ESPN Classic - Frazier battled Ali in timeless trilogy Frazier battled Ali in timeless trilogy By Mike Sielski Special to ESPN.com "Joe Frazier would come out smoking. If you hit him, he liked it. If you knocked him down, you only made him mad," says George Foreman on ESPN Classic's SportsCentury series. In the ring, Joe Frazier was a bull who didn't need a red cape. Provocation or prodding wasn't necessary for him to come charging after the man in front of him, his head down, his fists acting as sharp horns and inflicting similar damage. Joe Frazier won the first of his three epic battles with Muhammad Ali. It was that relentlessness -- the near-total abandonment of duck-and-cover, the philosophy that one must absorb punishment before one can properly distribute it -- that defined Frazier's boxing career and has defined his life. It carried him to an Olympic gold medal and to the heavyweight championship of the world. And it was that relentlessness that made him the perfect foil for his nemesis, Muhammad Ali. Discussing Frazier's boxing career without bringing up Ali is like talking about Neil Armstrong without mentioning the moon.

The two are forever linked, thanks to their three timeless bouts -- Frazier won only the first, and the third was a near-death experience for both of them -- the contrasting styles with which they fought, and the vitriol they hurled at each other for so long. For years, Frazier has voiced his bitterness over the way Ali had insulted him, over how Ali had called him "ugly," "a gorilla," and an "Uncle Tom." His anger was never in fuller view than when Ali, stricken with Parkinson's disease, lit the Olympic flame at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, and Frazier said he would have liked to have "pushed him in." "Technically the loser of two of the three fights, [Frazier] seems not to understand that they ennobled him as much as they did Ali," wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam, "that the only way we know of Ali's greatness is because of Frazier's equivalent greatness, that in the end there was no real difference between the two of them as fighters, and when sports fans and historians think back, they will think of the fights as classics, with no identifiable winner or loser.

These are men who, like it or not, have become prisoners of each other and those three nights." Born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Beaufort County, S.C., Joe was the 11th child of Rubin and Dolly Frazier. The Fraziers had a 12th child, David, who died of diphtheria at nine months old. Rubin was a sharecropper, who, according to Frazier's 1996 autobiography, "Smokin' Joe," ran a moonshine still and grew "this musk, which I figure now must've been tobacco or marijuana." By 1959, Joe was on his own, and that year, at 15, he moved to New York to live with an older brother, Tommy, and Tommy's wife, Ollie. He had a difficult time finding work, so difficult that he began stealing cars and selling them to a Brooklyn junkyard for $50 apiece. "It got to a point, finally, where I was just too embarrassed to keep leaning on my brother," Frazier wrote.

"I decided to head to Philadelphia, where I had relatives that would put me up, and see if my luck would change." Did it ever. While working at a slaughterhouse, he punched sides of beef in a refrigerated room (giving Sylvester Stallone some inspiration for "Rocky") and took up bona-fide boxing in December 1961 when, 30 pounds overweight at 220, he entered a Police Athletic League gym in the city. Joe Frazier lands one of his trademark left hooks. A few months later, he met Yank Durham, a trainer at the gym. Durham turned Frazier into a champion, shortening his punches, improving his leverage, adding speed and power to what would become Frazier's signature weapon -- his famous left hook. Frazier began traveling around the country, boxing regularly. He was the Middle Atlantic Golden Gloves heavyweight champ for three straight years but lost to Buster Mathis in the finals of the 1964 U.S. Olympic Trials. However, during a subsequent exhibition bout between the two, Mathis injured his hand, paving the way for Frazier to replace him at the Olympics in Tokyo.

Despite fighting the final bout with a broken left thumb, Frazier won gold at the '64 Olympics by decision over German Hans Huber. Later in the year, Frazier learned he had cataracts in his left eye. Though he was visually impaired, he turned pro as some Philadelphia boxing fans formed a group called Cloverlay and bankrolled him to the tune of $20,000. Frazier's pro debut came on Aug. 16, 1965, and within 12 months he was 11-0, with every victory coming by knockout. While Ali defied the U.S. Army in 1967, refusing to be inducted, the WBA stripped him of his heavyweight title. Frazier bypassed an eight-boxer tournament the WBA established to determine a new champion -- a tournament that included Floyd Patterson, Jerry Quarry and Jimmy Ellis -- and padded his record against other fighters. He knocked out Buster Mathis in the 11th round in 1968 to become the New York State champion, floored Quarry in eight rounds in 1969, and dispatched Ellis, the WBA champ, in five on Feb.

