Come Out Smokin' (8 page)

Somehow, it gave Ali the idea that he was imbued with mystical powers, that he could do anything he set his mind to. It gave others the same idea.

“I could announce that tomorrow Muhammad Ali will walk across the Hudson River and charge twenty dollars admission,” said Garden matchmaker, Teddy Brenner, “and there would be twenty thousand down there to see him do it. And half of them would be rooting for him to do it and the other half would be rooting for him to sink.”

Now it was full steam ahead to make the match of the century. Time was wasting. Any day now, the Supreme Court would hear the final appeal of Ali's draft evasion conviction; any day now Muhammad Ali could be behind bars. Ali's management would have liked him to have another pre-Frazier fight, but there wasn't time. It had to be now, as soon as possible.

Twenty-three days after Ali knocked out Oscar Bonavena, the announcement was made on that Tuesday afternoon in Toots Shor's restaurant in midtown New York in the most spectacular, headline-making press conference in sports history.

Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier would meet on March 8, 1971, in Madison Square Garden in what Jerry Perenchio was calling “the greatest spectacle of all time.”

Two days before he was to defend his crown for the first time, Joe Frazier walked through busy downtown Detroit at high noon. Nobody recognized him.

He wandered into a crowded department store, slipping and sliding through hordes of lunch-hour shoppers. Only one little old lady thought she knew him. Hesitating for a moment as if to overcome shyness, she slowly approached. “Excuse me,” she said, “but aren't you Joe Frazier?”

“No, ma'am,” Frazier said politely. “I'm his brother. Joe is back at the hotel resting. He's fighting in two days, you know.”

“Oh, well, please wish him the best of luck for me.”

“Yes, ma'am, I will,” Frazier said. “Thank you very much, ma'am.”

No heavyweight champion in history, with the possible exception of Ezzard Charles, has been pushed so far in the background of public acceptance and recognition as has Joe Frazier. John L. Sullivan, James J. Corbett, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali were idols of their day. Jess Willard, Jim Jeffries, and Primo Camera were easily recognized because of their size. Bob Fitzsimmons' bald pate, Jack Johnson's flamboyance, Sonny Liston's scowl, Gene Tunney's culture, Floyd Patterson's unflappable calm, Ingemar Johansson's Scandinavian good looks and Jersey Joe Walcott's age made them well known to people outside boxing. But Joe Frazier was the champion nobody knew.

Even the august and painfully accurate
Reader's Digest Almanac
, in its annual listing of sports champions, called him “Joe Frazier.”

Joe Frazier is totally uncomplicated and non-controversial. He is devoid of any special public appeal, either as a fighter or as a man, inside the ring or out. It is not a knock against the man. That's simply the way he is, because that's the way he wants to be.

It didn't bug Joe to go anonymous and unworshiped. He is what he is and he didn't intend to change; he didn't intend to be what other people thought he should be.

“I'm just me, see,” he explains. “If people don't like me, that's their business. If they don't notice me, that's good. I got enough people pestering me anyway. I'm making money, ain't I? That's enough for me. Let the other guys take the glory. I'm the heavyweight champion of the world. They none of them can take that away from me, not outside the ring. And I don't know any that can take it away from me inside the ring either.

“I haven't changed. Some people say I should change, but I can't. I wouldn't know what to change to.”

Much of the man's lack of public acceptance was not even of his own making. It was his misfortune to come along in the time of Muhammad Ali, the man he insisted on calling Cassius Clay.

“I call him Clay,” Joe Frazier explained, “because he said he don't care what I call him. That's the name his mamma and daddy gave him, so that's what I call him.”

In the minds of many, Muhammad Ali was still the heavyweight champion of the world. A man can't lose his title in a courtroom, they reasoned, and he can't forfeit it because someone sitting behind a desk takes it away from him. A man can only lose his title in the ring, and Muhammad Ali had not lost there. Ali was outspoken, he was controversial, he had appeal, he was an idol of his people and although Joe Frazier had nothing to do with Ali's dilemma, Joe was the one who bore the brunt of their wrath because he deigned to call himself champion, he dared to wear Muhammad Ali's crown. (It was that way with Ezzard Charles, too. He had replaced an idol, Joe Louis, under less than satisfactory conditions, winning the championship in an elimination after Louis had retired.)

To make matters worse for Frazier, Ali would never let them forget that the man wearing his crown was undeserving of it. “Not,” Muhammad decreed, “until he beats me in the ring and straightens out this mess.”

