Smokin' Joe

When I heard that Joe Frazier had passed on last night, my first thought was about my father. On March 8, 1971, he was a college sophomore and away at school far from our hometown of Philadelphia. He said the only Black people in America rooting for Frazier that night were those from Philly. Far as he was from home, there weren’t too many Black Philadelphians in the theater where he watched the closed-circuit broadcast. With all the other Black folk in the audience looking at him angrily, my dad loudly and proudly cheered on Smokin’ Joe. Philadelphians.

From the moment my dad told me that story—and it’s been about 25 years now—Joe Frazier has been my favorite athlete of all time. I never saw him fight live, obviously, and I’ve only seen 5 of his fights on video. Still, he’s my favorite of all time. He ranks higher than Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson, Mike Schmidt, Ryan Howard, Cole Hamels, Steve Atwater, John Elway, Ray Lewis, Jerome Brown, Bernard Hopkins, Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson, Joe Montana, Wilbur Marshall…all of them. For me, Joe Frazier is #1.

And even though he retired before I was born and only fought once after that, I find myself rooting for Joe every time I watch one of his fights. This is especially true when I watch the Thrilla in Manilla. To this day, that is the most brutal, close-to-death for both participants sporting event I’ve ever seen.

The end of that fight, 36 years later, is surreal to me. Both fighters were spent; they were both done. According to Frazier and Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, Muhammad Ali begged Dundee to cut his gloves off. Dundee told him to hold on and looked over his shoulder at Frazier’s corner. In the opposite corner, Frazier told his trainer, Eddie Futch, that he had one round left in him. Futch looked at his fighter, down to about half an eye, and told him that he loved him too much to let him continue. “OK,” Joe said he said. “Shut it down.” Dundee’s hunch paid off, and Ali won the rubber match. Yes, it was that close between them. As the Newark Star-Ledger’s Jerry Izenberg once said, “They weren’t fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world. They were fighting for the heavyweight championship of each other.”

The heavyweight championship of each other. What a perfect way to put it. They killed each other that night in Manilla. To some extent, their minds and bodies held on for decades longer, but neither man was the same after that fight. And the 30 seconds Angelo Dundee waited allowed Ali to go down in history as the greatest heavyweight boxer ever and Frazier left to be considered top 5 or top 10 by most experts. Essentially, he is all but forgotten outside of the trilogy with Ali.

But that’s OK. That’s how it seems to go with Philly’s best. But he’s ours. And we remember him. And that left hook that made Muhammad’s tassels fly in the air.

Joe Frazier lived a good life and hard life, if not such a long life. But he never backed down from a fight and did himself and his people proud. Now, his body told him it was time to shut it down. We remember March 8, 1971; October 1, 1975 (September 30 here in the States); and everything before, between, and after.

God bless you, Smokin’ Joe.