16, 1970, to become the undisputed heavyweight champion. Then Ali returned, as his boxing license was reinstated. On Dec. 30, 1970, the two signed to fight, and the name-calling began. "A white lawyer kept him out of jail. And he's going to Uncle Tom me," Frazier wrote in his autobiography. "THEE Greatest, he called himself. Well, he wasn't The Greatest, and he certainly wasn't THEE Greatest. . . . It became my mission to show him the error of his foolish pride. Beat it into him." On March 8, 1971, in the "Fight of the Century" at Madison Square Garden, Frazier landed a left hook in the 15th round that sent Ali careening to the canvas. The unbeaten Frazier won a unanimous decision as he handed Ali the first defeat of his pro career. Frazier successfully defended his title against Terry Daniels and Ron Stander (both on early-round TKOs) before meeting George Foreman on Jan. 22, 1973, in Jamaica.

Stronger and quicker, Foreman knocked Frazier down six times in the first two rounds before the fight was stopped. Frazier's title was gone. A year later, he met Ali again, in a non-title bout. On Jan. 28, 1974, in a fight to determine who would get the next shot to dethrone Foreman, Ali won a decision in Madison Square Garden, though Frazier and several sportswriters, including The New York Times' Red Smith and Dave Anderson, thought he had won. With the cataract in his left eye growing increasingly worse, he defeated Quarry and Ellis again, then agreed to fight Ali one final time, on Oct. 1, 1975, in Manila. In arguably the greatest heavyweight bout in boxing history -- Ali called it the "closest thing to dyin' I know of" -- the two men clubbed each other with their fists for 14 rounds. Frazier's trainer, Eddie Futch, wouldn't let his fighter come out for the 15th.

"Once more," Sports Illustrated's Mark Kram wrote of the "Thrilla in Manila," "had Frazier taken the child of the gods to hell and back." Frazier finished his career with a 32-4-1 record and 27 knockouts. Frazier retired after his next fight -- when he was knocked out by Foreman in the fifth round in 1976. He came out of retirement five years later for one fight, a draw with a former convict, Floyd "Jumbo" Cummings, and finished his career with a 32-4-1 record and 27 knockouts. Frazier lives in Philadelphia, owns and runs a gym there. His health is not the best as he has diabetes and high blood pressure. He and his nemesis have alternated between public apologies and public insults. One exchange came in 2001 after Ali told The New York Times he was sorry for what he said about Frazier before their first fight. At first, Frazier accepted the apology, but then � "He didn't apologize to me -- he apologized to the paper," Frazier said in a June issue of TV Guide.

"I'm still waiting [for him] to say it to me." Ali's response: "If you see Frazier, you tell him he's still a gorilla." Thrilla In Manila: Classic Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier Fight Turns 40 Thrilla In Manila: Classic Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier Fight Turns 40 By Charles Poladian On 10/01/15 AT 5:33 PM The third fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, better known as the Thrilla in Manila, took place Oct. 1, 1975. Pictured is Ali after being knocked down by Frazier in their first bout, March 8, 1971. Photo: AFP Joe Frazier handed Muhammad Ali his first loss as a professional boxer March 8, 1971, at New York's Madison Square Garden in what was dubbed the Fight of the Century. After Ali evened up the series Jan. 28, 1974, everything was lined up for a third fight to determine who was the best.

In what would be known as the Thrilla in Manila, which Ali hyped with plenty of trash talk, the heavyweights squared off at the Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City, Philippines, Oct. 1, 1975. Ali had been suspended from the sport from 1967 to 1970 due to his draft resistance during the Vietnam War. Ali, stripped of his heavyweight titles, fought to get the belts back. Frazier was the undefeated champion coming into the 1971 fight and Ali had his own unblemished record. Frazier earned a 15-round unanimous decision to retain the heavyweight championship. After suffering his first loss, Ali won 10 straight fights before losing to Ken Norton on March 31, 1973. Frazier won two fights before getting knocked out by George Foreman on Jan. 22, 1973. Ali beat Norton on Sept. 10, 1973, followed by another victory against Rudie Lubbers Oct. 20, 1973. Frazier would bounce back with a win against Joe Bugner to set up a second fight with Ali, on Jan.

28, 1974. Frazier would lose while Ali would go on to defeat Foreman in "the Rumble in the Jungle" on Oct. 30, 1974. By the time the Thrilla in Manila rolled around, the fighters had a strong rivalry. Ali would push the ill will further with incendiary insults, according to the Guardian . "It will be a killer, and a thriller, and a chiller when I get the gorilla in Manila," Ali said during a press conference. The third Ali-Frazier match had plenty of drama and action. "Ali dominated early, then Frazier, then Ali, before these fast-aging throwbacks entered into a mutual destruction pact, ignoring all consequences, pounding each other with arms steadily drained of sharpness but laden still with bad intentions," the Guardian's Kevin Mitchell wrote of the battle. Ali would gain the upper hand with knockdowns of Frazier in the 13th and 14th rounds. Frazier's trainer, Eddie Futch, would stop the fight before the 15th round. "No one will forget what you did here today," Futch said to Frazier, according to ESPN .

