Método

Ali was the first fighter in the ring, dressed in red trunks with white trim. He came in at a svelte 215 and danced lightly around the ring, throwing quick combinations at the air.

A moment later, Frazier made his entrance. He weighed a solid 205¹⁄²pounds, his best fighting weight. Frazier’s trunks and robe were green and spotted with gold flowers, resem-bling a pattern found on wallpaper or shower curtains. But Joe called the costume “regal, something that a king would wear.”

As Ali pranced toward Frazier, he purposely bumped the smaller man. The two fighters continued to provoke each other during referee Arthur Mercante’s instructions.

“Look out, nigger, I’m gonna kill ya,” Ali said as the bell sounded. Undaunted by the threat, Frazier came out bobbing, weaving, and pursuing. Ali circled his foe at center ring.

Frazier landed a hard left to Ali’s jaw, but Muhammad clinched and shook his head “No”

to assure the crowd that he wasn’t hurt. Ali’s jab found Frazier’s face. Joe, in turn, found some success in herding Ali onto the ropes. The bell ended a fairly even first round. The two champions fought at a scorching pace in the second. Frazier continued to close in on Ali. Ali circled and jabbed. At one point, he snapped Joe’s head back with a picturesque

combination. As he had promised, Frazier attacked Ali’s body every time he could catch him on the ropes.

Ali dominated the first half of round three, scoring well with combinations and staying out of harm’s way. It was the Ali of old in the ring now, not the impostor who had wrestled with Bonavena. But Frazier simply kept on coming, throwing punches and connecting whenever he could.

Round four was a repeat of its predecessor, with Ali landing to the head and Frazier to the body. But a shift in momentum was beginning to appear. Ali was expending a great deal of energy, but he wasn’t hurting or discouraging Frazier. And Joe was beginning to realize that he could walk through Ali’s punches.

At the beginning of the fifth round, Ali stung Frazier with a three-punch combination.

Frazier responded by dropping his guard and making a face, something no previous Ali opponent had ever done. Ali hit him again, then threw a flurry that Joe effortlessly bobbed and weaved around as he worked his way inside. A confident smile crept across Frazier’s face as the round wore on. At the bell, Ali showed the first signs of fatigue when he plopped wearily onto his stool.

Frazier stayed right under Ali’s nose throughout round six. Except for brief, inconse-quential flurries, Ali spent the entire round with his back to the ropes, where Frazier buckled his knees with a succession of smashing hooks to the head. He also dug both hands to the body. Although Ali signaled to the crowd that he wasn’t hurt, a pattern was beginning to emerge in the fight.

Frazier continued his body attack early in round seven before Ali made a successful counterattack off the ropes. His jabs continued to pop into Frazier’s face, which was becom-ing visibly puffy. But he finished the round exactly where Frazier wanted him: on the ropes.

Muhammad approached round eight with more purpose, working his jab and combi-nations in a manner not seen in several rounds. Then, suddenly, Frazier appeared to “will”

Ali onto the ropes without a struggle. On the ropes, Joe ripped powerful hooks to the body and head. Ali responded by clinching and throwing pitty-pat punches that would not have hurt a flyweight.

When Mercante separated the men, Ali waved Frazier back in to continue the assault.

Frazier gladly accepted, and they exchanged a brief flurry. At the end of the round, Frazier was flailing away at Ali’s body: “Kill the body and the head will die.”

Ali spent the first part of round nine in his now-familiar position on the ropes, where Frazier shook him with a terrific left hook. Ali then moved the action to center ring, where he unleashed his best offense to that point. For the first time, Frazier backed up under Muhammad’s two-fisted barrage. Ali’s rights followed his lefts so quickly that they looked like one punch. It looked as though Ali had turned the tide back in his favor: “Sting like a bee.”

By round ten, both men were showing signs of fatigue. Frazier uttered loud grunts as he threw his punches. Mercante had trouble separating the big men, and at times the action was rough for him as well as the fighters. At one point he inadvertently struck Frazier in the face with his right hand while separating the big men.

Neither Ali nor Mercante’s punching power impressed Frazier. By the end of the round, he had regained the momentum he had lost in the ninth.

Ali hit the canvas early in the eleventh. But Mercante ruled it a slip. After backing into the ropes, Ali was nailed by a devastating left hook that shook him to his toes. Another Frazier hook had him wobbling and almost down. Although he was staggering like a drunk,

Ali still managed to make a face at his tormentor. Frazier landed another long left hook, and Ali retreated on rubbery legs. Somehow, he hung on to finish the round.

A fired-up Frazier tagged Ali early in round twelve. Muhammad appeared groggy; his legs were leaden and his arms were weary. Still, he managed to plant several combinations into Frazier’s swollen features. Meanwhile, Frazier continued to mistreat Ali’s sore ribs with powerhouse hooks. Incredibly, both men came out for the thirteenth as if it were round one. Ali danced the way he did before his exile, and his jabs seemed to whistle through the air. He snapped Frazier’s head, and even fought well off the ropes. It was Ali’s best round since the ninth. However, the right side of his jaw was swelling to abnormal proportions.

