the swelling and several dilone tablets to dull the pain.

Frazier rose and began to move slowly, methodically, around the room, undressing painfully and going into an anteroom to examine his face.

He stood there in front of the mirror, his lips moving slowly, the words practically inaudible.

“I done whipped him,” he mumbled, almost to himself. “You flat-footed, you dumb, you ugly,” he droned in a monotone, mimicking Ali, his tormentor. “Hah,” he said, “we saw about that.”

Then in a loud voice he asked, “Did Clay fall?”

“You dropped him in the fifteenth,” somebody said.

“Oh, yeah,” Frazier said happily. “Yeah, that's right.”

“You know what this fight proves,” he said to a magazine writer. “It let people know I'm the best man, that I'm still the champ. Those people that yelled, ‘
Ah-lee, Ah-lee, Ah-lee
,' they didn't bother me none. When Clay went down, they didn't come into the ring and help him up.”

Just then, Frazier had a sudden thought.

“Yank,” he called. “Hey, Yank, go get Clay. Go tell him to come in here and start crawlin' on his hands and knees like he said he would.”

“I should go tell him he fought a helluva fight,” Durham said.

Moments later Yank Durham disappeared. He didn't really go looking for Ali, but when he returned, he had a message for Frazier.

“They took him to the hospital, Joe. They think he might have a broken jaw.”

The news touched Joe Frazier, the inner man.

“He gonna be all right?” he asked, the concern in his voice now very obvious.

“Don't worry about it, Joe,” said Eddie Futch, the assistant trainer. “It'll be OK. But you should have some ice on that face of yours.”

“Put some ice in the sink and I'll soak my whole head in it,” Frazier said to nobody in particular.

One of his entourage took a bucket of ice and dumped it into the sink and Joe Frazier walked over to the sink and buried his battered head in the ice. He kept it in there for several seconds, pulled his head out, then did it again, three more times.

When he walked away from the sink, somebody handed him a bottle of champagne. Frazier took it and put the bottle up to his lips. Then stopped.

“Can I drink it, Yank?” he asked, like a boy asking for his father's approval.

“Let's see,” Durham said and he took the bottle out of Joe's hand, lifted it to his lips, drew his head back and guzzled long from its contents. When he had finished, he was smiling. “Yeah,” he said, “it's all right.”

Durham handed the bottle back to Frazier and Joe took a small swallow.

Now, the pain and the weariness were beginning to disappear. But with their disappearance a familiar melancholy came over him, the typical withdrawal that comes to an athlete when he begins the long fall from the competitive high that accompanies him before a big, important performance.

Slowly, he finished undressing and walked to the shower. For fifteen minutes he remained there, allowing the hot water to cascade over his sore and tired body. The hot water was good. It seemed to wash the aches away.

When he had finished showering, he returned to the main dressing room, a towel around his waist. He slowly removed the towel and a camp follower helped him get dressed.

He knew he would have to make an appearance at his victory party in the Statler Hilton Hotel. Those $35 tickets had been sold on the basis of Frazier's attendance and Joe would not disappoint his fans. He would make an appearance, but he would not stay long. His body ached and he would make a hasty exit and return to the Hotel Pierre, where he would vainly try for sleep. He would rest, he would lie on his bed and rest, but sleep wouldn't come, not for a long time. Finally, when it did come, it would be a fitful sleep and Joe Frazier would toss and turn from the pain and from the withdrawal following his big night.

It was more than an hour after the final bell had sounded when Joe Frazier, fully dressed, finally left Madison Square Garden accompanied by several New York City detectives who augmented the usual crowd around him.

He ducked out into the cold night air and walked to the curb, where a limousine was waiting with its rear door open. He slipped into the back seat and closed the door. Outside, there was only a handful of fans. They pounded on the hood and peered into the window. Joe smiled and gave a little wave and then the car was thrown into gear and it disappeared into the night.

Joe Frazier smiled to himself. He knew if things had been reversed, if he had lost and Muhammad Ali had won and if this were Muhammad's limousine, there would be hundreds of people waiting outside.

He didn't care. He had won. He had what Muhammad Ali wanted. He was the heavyweight champion of the world.