Both fighters would retire in 1981. The Thrilla In Manila Turns 40thrilla in manila, thrilla in manila 40th anniversary, thrilla in manila fight, thrilla in manila video, muhammad ali, joe frazier, ali frazier, muhammad ali vs joe frazier, ii, muhammad ali joe frazier, ali frazier trilogy, fight of the centuryYesGP IBTimes Joe Frazier, Ex-Heavyweight Champ, Dies at 67 - The New York Times The New York Times Sports |Joe Frazier, Ex-Heavyweight Champ, Dies at 67 Search Continue reading the main story Photo Joe Frazier won the undisputed heavyweight title with a 15-round decision over Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden in March 1971, in an extravaganza known as the Fight of the Century. Credit Associated Press Joe Frazier, the former heavyweight champion whose furious and intensely personal fights with a taunting Muhammad Ali endure as an epic rivalry in boxing history, died Monday night at his home in Philadelphia. He was 67. His business representative, Leslie Wolff, said the cause was liver cancer.

An announcement over the weekend that Frazier had received the diagnosis in late September and had been moved to hospice care early this month prompted an outpouring of tributes and messages of support. Known as Smokin’ Joe, Frazier stalked his opponents around the ring with a crouching, relentless attack — his head low and bobbing, his broad, powerful shoulders hunched — as he bore down on them with an onslaught of withering jabs and crushing body blows, setting them up for his devastating left hook. It was an overpowering modus operandi that led to versions of the heavyweight crown from 1968 to 1973. Frazier won 32 fights in all, 27 by knockouts, losing four times — twice to Ali in furious bouts and twice to George Foreman. He also recorded one draw. Continue reading the main story A slugger who weathered repeated blows to the head while he delivered punishment, Frazier proved a formidable figure. But his career was defined by his rivalry with Ali, who ridiculed him as a black man in the guise of a Great White Hope. Frazier detested him. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Ali vs. Frazier was a study in contrasts.

Ali: tall and handsome, a wit given to spouting poetry, a magnetic figure who drew adulation and denigration alike, the one for his prowess and outsize personality, the other for his antiwar views and Black Power embrace of Islam. Frazier: a bull-like man of few words with a blue-collar image and a glowering visage who in so many ways could be on an equal footing with his rival only in the ring. Ali proclaimed, “I am the greatest” and he preened how he could “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” Frazier had no inclination for oratorical bravado. “Work is the only meanin’ I’ve ever known,” he told Playboy in 1973. “Like the man in the song says, I just gotta keep on keepin’ on.” Frazier won the undisputed heavyweight title with a 15-round decision over Ali at Madison Square Garden in March 1971, in an extravaganza known as the Fight of the Century. Ali scored a 12-round decision over Frazier at the Garden in a nontitle bout in January 1974.

Then came the Thrilla in Manila championship bout, in October 1975, regarded as one of the greatest fights in boxing history. It ended when a battered Frazier, one eye swollen shut, did not come out to face Ali for the 15th round. The Ali-Frazier battles played out at a time when the heavyweight boxing champion was far more celebrated than he is today, a figure who could stand alone in the spotlight a decade before an alphabet soup of boxing sanctioning bodies arose, making it difficult for the average fan to figure out just who held what title. The rivalry was also given a political and social cast. Many viewed the Ali-Frazier matches as a snapshot of the struggles of the 1960s. Ali, an adherent of the Nation of Islam who had changed his name from Cassius Clay, came to represent rising black anger in America and opposition to the Vietnam War. Frazier voiced no political views, but he was nonetheless depicted, to his consternation, as the favorite of the establishment. Ali called him ignorant, likened him to a gorilla and said his black supporters were Uncle Toms. “Frazier had become the white man’s fighter, Mr.

Charley was rooting for Frazier, and that meant blacks were boycotting him in their heart,” Norman Mailer wrote in Life magazine after the first Ali-Frazier bout. Frazier, wrote Mailer, was “twice as black as Clay and half as handsome,” with “the rugged decent life-worked face of a man who had labored in the pits all his life.” Frazier could never match Ali’s charisma or his gift for the provocative quote. He was essentially a man devoted to a brutal craft, willing to give countless hours to his spartan training-camp routine and unsparing of his body inside the ring. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “The way I fight, it’s not me beatin’ the man: I make the man whip himself,” Frazier told Playboy. “Because I stay close to him. He can’t get out the way.” He added: “Before he knows it — whew! — he’s tired. And he can’t pick up his second wind because I’m right back on him again.” In his autobiography, “Smokin’ Joe,” written with Phil Berger, Frazier said his first trainer, Yank Durham, had given him his nickname.