In the fourteenth, the fighters continued to show incredible stamina. Ali’s blows con-tinued to rearrange Frazier’s features, which had become misshapen from the accumulation of punches Ali had landed. Lumps and bumps protruded “like a sack of potatoes,” as artist Leroy Neiman put it. But Frazier kept chugging forward like a locomotive, and his hooks continued to thud into Ali’s pain-wracked body.

The fight appeared even at that point. For most spectators, the final round would determine the winner, though no one knew how the judges were seeing it.

Mercante ordered the fighters to touch gloves at the start of round fifteen. Ali began by circling and pumping his jab at a crouching Frazier. Then it came: like a bolt of lightning, Joe sprang up from his crouch and exploded a left hook off Ali’s swollen jaw.

Ali fell, landing flat on his back. He rose at four, and Mercante waved Frazier back in.

Frazier crashed another hard left to the jaw, followed by a brutal two-fisted attack. Ali appeared helpless, about to fall again. But he remained upright as Frazier tried his best to finish him, slamming two more hooks into Ali’s ballooning jaw. Then Ali dug down and mounted a desperate counteroffensive. The final bell must have sounded like sweet music to both the exhausted warriors.

The decision was almost anticlimactic. Referee Mercante scored it 8 rounds to 6, with one even. Judge Artie Aidala had it 9–6. Judge Bill Recht saw it at 11–4. All three officials had voted for Frazier. Smokin’ Joe was now the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, and he had beaten the man who had belittled him for so long.

When he heard the decision, an ecstatic Frazier yelled across the ring to Ali: “Who’s the champ? Who’s the champ?”

In Ali’s corner, Bundini Brown burst into tears and grabbed Ali. “Don’t worry, Champ,”

he cried. “You fought like a champ. You got nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Don’t hold me, Bundini,” Ali responded. “Damn. I’m sore in the neck. I’m sore in the ribs.”²¹

As the crowd roared in appreciation of a great fight, both men’s handlers led them out of the ring.

Referee Mercante said afterward that it was a “tough fight to handle” because of the showy antics of both men. He felt the match was beautifully fought, but expressed surprise that “it went 15.”

“I thought it would be more wide open on Ali’s part,” Mercante continued. “I was surprised to see him in close so much, slugging toe to toe.”²²

Mercante went on to say he had to stop the fighters from taunting each other throughout the contest. “They mumbled at each other something like, ‘If that’s your best shot, you don’t have much.’”²³

Frazier was a battered winner. Ice packs were applied to his grotesquely lumped face during the post-fight press conference. In his comments, Frazier gave generous praise to the

loser. “I’ve got to give Clay credit, he takes some punches,” Frazier said. “Oh my God, that shot I hit him with in the last round ... I went back home, back to the country for that one.”²⁴

Asked about Ali’s performance, the champ said, “He must have been crazy, the way he stayed on those ropes. He thought I was flat footed. He knows better now.”²⁵

One reporter asked Frazier what he thought of Ali’s “clowning.”

“Clowning? Man, where were you?” Frazier shot back. “He wasn’t clowning. He just couldn’t move.”²⁶

Frazier was asked if Ali ever hurt him.

“A couple of times I felt his blows,” Joe admitted. “You can’t get hit by a man his size without hurting.”²⁷

Frazier made a brief appearance at the press conference but soon excused himself to

“straighten up” his battered face before making a quick trip to the victory party.

Ali did not attend the conference. Reports indicated that he’d been taken to the hospital to have his swollen jaw X-rayed. After the X-rays were taken, Ali’s personal physician, Dr.

Ferdie Pacheco, advised the ex-champ to spend the night in the hospital. Ali refused. He didn’t want to give the impression that Smokin’ Joe put that kind of hurt on him.

Bundini showed up at the press conference in Ali’s place. “We’ll be back,” he said.

“And this time there won’t be any three years between fights. You can’t put a car in the garage for three years and expect it not to have a few kinks.”²⁸

On the subject of Frazier, Bundini was gracious.

“I always called Joe Frazier a turkey,” he said. “But he’s no turkey, he’s no ordinary champion. He’s a real champion. When we come back, we’re gonna have to take the title away from the champion.”²⁹

The fight had some negative consequences for Bundini, when the New York State Ath-letic Commission slapped him with an indefinite suspension. The action was based on infractions of the type Yank Durham had alluded to before the fight.

First, Bundini had yelled advice to Ali during the course of several rounds. He had been warned about that prior to the fight. Second, Bundini had soaked a sponge and sprayed water from it toward Ali in an attempt to revive the fighter when he was on the canvas in the 15th round.

