Where Are They Buried? (17 page)

Frazier spent the rest of his life trying to fight his way out of Ali’s shadow. Though Ali was gracious in defeat in the first
fight, he was vicious with his words and never missed a chance to get a jab in at Frazier while promoting their fights. Frazier, who never had the inclination for the oratorical bravado of Ali, and who in his later years would have financial trouble and end up running a gym in Philadelphia, took the jabs personally. He felt Ali made fun of him, and those feelings were only magnified as Ali went from being an icon in the ring to one of the most beloved people in the world. In an interview on the thirtieth anniversary of the first Ali-Frazier bout, Ali apologized saying, “I said a lot of things in the heat of the moment that I shouldn’t have said. Called him names and I apologize for that. I’m sorry. It was all meant to promote the fight.”

At the fortieth anniversary of Frazier’s win over Ali—a day Frazier celebrated with parties in New York—he said he no longer felt any bitterness toward the ex-champ who suffers from Parkinson’s disease and is mostly mute. “I forgive him,” said Frazier. “He’s in a bad way.” That night the Fight of the Century remained fresh in Frazier’s mind as he talked about his life and career. “I can’t go nowhere where it’s not mentioned. That was the greatest thing that ever happened in my life.”

Just a month after being diagnosed with liver cancer, “Smokin” Joe Frazier died at 67. He is buried at Ivy Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Off the Pennsylvania Turnpike, take Exit 339 to Route 309 and follow it south for about three miles before turning right on Easton Road. Go past Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, and Ivy Hill is another one and a half miles on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and stay on the main drive for a couple hundred yards. At the second fork, you won’t miss Joe’s magnificent stone directly in front of you.

OCTOBER 23, 1869 – OCTOBER 3, 1936

For 36 years John Heisman coached college football, contributing numerous key innovations to the sport. He was responsible for legalizing the forward pass, he was the first coach to use the quarterback as safety on defense, and he promoted the division of the game into quarters and the scoreboard showing down, distance, time, and score. Heisman also introduced the center snap
and the “hike” or “hep” count signals of the quarterback in starting play. Before that innovation, the center on an offensive line would roll the ball on the ground to the quarterback.

Between 1892 and 1927, he coached at eight different colleges including Clemson and Auburn, but it was his head coaching position at Georgia Tech that was most memorable. With the Yellow Jackets, Heisman introduced the “Heisman Shift,” a feared offense used to compile an impressive 100-29-6 record over his sixteen-season tenure. In 1916, Heisman gave new dimension to the word “rout” when his Yellow Jackets stung Cumberland’s Bulldogs, 222-0. That game, which has been called the Game of the Century, is still celebrated in Georgia Tech sports lore while Cumberland prefers to pretend it never happened.

After his death, the Downtown Athletic Club of New York City—of which John was the director—named its annual trophy in his honor. The Heisman Trophy is awarded each year to college football’s outstanding player. Many of the trophy’s past winners have gone on to lead illustrious professional football careers including such renowned players as Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsett, and, of course, O.J. Simpson.

After a bout of pneumonia, John died at 66 and was buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Head east through Rhinelander on Business Route 8 and you’ll notice the road makes a quick jog (a left, then a right). A few hundred yards after this jog, turn right onto Newell Street and the cemetery is a short distance on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery at the corner entrance, bear left, then stop just before the next paved road on the right. Follow the grass path on your right for about 80 feet to the Donaldson stone. This is John’s wife’s family plot, and here you’ll find John’s flat marker, as well.

AUGUST 13, 1912 – JULY 25, 1997

Ben Hogan started in golf as an eleven-year-old caddy and by nineteen was a professional player. In those Depression-era years, a career as a professional golfer wasn’t nearly as lucrative as it is today, and tour pros pooled their monies and traveled together. The monetary reward for being a superior player wasn’t at that time evident and diligence on the practice range was somewhat
of an oddity. Upon reaching the professional ranks, many players were content to let their skills plateau.