It was, he said, “a name that had come from what Yank used to say in the dressing room before sending me out to fight: ‘Go out there, goddammit, and make smoke come from those gloves.’ “ Foreman knocked out Frazier twice but said he had never lost his respect for him. “Joe Frazier would come out smoking,” Foreman told ESPN. “If you hit him, he liked it. If you knocked him down, you only made him mad.” Durham said he saw a fire always smoldering in Frazier. “I’ve had plenty of other boxers with more raw talent,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1970, “but none with more dedication and strength.” Ali himself was conciliatory when Frazier’s battle with cancer became publicly known. “My family and I are keeping Joe and his family in our daily prayers,” Ali said in his statement over the weekend. “Joe has a lot of friends pulling for him, and I’m one of them.” And when word reached him that Frazier had died, Ali, in another statement, said: “The world has lost a great champion.

I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration.” Billy Joe Frazier was born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Laurel Bay, S.C., the youngest of 12 children. His father, Rubin, and his mother, Dolly, worked in the fields, and the youngster known as Billy Boy dropped out of school at 13. He dreamed of becoming a boxing champion, throwing his first punches at burlap sacks he stuffed with moss and leaves, pretending to be Joe Louis or Ezzard Charles or Archie Moore. At 15, Frazier went to New York to live with a brother. A year later he moved to Philadelphia, taking a job in a slaughterhouse. At times he battered sides of beef, using them as a punching bag to work out, the kind of scene used by Slyvester Stallone in the film “Rocky,” though Stallone said that he drew on the life of the heavyweight contender Chuck Wepner in developing the Rocky character. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Durham discovered Frazier boxing to lose weight at a Police Athletic League gym in Philadelphia.

Under Durham’s guidance, Frazier captured a Golden Gloves championship and won the heavyweight gold medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He turned pro in August 1965, with financial backing from businessmen calling themselves the Cloverlay Group (from cloverleaf, for good luck, and overlay, a betting term signifying good odds). He won his first 11 bouts by knockouts. By winter 1968, his record was 21-0. A year before Frazier’s pro debut, Cassius Clay won the heavyweight championship in a huge upset of Sonny Liston. Soon afterward, affirming his rumored membership in the Nation of Islam, he became Muhammad Ali. In April 1967, having proclaimed, “I ain’t got nothing against them Vietcong,” Ali refused to be drafted, claiming conscientious objector status. Boxing commissions stripped him of his title, and he was convicted of evading the draft. An eight-man elimination tournament was held to determine a World Boxing Association champion to replace Ali. Frazier refused to participate when his financial backers objected to the contract terms for the tournament, and Jimmy Ellis took the crown.

But in March 1968, Frazier won the version of the heavyweight title recognized by New York and a few other states, defeating Buster Mathis with an 11th-round technical knockout. He took the W.B.A. title in February 1970, stopping Ellis, who did not come out for the fifth round. In the summer of 1970, Ali won a court battle to regain his boxing license, then knocked out the contenders Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena. The stage was set for an Ali-Frazier showdown, a matchup of unbeaten fighters, on March 8, 1971, at Madison Square Garden. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Each man was guaranteed $2.5 million, the biggest boxing payday ever. Frank Sinatra was at ringside taking photos for Life magazine. The former heavyweight champion Joe Louis received a huge ovation. Hubert H.

Humphrey, back in the Senate after serving as vice president, sat two rows in front of the Irish political activist Bernadette Devlin, who shouted, “Ali, Ali,” her left fist held high. An estimated 300 million watched on television worldwide, and the gate of $1.35 million set a record for an indoor bout. Frazier, at 5 feet 11 1/2 inches and 205 pounds, gave up three inches in height and nearly seven inches in reach to Ali, but he was a 6-to-5 betting favorite. Just before the fighters received their instructions from the referee, Ali, displaying his arrogance of old, twice touched Frazier’s shoulders as he whirled around the ring. Frazier just glared at him. Frazier wore Ali down with blows to the body while moving underneath Ali’s jabs. In the 15th round, Frazier unleashed his famed left hook, catching Ali on the jaw and flooring him for a count of 4, only the third time Ali had been knocked down. Ali held on, but Frazier won a unanimous decision.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story Frazier declared, “I always knew who the champ was.” Frazier continued to bristle over Ali’s taunting. “I’ve seen pictures of him in cars with white guys, huggin’ ‘em and havin’ fun,” Frazier told Sport magazine two months after the fight. “Then he go call me an Uncle Tom. Don’t say, ‘I hate the white man,’ then go to the white man for help.” For Frazier, 1971 was truly triumphant. He bought a 368-acre estate called Brewton Plantation near his boyhood home and became the first black man since Reconstruction to address the South Carolina Legislature. Ali gained vindication in June 1971 when the United States Supreme Court overturned his conviction for draft evasion. Frazier defended his title against two journeymen, Terry Daniels and Ron Stander, but Foreman took his championship away on Jan. 22, 1973, knocking him down six times in their bout in Kingston, Jamaica, before the referee stopped the fight in the second round. Frazier met Ali again in a nontitle bout at the Garden on Jan. 28, 1974.