Muhammad Ali had spoken and when Muhammad speaks, millions listen.

As a fighter, Joe Frazier was never accused of either greatness or flamboyance. “He's a slugger,” Yank Durham emphasized, “not a finesse fighter.” He is a hard worker, known in his trade as “an honest fighter.” It means he always comes to fight and the fans always get their money's worth when Joe's in the ring. Describing his style is difficult. It's best to say his is a lack of style.

Joe Frazier's boxing style, whatever that is, is like Joe Frazier's life-style . . . straightforward, to the point, uncomplicated. He doesn't clown or act in the ring, and he isn't brash, boastful, or bizarre outside it. Whatever Joe Frazier is—or isn't—is not designed to sell tickets. But it's honest. Joe Frazier is a businessman and boxing is his trade. And he is very good, very professional at it.

What he likes about his business is the individuality of it. No depending on other people, just one man, alone, against another and the best man wins.

“In the ring,” Joe says, “it's me and you, baby, and I'm gonna be sure it's you. I don't even want to fight one round. I want to put the guy away as soon as possible. What I mean is I like it, fighting. There's a man out there trying to take what you got. You're supposed to destroy him. He's trying to do the same thing to you. Why should I have pity on him? I like the feel when I catch a man and he goes down. It's like a business. Otherwise, it's no fun. We don't say, ‘Hey, let's go out and have a little fun by hitting each other over the head.' ”

Joe Frazier is a fighting, not a talking man. He finds it difficult to express his thoughts in words, but he tries. Still, ultimately, he does it better than he says it.

“Most every time I step into the ring,” he says, “it seems like I'm challenged because I'm short for a heavyweight, and these big guys are thinking and acting like they got the power over me, like they command me. Well, I'm a small piece of leather, but I'm well put together and nobody commands me. Nobody.

“I fight one way, moving all the time. When the bell rings I come out smokin'. I mean I put pressure on and once they find out how hard I hit, they're movin' back. I love power in any form. That's why I like fast cars and drive a twenty-five-hundred-dollar motorcycle. They represent power. They really move. I have no fear about accidents. That's negative thinking. I'm positive about everything. What good does worrying do? If something's going to happen, it can happen to you crossing the street.”

There is a misconception that Frazier enjoys inflicting damage on people. It comes from a habit he has of laughing in the ring. Joe Frazier enjoys fighting, but he doesn't like hurting people. It's not exactly the same thing.

The laughing, he says, is a habit. “I can't help it. I'm not trying to put people on. Sometimes it comes to me, the cat laid a good one on me and it didn't hurt. So I laugh. It has to do with confidence, a feeling that all the hard work, all the training has stood up.”

Joe Frazier is a fanatic about training. Every day, he soaks his head in rock salt and water. “It makes me mean and toughens my skin,” he explains. “I've never had a stitch.”

It's a theory popular among boxing experts that a fighter must be as tough mentally as he is physically. Cus D'Amato, the outspoken and somewhat iconoclastic student of boxing who guided Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight championship of the world, is probably its foremost exponent. A fighter, D'Amato says, doesn't get knocked out unless he subconsciously wills it.

“If a fighter refuses to be knocked out,” Cus adds, “there is no way you can do it no matter how hard you hit him. It's a matter of will. All great fighters have strong wills.”

Number among them Joe Frazier, who has had no particularly close relationship with Cus D'Amato, and thus is not parroting someone else's theory when he says, “It may sound funny, but I've got so that I think I'll never be knocked out. That's how I feel. I've been hit with some good shots, by Bonavena, Ramos, Quarry, Ellis, but I've got confidence now that I won't be knocked out.”

It's that confidence, that iron will that D'Amato was talking about. And Joe Frazier comes by those qualities naturally.

“I don't have to think what to do,” he says, “I just do it. But if I'm tagged, my instinct is to move to the other guy, smother his punches, get in close. Then they can't get to me and they don't know if I'm hurt. Conditioning, that's what does it. That's why boxing is beautiful. It's me or him and I don't intend for it to be me. I just get this feeling,
you
got to go, not me.”

For all his ferocity in the ring, his apparent meanness, there's another side of Joe Frazier, a gentle side the public doesn't see. There is Joe Frazier husband, father, mechanic, solid citizen of a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. He lives a simple and well-ordered life, using boxing only as a means to an end.

