I'm not a particularly foul-mouthed type but there are times in a man's life when he needs to swear because anger courses through you in a way that only a good cursing will do. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to properly swear in this space, damn it! Smokin' Joe Frazier passed away this week and the lack of respect accorded that man was obvious to me even at a young age. Be honest, when was the last time you thought about Joe Frazier? His great nemesis, Muhammad Ali, is never far from our thoughts as he is routinely feted as the greatest sportsman ever, a courageous civil rights pioneer, a poet and a poseur of extraordinary magnitude and on and on. Frazier had no such romance in his legacy. One day you hear he has advanced liver cancer and the next day he is dead. It was that quick.
But that's not why I feel like cursing. No, I am still incensed because it's 1971 all over again. When Frazier fought Ali for the first time it was billed not only as the biggest fight ever, it was the biggest sporting event ever. I was in grade eight and I was a Frazier fan and I'm not entirely sure why because everybody else was for Ali. Frazier was straight up with no pretence, while Ali was just so full of himself, so busy perpetuating his own myth.
When the fight was finally announced the invective hurled at Smokin' Joe was intolerable. Even worse, Ali made him out to be a traitor to his race. An uneducated son of a sharecropper from South Carolina, a direct descendant of slaves and a guy who actually worked in the cotton fields growing up and here was the light-skinned Ali, who never had a job other than boxing in his life, screaming that Frazier wasn't black enough?
In the documentary Thrilla in Manila they broke things down like this: 'If you rooted for Ali, you were black, liberal or young and for the civil rights movement. If you backed Joe Frazier, you were a representative of white conservative America.'
Well, I was white, but conservative? Certainly not this 13-year-old, but no one in my class would bet on Frazier so I had to take all the action. We bet our lunch money for the month, me against 10 other guys. I had no idea how I would pay it if I lost but I didn't care. There was no live TV coverage, this being the biggest thing ever; it was also the first pay-per-view event so I followed on the radio, which was only allowed to do round-by-round updates.
As you probably heard, Frazier won. Knocked Ali down in the 15th with a thunderous left hook and scored a unanimous decision. I was deliriously happy and thought for a moment that I could quit school and just retire because I had won so much money. The next day I was the first person at school. Pay up, suckers. But one guy who was the designated mouthpiece for the group said they weren't paying.
