In its most recent edition, Belles Lettres, published by the Center for the Humanities at Washington University, published a long essay about boxing great Joe Frazier by center director Gerald Early. The American is reprinting that essay in the 2012 Black History Month section, in three parts, with permission. This is part 2.
2. What my sibling knew
The first person to teach me anything about boxing was my sister, Rosalind, two years older and many years smarter. In those days, I thought Rosalind simply knew and knew and knew. She told me all about the first middleweight championship bout between Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio, which took place in September 1957. As I was only five, I had no idea what she was talking about, why the fight was important or who the fighters were or even what prizefighters were, exactly.
Yet she painted a picture that I found unforgettably compelling about the two men, the fight, and what was at stake – Robinson was old at 37 and Basilio was tough – and, as I remember it, she was curiously objective in her analysis. She had good things to say about both men.
I wanted Basilio to win because I liked the sound of his name. She did not make fun of me for that, for my ignorance or shallowness. She thought that was not a bad reason to back a fighter. “Names mean something,” she said. She liked Basilio, too, but liked the sound of Sugar Ray better.
She was really rooting for Robinson to win the rematch a year later, as Basilio won the first bout. I said I would stick with Basilio. She said Basilio would lose because Robinson “beat him up a lot” in the first fight. “You can’t get beat up like that and win a lot of fights,” she said sagely. And she was right.
She taught me about the famous heavyweights of the era: Floyd Patterson, Ingemar Johansson, Rocky Marciano and Sonny Liston. But she also taught me about heavyweights that only the Corinthians – the true, committed fans – followed: Eddie Machen, Thad Spencer, Doug Jones, Zora Folley, and Cleveland Williams.
All of these fighters were serious contenders at a certain point in their careers before they ultimately became “dogmeat,” the expression used in Philadelphia gyms to describe a fighter who is just a stepping-stone, or a meal, for an up-and-comer or an easy notch for a champion looking to defend his title without having to train too hard.
But I grew up among black and white working-class people in Philadelphia, and boxing was in the blood, in the genetic makeup of the city. Boxers loomed over the landscape, symbolic and ornamental, portentous and implike, like angels and gargoyles in the architecture. Boxing called to me from the pavement; it stalked me in the very air.
My wife, Ida, on arriving in Philadelphia as a college freshman, said the city “had an attitude. Hard, crowded, tough, untrusting, as if being nice was a sign of weakness. It seemed like a place where everybody lives on top of each other and everybody was at war with everybody else.” She was right. That was Philadelphia exactly, or at least the Philadelphia of the working poor, for whom boxing was a form of morality and the representation of a conceit.
I hated the city with a ferocity that I felt rightly or wrongly helped to keep me alive, and I loved the city more than anything but God. Philadelphia was, during the drunkenness of my boxing passion, a sort of God for me. When I first met Ida, nothing gave me greater pride than to act exactly how she thought Philadelphians, at least black ones, acted: as if they carried the world’s biggest chip on their shoulders and wanted, for all the world, to kick someone’s ass. I winked at her once and called my attitude “boxing chic.”
What my sister or my other relatives couldn’t teach me about the Stern Art of Bruising, the kids and adults in the neighborhood did. All the street gangs – and Philadelphia was rife with them in my youth, such that it was impossible for me as a boy to go where I wanted to without stress and risk – had their warlords, the kids with the best, the fastest pair of hands, the best hand-to-hand fighters, the kids who could really duke it in a “fair one,” the supreme ass kickers.
I saw a lot of these kids fight on the streets when I was growing up. Some of them were really good. A few of them became professionals. Three I knew became champions – Matthew Saad Muhammad, Tyrone Everett, and Jeff Chandler, the Lords of the Jungle. (North Philadelphia, where the largest black population lived, was called the Jungle, although the three champions I knew came from South Philadelphia, where W. E. B. Du Bois did his study of the Philadelphia Negro at the end of the nineteenth century.)
I was an eager pupil for the lore and the gore. God, how I thought I loved boxing then, and for a good many years to follow, as if my heart were wired to the throbs of training gyms. It was the only worthy thing in the city for me.
And so it was that I entered the world of boxing in Philadelphia and followed avidly the careers of Eugene “Cyclone” Hart, Sammy Goss, Stanley “Kitten” Hayward, Bad Bennie Briscoe, Joey Giardello, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Gypsy Joe Harris, and the rest of the mad warriors who made up the local fight scene. The Philly fighter: the guy who fought as hard in his gym workouts as he did in his actual fights, sometimes harder, because it meant something to be the king of the gym – less than being a champion, but for some not a lot less.
Joe Frazier arrived sometime in 1961, as I was beginning my true boyhood education in boxing, to work for a local slaughterhouse called the Cross Brothers. The hero, not the dragon, came with the art of fire breathing, scorching and cleansing and laying bare all that was around him. He became the king of all Philly fighters. He became – this black southerner with no education, Gullah roots, a passel of children, a desire to be somebody, a sense that he had a rendezvous with destiny – everything that Philadelphia, or more precisely a significant portion of working-class Philadelphia, was and aspired to be: tough, proud, ambitious, dumb, and lucky. He could only hope that his body would last long enough for him to become a world-class athlete and make a lot of money.
The third and final part of the essay will be published in next week’s Black History Month section.
Gerald Early is Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.
To apply for the 2012 Dr. Donald M. Suggs Scholarship to the University of Missouri-Columbia, visit www.stlamerican.com or call Kate Daniel at 314-289-5413 or email kdaniel@stlamerican.com for an application or more information. High school seniors who will be entering college in fall 2012 are eligible to apply, and a minimum ACT test score of 27 or equivalent SAT score of 1200 is required. The application deadline is Friday, February 24, 2012.