“I got some nice things with my boxing money,” he says. Among them, in addition to an estimated $400,000 in stocks, bonds, investments, and cash, are a $125,000, seven-bedroom, seven-bath house on two and a half sprawling acres in Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania. It has nine telephones, three recreation rooms, and a six-car garage, which Joe helps fill with a gold Cadillac, a Corvette Stingray, a station wagon for his wife, a 1934 Chevrolet for tinkering, and a Harley-Davidson Electric Guide motorcycle for kicks.

The motorcycle cost Joe $2,500. It was a bargain. “I chromed it up and now it must be worth forty-five hundred dollars. You know how fast I once had my bike up to? One hundred and ten miles an hour. I felt powerful, man.”

Joe likes to climb aboard his motorcycle and spin through the backwoods roads of Whitemarsh, a habit that causes fierce consternation in the members of Cloverlay, Inc., but not in Yank Durham.

“It's his bike,” Durham philosophizes. “He bought it and he rides it. I told him, ‘If you're going to ride it, be a
good
rider.' He's been thrown off the bike, but no bones broken. And anyway, the more people tell him not to, the more he'll do it. He's young and he's got to get it out of his system. You know how young automobile drivers are. After a while they steady down. It's all part of growing up.”

The little boy in Joe Frazier pops out often, especially around things mechanical. For relaxation, he loves to tinker with his cars and he enjoys puttering around the house. A week after he earned $250,000 for a fight, he took down his own Christmas tree lights and he'll take a bread knife and fiddle for hours with one of the many television sets in his house rather than call a repairman.

“There's nothing I can't fix,” he boasts. “Why call somebody when I can do it myself?”

It's not the money. Joe has plenty and he's not afraid to spend it. He is what is known as an easy mark.

Back when he came home from the Olympics with a busted hand and bank balance, a man came to see Joe, a stranger. He said he lived down the street and that his wife had bought a stove that was about to be delivered and he had no money to pay for it. Could Joe lend him some and the man would pay him back the next day? Frazier searched the house and gathered up all the cash he could find and gave it to the man. He never saw the money again. He never saw the man again, either.

That's part of Joe Frazier's generous nature. He is always willing to lend a helping hand to anyone and picks up hitchhikers wherever he goes.

“I feel it's only right to help anyone who wants to get somewhere,” he says. “Look at the Mets when they won the World Series. Do you know I picked them to win the pennant in June while I was training for the Quarry fight? They had drive, man. They knew where they were going all the way. That's what got them there.”

His Cadillac is Joe's pride and joy, his status symbol. It is equipped with two telephones that are two more toys for him to play with. It gives him great pleasure to pick up the telephone and call somebody—a friend, a business associate, a newspaperman—and ask, “Hey, you know where I'm calling from? From my car. Ain't
that
something?”

Once he was driving home in his Cadillac late at night and he was stopped by a prowl car twelve blocks from his house. Two policemen, guns drawn, approached cautiously.

“Get out of that car,” they commanded.

“Why do I have to get out of my own car?” Frazier asked.

“Because we said you have to,” one of the policemen said. “Now, let's see your identification.”

Joe pulled out his wallet, which has his initials embossed on it and inside a badge, presented to Frazier from his close personal friend, Philadelphia Police Chief Frank Rizzo.

“Oh,” said one policeman. “Yeah, we thought it was you. We were just making certain nobody stole your car.”

Were they? Joe Frazier wasn't so sure.

“What do you think the cops think when they see a black man driving a car like this?”

Envy?

Joe nodded. “I could see in their eyes what they were thinking as they came to the car. ‘How come a black boy can afford a car like that?' ”

Despite his Cadillac and his Harley-Davidson Electric Guide and his 1934 Chevy, Joe says, “My kids are my hobby.”

There are five Frazier children—Marvis, the oldest and only boy, born in 1961; Jacquelyn, who is two years younger; Weatta, a year younger than Jacquelyn; and the two babies, Jonetta and Natasha. The names, Joe says, have no special significance. “I hear a name, I like it, I use it,” he explains. “Maybe someday people will hear my kids' names and want them for their own.”

Joe's being away from home a lot makes it difficult for Florence Frazier, who has had to rear the children practically single-handedly. When he does get home, though, Joe is a gentle, warm, and doting father. But he can be stern—a rigid disciplinarian—and the one thing he insists on from his children is obedience.

“In our house,” he says, “everybody has responsibilities. Everybody makes his own bed. If I'm driving the kids to school and I see a light on in their room, I stop the car, they get out and they have to go back in the house and turn it off. They do their chores and they listen.”