A Commission spokesman stated: “Chances are he [Bundini] would have been sus-pended for ignoring orders not to coach, but when an eye witness saw him throw the water, that was the last straw. The spray of water went all over, even into the lenses of some of the cameras ringside.”³⁰

“Trying to revive my soldier,” Bundini protested. “My, you’d think I’d climbed into the ring to get Frazier with a baseball bat.”³¹

Dundee said: “You can’t forfeit a man for trying in that situation.”³²

Bundini, whose real name was Drew Brown, was as much a part of the Ali mystique as the phrase he had coined early in Muhammad’s career: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, rumble, young man, rumble!”

Brown began his association with boxing back in the 1950s, working with welterweight champion Johnny Bratton and the great Sugar Ray Robinson. He was introduced to Ali before the first Liston fight and, with the exception of a brief separation in the 1960s, he remained by the side of “The Greatest” throughout the rest of his career.

Bundini once explained that the reason he had approached the young Cassius Clay was to show him his self importance and keep him humble. Even Bundini couldn’t induce

Ali to be humble. Otherwise, though, an almost mystical bond developed between him and the fighter. Bundini would often get physically ill before one of Ali’s fights.

Brown’s official title was “assistant trainer.” Others recognized his status as much more than that. Jimmy Dundee once said that the only difference between Bundini and a witch doctor was the absence of a headdress.

Brown’s life had been an adventure even before he hooked up with Ali. He’d been a

“pillar-to-post baby,” as he put it, never having any true roots. He joined the Navy at the age of 13, and served aboard three different ships during World War II. Eventually, he was discharged for attacking an officer with a meat cleaver.

Brown said the worst thing about the discharge was losing the Navy uniform. “Little girls like uniforms, and I was only 15,” he said.

He then spent 12 years in the Merchant Marines. While he was on a trip to Beirut, Lebanon, a local family befriended him. When he left, his tearful Lebanese friends stood on the deck and cried, “Bundini! Bundini!” Though he didn’t know what it meant, it became his handle.

And now he had a suspension.

Ali made himself available to the press the day after the fight. Contrary to some spec-ulation, he didn’t appear shattered by his first professional defeat.

Ali felt that he had done enough to capture the decision. “I know I won the most rounds, I think I won nine rounds. I caught a few shots and the knockdown made it exaggerating.”

Concerning the knockdown, Ali gave Frazier some credit: “When a man gets me going, when I’m wobbly, that’s a punch. And when a man drops me, that was a helluva punch.”³³ Ali took the loss in stride and believed the experience would make him a better person.

Now he just wanted to go home and spend time with his family.

He also repudiated his pre-fight pretense that Frazier was his enemy and an “Uncle Tom.” He stated that Frazier was a nice man but vowed to beat him next time.

In fact, Ali waited only two days before calling for a rematch. The ex-champ said he and Frazier had a verbal agreement for a return go. “Any time he wants it,” Frazier responded.

Ali insisted that for a rematch, he wanted a foreign referee and judges. He believed that his open repudiation of the war in Vietnam had destroyed his chances of receiving an unbiased decision in a close fight.

Thus ended the most anticipated fight in history, a fight that more than matched the hype and hoopla that surrounded it. Yet the closeness of the result created even more demand for a rematch. Ali–Frazier II became the most sought-after match in boxing over the next two years.

Ali impressed people with the way he was dealing with his first professional setback.

In defeat, Ali had proven far more resilient than anyone could have guessed. Arthur Daley wrote the next day that Ali was “just too proud a man, too magnificent an athlete and too gutsy a warrior to let himself stay down.”³⁴

As the man who finally defeated Ali and temporarily buttoned the “Louisville Lip,”

Frazier finally dispelled the shadow that had hung over his claim to the title. After taking on a hectic schedule of engagements the week following the fight, Joe was admitted to St.

Luke’s Hospital in Philadelphia on March 16 for exhaustion and high blood pressure.

Rumors about Frazier’s health ran rampant. Boxing writer Bob Waters reported that the champ was retiring due to pressure from his wife and Yank Durham. Frazier’s physician, Dr. James Guiffre, stated that the champ possibly had a kidney ailment, but didn’t think that it was a result of the fight because Ali landed so few body punches.

Despite that medical opinion, rumors continued to fly, the most extreme of which was that Frazier was dead or dying.

“Great, now they’ve killed him,” an Associated Press reporter wrote in reference to the hearsay. “Getting him sick wasn’t enough. What are they going to do when he leaves the hospital after three days?”³⁵

When questioned about his possible retirement, Frazier didn’t see why he should be pressured into making a hasty announcement. Dr. Guiffre didn’t see any physical reasons for the champ to retire.

In fact, Frazier had no serious intention to retire. He simply needed a rest after one of the most grueling prizefights in modern boxing history. He won the battle. Yet he appeared to have paid a higher physical price than Ali. The March 8 fight was to be Frazier’s last for 1971.

With the superfight over and the title in mothballs, interest in the heavyweights might easily have begun to wane. But Ali was showing interest in taking a few fights before the end of the year. And a young contender was beginning to attract a large following of his own.