THRILLA IN MANILLA A trip down memory lane
Spare a thought this Friday-Saturday morning for a harrowing anniversary. Gruesome, sure, but also one of heroic nobility. Thirty October 1’s ago at Quezon City in the Philippines, Muhammad Ali of Planet Earth and Joe Frazier of Nearly the Whole World met for the third and last time and savaged each other to a standstill in an almost terminal tumult still described, with corny impiety, as “The Thrilla in Manila”.
So implacably brutal was the beating each man, in turn, both gave and received that the moment Frazier was compassionately retired at the end of the penultimate 14th round, across the ring Ali himself collapsed in his corner. “Legs like jelly, his body just oozed to the floor,” the ringside writer Dave Wolf graphically described for Life magazine.
None of us realised clearly at the time the causal malevolence of that pivotal moment. Ali should never have squared up for a serious prizefight again. He had entered the ring a proud black man; he left it quivering and the colour of grey. In 14 three-minute rounds he had aged by 14 years.
All we felt at the time, remembers Britain’s pre-eminent boxing writer Hugh McIlvanney, then with the Observer, was “awe at the spectacle of extraordinary men setting new limits for themselves, pushing back the boundaries of their courage”.
Dave Anderson of the New York Times wrote of Ali leaving the ring: “His face resembling a mask that had been stretched to fit… a man afraid to let his breath out in case his stomach would fall out with it.”
A day later, Ali’s doctor Ferdie Pacheco said his champion should never fight again: “He is badly beaten up. It took 24 hours for his brain to recuperate and for his thought processes to announce it was the closest to death he knew of.”
Frazier fought seriously just once more, a losing five-rounder. Greviously, Ali was allowed 10 more fights and fully 111 rounds and, punch by punch and step by faltering step, it was increasingly sad to see. Ali and his legend live on, sure, but if ever ends had beginnings they were accursedly apparent at a stadium near Manila on the first day of October, 1975.