Frazier kept boring in and complained that Ali was holding in the clinches, but Ali scored with flurries of punches and won a unanimous 12-round decision. Ali won back the heavyweight title in October 1974, knocking out Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire — the celebrated Rumble in the Jungle. Frazier went on to knock out Quarry and Ellis, setting up his third match, and second title fight, with Ali: the Thrilla in Manila, on Oct. 1, 1975. In what became the most brutal Ali-Frazier battle, the fight was held at the Philippine Coliseum at Quezon City, outside the country’s capital, Manila. The conditions were sweltering, with hot lights overpowering the air-conditioning. Ali, almost a 2-to-1 betting favorite in the United States, won the early rounds, largely remaining flat-footed in place of his familiar dancing style. Before Round 3 he blew kisses to President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, in the crowd of about 25,000. But in the fourth round, Ali’s pace slowed while Frazier began to gain momentum.

Chants of “Frazier, Frazier” filled the arena by the fifth round, and the crowd seemed to favor him as the fight moved along, a contrast to Ali’s usually enjoying the fans’ plaudits. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Frazier took command in the middle rounds. Then Ali came back on weary legs, unleashing a flurry of punches to Frazier’s face in the 12th round. He knocked out Frazier’s mouthpiece in the 13th round, then sent him stumbling backward with a straight right hand. Ali jolted Frazier with left-right combinations late in the 14th round. Frazier had already lost most of the vision in his left eye from a cataract, and his right eye was puffed and shut from Ali’s blows. Eddie Futch, a renowned trainer working Frazier’s corner, asked the referee to end the bout. When it was stopped, Ali was ahead on the scorecards of the referee and two judges. “It’s the closest I’ve come to death,” Ali said. Frazier returned to the ring nine months later, in June 1976, to face Foreman at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.

Foreman stopped him on a technical knockout in the fifth round. Frazier then announced his retirement. He was 32. He later managed his eldest son, Marvis, a heavyweight. In December 1981 he returned to the ring to fight a journeyman named Jumbo Cummings, fought to a draw, then retired for good, tending to investments from his home in Philadelphia. Both Frazier and Ali had daughters who took up boxing, and in June 2001 it was Ali-Frazier IV when Frazier’s daughter Jacqui Frazier-Lyde fought Ali’s daughter Laila Ali at a casino in Vernon, N.Y. Like their fathers in their first fight, both were unbeaten. Laila Ali won on a decision. Joe Frazier was in the crowd of 6,500, but Muhammad Ali, impaired by Parkinson’s syndrome, was not. In addition to his son Marvis and his daughter Jacqui, Frazier is survived by his sons Hector, Joseph Rubin, Joseph Jordan, Brandon Marcus and Derek Dennis; his daughters Weatta, Jo-Netta, Renae and Natasha, and a sister. His marriage to his wife, Florence, ended in divorce.

Long after his fighting days were over, Frazier retained his enmity for Ali. But in March 2001, the 30th anniversary of the first Ali-Frazier bout, Ali told The New York Times: “I said a lot of things in the heat of the moment that I shouldn’t have said. Called him names I shouldn’t have called him. I apologize for that. I’m sorry. It was all meant to promote the fight.” Advertisement Asked for a response, Frazier said: “We have to embrace each other. It’s time to talk and get together. Life’s too short.” Fascination with the Ali-Frazier saga has endured. After a 2008 presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, the Republican media consultant Stuart Stevens said that McCain should concentrate on selling himself to America rather than criticizing Obama. Stevens’s prescription: “More Ali and less Joe Frazier.” Frazier’s true feelings toward Ali in his final years seemed murky. The 2009 British documentary “ Thrilla in Manila ,” shown in the United States on HBO, depicted Frazier watching a film of the fight from his apartment above the gym he ran in Philadelphia.

“He’s a good-time guy,” John Dower, the director of “Thrilla in Manila,” told The Times. “But he’s angry about Ali.” In March 2011, however, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the first Ali-Frazier fight, Frazier said he was willing to put the enmity behind him. “I forgave him for all the accusations he made over the years,” The Daily News quoted Frazier as saying. “I hope he’s doing fine. I’d love to see him.” But as Frazier once told The Times: “Ali always said I would be nothing without him. But who would he have been without me?” A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 2011, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Relentless Champion of the ‘Fight of the Century’. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe The unforgiven | Global | The Guardian The Observer The unforgiven Muhammad Ali never had a tougher fight. Joe Frazier never felt more bitter about defeat and continues even today to hate his great rival.