Ben, however, was a pioneer at refining his game. While his competitors succumbed to other distractions, Ben, who called learning a “daylight-till-dark process,” dedicated himself to developing a “repeating swing” that could stand up under the pressure of tournament play. True, in those early years, Ben was almost winless, so perhaps he needed the practice more than anyone else, but it seems, too, that through the rote discipline of perfecting his swing and other particulars, Ben was able to create a more solid base of golfing ability that stayed with him through the stress of competition.

His skills also stayed with him during his military service during World War II, when there wasn’t a lot of time to play golf, or any game for that matter. Indeed, upon his discharge from the Army, Ben resumed his place on the tour and almost immediately dominated the competition, butting heads with rival Sam Snead in the process, and winning 62 USPGA events, including nine majors between 1946 and 1953. The tremendous run of athletic excellence came despite a horrific 1949 car accident from which he suffered, among other injuries, some loss of vision in his left eye.

Nearly unbeatable, Ben was asked how he’d learned his trade. “I dug it out of the ground,” replied the master.

At 84, Ben died of heart failure and now rests at Greenwood Mausoleum in Fort Worth, Texas.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-30, take Exit 12 and follow University Drive north for 1½ miles to White Settlement Road. Turn left and Greenwood is immediately on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Pull into the drive after the funeral home, and the mausoleum is the low marbled building in front of you. Enter the mausoleum through the second door on the right side of the building (this would be the northeast entrance). Walk straight in, under the Yandell crypt, and twenty feet further, on the left is Ben Hogan.

JULY 16, 1889 – DECEMBER 5, 1951

By age nine, Joe Jackson was working twelve-hour days at a textile mill to help support his family. By twelve he was playing on the company’s baseball team. In 1908, at eighteen, Joe joined the minor league Greenville Spinners. During one particular game,
Joe wore a new pair of spiked baseball shoes, but they gave him blisters, so he finished the game in his stocking feet. Later, after belting a triple, he slid into third base and an opposing fan yelled “You shoeless son of a gun!” which led a sportswriter to dub him “Shoeless Joe.”

Joe was soon promoted to the Major Leagues and after just two seasons with the Cleveland Indians he was revered as one of baseball’s best players, always a threat with the bat and a dependable fielder with a strong and accurate arm. In 1915 he was traded to the Chicago White Sox and over the next four seasons became the city’s favorite sports hero, often leading the league in a variety of hitting statistics.

In 1919, Shoeless Joe and seven teammates, the Chicago Eight, were implicated in the so-called Black Sox scandal that charged they had received cash payments in return for playing below their ability and allowing the Cincinnati Reds to win that year’s World Series. “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” soon became a tag line of fans that hoped that their heroes had not betrayed them or the game. The following year, the sports world wrung its hands in anxiety as the outcome of the eight players’ trial for criminal fraud was anticipated.

As it turned out, the players were acquitted of fraud charges after a transcript of grand jury testimony was lost and the prosecution’s case crumbled. Nevertheless, after the 1920 baseball season the Chicago Eight were banned from baseball for life by Commissioner Kennesaw Landis. For the last 80 years, various baseball nuts have petitioned the league to reverse the ban against the players, and especially against Shoeless Joe, so that he might assume his place in Cooperstown.

To date, the ban has not been reversed, and for good reason, it seems. The “missing” transcript surfaced in 1923 and it demonstrates quite clearly that Shoeless Joe and three of the other players admitted to participating in the fix, albeit reluctantly. After being asked by the grand jury whether anyone paid him money to throw the series in favor of Cincinnati, Shoeless Joe replied, “They promised me $20,000 and paid me five [thousand].” Later, though, when asked whether he made any intentional errors on a particular day, Shoeless Joe replied, “No, sir, not during the whole Series.” It appears that Shoeless Joe agreed to throw the game, then later had misgivings and played as well as he could, but his team lost anyway.

