“The world has lost a great champion” RIP Joe Frazier 1944-2011
“The world has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration. My sympathy goes out…
“The world has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration. My sympathy goes out to his family and loved ones.”
Muhammad Ali
“Joe Frazier would come out smoking. If you hit him, he liked it. If you knocked him down, you only made him mad.”
George Foreman
Joe Frazier, the relentless slugger who became the heavyweight champion of the world and earned boxing immortality with three epic battles against Muhammad Ali, has died at the age of 67.
‘Smokin’ Joe’ Frazier, who was the first boxer to beat Ali, died in Philadelphia a month after being diagnosed with liver cancer.
Frazier won the Olympic heavyweight boxing gold medal for the United States in 1964 in Tokyo and held the world heavyweight boxing crown from 1970 to 1973.
He is eternally linked with Ali thanks to their trilogy of fights in the 1970s, among the most famous in the history of the sport. Frazier won the first and Ali took the next two.
Frazier won the world heavyweight title in 1970, knocking out champion Jimmy Ellis, after Ali had been stripped of the championship in 1967 for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War due to his Muslim beliefs.
Ali was reinstated in boxing and met Frazier on March 8, 1971 at New York’s Madison Square Garden, in a bout billed ‘The Fight of the Century’. Frazier sent Ali to the canvas with a left hook in the 15th round. Ali got up but Frazier won by unanimous decision.
The brutal encounter left both men hospitalised. Frazier later lost his title in 1973 to hard-hitting George Foreman.
The second Ali-Frazier fight was on January 28, 1974, again at Madison Square Garden, with Ali winning a 12-round decision.
Ali then beat Foreman to reclaim the championship. He defended it in the third Frazier fight on October 1, 1975, in an encounter in the Philippines known as ‘The Thrilla in Manila’ – one of the most famous sporting events of the 20th century.
The two punished each other for 14 rounds, then Frazier’s trainer and cornerman Eddie Futch stopped the fight before the 15th round, while Frazier fumed in the ring corner, one of his eyes swollen shut. Frazier never forgave Futch for giving Ali a victory by technical knockout.
Ali collapsed from exhaustion after the ‘Thrilla’ saying the fight was “as close to death as I could imagine.”
The Ali-Frazier rivalry was waged not only in a boxing ring. Ali ridiculed Frazier as a “gorilla” and an “Uncle Tom.”
For his part, Frazier insisted on calling his foe Cassius Clay, the birth name that Ali changed in 1964 for a Muslim name.
Frazier remained bitter toward Ali for decades. At the 1996 Games in Atlanta, when Ali, stricken with Parkinson’s disease, lit the Olympic flame, Frazier said he would have liked to have “pushed him in.”
Frazier was born in segregated South Carolina in 1944, the youngest of 12 children.
The “sledgehammer left hook” that put Muhammad Ali on the canvas in 1971 pretty much tells the story of Joe Frazier’s career, NPR’s Tom Goldman says.
“It was as crushing and symbolic” as any of Frazier’s punches over his long career, Tom said. “It put his bitter rival, Muhammad Ali, on his ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ keister at Madison Square Garden.
The punch, which clinched then-heavyweight champion Frazier’s victory over Ali in that fight, “started around Joe Frazier’s left hip,” Tom said. But, he added, “its origins stretch back a couple of decades to segregated South Carolina, where a young boy from a sharecropping family — Frazier was about 8 — fashioned a punching bag out of a burlap sack stuffed with rags and corn cobs and Spanish moss. By Frazier’s own estimation, he slugged that thing for the next six or seven years damn near every day.”
Frazier amassed a career record of 32-4-1. He retired after a second loss to Foreman in 1976 then came out of retirement for a fight in 1981 before ending his career for good. His only losses were to Ali and Foreman.
Ali became a beloved sports legend but Frazier was never embraced the same way. He also lost almost all of his money. He lived alone in an apartment above the gym where he trained young fighters in a run-down section of Philadelphia.
Floyd Mayweather Jr. twittered an offer to pay for funeral expenses. “My Condolences go out to the family of the late great Joe Frazier. #TheMoneyTeam will pay for his Funeral services.”
Frazier in the 1980s managed the boxing career of his eldest son, Marvis, who was best known for devastating knockout losses to champions Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson. Frazier’s daughter Jacquelyn Frazier-Lyde entered women’s boxing and fought Ali’s daughter Laila, losing on a decision in 2001.
