“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>In its most recent edition, “font-size: 9pt; font-family: Verdana;”>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,w ith permission.
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“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>3. The will as the sum of all fears “font-family: Verdana; font-size: 9pt;”>
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>When Madison Square Garden promoter Teddy Brenner asked Joe Frazier to write the figure $2.5 million on a piece of paper, Frazier couldn’t do it. Neither could Muhammad Ali, who did not even bother to try to write down the figure. Their inability to do so cost them a considerable sum of money, as they could never understand that Brenner’s offer of a percentage of the gate for their March 1971 fight was a better deal than the flat fee of $2.5 million offered by Jack Kent Cooke. Both fighters were that dumb.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>I don’t say that with arrogance or a sense of superiority but with a deep sense of identification and understanding. I know what it is like to look that stupid in front of white people and what it can cost. I am not trying to make the incident racial in any way, because it wasn’t. But Frazier was acutely embarrassed that he couldn’t write 2.5 million numerically and had no idea how to calculate the percentage of anything. It is unclear whether Ali was embarrassed.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>But both men put on a brazen front and insisted on their guarantee and pretended that it didn’t matter whether they could understand the other offer. When I heard that story I simply thought that, well, there’s a real incentive to, as a friend of mine put it, “smarten up.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>I mention this story only to put to rest the mistaken notion that Ali was smarter than Frazier. He wasn’t. Both men were equally uneducated, equally unlettered, equally uncurious about ideas or the world. Ali was simply glib and had the glib person’s bulwark of a dogma to defend and protect him in a strange world that wanted to exploit his looks and his athletic skills in much the way brothels exploit beautiful young whores. “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches . . .” could fend off a great deal, and the hypocrisy and illogic of racialism did not require great intellect to parse, only a certain sort of minimal self-awareness on the part of a black person.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>In looking back at the rivalry between Frazier and Ali, we are apt to denounce Ali’s derogatory name-calling, referring to Frazier as an Uncle Tom, a gorilla, a nigger, and the like. Frazier is now seen, in some ways, as a more “authentic” black than Ali, less afraid of the larger white world (as he did not need the militant bromides and grim visages of the Nation of Islam to offer him solace), less fixated about color, less hysterical about racial politics, and more genuinely rooted in black southern culture.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>This interpretation, most vigorously promoted by Mark Kram, is a sort of corrective for all of the years of overweening, sometimes blatantly wrongheaded Ali hero-worship as the prince of boxers and the darling of black militancy and political resistance because of his stance against the Vietnam War and the draft. Frazier always thought Ali’s politics was “a bunch of bullshit.” “[If] I had been single, like Ali, I’d have had no problem serving this country if that draft board had called me. In fact, I tried to join the military when I was fourteen, but wasn’t accepted. Ours is a great country, and worth defending. What Clay [Frazier insisted on not using the name Muhammad Ali but rather Cassius Clay] did was to make himself out as a man of conscience instead of the draft dodger he was.” That’s working-class cynicism for you!
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>Although, history still sides with Ali: the Vietnam War was a tragedy and a mistake, resisting the government’s will and policies is sometimes wise and sometimes morally necessary, and overly esteeming people in the military is a fairly dangerous thing to do. It is good that Frazier is getting a second and deeper look in recent years, but he still remains, even in death, something like a foil for Ali, where Frazier becomes the measure by which Ali is either an unqualified romantic hero or a qualified complex hero.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>I thought Frazier would break Ali in half in their first fight in 1971, and he wanted to so badly that he nearly died as a result. Frazier won the fight – although Ali turned public sentiment against him so that even in victory Frazier did not enjoy the status or accolades a true champion should have – he hurt Ali badly in the 11th round, nearly breaking his jaw, and knocked him down with a pile-driving left hook in the fifteenth.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>“But the fight had taken a toll on me. My blood pressure was dangerously high,” Frazier writes. He goes on to say that it wasn’t Ali’s punches that was the cause of his problem, but Frazier took the worst beating of his career up to that point in his first fight with Ali, who battered him with stinging jabs and straight right hands. Frazier went into intensive care. There were rumors circulating in Philly that he had died. He was in the hospital for weeks.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>Ali made a point of this whenever he discussed the fight, indicating that Frazier had been more severely beaten in the fight even though Ali never knocked him down. Frazier would have absorbed Ali hitting him with a tree trunk to win that first fight. I wanted Ali to win that fight but I respected the sheer suicidal intensity of Frazier’s hatred of his rival. “I’d rather die than lose,” some fighters have said, but Frazier came very close to doing just that, dying as a cost of winning.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>By the time the two men fought again in Manila in 1975, the third and final match (Ali won the second, a ten-round decision, in New York in 1974, when neither man was champion), I wanted very much for Frazier to win back the title but felt that Ali would break him in half – and that was nearly the case. Ali took a severe beating from which he never fully recovered, but he broke Frazier apart round by round, muscle by muscle.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>I was not surprised at Frazier, only that he fought as hard and long as he did as a washed-up fighter, which he was then. But his will was unvanquished, and so he fought better than he knew. But for Frazier, breathing the fire of war, absorbed with the pure hatred of one’s enemy in every synapse and sinew, was not enough. The homeboy didn’t make it. And he lived on the fumes of his bitterness after that.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>Joe Frazier was demented with how much he detested Muhammad Ali. I respected that, even when others told him he was being foolish and foul in some of the things he was saying about Ali. Why make up with Ali? Loves and kisses would only have made Frazier more completely a foil of Ali than he was.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>I thought there was a sort of romantic glow about his hatred, a shimmering clarity that gave Frazier’s life meaning and purpose, the grandeur of rude dissent. Great passion creates a kind of greatness, even as it corrupts itself with self-pity and bravado. The more alloyed the hatred, the sterner its imperfect glory.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>Frazier wasn’t really railing against Ali in his last years but rather against God for giving him more hatred than his body could do anything with. But Frazier was luckier than most men in that he found a profession where he could go to war against what he hated and not have find substitutes to deceive his mind and soul.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>No greater representation of athletic valor hath working-class Philadelphia than Joe Frazier, no greater a symbol of the city’s compelling character. It is an ironical misfortune that perhaps only a working-class Philadelphian can truly appreciate: that the only man in his sport whose will was greater than his own, was the man he so thoroughly hated.
“font-size: 9.0pt; font-family: Verdana;”>Gerald Early is Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.
