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Smokin’ Joe: The Life of Joe Frazier by Mark Kram, Jr.

Ecco, 384 pp.

By Allen Barra

No fighter in the last sixty years, maybe ever, gave fans more for their money than Joe Frazier. No matter the opponent or his style, you always knew exactly where Joe would be: as close to the other man as he could get. Bobbing and weaving, fists pumping, Frazier’s purpose was to back every foe into the ropes or a corner.

In Mark Kram, Jr.’s Smokin’ Joe, an unnamed ring veteran recalls that fighting Frazier was “like getting hit by four hands.” George Chuvalo, a rock of a Canadian whose back even Frazier couldn’t put on the canvas, said, “Everything moves, his head, his shoulders, his body and his legs … He fights six minutes every round.”

Consigned by history to a supporting role in the saga of Muhammad Ali, Frazier has long deserved a definitive biography. Kram (author of Like Any Normal Day, winner of the PEN 2013 award for literary sportswriting) writes with the intensity that Frazier fought with. In victory and defeat, “Few men in the annals of the ring produced moments as indelible.” Unlike his subject, Kram knows when to take a step back and reflect, revealing a Frazier far removed from the enduring portrayal of him as “an angry and unforgiving man so incapable of letting go of the hatred he harbored for Ali.”

To the public, he was Smokin’ Joe, but to his family and friends he was “Billy Boy,” a nickname given to him by his father Rubin “a one-armed handyman-cum-bootlegger whose speech impediment prevented him for uttering the words baby boy.”

Born in 1944, Billy grew up in Laurel Bay, South Carolina, in Beaufort County, perhaps the poorest county in America. He shared his first home, a bare structure of just four rooms elevated from the ground to keep it dry from flooding, with eleven siblings. The family had ten acres, which sounds like a lot but much of it was swamp land occupied by snakes and the occasional alligator. They spent long hours in the brutal sun coaxing beets, radishes, tomatoes, peas, cotton and watermelon from the land. His sister-in-law Miriam supplemented their diet with raccoon, warning that “Before you cook it, you got to strip away the glands, and you’ve got to get one that doesn’t have rabies.” Rubin boosted their income with corn liquor made with the help of government-subsidized sugar.

“I never had a little boy’s life,” Joe said. An indifferent student, he quit after the ninth grade. “Beaufort,” he reflected in his autobiography, “never stopped letting you know that you were a nigger.” At age fifteen, Billy borrowed the fare and boarded a Greyhound for New York. For a while he survived by stealing cars and selling parts, but moved on to Philadelphia, where he had friends and family. He had the good fortune to drift into the gym at the Twenty-Third Police Athletic League in North Philly, where he met boxing trainer Yancey “Yank” Durham. “Yank,” it was said, “stood out in the unprincipled realm of boxing ‘like a healthy thumb on a leprous hand.’”

Durham watched the teenager hit the heavy bag and was unimpressed; he was fat and, at a shade under six feet, short for a heavyweight. But Yank also saw that the kid had an uncommon work ethic, and, most important, like so many fighters who came out of Philly gyms, a lethal left hook. “To counterbalance Joe’s physical shortcomings,” Kram writes, “Durham was of the belief Frazier only had one way to go and that was ‘straight ahead’ into the chest of his opponent – chin down, eyes up, always on the attack.”

Yank and Joe became inseparable. “If Yank told Joe to jump in front of a train,” said a friend, “Joe would jump in front of a train.” Backed by an investment firm formed by group of Philadelphia sportsmen under the name Cloverlay, Inc., Frazier buzz-sawed his way through the amateur ranks and to an Olympic gold medal at the 1964 games in Tokyo. Soon the Durham-Frazier team was joined by another celebrated trainer, Eddie Futch, a lightweight boxer in the 1930s who was clever enough to survive sparring with Joe Louis. (He would take over Frazier’s training after Durham’s death in 1973.)

Joe’s professional career was marked by brutal bouts with every genuine contender, many of them twice, and, of course, the three legendary clashes with Muhammad Ali. Kram recounts them in vivid detail – part of the fun in reading Smokin’ Joe is that you can watch all of Frazier’s big fights on YouTube — particularly the brawls with the star-crossed Jerry Quarry, burdened with the label of the Great White Hope, and the muscular Argentinian Oscar Bonavena, who, wrote one Philly sportswriter, “fights like a guy trying to push a car out of snow-bank.” Their second bout, Kram says, “should have been held in a barroom instead of a boxing ring.” Referee Joe Sweeney later suggested that both men should have been disqualified for fouling.

The show pieces, of course, are the Ali fights. The origins of Frazier’s anger towards Ali are easy to trace. Joe “had stood by Ali not just in word but in deed, using his influence in whatever way he could to help Ali get his license back” when he was stripped of his title. When Ali began to see Frazier as a threat to his title – and thus white America’s hope to take him down – he mocked Joe in public as an Uncle Tom. After one shameful display at a public event in Philadelphia, an angry Frazier drove to Muhammad’s home and confronted him for “Showin’ me up like that. Right here in my home town. Callin’ me names.”

