Talking to my brother late last week, I learned he was every bit as devastated by Joe Frazier’s death as I was. That was odd, considering that a little over 36 years before Frazier died, we were both in what was then the Baltimore Civic Center, watching the Thrilla in Manila on closed-circuit television, rooting for one Muhammad Ali to beat Frazier in the rubber match of their renowned pugilistic trilogy.
Frazier died of liver cancer last Monday. According to news reports, one of at least three memorial services for the former heavyweight boxing champion will be held today at a Philadelphia Baptist church.
Frazier moved to Philadelphia after growing up the son of a sharecropper in South Carolina. He was an overweight kid who worked in a slaughterhouse, hauling slabs of beef into a freezer.
Eventually he found his way to a local gym, where he boxed so he could shave off some of those excess pounds. After watching Frazier’s left hook, boxing aficionados who frequented the gym realized the kid had something.
Frazier did get rid of those excess pounds; then he started getting rid of his boxing opponents. He won the 1964 heavyweight boxing championship at the Tokyo Olympic Games. In 1965 he started his pro career, rising quickly in the rankings.
Some pundits have written and said that it was Frazier’s misfortune that his rise coincided with Ali’s. I contend that it was Frazier’s greatest fortune.
The two met as undefeated champs on March 8, 1971. Frazier won that one. They met again in 1974. Ali won that bout.
But it was that final match in Manila, on Sept. 30, 1975, that turned many die-hard Ali fans into Joe Frazier fans.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to fess up that I was one of the die-hard Ali fans, and had been since he wrested the title from Sonny Liston on Feb. 25, 1964.
I was an Ali fan not only because of his boxing skills, but also because I thought the draft board in his hometown of Louisville, Ky., engaged in some hanky-panky when it came to Ali.
After beating Liston, Ali announced he was a member of the controversial sect the Nation of Islam, which wasn’t popular in 1964 and isn’t much more popular today. He took an armed forces entrance examination and was considered too stupid to even be cannon fodder.
Shortly after, Ali was considered intelligent enough to be cannon fodder after all, and suddenly became eligible for the draft.
The proper name for this might have been called “misusing the draft for political purposes.” Ali was targeted because he was a member of the Nation of Islam.
Some members of the civil rights organization known as SNCC – the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — who opposed the Vietnam War ran into problems with their local draft boards.
When Ali refused induction into the Army in April of 1967, he became a villain to many, but a hero to just as many others.
For some, it was for opposing the war. For me, it was because he had resisted the shameless abuse of power exercised by the Louisville draft board.
When Ali and Frazier met in Manila, I was still a die-hard Ali fan. But after watching Frazier’s heroic effort in that fight — taking a vicious pounding from Ali in the early rounds and then coming back and taking the Louisville Lip to the brink of defeat — I realized Frazier had the stuff of which true champions are made.
Ali admitted as much in his autobiography, “The Greatest,” a book in which Frazier comes off looking much more heroic than Ali.
Now might be the appropriate time for us to either read or reread that autobiography.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