Thirty years after the Thrilla in Manila, America's leading boxing writer Thomas Hauser remembers the greatest heavyweight bout of them all and discovers why Frazier thinks the ailing Ali has been 'shut down by God' Thomas Hauser Share on Messenger Close On 1 October 1975, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier entered a boxing ring in Quezon City, six miles outside Manila, the Philippines, to do battle for the third time. Ali was the odds-on favourite. The fight was scheduled for 15 rounds and began at 10:45 in the morning to accommodate closed-circuit television viewers in the United States. As it unfolded, everyone at ringside understood that they were watching greatness. 'Joe was nowhere near the fighter he'd once been,' Dave Wolf, a member of Frazier's camp, would recall. 'And neither was Ali. But as occasionally happens in boxing, their declining curves crossed at exactly the same spot. And they were so evenly matched and put so much of themselves into the fight that it was historic.' 'What it came down to in Manila,' Jerry Izenberg, a leading American sportswriter, says now, 'wasn't the heavyweight championship of the world.

Ali and Frazier were fighting for something more important than that. They were fighting for the heavyweight championship of each other.' The result was a battle of epic proportions. Jack Johnson versus Jim Jeffries and the rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling were more historically significant. But no heavyweight title fight ever had more dramatic sustained action. Ali and Frazier fought three fights that are the pyramids of boxing. Their first encounter, at Madison Square Garden in 1974, in which Frazier prevailed, was rife with social and political overtones. Muhammad evened the score at the same venue three years later in Ali-Frazier II, which was more muted, in and out of the ring. As a fist-fight, Ali-Frazier III was their greatest confrontation. The bout was the promotional creation of Don King and Bob Arum. It took place in the Philippines for one simple reason. Money. The country's President, Ferdinand Marcos, wanted the glory that would come from presiding over the bout and saw to it that the necessary funds were made available. Not everything went smoothly. Security was tight because of insurgent political activity and early-morning roadwork conflicted with an overnight military curfew.

Also, Ali caused a bit of a stir by bringing his mistress (Veronica Porche, later his third wife) to a reception at the presidential palace. Marcos referred to Veronica as Muhammad's 'wife', which made Belinda Ali more than a little unhappy. Like its predecessors, Ali-Frazier III featured two great fighters with distinctly different personalities. In one corner, Joe Frazier: a decent hard-working man with rural roots and little formal education. In the other: the most famous man on Earth. Ali, in the 1960s, was the most beautiful fighting machine ever. After beating Sonny Liston to capture the heavyweight crown in 1964, he had nine consecutive title defences before being stripped of his championship for refusing induction into the US army at the height of the war in Vietnam. During Ali's three-year absence, Frazier knocked out Jimmy Ellis to become heavyweight champion. But it was a 'paper' title. Then Ali returned and, in 1971, 'Smokin' Joe' defeated the former champion on points over 15 brutal rounds. Frazier thought that, once he had beaten Ali in their first fight, he would be accorded wider respect. It never happened.

Even though Joe was the undisputed heavyweight champion, Ali was still The Man as far as most black Americans were concerned. 'Joe Frazier was an available symbol behind whom people who hated Ali could unite,' American sports broadcaster commentator Bryant Gumbel has noted. 'Was it Joe's fault? Of course not. In fact, one of the sad stories to be written about that era is that Joe Frazier never got his due as a man. In some ways, he symbolised what the black man's struggle was about far more than Ali did. But it was Joe's misfortune to be cast as the opponent of a man who was the champion of all good things.' After beating Ali, Frazier was dethroned by George Foreman. Then he lost a rematch on points to Ali. Following that, Muhammad journeyed to Zaire for the 'Rumble in the Jungle' in 1974. There he knocked out Foreman to reclaim the throne. The stage was set for Manila. 'You have to understand the premise behind Ali-Frazier III,' Ferdie Pacheco, Ali's cornerman and ring physician, recalled. 'The first fight was life and death, and Frazier won.

Second fight; Ali figures him out, no problem, relatively easy victory for Ali. Then Ali beats Foreman, and Frazier's sun sets. I don't care what anyone says now; all of us thought that Frazier was shot. We all thought Manila was going to be an easy fight. Ali comes out, dances around, and knocks him out in eight or nine rounds.' Wrong. In Manila, Frazier was fuelled by pride as a fighter and by hatred for Ali. Before their first fight, Ali had branded Joe as 'dumb' and an 'Uncle Tom'. In promoting Ali-Frazier II, he had called Joe 'ignorant' during a joint television interview, which led to an ugly studio brawl. Then, at a press conference in advance of Ali-Frazier III, Muhammad went further over the line. The insults began with a poem: It will be a killer And a chiller When I get the gorilla In Manila Then Ali reached into his pocket, pulled out a black rubber gorilla, and announced, 'This is the way Joe Frazier looks when you hit him.' Ali began pummeling the gorilla.