“Just fun, Joe,” Ali replied. “Gotta keep my name out there. Don’t mean nothing’ by it.”

Frazier was having none of this. “You turn on a friend for what? So you impress them Muslim fools, so you be the big man?” Frazier retaliated by refusing to use Ali’s Muslim name.

The glib and charismatic Ali, raised in relative middle class comfort, was relentless in his humiliation of Frazier, who had struggled his whole life under conditions far more common to black people in America. Frazier had no answer to Ali’s showmanship. Years before, a friend, hoping to improve Joe’s image, enrolled him an elocution class at Temple University. When Frazier asked what an elocution class was, he was told “They teach you how to speak.”

“Fuck you,” Frazier said, “I know how to speak.”

The first Ali-Frazier fight in 1971 – “The Fight of the Century” – captured the American public’s imagination as no sporting event since the Joe Louis rematch with Max Schmeling in 1939. On March 8, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Michael Caine, Marcello Mastroianni, Gene Kelly, Hugh Hefner, Burt Lancaster (who did the radio commentary), Frank Sinatra (the photographer for Life magazine), and dozens of other celebrities jammed into Madison Square Garden; in the White House, Richard Nixon, rooting for Frazier, had the fight piped in. Among celebrity journalists were Norman Mailer, Budd Schulberg, and William Saroyan.

Before leaving his dressing room, Frazier, on one knee, prayed aloud, “God, let me survive this night. God, protect my family. God, grant me strength. And God … allow me to kick the shit out of this mother fucker.”

It was the greatest night of Joe’s life. Pressing Ali without let up, he finally connected with his signature left hook in the fifteenth round, sending Ali to the canvas and earning a unanimous decision.

You can watch Frazier knock Ali down in the 15th. The commentator is Burt Lancaster.

How much the fight took out of Joe can never be known, but for some time after he suffered from physical and emotional exhaustion and, in the ring, was never quite the same Smokin’ Joe.

* * *

Early in 1973 a depleted Frazier, suffering from poor vision in his left eye, fought an absurdly underrated George Foreman in Jamaica and was KOed in a shocking upset – Howard Cosell put Frazier’s name in the lexicon when he screamed in the first round, “Down goes Frazier!” three times.

When Foreman lost the title to Ali by a knockout in Zaire, Frazier clamored for a rematch. He told reporters, “I want Clay like a hog wants slop.” Joe’s second clash with Ali was another barn burner but a disappointment to Joe as Ali won a 12-round decision after the referee allowed him to clinch a ridiculous 113 times.

Their third fight, the Thrilla in Manilla, may be the most savage fourteen rounds in boxing history. Though the outcome was very much in doubt, Frazier’s face was in terrible shape, and before the bell for the 15th round Eddie Futch “in this moment that called upon him to display nothing short of moral courage” threw in the towel rather than see his man damaged for life. As the Newark Star-Ledger’s Jerry Izenberg put it, “Joe and Ali fought for the championship not just of the world but of each other.”

Kram puts an eloquent cap on their forty-one rounds in the ring: “By an accident of circumstances, they ended up in the cross hairs of an argument far larger than themselves.”

Frazier in retirement was a pit bull in winter. Like Ali, he hung around too long and fought some fights he should have taken his handlers’ advice and avoided, such as his second bout with Foreman, where an overweight Joe was nearly knocked unconscious.

Joe had hoped all his life to be an R&B singer, but that career never came together. Like his father, he had many children by several women. One, Hector, stole cars as Joe had and died in prison; another, Marvis, became a minister. “The culture of poverty he had grown up with,” Kram reflects, “would remain with him as if it had stowed away in the bag he had packed with his Sunday church clothes. It gave him his drive to excel in the ring and his love for song, yet it left him with the inability to embrace life beyond the horizon of today.”

Yet Joe had the common touch that Ali lacked. “He would sit with the firemen at the station around the corner and occasionally play half-ball with them on summer evenings.” He loved to visit schools to talk to kids. One grateful teacher wrote to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The children loved him. He was good for them. … There should be more Joe Fraziers in the world.” He loved fixing cars and would often help stranded motorists. In 2011, when he died at age 67 of liver cancer, he had little money remaining, but in his last few years he seemed at peace with the world and displayed an upbeat personality to the public.

The ring brought out the best in Joe and Muhammad; outside the ring they were at their worst. It would be wonderful to say that they became friends again. Marvis thought, “Deep down, I believe they both love each other.” Or at least they wanted to. They sat next to each other at the 2002 NBA All-Star Game, where Ali initiated what may have been their last conversation:

“Hey, Champ.”

“Yeah, Champ?”

“We’re still two bad brothers, aren’t we?”

“Yes, we are, man. Yes we are.”

Ali never gave Joe the apology he wanted, but at his funeral, when Jesse Jackson asked everyone to “Rise and show your love.” Ali, shaking from the Parkinson’s that Joe Frazier’s fists had likely exacerbated, made it to his feet and clapped.

Allen Barra writes about books and film for Truthdig, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Salon, and the New Republic. He was recently cited by the National Arts and Journalism Awards for literary and film criticism.