Former heavyweight champion Michael Spinks is not yet ready to talk about the enormous loss of his friend, boxing legend Joe Frazier, who passed Monday night from liver cancer at age 67.
“Michael said he has lost so many friends that he is just overwhelmed with the sadness that has occurred around him,” said Alderman Samuel Moore, a close confidante of the Spinks family.
They all worked closely together in Butch Lewis Productions, which also managed Frazier’s early professional boxing career.
“We all just saw Joe at Butch’s funeral,” Moore said. “We just lost Butch Lewis, and then to come round to Joe like that.”
Lewis died July 23 at age 65.
The son of a South Carolina sharecropper who won an Olympic gold medal in 1964 in Tokyo and rose to undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, Frazier was diagnosed in September and admitted to hospice care in Philadelphia last weekend before his death.
Spinks’ St. Louis-based team trained extensively in Frazier’s Philadelphia gym.
“That was a nice, tight, little, hot gym,” Moore said. “That was the epitome of training. Joe used a lot of heavy bags and belly balls. It was tough training. Mike got a lot out of Joe’s gym. Joe was a hard worker. I liked everything about him.”
The late Ray Latham and the Finger twins, Lavell and Terrell Finger, are other St. Louis fighters who trained with Frazier and Lewis. Frazier toughened all of them.
“If I were a young man, I’d aspire to the hard work of Joe Frazier,” Moore said. “He was a self-disciplined fighter. He had the discipline to run on his own before the trainer gets there. Joe always ran in the mountains.”
The world knew the disciplined fighter with the devastating left hook who fought three epic battles with Muhammad Ali, culminating in the 1975 “Thrilla in Manila,” and later tangled with and lost to George Foreman. The Spinks team also knew the man – the friend, the prankster … the singer!
“Joe thought he could sing,” Moore chuckled. He’d sing, ‘It Was All Right with Me,'” the Cole Porter standard.
Though his immortal adversary in Ali was famed for his devastating wit and aggressive pranks, Frazier also had that dimension to him. In fact, he played off Ali in his pranks.
“He was practical joker – he scared us all,” Moore said.
“He’d threaten you, but be joking. He was always a frightful guy to be around. He’d crack a joke: ‘You’re starting to look like Muhammad Ali to me. I might have a flashback.’ Make you want to stay away sometime.”
Frazier’s animosity for Ali was hard-earned.
“He should also be remembered as Ali’s personal media punching bag, where he was called everything from an Uncle Tom to a Gorilla by Ali,” said St. Louis American sports columnist Michael Claiborne.
“Smokin’ Joe took it personally and developed a hatred for Ali until a few years ago where they made peace.”
Any yet, behind the scarred, wary, scary prankster was a warm man.
“He was a kind guy. He was a lover and he wanted to be loved,” Moore said of Frazier.
“He accepted most people. He was not snooty. He loved his family – loved those kids. That followed all the way through to when Ali’s daughter and his daughter fought. Joe was a big part of that.”
Jacqui Frazier-Lyde and Laila Ali squared off in 2001. Like fathers, like daughters, as Ali got the better of the fight.
Claiborne said, “Joe Frazier should be remembered for a lot of things: a great champion, father and first-class gentleman who did the best with what he had to work with, in and out of the ring.”
Moore said, “We have lost this great man, the great Joe Frazier.”
