AS OMENS went, this was as dark as boxing had ever known, a day in early autumn, 1975, when Muhammad Ali was in the ring, doing his thing, an audience hanging on his every abusive word about Smokin’ Joe Frazier. Only that’s not what Ali called him. Just as Joe never called Ali anything other than Clay – his hated slave name – Joe was always the Gorilla to Ali. The ape man. The Uncle Tom.
It will be a killer And a chiller And a thrilla When I get the gorilla In Manila
Ali had a rubber gorilla he’d carry around with him in those days. He’d take it out and batter it upsides the head. Come on, gorilla. We’re in Manila. Come on gorilla, this is a thrilla.
In the build-up to the most pitiless fight in heavyweight history – a fateful night that was 30-years-old yesterday – Ali cranked up the hate on a daily basis. This particular day, recounted in Mark Kram’s extraordinary work Ghosts Of Manila, Ali stood in the ring, his gym packed to the rafters, and asked his people: “Who am I?”
“The greatest,” replied his corner man Drew Bundini Brown. “The king of all he see!” Ali spread his arms like a preacher man. “Joe Frazier,” he started.
“Ape, ape, ape,” went the crowd.
“Joe Frazier should give his face to the Wildlife Fund! He so ugly, blind men go the other way!”
“Ugly! Ugly! Ugly!” chuckled Bundini.
Ali again: “He not only looks bad! You can smell him in another country! What will the people in Manila think? We can’t have a gorilla for a champ! They’re gonna think, lookin’ at him, that all black brothers are animals. Ignorant. Stupid. Ugly. If he’s champ again, other nations will laugh at us.”
“Call us pig farmers,” shouted one of the faithful. “Can’t have it.”
“Jist niggers!” said another. “‘Ain’t that the truth.”
“Jist niggers and freaks,” Ali replied. “They gonna say that ’bout me?”
“Noooooo,” they all screamed.
Not everyone in the gym that day was devoted to Ali. Gypsy Joe Harris was a Frazier man. A spy. As the crowd bayed, Gypsy shook his head gravely. “Smoke ain’t gonna like this.” “What you got, Gyp,” Joe asked him that night.
“He ready to be a corpse,” Gyp said.
Joe could read old Gypsy, though. Knew he was keeping something from him. “What else happenin’?” Gyp hesitated. “Gimme it!” yelled Joe. “Well, Smoke, it was like this…”
Frazier soaked it all up like a sponge. When they arrived in Manila it was the same story. Ali poured scorn on his opponent. Humiliated him. Joe had the heart of a lion but verbally he was out of his depth when Ali got going. One time, as fight day approached, Ali spotted Frazier on a hotel balcony, grabbed a security guard’s gun and fired some rounds at him. Everybody knew it wasn’t live ammo but it still startled the hell out of Joe. “Go back in your hole, Gorilla,” Ali ranted. “You gonna scare the people! Come out again and I’m gonna kill ya before time!”
Joe retreated to his room and, writes Kram, walked over to a mirror. “Am I a gorilla?” he asked. “Am I? He don’t know how this hurts my kids.”
Smoke knew what he had to do. Knew it for years but every word that came out of Ali’s mouth just reinforced it. When Gyp told him exactly what Ali had said about him, he turned to Eddie Futch, his trainer. One of the best of all time, was Futch. “Eddie, listen up! Whatever you do, whatever happens, don’t stop the fight! We got nowhere to go after this. I’m gonna eat this half-breed’s heart right out of his chest. I mean it, Eddie. This is the end of him or me.”
The blood feud between Ali and Frazier had three parts but what happened at the Philippines Coliseum in Quezon City on October 1, 1975, was, in fact, the end of both of them. “We went to Manila as champions, Joe and me, and we came back as old men.” Ain’t that the truth.
Watching the video again last week, the horror and brutality of what happened in those 14 rounds is not dimmed an iota by the passing of time. Looking for an early night, Ali dominated the first four rounds, drawing blood from Frazier’s mouth with some evil blows. “What you got in that niggah head?” he said when Joe refused to buckle. “F**kin’ rock,” replied Frazier. The second phase began in round five when Frazier got inside Ali’s defences and looked to all the world as if he was going to make good on his promise to rip the champion’s heart out of his chest.
“I wanted him like a hog wants slop,” said Frazier. Kram described it like a wild boar going for a truffle. Joe’s hatred was there for all to see. Blow upon blow descended on Ali’s face and body. Angelo Dundee, Ali’s trainer, said he never saw a barrage like it in the ring. Bundini, meanwhile, began to cry. As his man was getting beaten up on the ropes he turned away. “Lawd have mercy!” he said.
Beside him, Herbert Muhammad, Ali’s manager, opened a bottle of gin.
Privately, as he unleashed his bombs, Frazier was thinking to himself: “What is holdin’ this mothaf**kin’ fool up?” The whole world was. Like Frazier said, those were punches that would have brought down the walls of a city. But this was a night of three acts and Ali came fighting back from the 11th. Soon Joe couldn’t see out of his left eye. His mouthpiece was sent flying seven rows into the crowd. Come the end.
In the 14th Joe was as spent as any boxer had ever been. Thing was, so was Ali. He somehow managed to fire nine right hands into Joe’s left eye, punches he could not see. Ali was on top, but he wanted out. Just as he was telling his corner to cut his gloves off, Futch was laying a hand on Joe’s shoulder and telling him to sit down. “It’s over, Joe,” he said, famously. “No-one will forget what you did here today.”
Both men were carried to their dressing rooms by their handlers. Joe’s eyes were shut and he could see virtually nothing now. Upon his arrival, the first thing Ali saw was a dead cop on his floor, a victim of a prank gone tragically wrong. “A dead man,” Ali said horrified. The way he was feeling, it was a premonition. He got out of there fast. He lay down in another room, finally out for the count. “Champ?” somebody asked. “Are you up for talking to the press?” Bundini went spare. “Look at him!” Ali was a mess.
There were welts all over his body and giant haematomas on both hips. He could barely talk he was so exhausted. Dave Anderson, the American sports writer, said “the champion’s face resembled a mask that had been stretched to fit”.
“But Joe’s out there,” they said. Ali raised his head. “He is?” Ali sat up. “Get me my comb,” he said.
BOTH MEN HAVE PAID A HEAVY PRICE FOR Manila. For all his wisdom and his goading of a “stupid” Frazier, Ali stayed in the ring for another six years and for ten more fights. What damage was done in that time.
Frazier, on the other hand, knew pretty much that his time was up. He fought two more fights, once in 1976 and again, in a brief comeback, in 1981. In the end he had more sense than Ali, but Frazier is still imprisoned by what happened back then.
He can’t let it go. Can’t forgive Ali for the pain he caused him and his family. He believes things would have been different for him if Ali never existed, he would have been a champion for longer, a champion beloved by his people. “I’d have gotten a lot more respect,” he told the writer Thomas Hauser in 1991, emotions that are sadly as relevant now as they were then. “I’d have had more appreciation from my own kind.
“I hated Ali. God might not like me talking that way but it’s in my heart. I hated that man.” Ali has a terrible illness and inspires pity nowadays. But Ali has something that Joe doesn’t have. He has peace of mind. Serenity. A legacy of glory. Frazier has none of that. He is healthier, yes. Mentally, though, the scars of Quezon City are still there and always will be.