'Come on, gorilla,' he taunted as Frazier glowered and the assembled media laughed. 'We're in Manila. Come on, gorilla; this is a thrilla.' 'Joe Frazier is so ugly,' Ali said, pouring more salt into the wound. 'His mother told me that, when Joe was a little boy, every time he cried, the tears would stop, turn around, and go down the back of his head.' 'I don't want to knock him out,' Frazier said afterwards. 'I want to hurt him. If I knock him down, I'll stand back, give him a chance to breathe. It's his heart I want.' The early rounds belonged to Ali. He outboxed Frazier, landing sharp clean punches, and had the challenger staggering several times. Frazier moved inexorably forward. Ali continued to pile up points. Then, in the middle rounds, the tide turned. 'Joe Frazier's not a great boxer,' Ali once said. 'But he's a great slugger, a great street fighter, a bull fighter. He takes a lot of punches, his eyes close, and he just keeps coming.' In Manila, Frazier kept coming. The heat was oppressive.

The pace of the fight and brutality of the blows was unprecedented for heavyweight combat. 'In the sixth round,' Ed Schuyler, who was at ringside for the Associated Press, recalled, 'Frazier hit Ali with a left hook that's the hardest punch I've ever seen. Ali's head turned like it was on a swivel, and his response was to look at Frazier and say, "They told me Joe Frazier was washed up".' 'They lied,' Frazier countered. In round 12, Ali regained the initiative, staggering Frazier again and measuring him for hard punishing blows. In round 13, a jolting left hand knocked Joe's mouthpiece into the crowd. Round 14 was more of the same. Frazier was spitting blood. His left eye was completely closed and his right eye was closing. He could no longer see the punches coming. After the 14th round, Frazier's trainer, Eddie Futch, stopped the fight. Shortly before his death 26 years later, Futch said, with certainty in his voice: 'To this day, some people say to me, "There were only three minutes left.

Why did you stop it?" And my answer has never changed. I tell them, "I'm not a timekeeper. I'm a handler of fighters".' The stoppage was fortuitous for Ali. Years later, Wali Muhammad, one of Ali's cornermen in Manila, acknowledged: 'After the 14th, Ali came back to the corner and told us, "Cut 'em off". That's how tired he was. He wanted us to cut his gloves off. Angelo [Ali's trainer] ignored him. He started wiping Ali's face, getting him ready for the 15th. We sponged him down. I don't know if he'd have gone out for the last round or not. Ali's not a quitter; he'd never quit. But I'd never seen him exhausted like that before.' 'Frazier quit just before I did,' Ali told me in 1990. 'I didn't think I could fight any more.' Ali conducted his post-fight interview while sitting on a stool in the ring. 'I was surprised Joe had so much stamina,' he said. 'There was too much pressure. He's the greatest fighter of all times next to me. This is too painful.

It's too much work. I might have a heart attack or something.' The young Ali had been virtually untouchable. When Ali fought Cleveland Williams in 1966, in the three rounds that the fight lasted, Williams hit him only three times. In Manila, Joe Frazier bludgeoned Ali with 440 blows. 'Ali took a beating like you'd never believe anyone could take,' Ferdie Pacheco recalled. 'When he said afterward that it was the closest thing he'd ever known to death - let me tell you something: if dying is that hard, I'd hate to see it coming. But Frazier took the same beating. And in the 14th round, Ali just about took his head off. I was cringing. The heat was awesome. Both men were dehydrated. The place was like a time-bomb. I thought we were close to a fatality.' 'Ali-Frazier III was Ali-Frazier III,' says Jerry Izenberg. 'There's nothing to compare it with. I've never witnessed anything like it. And I'll tell you something else. Both fighters won that night, and both fighters lost.' Neither was the same again.

Ali fought 10 more times, but the speed and reflexes were gone. Ultimately, he would lose three of his last four fights, including a brutal defeat in 1980 at the hands of Larry Holmes. Frazier never won a fight after Manila. He was knocked out by George Foreman for the second time in 1976, retired, and came back in 1981 for a draw against Jumbo Cummings in his last hurrah. Thirty years have passed since that fateful encounter in Manila. And the combatants, while linked by history, have long since gone separate ways. Ali, now 63, is still arguably the most recognisable person on the planet. His status as a world icon was confirmed by the outpouring of love that accompanied his lighting the Olympic flame in Atlanta in 1996. Frazier, 61, owns a gym in Philadelphia. Both men have a following in the sports memorabilia market, although Ali commands higher fees. Each is in declining health. Ali's battle with the ravages of Parkinson's syndrome is a matter of public record. Frazier walks with a limp as a consequence of injuries sustained in a car accident.

Neither man talks as clearly as he once did. But Joe's voice is now the louder of the two and, when the subject is Ali, there is an ugly edge to what he says. In the ring, Ali hurt people. Outside the ring, he tried not to. One of the few exceptions to the latter half of that equation was his treatment of Frazier. Outside the ring, Ali hurt Joe a lot; and Joe didn't have the verbal skills to match him. Ali played the race card against Frazier in a mean-spirited way. For the entertainment of white America, he labelled Joe as ugly and dumb. And at the same time, speaking to black America, he branded Frazier an Uncle Tom, turning him into an object of derision and scorn. The latter insult was particularly galling. Joe Frazier is not, and never was, an Uncle Tom. Yet to this day, there are people who think of him as a less-than-proud black man because of Ali's diatribes. 'One of the many paradoxes about Ali,' says historian Randy Roberts, 'is that he embraced an ideology that disparaged white people; yet he was never cruel to white people, only blacks.

