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The Battered Face Of A
Winner
Issue date: March 15,
1971
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(Tony Triolo)
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Moving remorselessly forward, Joe Frazier, that gritty
stump of a man, won a unanimous decision at Madison Square
Garden on Monday night to become the undisputed heavyweight
champion of the world. Frazier not only beat Muhammad Ali
to the punch, he
licked him in the prophecy department. "Clay is
good," he said beforehand, "but he isn't good
enough to escape." He wasn't. Ali, in turn, billed
the bout as The Return of the Dancing Master. It wasn't.
Ali didn't get up on his toes and jab; he chose,
disastrously, to hook with a hooker. By this, Ali gave away
his 6 1/2" advantage in
reach.
Ali gave away much more by his bizarre charades—lying
against the ropes, the pretty red tassels on his shoes
drooping lifelessly; shouting sepulchrally to the press,
"Nooo connntesssst"; beckoning Frazier to hit
him; shaking his head defiantly when
hit; tapping Frazier on the forehead as though testing for
termites. But these acts, designed to steal time, failed
in their purpose. Ali's time was
past.
It was Frazier's hour, as became manifest in the 11th
round, when a big hook left Ali rubber-legged. In the 12th
Frazier folded Ali like a carpenter's rule with successive
shots to the belly and head, and in the final round a
sweeping left hook, which
seemed to start a Frazier's shoe tops, put him down for a
four-count, closing a reign of both majesty and
mystery.
The following is a report by Sports Illustrated's Mark
Kram:
'Everyone Will Remember What
Happened'
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Frazier put the first blemish on Ali's record, but not before Ali left several on Frazier's face.
(Tony Triolo)
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He has always wanted the world as his audience, wanted the
kind of attention that few men in history ever receive. So
on Monday night it was his, all of it, the intense hate and
love of his own nation, the singular concentration and
concern of
multitudes in every corner of the earth, all of it suddenly blowing
across a squared patch of light like a relentless wind. It
was his moment, one of the great stages of our time, and it
is a matter of supreme irony that after all the years that
went into
constructing this truly special night Muhammad Ali was in fact
carefully securing the details for his own funeral end—in
front of the millions he moved so
deeply.
The people, he said, would be in the streets of Africa and
Asia waiting for word of what happened, and what they have
heard—by now— is what they never really believe. The
sudden evil of Joe Frazier's left hook, Ali's bold effort
to steal time by
theatrics, his wicked early pace that left him later without any
guns and his insistence on hooking with a hooker (a bad
bit of business)—all of this combined to provide the push
for his long, long fall from invincibility. It left
Frazier at last the only
heavy-weight champion of the world and the survivor of one of
the most destructive fights among big men in
decades.
The first dramatic damage to Ali came in the 11th round
when Frazier hooked him to the head and followed with a
cruel left to the body that sent Ali rolling back to a
neutral corner, a man who seemed caught in an immense,
violent wave. He hung on, but
his eyes took on a terrible softness and they were never the
same again. At the bell, water was thrown in his face
before he could reach his corner. There, with his medicine
man, Bundini, desperately trying so inflame him, and his
trainer, Angelo
Dundee, shaking a finger frantically in his face, he was pasted
back to a semblance of one piece. As he came out for the
12th, on could see that something was wrong with the right
side of his face; it was swelling rapidly and his jaw
seemed
broken.
He spent almost the entire 13th round in a neutral corner,
but he was not active and appeared in a trance, oblivious
to the hoarse scream of Bundini: "You got God in your
corner, Champ!" Ali responded in the 14th, but not
convincingly, even though he
did win the round; by now both fighters, their bodies
graphically spent, were continually draped over each other,
looking like big fish who had wallowed onto a beach. Then,
in the 15th, Frazier exploded the last shells from that big
left gun. It was
near the middle of the round, and the left boomed into Ali's
face, sending him to the canvas with his head
ricocheting frightfully off the floor, his fee waving in
the air. He got up and finished the round, but he had
lost.
The work of Frazier—his glinting animalism, his intensity
of purpose—can not be minimized or in any way discredited.
This was not a negative victory; smothering pressure
contributed much to Ali's weird behavior, the options Ali
took in strategy and
the exhaustion that began to devour him about the sixth
round.
The bout was exciting, theatrical and bizarre—and mild
disappointment to some. "Neither fighter did well
what he does best," said Cus D'Amato, boxing's mad
scientist. "Frazier, the body puncher, went more
effectively to the head, and Clay, the dancer,
was flat-footed. But either because of this, or despite it,
it was drama of the highest
order."
It was obvious what Ali had in mind from the opening bell
and, perhaps knowing what he had left in him, he followed
the only course open: attack this machine early, shake his
confidence. It was a sound tactic; early is when Frazier
is most accessible.
From the start Ali used flamboyance in an attempt to
deflate Frazier's spirit. When both arrived in the ring,
he danced across it with a smile on his face, brushing
abrasively close to Frazier, almost up against him, but the
ploy appeared fruitless.
In the first moments Ali began doing what he would repeat
throughout the early rounds of the fight: every time
Frazier's left hook caught him he would shake his head
vigorously, telling his audience that the punch did not
bother him, telling Frazier that
he was wasting his
time.
Ali was effective for a while, and there was a clean line
to hi work. The jab probed and distributed pain and
perplexed Frazier. Joe seemed to be trying to stay low, but
more and more he began to raise himself into the range of
Ali's firepower. Soon,
however, it was clear that he was not doing this out of
confusion but by design. He was going to take what Ali had
to give, and in so doing—he undoubtedly thought—he could
intimidate Ali. Frazier took it all—the hard jabs by Ali
and that flashing right
that traveled instantly behind it. In the third round Joe
came out smiling, as he often does at this point in his
fights, and he beckoned for Ali to come out to meet
him.
A long night was still ahead for Frazier, because this was
an Ali determined to put a muzzle on all the mouths that
have questioned his courage, his will, his ability to
handle pain. "That man," Frazier said later, his
own face covered with pyramids of
hurt, "can sure take some punches. I went to the
country, back home, for some of the shots I hit him
with." And Ali's jab faded like a sick flower. His
once remarkable legs gone, his arms heavy, he hung on the
ropes and spent long and dangerous
periods in the corners; it was astonishing that he escaped
serious damage. "The way they were hitting,"
said Referee Arthur Mercante, "I was surprised that it
went 15. They threw some of the best punches I've ever
seen."
"Everyone will remember what happened here," Ali
had said before the fight. "What I want them to
remember is my art and my
science."
They will remember. Though not as he
intended.
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CNN/SI followed Holyfield through a typical day of training.
Check out the video clips, but be sure to come back to Evander's
Believe It Or Not.