A champion's battle

Joe Frazier stopped, and pointed to a picture on the wall.

His gym in North Philadelphia was a funky, ramshackle place that could have been a movie set, crammed not just with the tools of a savage trade, but also with ephemera gathered during a career for the ages.

The photo was a blow up, an oversized reproduction of a Life Magazine cover from 1971, from the week of what was dubbed the Fight of the Century and absolutely lived up to the hyperbole. In the portrait, the two great rivals posed in evening wear, though evening wear that suggested the flamboyant styles of the day. If memory serves, Joe wore a ruffly pink shirt and a black velvet bow tie.

"Look at that picture," he said. "You tell me, who is more handsome? Who is the more handsome man? You tell me I'm not more handsome than he is."

He couldn't hide it, even then, though through an hour or more of conversation he had tried to keep his true feelings in check. Frazier had come to understand that people became uncomfortable when he expressed his feelings about Muhammad Ali, who was regarded by so many in his frail dotage into a kind of silent saint.

Hatred, that was certainly part of it -- the throwaway line about wishing Ali had fallen into the Olympic cauldron in Atlanta in 1996.

This wasn't hatred, but pain.

Through all of those taunts, all of that tub-thumping to sell tickets and closed circuit seats, to get inside Frazier's head -- you're ugly, you're a gorilla, you're the white man's champion -- Ali had cut straight to his manhood.

Joe Frazier knew too well what it felt to be treated as less than a man, so those blows he couldn't easily fend off.

He died on Monday, and lord knows he was imperfect. He drank too much, was rough around the edges and was no one's idea of husband of the year. As the trainer and mentor of his son, Marvis, he put him in the ring with opponents like Mike Tyson and Larry Holmes, against whom he had absolutely no chance.

But the fact is few bothered to try to know him, to understand him, beyond his role as the foil, as The Other to the most famous athlete, and one of the most famous human beings, of the 20th Century. He was lost in Ali's incandescent glow; he didn't have the words, the mental dexterity, to fight back with anything but his fists.

He desperately wanted to be treated as an equal. He desperately wanted to be a star. That's why the goofy singing career. That's why he pined for his own movie, like that Ali hagiography starring Will Smith. Never happened.

Frazier grew up in brutally impoverished circumstances in South Carolina. Like so many, he ventured north seeking work. He began fighting, and though short and squat for a heavyweight, he found a style that perfectly suited his physique, pushing ever forward, hands high, bobbing up and down, and flinging a murderous left hook.

He did other stuff as well: Stole cars, worked in a slaughterhouse, mopping up the blood and gore. When he returned to that work after winning a gold medal for the United States of America at the 1964 Olympic Games, his left hand broken from one of the punches he landed, he was immediately fired, because you couldn't do the mucking out with a cast on your hand.

There were no free passes. No gifts. By the time he turned pro, Ali was already the champion. Frazier beat all comers. He shattered George Chuvalo's face. When Ali was forced into exile, he unified the vacated title, knocking out Jimmy Ellis, and then waited patiently for the moment when the world would acknowledge that he was the true champ. Behind the scenes, he worked to help Ali get his license back, and offered to lend him money.

But he never really did get what he desired, even after winning their first fight, even after dropping Ali on his back, his tasseled boots hanging in the air. Extenuating circumstances. Ring rust. And then, after beating two nobodies, Frazier was bounced off the canvas six times by George Foreman in Kingston, Jamaica, and his short reign as heavyweight champion was over.

By the time Frazier fought Ali for a third time, in Manila in 1975, on the heels of Ali's miraculous victory over Foreman in Zaire, he was regarded as washed up. That's when Ali called him a "gorilla", and people laughed and laughed and laughed.

"Ali wasn't right," Frazier said that day in the gym. "He wasn't right as a black man."

Just try and watch that fight without flinching. Just try and watch those 14 rounds, and think about the hand-wringing over violence in hockey, think about the slickly-packaged bloodletting of the UFC, and understand that it is something else entirely to watch one man try to kill another man because he so despises him. That's what was happening that night, until Frazier's trainer Eddie Futch refused to let him leave his corner for the 15th round.

He was defeated, physically diminished forever by that fight.

But he was unbowed. He was a man.