Except for occasional humorous barbs, Ali's white opponents were treated with dignity and respect. But things got ugly with Floyd Patterson, Ernie Terrell, and Frazier. Patterson and Terrell might have asked for it because of things they said. But Joe was innocent. And to deny the cruelty of what Ali did to Joe Frazier is to continue to be cruel to Joe.' 'I'm sure Ali has forgotten most of what he did,' Dave Wolf observed years after he watched from Frazier's corner in Manila. 'But the damage he did to Joe was never undone. There were moments when Joe was so hurt and which he remembers so vividly. And Ali probably doesn't remember them at all.' 'You don't do to a man what Ali did to Joe,' says Bert Watson, Frazier's business manager in the Eighties and Nineties. 'Ali robbed him of who he is. To a lot of people, Joe is still ignorant, slow-speaking, dumb, and ugly. That tag never leaves him. People have only seen one Joe: the one created by Ali.

If you're a man, that's going to get to you in a big way.' To prove the point, Watson tells the tale of the first trip that he and Frazier took together. 'We were driving in Florida and stopped for gas,' he recalls. 'We'd been talking about Ali. Right before I got out of the car to go to the bathroom, I said, "One thing you've got to admit; the man was a great fighter". Anyway, I go to the bathroom, come back, and Joe is gone. I had to hitchhike to the motel where we were staying. Finally, I got there. Joe was in his room. I went in and said, "What happened? Why'd you leave me like that". And Joe told me, "When you work for me, you don't say nothing good about Ali".' Some things never change. 'I hated Ali,' Frazier told me 15 years ago. 'God might not like me talking that way, but it's in my heart. I know things would have been different for me if he hadn't been around. I'd have gotten a lot more respect. I'd have had more appreciation from my own kind.

Twenty years I've been fighting Ali, and I still want to take him apart piece by piece and send him back to Jesus.' 'He shook me in Manila,' Frazier said of their final fight. 'We were gladiators. I didn't ask no favours of him and he didn't ask none of me. I don't like him but I gotta say, in the ring, he was a man. In Manila, I hit him punches, those punches, they'd have knocked a building down. And he took 'em. He took 'em and he came back, and I got to respect that part of the man. But I sent him home worse than he came. He was the one who spoke about being nearly dead in Manila; not me.' Joe Frazier is not a forgiving man and his bitterness continued to flow. 'Look at him now. He's damaged goods. I know it; you know it. Everyone knows it; they just don't want to say. God has shut him down. He can't talk no more because he was saying the wrong things. He was always making fun of me. I'm the dummy; I'm the one getting hit in the head. Tell me now.

Him or me; which one talks worse now? He can't talk no more and he still tries to make noise. I don't care how the world looks at him. I see him different, and I know him better than anyone. Manila don't matter no more. He's finished, and I'm still here.' Earlier this year, speaking of Ali's current physical condition, Frazier said with satisfaction: 'I did that to him. I'll outlive him.' Meanwhile, Ali has long since put down his guns. 'Joe Frazier is a good man,' he told me in a moment of reflection. 'I couldn't have done what I did without him, and he couldn't have done what he did without me. If God ever calls me to a holy war, I want Joe Frazier fighting beside me.' Then, looking back over his career, Ali called Frazier 'the roughest and toughest' opponent he'd ever faced and rated his fights as follows: 'When I was at my best - against Cleveland Williams. The fight that meant the most to me - beating George Foreman to win the championship of the world again.

And the best fight for fans - against Joe Frazier in Manila.' · Thomas Hauser is the author of 'Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times', which won the 1991 William Hill Sports Book of the Year. His latest book, 'Muhammad Ali: The Lost Legacy', (Robson Books) will be published in October The Guardian's boxing correspondent, Kevin Mitchell, talks about the career of Joe Frazier and his relationship with Muhammad Ali Published: 8 Nov 2011 Smokin' Joe Frazier, the man who handed Muhammad Ali his first defeat, has died at the age of 67 after suffering from liver cancer Published: 7 Nov 2011 From the Vault: In 1971, Joe Frazier shook the world by beating Muhammad Ali. Read the Observer's report and share your memories Published: 8 Nov 2011 Sean Ingle: From Olympic gold to a surprise appearance on This Is Your Life, via some brutal fights, here are 10 classic Frazier moments Published: 8 Nov 2011

Question: In what city did Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier have a "thrilling" fight?
Answer: Manila