After their ban, none of the Chicago Eight played Major League baseball again, though a few may have surreptitiously played in other leagues, and Shoeless Joe retired to South Carolina, where he ran a liquor store and a pool hall.

Shoeless Joe died at 64 of a heart attack or, “coronary thrombosis caused by arteriosclerosis and cirrhosis of the liver,” and he was buried at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Greenville, South Carolina.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-385, take Exit 40 and follow Route 291 north for 1½ miles. Turn left on Edwards Road, then right on Wade Hampton Boulevard (Route 29), and the park is immediately on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn at the first right, then bear left at the “Y.” Stop 30 feet before the next intersection and look along the left-hand curb for the Landers plot in Section V. Shoeless Joe’s grave is nine rows behind Landers. Joe’s marker is just a flat one in the grass, but it’s easy to find—just look for the spare baseballs and shoes left by previous visitors.

MARCH 31, 1878 – JUNE 10, 1946

In some areas of America during her history, impromptu bare-knuckled boxing contests between black fighters were an underground cultural staple held for the gambling entertainment of cajoling white spectators. In Texas during the late 1800s, the preeminent champion of these so-called “battle royales” was a powerful combatant named Jack Johnson.

Jack moved on to broader venues in 1897, fighting professionally in the heavyweight class where five years later he won California’s Negro heavyweight championship. The title was a bit of a contrivance since blacks were not permitted to fight against whites in championship bouts, the main reason being the social ramifications in the event that a black man won. Excellence of a black over a white in a prestigious contest could not be chanced; decades after the Civil War, Jim Crow segregation was alive and well.

But a monkey wrench was tossed into this farcical situation in 1908 when Jack traveled to Australia and knocked out World Heavyweight Champion Tommy Burns—a white man. Johnson was crowned the new champion and the psyches of bigots from coast to coast were staggered. Keen on righting what was widely considered a horrific travesty of sport, a frenzied series of matches for a “Great White Hope” to dethrone Jack were undertaken, and he was forced to defend his crown seven times during the next sixteen months. Finally, the mockery prompted former undefeated heavyweight champion James Jeffries from retirement as
he announced, “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”

In downtown Reno on July 4, 1910, the match billed as “The Fight of the Century” took place in front of 22,000 people. While the ringside band played a special composition titled “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” Jack and Jeffries took their respective corners and began a slugfest that ended with Jeffries quitting during the 15th round. The outcome of the fight incited race riots across the country. Humiliated whites were in no mood for celebratory blacks during what was “supposed” to be their weekend of comeuppance, never mind that the whole affair occurred, not coincidentally, on the nation’s most celebrated holiday.

Five years later, Jack Johnson lost his title to Jess Willard, suffering a knockout in the 26th round of a scheduled 45-round fight. Those were the golden days of boxing, indeed!

Jack spent his retirement enjoying the prestige of a celebrity athlete though there were limitations; after marrying a white woman in 1912, he and his bride fled to Canada and then France for a period after learning Jack was the target of a retaliatory lynching. In 1920, he surrendered to U.S. marshals and spent a year in Leavenworth on trumped-up charges related to violation of the Mann Act; in 2008 Congress passed a proposal requesting a posthumous pardon. At 68, he died in a North Carolina car crash, reportedly after angrily racing away from a diner that refused to serve him.

Jack is buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I 90/94, take Exit 44 and follow Irving Park Road (Route 19) 2½ miles east to the entrance on your left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and follow Main Avenue to Greenwood Avenue. Turn left and the Johnson family plot is a short distance on the left, though Jack does not have his own headstone.

MARCH 17, 1902 – DECEMBER 18, 1971

Bobby Jones, arguably the most talented golfer of all time, accomplished in 1930 what no one had ever done before—and no one has done since. He achieved a grand slam, that is, victories in the United States and British Opens and in the United States and British Amateur championships within a single season.